IFC http://ifc.com/ The Official site of the Independent Film Channel. IFC brings you independent film news, interviews, and film festival buzz. Check out IFCs Original Shows, Webseries, & much more. Sat, 13 Aug 2011 23:43:37 +0000 en 1.1 Movable Type 4.34-en <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/opening-this-week-18.php Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:09:45 -0500 06232008_elsaandfred.jpgBy Neil Pedley

As the temperature rises, romance blooms amongst the geriatric set, "Mary Poppins" goes Bollywood, and parents will get their first chance to lay eyes on that which will likely have them driving to Toys "R" Us all summer long.

"Elsa and Fred"
Seeing anyone under 30 fall in love on screen is elusive these days, and so director Marcos Carnevale's gentle and endearing tale of romance between a couple with a real-life combined age of 176 is quite the breath of fresh air. In a role that nabbed several awards in his native Spain, Manuel Alexandre stars as Fred, an embittered widower whose chance encounter with Elsa (China Zorilla), a mischievous Fellini fanatic, leads the pair to Italy to fulfill her dream of reenacting the famous Trevi Fountain scene from Fellini's "La Dolce Vita." In Spanish with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Finding Amanda"
Fans of the small screen will likely already be familiar with the singular, sarcastic wit of Peter Tolan as the co-creator and chief writer on television's best soap opera for men, "Rescue Me." This acidic semi-autobiographical comedy is his first feature, starring Matthew Broderick as — what else? — a TV writer/producer who's put some of his old vices behind him, but still hasn't quite managed to kick his addiction to betting on the horses. When his gambling problem leads to trouble with his wife (Maura Tierney), he unwisely decides to head to Vegas to redeem himself by attempting to persuade her niece (Brittany Snow) to leave her profession (the world's oldest) and enter rehab, if he can only manage to stay out of the casino long enough. Unfortunately, a scene-stealing Steve Coogan shows up as a seedy casino manager who once again proves that if you run a casino in a Hollywood film, you're contractually obliged to be a smarmy bastard.
Opens in limited release.

"Full Grown Men"
It's been a long trip for David Munro's road movie, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006 and secured a distribution deal by nabbing indieWIRE and Sundance Channel's 2007 Undiscovered Gems Audience Award. Matt McGrath stars as Alby, a 35-year old Peter Pan living a long way from Neverland as a husband and father who finds his young son's Christmas gifts more appealing than his own. Evicted from the house by his exasperated wife, he sets out on a trip to the Diggityland theme park, hoping to recapture the glory days of his youth with Elias, his best friend from childhood (Judah Friedlander) in tow. But Elias' recollections of their childhood are not quite as rose-tinted as Alby remembers. Alan Cumming, Amy Sedaris and Deborah Harry make sure the film is one wild ride.
Opens in limited release.

"Gunnin' for that #1 Spot"
Following the ingenious "Awesome; I F**kin' Shot That!," which incorporated the footage from 50 camcorders handed out to fans at a 2004 Beastie Boys concert into a rock doc, Beasties founder Adam Yauch is taking his act from Madison Square Garden to Rucker Park, where he turns the cameras on his other great love, basketball. The erstwhile Nathanial Hornblower takes us back to his hometown of Brooklyn to the first annual Boost Mobile Elite 24 Hoops Classic and follows some of the best prep players in the country, including future first round picks Michael Beasley and Kevin Love, as they go head to head with each other on the street ball court, looking to put themselves in the shop window for the NBA and the sneaker companies alike.
Opens in New York.

"The Last Mistress"
Less than a month after studying art in "Mother of Tears," IFC fave Asia Argento is back to delight us in provocative French director Catherine Breillat's tale of aristocracy and desire, lavishly furnished with copious amounts of gorgeously shot sex. Loosely based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's steamy 19th-century novel, the film breaks in first-timer Fa'ud Ait Aattou as a libertine looking to put his debauchery behind him by marrying Breillat regular Roxane Mesquida's empty powdered wig, but is unable to resist the siren song of his former lover, played by Argento. By now, you know who we'd go with. In French with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Red Roses and Petrol"
Joseph O'Connor's caustic play puts the two things the Irish are better at than anyone else in the world front and center — drinking and longstanding family conflict. Malcolm McDowell gets top billing as the patriarch whose sudden and unexpected death forces his hopelessly fractured family to gather in Dublin for the wake. Trapped together for the first time in years, they have little option but to get hammered and uncover the true source of their lingering trauma. Director Tamar Simon Hoffs gets behind the camera for the first time since 1987's teen party flick "The Allnighter," once again enlisting the help of her daughter and former Bangles lead singer Susanna to provide the music, along with Flogging Molly.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic"
After a small string of badly received flops, Bollywood production outfit Yash Raj Films brings back the tried and tested combo of Rani Mukerji and Saif Ali Kahn for this light but spirited family musical drama. The film features a lively ensemble of child stars as four orphans who are forced into the reluctant custody of a wealthy industrialist (Kahn) and find themselves about as welcome as a new round of trade tariffs. After praying for help, the children are duly obliged with the presence of the angel Geeta (Mukerji) to watch over them as a nanny and deliver the requisite spoonful of sugar to bring harmony to this makeshift family. In Hindi with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Trumbo"
Nobody related to the world of film is fond of Joseph McCarthy, the paranoid bullyboy senator from Wisconsin who led the communist witch hunt of the 1950s, but few are likely to dislike him with quite the vitriolic intensity of Dalton Trumbo. One of Hollywood's highest paid screenwriters of that era, Trumbo's career was shattered when he was thrown into prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and became a part of the blacklisted "Hollywood 10." Based on his son Christopher's play, director Peter Askin's documentary charts the scribe's rise and subsequent fall from grace, his time in Mexico and resurgence culminating in restored credit for his work during exile, as well as performances of Trumbo's work and correspondence by the likes of Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti and Nathan Lane.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"WALL - E"
"Finding Nemo" director Andrew Stanton has apparently had this little fellow shuffling around inside his head since before Pixar made their name with "Toy Story" over a decade ago. An instantly adorable fusion of Johnny 5, Herbie and Droopy Dog with a cuteness factor turned up to eleven, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class) is left alone to pick up after us after we humans leave Earth looking like a freshman student's shared kitchen. Though likely irresistible to the tots in the audience, WALL-E faces a challenge when he meets the search robot EVE, a clinical creation who is charged with reporting the planet's status who WALL-E instantly falls for, but who has no feelings of her own.
Opens wide.

"Wanted"
With his dark and gritty adaptation of Sergey Lukyanenko's "Night Watch", story director Timur Bekmambetov outperformed the likes of American imports "Return of the King," Harry Potter and that film about the boat that sank to engineer the highest gross ever recorded at the Russian box office for a single movie. Now, he is setting his sights on Hollywood domination with another visceral assault on the senses, an adaptation of Mark Millar's graphic — and we mean graphic — novel that shows that assassins really do have more fun. James McAvoy (complete with a stunningly bad imitation of an American accent) is the listless cubicle dweller offered a career change by Angelina Jolie's mysterious Fox, one of the world's deadliest assassins, who's charged with training him to replace his murdered, estranged father in the ranks of a secret death and justice squad known as the Fraternity, led by Morgan Freeman. Curving bullets and Jolie's curves aim to win over that oh-so-underserved niche demographic of 18-35 year old men.
Opens wide.

[Photo: "Elsa and Fred," Mitropoulos Films, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Interview: Sarah Gavron on "Brick Lane"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/sarah-gavron-on-brick-lane.php Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:43:33 -0500 06182008_bricklane1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

British filmmaker Sarah Gavron began her career making documentaries and television projects. Her BBC drama "This Little Life" won two BAFTAs, she's been nominated for one more, and her shorts have racked up jury awards and acclaim on the festival circuit. Gavron's vibrant feature debut "Brick Lane" is an adaptation of Monica Ali's controversial bestselling novel about a Bangladeshi woman named Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee, in a truly anchoring performance) who's forced into an arranged marriage at 17 to the much older Chanu (Satish Kaushik). Moved into the titular block of flats in London's East End, Nazneen tries to make sense of her new life while dutifully raising a family, but her unrealized passions are awakened when she meets and begins an affair with a politically confrontational young Muslim local named Karim (Christopher Simpson). Gavron and I chatted about adapting Ali's book and her surprising experiences within the Bangladeshi community.

As a first-time feature filmmaker, was it a challenge getting all the period details correct?

Yeah, I suppose this project was daunting for a number of reasons, and that was one of them. By deciding to set the majority of the story in 2001, there are subtle but explicit changes from that time, then we had Bangladesh of [Nazneen's] childhood, which was 1985. But you go to villages in that part of the world and they're still untouched by the modern world. You can find villages very near urban centers that have no televisions, no telephones, no cars, no electricity. With this film, [the greater challenge] was the cultural element — I was an outsider to that community. I had to work really closely with people from the Bangladeshi community, who helped me fill out the particulars of that world.

I realize when adapting a 500-page novel that spans three decades you'd have to distill some of the material, but why did you decide to concentrate the story on 2001?

In our imaginations, you could have told the parallel story of two sisters. The sister's letters are a large part of the novel, a literary device you would have to translate. You could have told the three-part journey of Nazneen as thesis, antithesis and synthesis of her life, but we decided to focus on looking through that prism of 2001, partly because that's when her journey begins. That's when she meets Karim, that's when her eyes open up to the world, that's when the background of the world changes with the cultural shifts in London and political shifts through 9/11. So it was the year of transformation, and everything else you could suggest.

How did you approach Karim's post-9/11 radicalization to avoid oversimplification?

06182008_bricklane2.jpgWe're saturated with images of radical Islam, suicide bombers and wife beaters %#151; all those stereotypes of the extreme version of the Muslim community — in drama and literature. And post-Monica's book, there seems to be an abundance of it on British television, I have to tell you. So what seemed unique to me about the novel was that at its heart it was a human story that happened to be set in this community, against that backdrop. These are characters that people could relate to, connect to, across generations. So you'd see 9/11, but through this very particular perspective, and only in glimpses. You'd see the change in Karim, but only through [Nazneen's] eyes. It wasn't a film that even pretended to embrace and explore those issues. It was this one woman's journey, and as these things touched her, you saw them.

The book itself had a few detractors within a Bangladeshi minority group, who apparently didn't want the film to be shot in the real Brick Lane. How did that affect the production itself?

It's worth unpacking because it's distorting if you just read the regional stories. As an outsider, I couldn't have made the film without working very closely with this cast and crew, many of whom were Bangladeshi. What you realize about filmmakers in [South Asia] is that they're very subversive, particularly in Bangladesh, because if you make films, you're already on the edges of society. Whereas in Britain, you don't often count just making a film as a political act.

What I discovered through making this film was what was deeply political about it, that the Western perspective completely misses, that it's told from the point of view of a marginalized voice. It's about a woman's journey towards independence, and that was what they react to because they're not interested in political unrest on the streets or radical Islam. It's not a representation, it's one fictional story. When we were shooting the interior of the flat, we got this phone call at midnight saying that there was this threat as we were about to shoot on Brick Lane itself. Do you know that area?

Only what I've read while researching for this interview.

It's a great, vibrant, interesting area. Anyway, this threat got a lot of media coverage because there was an implicitly violent agenda there, but what emerged was that it was this tiny group — five men really — a vocal minority who were saying they objected to things that weren't in the book or the film. They cited things like a leech falling into a curry pot in a Brick Lane restaurant that might do damage to business. What was probably underpinning it was that they didn't like this story of a woman, where her journey ends up.

The western media picked it up, and it became this story of controversy. All the Bangladeshis on our crew were upset and saying, "These people don't represent us." But you wouldn't have known that from the press coverage. It felt like the entire community was out there. We carried on, didn't change anything in the film or the script, but we did shoot other stuff. Film is a machine, you never stop. We slightly relocated a market scene, but we came back to Brick Lane with a slightly smaller crew and got the shots we needed when the media coverage died down.

06182008_bricklane3.jpgWith plenty of exceptions, there seems to be a certain dry, bleak, kitchen-sink sameness to British drama these days. Do you feel this way? Do others in Britain?

Yeah, I think they do. As you say, there are many exceptions, but somehow, that doesn't come through. There hasn't been [something like] Denmark, which had a revolution with Dogme, and you felt that their whole film industry had changed and re-identified itself. Even though these gems come out of Britain, somehow they haven't made their mark, and you still associate it with this particular kind of drama. I made a conscious decision to go for an aesthetic that was outside that. We know [Nazneen's] council estate's grim and we do see there's graffiti, racist attacks and poverty. What we don't see so much is there was this blossom tree that all these women would stand under. You go into these Bangladeshi homes and they have these rich fabrics that remind them of the colors of home; you don't expect that so much. When the council estate is forbidding because [Nazneen] sees it as that, we show it as that. When she has delusions [of being] in love, she sees a brighter and more welcoming world. I made a decision that the aesthetic of the film would be driven by that, which is less usual to British cinema.

What did you find most surprising about Bangladeshi culture?

Just going to Bangladesh was an experience... if you go into small villages in the U.K., they're backward and culturally devoid. But if you go into small villages in Bangladesh, they have classical music concerts. There are people who've been studying the flutes for years. There's a kind of inbuilt cultural sense that I find fascinating and inspiring. It's also a country that's beset by natural disasters and political instability; what was striking was how confident the new generation are and how they're now contributing politically. There's such a sharp difference from parents to children. The younger generation of Bangladeshi men and women used to shock their parents by going clubbing and wearing short skirts, and now they shock their parents by wearing the hijab. We wanted to touch on [this], not explain or offer easy answers on radicalism or arranged marriage, but suggest things. It's all political. In Bangladesh, if you put a kiss in a film, it's political.

[Photo: Tannishtha Chatterjee as Nazneen; Satish Kaushik and Chatterjee; director Sarah Gavron on set - "Brick Lane," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]

"Brick Lane" opens in limited release on June 20.

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<![CDATA[On DVD: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and "Diva"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/4-months-3-weeks-and-2-days-an.php Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:55:11 -0500 06172008_fourmonths.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

Maybe it's jumping the gun to say so, but is the Romanian New Wave kaput already? The latest and most-Cannes-honored post-postmodern, hyperrealist, ex-dictatorship, young-auteur film movement seems to have already fizzled — after Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (2007) emerged with last year's Palme D'Or, nothing new has appeared at the world's festivals from Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristi Puiu, Catalin Mitulescu or Radu Jude, at a time when they should be leaping on their global visibility and market success like five-year-olds on a summer puddle. In his prime, Godard would've churned out five features and three shorts in the three years since the scent of Romanian sulfur first hit the air with Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (2005). Who knows what's keeping them (Puiu hasn't had a credit in three years), or what bureaucratic Kafka-ness they must battle to get one of their extraordinarily inexpensive movies made, but the worst-case scenario has us looking already elsewhere on the globe for a freshly imagined gout of cinematic energy.

"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" may be the best of the Romanians, in part because, like "Mr. Lazarescu," it constitutes a kind of state-of-the-art naturalism, down to the longueurs, underlighting, open-ended narrative and extraordinarily confident use of off-screen space. (When it's done well, nothing looks as easy as evoking a three-dimensional world outside the frame.) But it's a cleaner-running, more mysterious machine, because while it's equally cataclysmic, it lacks Puiu's film's deadened sense of inevitability. It's an ordeal by anticipation; if you're a newcomer, the less known the better. Let us say just that it's about the struggle to obtain an illegal abortion, and the repressed crucible at the film's squirming center does not belong to the pregnant character. We're not immediately cued up to know who we're supposed to be empathizing with, in a crowded co-ed dorm a few years before the fall of CeauÅŸescu — Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), the pregnant, nerve-wracked brunette or Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), her pragmatic blond roommate? Rolling out in long single takes that give the film an acute sense of ticking-clock anxiety (this is the way to do it, not clusterfuck-edit your material in a vain attempt to "make us feel" your story's apprehension), Mungiu's movie is about the minute-to-minute things that can and will go wrong, leading up to a hotel room face-off with a brooding, manipulative, completely unreadable abortionist in a leather jacket (Vlad Ivanov; both he and Marinca have netted critics' awards) that plays so subtly and under-the-breath that only when it's over do you realize the weight of what transpired. What we don't see — as in, what's happening during a long, mercilessly suspenseful birthday dinner scene that is more concisely conceived than any ten American films this year — is what Mungiu uses to knock the air out of us. It's a raw, uncompromised and deliberately inconclusive film as a whole, and as such justifies its new wave hype by being antithetical in almost every facet to what American movies ordinarily do and how they're shaped.

06172008_diva.jpgAmerican cinephiles, at least, like their new waves to have a sociopolitical purpose — battling oppression, recovering from totalitarianism, emerging from war or cultural anemia or pre-industrialized stasis. But the "cinema du look" French mini-wave of the 1980s enjoyed some eyeball-time here, although its only ambition was to be as glossy, cool and auto-Americanish as possible. To be fair, inaugural figurehead Leos Carax didn't really belong in the grouping, but Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix certainly did, and their movies divided, and still divide, those who think they're empty and glib, and those who think that style and ironic pulpiness are fab ends unto themselves. The announcement movie of the "movement" was Beineix's "Diva" (1981), what with its supercool attitudinizing and cohesive vision of Paris as a parade of secret cultures, movie-movie posturing, quixotic passions, multi-culti matter-of-factness (years before it became truly chic) and post-punk fashion.

Here's why "Diva" was a global hit: it conjured a modern urban universe in which everyone is an impulsive, hell-or-high-water artiste, whether they're actually producing art or merely cluttering their rooms with wrecked cars and doing jigsaw puzzles. Everyone dallies and obsesses; aping Godard, Beineix sets up a suspenseful crime tale and then loiters in an apartment for a fat dose of flirting. The fugue of high and low Euro-culture is one of the school's pervasive ideas, and here Beineix cooks up a dynamic in which a messy underworld of music piracy, murderous police corruption, kleptomania, chain-smoking, thuggery and movie fetishism revolves, bizarrely, around opera, and a particular reclusive, record-refusing diva (Wilhelmenia Fernandez) fond of "La Wally." It begins, more or less, with a shoeless woman running for her life in a raincoat (nod to "Kiss Me Deadly"), graduates to tableaux of a nude-model Vietnamese girl coasting through a puzzle-piece-strewn millionaire's loft on roller skates, and a moped chase through the Metro. Beineix's idea of quickly transitioning from the street to the underground is to watch a passing woman get her skirt billowed up over an subway grate, and then cut to a shot from beneath. The film is not jacked on crank, exactly, but it's restless and consistently inventive; nothing in it is ordinary, and no shot is drab or uninhabited. It may be Americanized after a fashion, but it's also intensely French.

[Photos: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," IFC Films, 2007; "Diva," United Artists Classics, 1982]

"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (Genius Products) and "Diva" (Lionsgate - The Meridian Collection) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[On Child Actors]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/ifc-news-podcast-81-on-child-a.php Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:26:24 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we're inspired by the upcoming release of "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl," starring current reigning child star Abigail Breslin, as well as the recent passing of "It's a Wonderful Life"'s Bobby Anderson and the arrest of Tatum O'Neal, to take a look at child actors on screen, how to best make the leap into adult stardom and what happens when you can't.

Download: MP3, 34:07 minutes, 31.2 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9634 2008-06-16 10:26:24 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_81_on_child_a publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009634 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[On Child Actors (photo)]]> Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:26:24 -0500 1009634 2008-06-16 10:26:24 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_81_on_child_a_photo inherit 9634 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Video: Exclusive Trailer for "Mad Detective"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/video-exclusive-trailer-for-th-1.php Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:15:21 -0500 "Mad Detective," a new police actioner from Hong Kong film veterans Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, opens in New York and On Demand on July 18th. Here's an exclusive look at the trailer.

For more on the film, check out the official site.


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]]> 9633 2008-06-16 10:15:21 closed closed video_exclusive_trailer_for_th_1 publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009633 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/opening-this-week-17.php Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:45:51 -0500 06162008_bricklane.jpgBy Neil Pedley

While Steve Carell and Mike Myers face off at the multiplexes this week, indie theaters fight back with a wide range of quirk, including a meter maid romance, a doc on balloon animals and a horror flick about killer hair extensions.

"Brick Lane"
"Brick Lane" in London's East End might be just a relatively short jaunt down the M1 from Salford, but it's still a million miles (and a decade) away from the careful multi-ethnic empathy of another film that dealt with south Asian refugees in England, the 1970s-set "East is East." This story follows 18-year-old Nazneem (Tannishtha Chatterjee), who steps off a plane from Bangladesh and into an arranged marriage with middle-aged Chanu (Satish Kaushik). Bored and lonely, she's forced to question her beliefs when the charismatic and secular Karim (Christopher Simpson) knocks on her door. Director Sarah Gavron landed herself a BAFTA nomination for this adaptation of Monica Ali's somewhat controversial novel, which enraged local Bangladeshi residents with what they considered to be an unsophisticated portrayal of their culture, so much so that when production came to town, the locals forced the film's producers to relocate.
Opens in limited release.

"Expired"
Parking attendants are the target of a very special kind of hatred, the type normally reserved for child murderers or people who gloat about their tofu consumption. Yet writer/director Cecilia Miniucchi's debut feature bravely contradicts the widely accepted notion that meter maids are incapable of any human emotion beyond malevolence — that they need love, too. Kind but lonely Claire (Samantha Morton) enters into a darkly sardonic relationship with Jay (Jason Patric), who uses parking tickets as a way to vent his anger issues, and the two begin a caustic dance of courtship on the road to mutual redemption.
Opens in limited release.

"Exte - Hair Extensions"
While the idea of murderous hair extensions might sound like every emo kid's wet dream, the realization that their fake locks target the head they sit upon might dampen enthusiasm somewhat. Acclaimed Japanese director Sion Sono ("Suicide Club") nabbed the Horror Jury Prize at the last year's Fantastic Fest in Austin for this dark and creepy tale of beauty-gone-bad that braids empowerment, pastiche and parody. Ren Osugi stars as the misogynist morgue attendant with a hair fetish who leaves work one night with a desecrated corpse that sprouts a never-ending possessed mane that he peddles to the local salon.
Opens in limited release.

"Get Smart"
With the likes of Austin Powers, and more recently, "O.S.S. 117" spy Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath trying to assault the box office as if it were a volcanic island fortress lair, the cold war spy spoof is veering dangerously close to cookie-cutter territory. Yet Maxwell Smart has returned in this update of the 1960s TV series with Steve Carell filling in for the late Don Adams as the overeager, painfully inept data CONTROL analyst who is teamed with Anne Hathaway's Agent 99 to battle the crime ring KAOS after every other agent is compromised. The exclusion of the show's original creators, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, have ruffled the feathers of a few purists, but Warner Bros. is trying to entice the faithful and the fresh with an eight-minute clip freely available on iTunes.
Opens wide.

"Kit Kittredge: An American Girl"
Having served as executive producer on the three preceding made-for-television movies, Julia Roberts and her Red Om Films Company once again give their stamp of approval to the first big screen adventure based on the popular doll series. None other than "Little Miss Sunshine"'s Abigail Breslin stars in the title role as a resourceful 10-year-old growing up during the Depression who longs to be a big time news reporter. Joan Cusack, Chris O'Donnell and Julia Ormond fill out the supporting cast for the film, which was directed by "Mansfield Park" helmer Patricia Rozema and written by Ann Peacock, of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe."
Opens in limited release; opens wide on July 2nd.

"The Love Guru"
Before he gave a national audience their first glimpse of relationship guru Pitka on the season finale of "American Idol," Mike Myers had been fairly secretive about his plans other than workshopping his latest creation in New York. With his first original live action character since "Austin Powers," Myers stars as a shaman of the heart who's hired to reconcile hockey star Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) and his wife before it interferes with Roanoke and the Maple Leaves' shot at the Stanley Cup. Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake and naturally, Myers' Mini-Me Verne Troyer all show up to help Myers do for marriage counselors what fellow "SNL" alum Adam Sandler recently did for Mossad-agents-turned-hair-stylists.
Opens wide.

"Twisted: A Balloonamentary"
Naomi Greenfield and Sara Taksler met in 2003 at St. Louis' Washington University and bonded over balloon animals. Four years later, they premiered their first documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, which takes a look at that staple of preschool parties, the balloon artist. Toting their camera to the annual Twist and Shout balloon artist convention, they discover helium-filled art that's not necessarily for the whole family and meet a few really unfortunately named people along the way (trailer park escapee Vera Stalker, John Holmes — oh dear, oh dear).
Opens in New York.

[Photo: "Brick Lane," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Interview: Carlos Brooks on "Quid Pro Quo"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/carlos-brooks-on-quid-pro-quo.php Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:50:57 -0500 06132008_quidproquo1.jpgBy Matt Singer

"I wanted to do something completely original and different that I hadn't seen before," said Carlos Brooks of his feature directorial debut. Though grounded in the traditions of detective fiction and film noir, Brooks' "Quid Pro Quo" is indeed something wholly its own; a film that lives inside those genres' boundaries while carving its own unique place outside them. In the film, Nick Stahl plays Isaac, a paraplegic public radio host who gets an anonymous tip about a guy who tried to bribe a doctor into amputating his leg. Researching the story introduces him to an underground (and evidently authentic) community of "wannabes" who desperately wish to be paralyzed, and to a mysterious blonde named Fiona (Vera Farmiga).

Before the thriller elements begin to congeal, "Quid Pro Quo" is particularly appealing in its detailed view of Isaac's day-to-day existence; the way in which, for instance, he can't work an umbrella and his wheelchair at the same time when he's caught in the rain. But Brooks was quick to point out that those scenes are not about pity. "It isn't that we should feel sorry for him," Brooks said, "because Isaac doesn't feel sorry for himself. But getting passed by — that's a universal image that every human being can relate to. I wanted to defeat those unconscious barriers between able-bodied and disabled people so we could get into who this character really is." I spoke with the first-time director about his impressive debut on the phone from Los Angeles, where he's already prepping his next film.

What was the origin of this project?

I initially had this idea of somebody who would be impaired in some way and would get some sort of talisman that would help them overcome that impairment, and in return for that gift I thought they'd have to help the person who impaired them in the first place. I wrote a few outlines and it just never came to life. I finally settled on a story about a person with a paraplegic injury, and one night I started Googling some word that I thought would get me into that world more authentically and found these people who suffer from what's called body integrity disorder, or "wannabes."

06132008_quidproquo2.jpgDid you watch other movies with disabled protagonists to prepare to make "Quid Pro Quo?"

Of course. You've got to go back to "Coming Home," which I think is one of the finest films made that show people with disability. A lot of movies that I wouldn't name do a really poor job of showing characters in that regard. They suffer from what I suffered from in the beginning of my outlines; I assumed I was more comfortable with [physical] disability than I was. In reality, I was writing about it rather than trying to imagine myself in that world writing from it. A lot of movies are just about [the disability] — the characters are just used as devices for sympathy. There's a Hollywood tendency to show the hero, to prove he's a good guy, stopping off at the home of a lady who uses a wheelchair to bring her groceries, which is absurd — she can get in her own car and drive to the store and get her groceries.

The movie looks unusually warm and romantic for something shot digitally. How did you achieve that?

We did some things that, to my mind, no one's ever consciously done before. I shot on a Sony 900 camera, and we used the 950 for a few scenes where it was a tight space. My production designer, Roshelle Berliner, and the [director of photography] Michael McDonough, and I experimented with shiny metallic surfaces to trick the video lens into thinking it's film. I don't know why this works, but it does. It tricks the chip in the video camera into softening those hard video lines and edges. If you walked on the set, you would think it's the strangest looking place because Isaac's apartment was full of wallpaper with metallic inlays. But on video, it looks like film. It gives it this Sidney Lumet-circa-"The Verdict" look, and that's what I wanted.

Why was that?

I wanted Isaac to be in a very comfortable place during the story. I wanted his world to be something of his own creation, a place he felt he'd really come to master. I could have shot it in a more cinema vérité way, and said, "Let's not design the sets. Let's go run and gun and shoot handheld." On one hand, that style of shooting can forgive a multitude of sins, because whatever you do, you're just being "real." On the other hand, it would not have been nearly as inviting as what we came up with finally. I wanted the film to be much more seductive.

06132008_quidproquo3.jpgGiven that this was your first feature, did you set any rules for yourself as a director before you started shooting?

I had all kinds of fancy ideas. I wrote a whole 500-page book with notes for myself on every scene that I could flip to while shooting or editing. I called it "The Prompt Book." I got that from watching "The Godfather" DVD; Coppola does this. The categories were like "What's the core of the scene?" or "What's the practical purpose of the scene?" or "What's the tone?" My favorite one was "What are the pitfalls?" How many different ways can I screw it up? When you shoot it, you realize "Nope, didn't think of that." [laughs]

One idea I had was the camera would always stay on the wheelchair level when Isaac is using his chair. Then when he stands, the camera will stand with him so we will feel that elevation and the liberation from that lower level. Those are great ideas, but at the end of the day, those are conceits. When I was actually shooting in my 18-day schedule in every borough in Manhattan, I began to understand that the movie is not about staying in some sort of physical point of view. It's more important that I figured out his emotional point of view. Plus, when you're moving that fast, the rules get thrown out. I forgot about even having the rule in the first place.

When you showed the movie at places like Sundance, what was the most popular question at Q & A's?

[Regarding the "wannabes"] "Have you ever spoken to these people?" or "Are they real?" It's really centered around this phenomenon. There's no way around it. There's something about this phenomenon, as specific and small as anything can be — was there ever a smaller subject matter that related to a smaller group of people? — but there's something about it that strikes some universal chord. I can talk and talk about all kinds of things with you, but the bottom line is the thrust of the story is going to be this thing that fascinated me in the first place.

That said, have you gotten wind of any reaction from the real wannabe community about the movie?

No, not much. I think people like that tend to have a very online kind of reality. I'm sure there are people, I just haven't met them.

So no opening night screening parties or anything?

[laughs] With the catering and the whole thing? No, but you never know...

[Photo: Nick Stahl; Stahl and Vera Farmiga; Director Carlos Brooks on set - "Quid Pro Quo," Magnolia Pictures, 2008]

"Quid Pro Quo" is now open in limited release.

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<![CDATA[Video: Guy Maddin on "My Winnipeg"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/video-guy-maddin-on-my-winnipe.php Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:05:47 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

Guy Maddin's latest film "My Winnipeg" finally opens in theaters today after making the festival rounds from Toronto to Berlin to Tribeca. It was at that last stop where we had a chance to sit down with Maddin and discuss his "docu-fantasia" and his Canadian hometown.


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]]> 9618 2008-06-13 07:05:47 closed closed video_guy_maddin_on_my_winnipe publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009618 <![CDATA[Interview: Werner Herzog on "Encounters at the End of the World"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/werner-herzog-on-encounters-at.php Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:48:00 -0500 06102008_encountersattheendoftheworld1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Fearless filmmaking legend Werner Herzog ("Rescue Dawn," "Grizzly Man") has survived everything from active volcanoes to angry natives, stray bullets during interviews and Klaus Kinski himself, but what about global devastation? Shot entirely in Antarctica on the National Science Foundation's dime, "Encounters at the End of the World" has an ominous double meaning in our age of climate crisis, but that theme would be too simplistic by half for a resilient cinematic visionary like Herr Herzog. A mirthful and meditative quest for beauty, profundity and magic amongst those rare human beings — many scientists or other esoteric specialists — who choose to live and work in this isolated locale, Herzog's latest finds new vital questions to ask the world (prostitution and homosexuality among penguins?) through a filter of vibrant personalities, lyrical juxtapositions between man and nature, and the auteur's distinctive deadpan wit. Though my chat with Herzog was far too brief this time around, even a sliver of his time produces — much like his films — wonderful, peculiar and unexpected findings.

One of my favorite moments in the film is the lone penguin who inexplicably ventures off alone towards the mountain, perhaps to its death. What do you believe was going through its head?

Well, we do not know because we do not read the mind of penguins. Of course, I do have some sort of question to the penguin scientist whether there's such a thing like derangement or insanity among penguins — and I mean in general, if there's such a thing in animals. That's a different question than, let's say, "March of the Penguins" would pose.

That reminds me of the DVD commentary you recorded for your debut feature, "Signs of Life," on which you criticize chickens for their stupidity. Do you have something against "fluffy penguins" and other flightless birds?

No, but I'm not into the business of [anthropomorphizing] penguins and I'm not into vanilla ice cream sentimentality about wild nature. That's okay; I have no problem with the other films out there that have another view. In fact, my film only has one penguin in it, and "March of the Penguins" is something different. They have been documented enough, I think. I didn't need to make another one. I have no grudge against penguins nor against chickens. [laughs]

A couple times in the film, when a scientist starts to ramble, you lower the volume and summarize what they're saying. Did you find any of your potential subjects too dull or awkward to be cinematic?

No, not at all. I think every single one that is on camera in "Encounters at the End of the World" is someone whom you would really like to have as a friend. They are wonderful human beings. Of course, there is a lot of humor in it, and a lot of people with whom you would immediately like to spend much more time with than what you see in the film.

Were there any new friends or storylines that didn't make the final cut?

There were a couple of very, very fine stories left, but the film would have become too long. That's the worst you can do to an audience: "Is it going to be over soon?" They start shifting around in their seat and looking at their wristwatch. So the film is 99 minutes long, and I think it's a good time. You should leave the theater with a feeling you would like to see more. Of course, there's more very, very good footage. Those things that had to be seen are in the film, and as a filmmaker, you have to exercise a certain discipline. I don't like films that are four-and-a-half hours long, or eight hours long. It just makes me nervous. I think there's a natural length to a film, and "Encounters at the End of the World" was about 100 minutes — the right and natural length of it, period. I have no regrets that I had to leave out a couple of fine things. So what?

06102008_encountersattheendoftheworld2.jpgYou've filmed in some of the world's most remote locations, and with Antarctica, you're the first person to shoot on every single continent. So where does a guy like you go when you take a vacation?

Well, I work in these countries and it's like vacation for me. How can I say... we are on dangerous territory now because, you see, I'm not out for ending up in the Guinness Book of Records for having shot in so many countries. I'm just very curious. In the film, there's a wonderful moment when a caterpillar driver speaks about how he was interested in the world and ventured out because he had fallen in love with the world. That's somehow what happened to me, and I've been curious and in quite a few countries to make films. But you see, we should not speak about how far out locations can get. My next film is going to take place in New Orleans, and I'm very excited. It's not comparable with Antarctica or the jungle in Peru, but it's a very vibrant and fascinating place.

That's "Bad Lieutenant," right?

Yes, it's a completely new version that people think is a remake, but it's a completely different story. I've never seen the "Bad Lieutenant" that was made sometime in the '90s, I guess.

You told Defamer you hadn't even heard of Abel Ferrara.

I don't know who he is, but I heard he has a good, gruff face and maybe he would be good as a gangster in the movie. The last James Bond is not a remake of the previous one. They're completely different stories, but the leading character is somewhat similar.

But the Bond movies are a series. So basically, the only thing your film has in common is its title?

Well, there is a bad lieutenant in the previous film and in this one. We may even drop the title. I don't know yet. [It's] not to avoid it, even if people think it might be a remake. You see, once this kind of rumor is out, you can never stop it. It's like slashing open a pillow on the roof of your house and the wind blows in it and spills all the feathers out into the landscape. Now go out and find those feathers again and put them back in the bag. It's impossible. We have to enjoy it as it is. I think we have to allow the rumors to live on. We cannot stop them, so let them live on.

Analogies like that remind me how funny you can be, especially when acting in other people's films.

It's not only on camera. When I do a film like "Encounters at the End of the World," people are laughing so much. It's very hilarious in many moments. People are always surprised that my films are funny, and I have a lot of humor and self-irony when I'm working as an actor. Of course, I'm always good when it gets into characters that are hostile, dysfunctional, violent and debased.

Given that you didn't see your first film until 11, what influenced your early comic sensibilities?

I think it's always the mothers that hand it on to their boys, the sense of humor. Each mother is different; they are always unique. It's very hard to analyze it. I don't want to look at myself too hard, but I have a suspicion that it's handed down from mothers to sons.

06102008_encountersattheendoftheworld3.jpgYou've been living in L.A. for quite a while now. Have you picked up any distinctly American habits or behaviors in your daily life?

I married in the United States, and I happen to live in Los Angeles, which I like a lot. It has done good to me because I never trot the same spot. I'm out for new horizons, new projects, new subjects. You see, here in the Antarctic film, I got an invitation from the National Science Foundation; what a wonderful thing that was. I worked with [the production company] Creative Differences and Discovery Channel. And now the film is out through ThinkFilm, which I didn't even know existed a year ago. So you see, it's all new alliances, new ways to do films and I really enjoy it.

Do you have any vices?

I do drink coffee, sometimes really fiendish espresso. And I do eat a steak once in a while. But you might find it strange, I've never been into any drugs because I don't like the culture related to drugs. When a joint is passing from person to person, I pass it on. I'm not a moralist, but I don't use it simply because I don't like the culture.

Do you ever have time to watch films?

I always have the chance, but I'm not really that much into it. I see maybe eight or ten films per year, sometimes less. I'm not a wild film buff who knows everything, who sees everything. I read, I listen to music, I do some cooking, I work with music — like, doing an opera — I travel on foot, I raise children. So there are other things out there [besides] filmmaking.

Cooking? Do you have a specialty dish?

Yeah, I'm quite good with meat — steaks, venison, seafood. With other things, I'm lousy. I'm not good with soups and I'm not good with sweets. My wife is much better. My program as a cook is limited, but I'm good at a few things. A man should cook a decent meal at least twice a week.

[Photos: "Encounters at the End of the World," THINKFilm, 2008]

"Encounters at the End of the World" opens in limited release on June 11th.

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<![CDATA[On DVD: The Films of Chris Marker, "Boarding Gate"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/the-films-of-chris-marker-boar.php Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:18:58 -0500 06102008_thelastbolshevik.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

I'm sorry, but if my choices are superheroes, Sarah Jessica Parker's handbag materialism, Ashton Kutcher, learn-to-love-again indies and an Adam Sandler comedy that couldn't even muster jokes enough for a two-minute trailer, then I'll stay home and have a conversation with Chris Marker. I'll at least be assured of having truthful contact with a real human consciousness, of having learned, of having been made aware of cultural connections no other artist would make and of bearing witness to first-hand history. An integral soldier in the French New Wave, Marker is famous here only for "La Jetée" (1962), the beloved all-stills time travel mega-short that was remade by Terry Gilliam as "12 Monkeys." Though he's remained a prolific manufacturer of cinema into his 80s, he's never been a meta-acrobat like Godard and Resnais and Rivette, nor a romantic ironist like Truffaut or Rohmer or Demy, and it's been virtually impossible to see his films, old or new, in the U.S. A few fictional tangents aside, Marker's mode was always the personal documentary — a non-fictional amble between political fact and subjective, and often poetical, observation, and over the years, practically under the oblivious noses of the filmgoing world, it's become one of the medium's most insightful, humane and profound strategies.

Marker's like Godard and Kiarostami in that filmmaking isn't his career but his life, woven inextricably into his daily routines, ruminations, friendships and memories. Thus, his movies don't have the mouth-feel of traditional entertainment or even of agenda-structured docs, but of personal correspondence, open-ended and imperative and exploratory. At long last, a slew of Marker films are available on DVD, including "The Last Bolshevik" (1993), a magisterial biopic of Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, arranged by Marker as series of first-person "letters" to the late giant, who followed the Eisenstein-Vertov-Dovshenko-Pudovkin cataract and thereafter suffered whatever totalitarian crap was thrown his way just so he could make movies. A good deal of the celluloid Medvedkin shot was on the "film train," a crazy, egalitarian form of movie production in which Medvedkin and a large crew drove a development-lab-equipped train around the USSR, shooting and printing films on the spot, showing them to the peasants they'd filmed, and then often discarding the celluloid thereafter. Marker was friends with Medvedkin (he had introduced the Russian's forgotten work to the West in 1971), and saw him as a kind of last man standing of Soviet history, born at the beginning of the century and dead just a few years before the empire fell. And so amid the movie's interviews with Russian film history luminaries and clips, there are intimate reminiscences, fond reconsiderations of the past and Marker's distinctive detours, drawing parallels and tendril-like connections between images and occurrences that always appeared to be unrelated. While you watch "The Last Bolshevik," it has the rhythm and vibe of an ordinary, if affectionate, documentary, but when it's over, you take away the overwhelming sense of having lived a new history.

That accumulative awe is the feeling of having Marker's sensibility sneakily come to bear upon you. Other Marker films also hitting the discs include "Remembrance of Things to Come" (2001), a lavish, dense and devil's-food-rich memoriam to neglected photog Denise Bellon, who just happened to live through and record the ascent of the Surrealists, the 1937 World Fair, the birth of the Cinémathèque Française, the Popular Front, the Nazi occupation and so on, her shots forming a fascinating, and rather Markerian, mini-history of two decades of French life. (Typical is the matter of Henri Langlois' famed bathtub full of film prints hidden from the Germans; some have since thought it an urban legend, but Bellon was there to photograph it.) Also, unforgettably, there's Marker's philosophical meditation on the post-9/11 world, "The Case of the Grinning Cat" (2004), which impulsively tracks the course of culture from a moment of traumatized empathy (even Marker is stunned by the headline on Le Monde: "We're All Americans"), to a rising struggle between opportunistic state power and the uncontrollable will of the people, personified by graffiti of a mysterious smiling feline Marker finds all over Paris. The Icarus/First Run discs, which are currently only available from Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts's online Chris Marker Store (they'll be widely released in the fall), include a number of extra films, by Marker and by his subjects — Bellon's short "Colette" (1950), and, happily, Medvedkin's absurdist masterpiece, "Happiness" (1934).

06102008_boardinggate.jpgAs far as French filmmakers getting a sweaty grip on the post-9/11 landscape go, Olivier Assayas certainly brings his bargeload of obsessions to the table in "Boarding Gate" (2007) — this modern world is a global spider web of instant travel, menacing commerce, brutal narcissism, cold-blooded sex, urban lostness and ceaseless doping and smoking and tough-talking. Assayas also sometimes indulges an unexamined proclivity toward populating his films (that includes his script for André Téchiné's "Alice and Martin," "demonlover" and "Clean") with young, slim, gorgeous, fashionably disheveled characters, and the effect can be unconvincing. Luckily, here Assayas has Asia Argento starring as an ex-hooker who gets tangled up bad (in her black underwear and pumps) with ex-boyfriend/sleaze magnate Michael Madsen, and who then is sent ricocheting toward Asia (the continent) and running from spoiled drug deals, murder plots and the like. The framing material of "Boarding Gate" may seem thin, but Argento, after more than 20 years flitting around the fringes of Euro-pulp and costume epics and the occasional Hollywood action flick, emerges here as a crystallized star. Unpretty but smuttily pugnacious and given to wildly unpredictable line readings, Argento is hypnotizing movie-stuff, as much the overpowering sexual core of this otherwise nutty and forgettable movie as Dietrich was of her Sternberg films, or Monica Vitti was of "The Red Desert," or Sandrine Bonnaire was of "À Nos Amours." She keeps getting compared to Brando in reviews, which accounts for Brando's instinctive animalism if not his restless intelligence. But sometimes in movies, instinctive animalism is more than enough.

[Photos: "The Last Bolshevik," Icarus Films, 1992; "Boarding Gate," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]

"The Last Bolshevik," "Remembrance of Things to Come," "The Cast of the Grinning Cat" (Icarus Films) and "Boarding Gate" (Magnolia Pictures) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Physical Disability in Film]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/ifc-news-podcast-80-physical-d.php Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:08:44 -0500 In "Quid Pro Quo," opening this week, Nick Stahl plays a wheelchair-bound reporter who begins a journalistic investigation into a group of handicap wannabes who long for disabilities of their own. Intriguing look into an unexplored subculture, or recycling of film stereotypes about the disabled? It got us thinking, and so this week on the IFC News podcast we examine how people with physical disabilities have been portrayed in movies, from "Freaks" to "My Left Foot" to "Rory O'Shea Was Here," and discuss whether actors playing disabled characters is the new blackface.

Download: MP3, 30:26 minutes, 27.8 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9598 2008-06-09 15:08:44 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_80_physical_d publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009598 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Physical Disability in Film (photo)]]> Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:08:44 -0500 1009598 2008-06-09 15:08:44 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_80_physical_d_photo inherit 9598 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/opening-this-week-16.php Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:41:44 -0500 06092008_beautyintrouble.jpgBy Neil Pedley

On offer this week is a veritable gallery of the eclectic and the eccentric as M. Night Shyamalan goes R-rated, Edward Norton goes green, Werner Herzog goes to the Antarctic, and two of Herzog's fellow countrymen go to California to climb a big rock very, very quickly.

"Beauty in Trouble"
Czech director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovský continue their longtime collaborative partnership with this dense ensemble drama loosely inspired by Robert Graves's poem of the same name. This time, the duo who balanced humor with drama in the Oscar-nominated Holocaust-set "Divided We Fall," turn to the devastating series of floods that swept Prague in 2002, and tell the story of Marcela (Anna Geislerová), an overworked mother of two living in squalor. When her ne'er do well husband is taken in by the police, she's courted by a well-to-do businessman (Josef Abrhám) and Marcela is forced to choose between family and the stability he offers.
Opens in New York.

"Chris & Don: A Love Story"
This intimate documentary from filmmakers Tina Mascara and Guido Santi chronicles the 33-year romance between novelist Christopher Isherwood and portrait artist Don Bachardy, who was 30 years younger than the "Berlin Stories" author. Employing a blend of archival footage, home movies, reenactments and animation narrated by a reminiscing Bachardy, the film celebrates their enduring and bittersweet tale of love and commitment.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on July 4th.

"Encounters at the End of the World"
Billed as "not another penguin movie," this documentary finds Werner Herzog continuing his fascinating, career-long exploration of man's relationship to the great untamed wilderness, venturing out into earth's final frontier, and in doing so becoming the first director to have shot on all seven continents. As part of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, Herzog travels to McMurdo Station, the NSF's base of operations in Antarctica, where he meets the 1,100 people who choose to call it home and prove to be every bit as breathtaking and enigmatic as the land they live on.
Opens in limited release.

"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"
Originally a novel first published in 1965, Yasutaka Tsutsui's high-concept meditation on fate and causality has survived more incarnations and adaptations than Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Now an animated film, this update tells of Makoto Konno, a high school girl who discovers the power to go back in time and re-do events in her life. Realizing she can only do this a finite number of times, she attempts to make things right for everyone in her life with chaotic and unexpected results. Despite a modest showing at the Japanese box office, the film was a hit on the festival circuit, picking up a multitude of nominations and awards for animation.
Opens in limited release.

"The Grocer's Son"
French filmmaker Eric Guirado feeds off his previous experience as a documentarian for his sophomore narrative feature, which captures the stalwart bucolic lifestyle of the French rural countryside. Nicolas Cazalé stars as Antoine, a city-dweller who reluctantly returns to the sleepy village from which he fled in order to run the family grocery business after his father is hospitalized. Joined by his big city friend Claire (Clotilde Hesme), Antoine is slowly charmed and disarmed by the serenity of the small community and the gentle and colorful nature of its people. In French with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"The Happening"
After a tell-all book aired out the dirty laundry of his messy divorce from Disney and his last film ("Lady in the Water") hung him out to dry, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan is back and hopes to scare more than studio chieftains with his latest. Armed with the first R rating of his career, Shyamalan has penned a paranoid apocalyptic thriller starring Mark Wahlberg as a high school science teacher who flees with his family in a bid to outrun a mysterious and deadly phenomenon.
Opens wide.

"The Hulk"
Back in 2003, Eric Bana told audiences that they wouldn't like him when he was angry, and the relatively poor showing of the Ang Lee-directed "Hulk" proved he wasn't wrong. Marvel has since explained it away as a dry run, insisting that the real Hulk franchise starts here and handing the reins over to another NYU alum in "The Transporter"'s Louis Leterrier, who directs while Edward Norton stars as the not-so-jolly green giant who must abandon his quest for a cure to his condition in order to save mankind from Abomination (Tim Roth), a devastating creature born from Hulk's own DNA. Liv Tyler co-stars as Hulk alter ego Bruce Banner's girlfriend Betty Ross.
Opens wide.

"My Winnipeg"
Canadian auteur Guy Maddin once again indulges in his love affair with German expressionism and the avant garde by applying it to his own life in this quasi-autobiography (or whatever you call it when you cast B-movie icon Ann Savage as your mother). Using a whimsical, stream-of-consciousness narrative technique that's as outlandish as it is beguiling, Maddin's self-described "docu-fantasia" takes the audience on a tour of Maddin's formative years in Winnipeg. Blending fact with fiction, the historical with the imagined, "My Winnipeg" is both a serenade and an exorcism directed at Maddin's childhood and the city that has been his home since his birth in 1956.
Opens in New York.

"Quid Pro Quo"
Following Jodie Foster's "The Brave One," working in public radio has never been so much in vogue, as Carlos Brooks demonstrates in his directorial debut starring Nick Stahl as a budding NPR muckraker who's paralyzed from the waist down and becomes curious when he hears of a man who actually wants to be a paraplegic. Having premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the film may draw unwanted comparisons to David Cronenberg's autoeroticism (in the most literal sense) drama "Crash," as Stahl enters the deviant subculture that covets and fetishizes human pain and suffering, including a "wannabe" amputee played by Vera Farmiga.
Opens in limited release.

"To The Limit"
Oscar-winning filmmaker Pepe Danquart chronicles the escapades of German speed climbing brothers Thomas and Alexander Huber, two men of boundless energy, audacious courage and somewhat questionable sanity. No stranger to sibling rivalry himself as the twin of another filmmaker, Danquart uncovers a fierce professional rivalry behind this pair of extreme sports icons as they prepare to mount a record breaking assault on the 3,000-foot high "Nose" of the El Capitan Summit in Yosemite National Park, where the duo looks to put the three-day climb to bed in a leisurely two hours and 45 minutes. In English and German with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

[Photo: "Beauty in Trouble," Menemsha Films, 2006]

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<![CDATA[The 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/the-50-worst-sex-scenes.php Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:20:56 -0500 Last year, IFC.com and Nerve.com teamed up to count the 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema history. But that was mere foreplay compared to our latest collaboration, the 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema.

Good sex is satisfying. Bad sex is not. Same goes for sex scenes, but that doesn't necessarily mean movies earned a spot on our list because they weren't erotic. Sex scenes can do many things besides titillate: they can disturb or enlighten, provoke or repulse, amuse or confuse. They can attempt any (or, in rare and poorly considered circumstances, all of) those things, but when they aim for one and get another, that's where an onscreen booty call flips from good to bad. The films contained herein, from different eras and different directors, in different styles with different agendas, all share one thing in common: a disconnect between intent and content. Also, they're icky, pretty much right across the board.

So why dwell on the negative? Well, for one, that's what the Internet was invented for. But more importantly, we can learn from these filmmakers' mistakes. Or at least laugh at them a little. Either way, it goes a long way toward making up for having to watch these fifty mini-monstrosities in the first place.

On to numbers 50 through 45!


[Note: Some of the above links will take you to Nerve.com. And as they say on the internet, this list is NSFW.]

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9584 2008-06-06 17:20:56 closed closed the_50_worst_sex_scenes publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009584
<![CDATA[The 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema (photo)]]> Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:20:56 -0500 1009584 2008-06-06 17:20:56 closed closed the_50_worst_sex_scenes_photo inherit 9584 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Interview: Steve Conrad on "The Promotion"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/steve-conrad-on-the-promotion.php Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:54:58 -0500 06042008_thepromotion1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

When Steve Conrad's directorial debut went into production, it was originally called "Quebec," a reference to the hometown of the character played by John C. Reilly, a middle manager who competes with another middle manager (Seann William Scott) for the top job at their supermarket. It was a small detail, but more so than most, Conrad's films are about the accumulation of small details. Maybe that's the reason why in the few months since the oddball comedy, which is now called "The Promotion," premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March, it's been hailed as "a comedy that balances broad farce and actual humanity with wit, warmth, and weirdness" (Cinematical) and dismissed as something that should be "added to the Geneva Conventions' list of humanitarian abuses" (The Hollywood Reporter).

What's particularly odd about the extreme reactions to Conrad's film is that he explores a subject that's both universal and too often ignored by filmmakers — the experience of working life. In some ways, he could be considered the American version of recent Cannes Palme d'Or winner Laurent Cantet, whose "Human Resources" and "Time Out" dramatically dealt with how employment and identity are intertwined. With a lighter touch, Conrad has made his own trilogy of films about how jobs define our lives, first with his screenplays for "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness" and now with "The Promotion." It's a subject Conrad knows well as a screenwriter who sold his first script at 21, only to see his status as a phenom fade by his early thirties. Now, at age 39 and once again sought after, Conrad has found success by writing about those grappling to achieve it.

Why did this story become your directorial debut?

I just felt it so personally — I know being desperate to improve the quality of your life at the last minute. We stay comic in the movie, enough that some people may not even notice that idea of buying a house you can't afford. It's very much in the news, but two years ago, it wasn't. It happened to me and it made for so many sleepless nights and so much awareness that I was virtually all by myself in the world. When I was a kid, I remember my older cousins and aunts and uncles, they had lives where when they got married, their moms and dads had saved $15,000 and helped them buy a house. Those days are long gone. I think guys my age are generally taking care of their parents now. I realized that when I was 30 and totally broke and out of the movie business that I was going to have to solve this problem personally.

06042008_thepromotion2.jpgSomeone pointed out to me yesterday that the people in my movies don't have friends. They don't have an exposition buddy they tell the story to. "Weather Man" guy didn't have a friend. "Pursuit of Happyness" guy didn't have a friend. Doug [Seann William Scott] doesn't have any friends. It has something to do with feeling these challenges that I set against my characters are challenges they have to solve by themselves. They're not movies where a ragtag bunch of guys get their act together and then team up and solve a problem. The way Doug solves his problem is the way I solved my problem, just by lasting, by endurance, not giving up.

You partially answered this before, but seeing as your films about how success is defined have been your most successful, why are they connecting now?

We spend so many of our waking hours inside of these questions and so few of our art forms address it. Our movies ignore it, and it's funny because they haven't always. Charlie Chaplin movies, they live so deeply inside those moments of not having something you need or something you want, so that the moment was sad and funny. I've somehow latched onto our working experience as a way to help me create stories. When you see a working comedy, they involve people having a good time doing their jobs really poorly or sluffing off or slacking, but I don't think that's the way most people approach their working lives. I think most people do their jobs pretty well. Like airline mechanics, the plane gets there most of the time — I don't picture Bill Murray and a bunch of guys fucking around down there, making themselves laugh. I own up to that idea that we spend hour upon hour upon hour working, and I like to think about the challenges it presents to us, the strength that it calls on, the weaknesses that it divulges. I think it says a lot about us today and Americans have a different relationship to it than anybody else.

You've said in previous interviews that you were inspired to write the screenplay from an experience you had at a supermarket seeing a middle manager being taunted by a group of teens (a scene which is in the film), but how did it grow from that scene into a movie?

I was so moved by that very hard experience I watched that guy go through and then return to work, which meant to me him choosing to face many more of these days. I thought— in order for him to continue to do this, he must have a goal, and then I thought, well, if he has a goal, what would it be and how can I help him reach it. So a story laid out for me by attaching a goal to a person and then going from there to what might impede him, how he might be successful at it and what that will mean to him. I connected that event to just wanting to give the guy a break.

06042008_thepromotion3.jpgFor whatever reason, grocery stores want to familiarize you with their management staff by this pyramidal photograph thing and it's bizarre. I walked in [to the grocery store] and I saw the kid next to another kid [on the chart] and then a rung above them, I thought wow, he wants to go right up, but then there were two of those guys. The image was so strong to me that we repeat it in the movie. They're right next to each other, [but] there's only one guy on top, so only one guy goes up. I thought— why should this other guy be a bad guy? Wouldn't it be more interesting if they were both deserving of the job?

And you seemed to have made a point of making them both equally qualified, even though Seann William Scott would be considered the lead of the film. How did you strike that balance with John C. Reilly's character?

I wanted to create a guy that has so many weaknesses that he's strong. And I thought of Reilly being the drug addict and alcoholic and born again Christian and motorcycle gang member and grocer and tap dancer. You know, we've got some deleted scenes — one day, I'm standing out on the corner in Chicago and I watched15 kids on bikes in a single file line, they all had [baseball] bats and it [was scary], like a scene from "Clockwork Orange." I repeated that scene in "Quebec," John standing there and 15 kids on bikes go by and he goes, "Good luck, guys!" But no one got it. [laughs]

You just called the film "Quebec," which was the film's working title. Are you happy with "The Promotion" as a title?

I very much like the idea that in the history of filmmaking, there's never been a movie called "The Promotion." Not to say ours is the definitive version, but there hasn't been a movie that I can call to mind that deals with that really important part of the American fabric, so I like that. "The Graduate" put a name on that weird period right after you get out of school, where you're not a grownup, but you're not a student anymore — you're a graduate — and I like that it emblemized a period of time. I like that "The Promotion" puts a name on a desire. So it works for me okay, but it's still "Quebec" in my imagination.

[Photo: "The Promotion," Third Rail Releasing, 2008]

"The Promotion" opens in New York and Los Angeles on June 6th.

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9535 2008-06-04 09:54:58 closed closed steve_conrad_on_the_promotion publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009535
<![CDATA[On DVD: "Variety," "Come Drink with Me"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/variety-come-drink-with-me.php Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:12:53 -0500 06032008_variety.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

One of the pioneering wagon-train movies of the inaugural, New York-based independent film movement, predating Jarmusch's "Stranger than Paradise," Bette Gordon's "Variety" (1983) comes off in retrospect as a veritable time capsule of post-punk downtown coolness. Just read the credits: screenwriter Kathy Acker (experimental novelist), star/photog Nan Goldin (famed shutterbug and model for the Ally Sheedy role in "High Art" 15 years later), soundtrack composer John Lurie (of Jarmusch movies and The Lounge Lizards), cinematographer Tom DiCillo (director of "Living in Oblivion," etc.), producer Renee Shafransky (Spalding Gray's longtime girlfriend), co-star Luiz Guzman, bit players Spalding Gray and Cookie Mueller (veteran of John Waters's universe), production assistant Christine Vachon, and so on. Where is Cindy Sherman? The grungy vibe of "Variety" is itself a window on the past — only at the nascent launch of a DIY indie wave in the post-'60s period could you, or would you, set an interrogatory neofeminist psychodrama like this in a Times Square grindhouse devoted exclusively to cheap Euro-porn.

Gordon's heroine is Christine (Sandy McLeod, who later went on to co-direct the 2003 Oscar-nominated short "Asylum"), an unassuming out-of-town girl who takes a job selling tickets at the joint out of desperation. Of course, she begins to brush up, sometimes literally, against the men that used to attend those theaters, becoming vulnerable to deranged masturbatory phone calls and even falling tentatively into the orbit of a wealthy middle-aged mystery man living a shadowy criminal existence at night, after spending his days watching porn. All the while, Christine tries to maintain her relationship with a reporter (Will Patton), but the more she talks about the movie house and its clients, the more he's repulsed. Acker and Gordon's simple masterstroke here is to make Christine hard to nail down — she's good-natured but not sweet, attitude-free but not naïve, more curious than shockable, and not overtly political in any way. As "Variety" presses on, Christine nonjudgmentally explores the possibility of being a sexual object — we're meant to read into her blankness, Rorschach-style.

"Variety" is smart but strangely, even beguilingly off-putting. It's also profoundly depressing; the lack of proactive energy on Christine's part is both the film's overriding message and the source of its hopelessness. (The dialogue and acting — excepting Patton, who was already perfecting his think-one-crazy-thing-say-another persona — tends toward the arch and stiff, but this is back when "indie" meant "without professional training or infrastructure of any kind," not "slumming stars taking a pay cut.") But historically, it speaks volumes: this is one of the first American films with a true feminist docket and an unalloyed female perspective, in a Reagan-era New York of lingering Forty Deuce smut and all-night luncheon counters and cultural warfare in the streets between the old-guard desires of men and the newfound sexual self-definitions of women.

06032008_comedrinkwithme.jpgWe were, of course, behind the times — female fighting machines, for instance, are de rigueur today, but Hong Kong cinema was putting them front and center decades ago, as in the seminal, long-time-coming-to-video HK classic from legendary director King Hu, "Come Drink with Me" (1966). This is where "Kill Bill" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and the latter movie's far too many candy-colored imitators, came from. King's epic is many times more arresting because the razzle dazzle and vaulting combatitude is arrived at not via digital effects but with old fashioned stuntwork, snap-crackle editing and simple filmmaking savvy.

Fans of the utterly psychotic wuxia pian fantasias Tsui Hark pushed to their limit in the '80s and early '90s know where we are: the amorphous period of medieval dynasties, where a bandit clan with big grudges has kidnapped an official, and Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei; think of her as the Sandra Dee of spine-shattering kung fu) is sent to the rescue...whatever. The plots of Shaw Brothers movies from the '60s onward were clotted, preposterous and often simply abridged for the sake of action. This is, in a sense, cinema in something close to its rawest form. In fact, the film's first major set piece — when the harmless-seeming Golden Swallow arrives at a country inn in bandit country, and soon has to take on dozens of bad guys alone, using the tables and rafters and everything else — is visual explosiveness and high-flying breathlessness almost completely sans narrative. You can get whiplash trying to keep up with the flurry of perspectives and lightning-fast shifts of physical activity, but you won't ever accuse the movie of playing to the cheap seats or telling you something twice.

[Photos: Bette Gordon's "Variety," Variety Motion Pictures, 1983; King Hu's "Come Drink with Me," Shaw Brothers, 1966]

"Variety" (Kino Video) and "Come Drink with Me" (Genius Products-Dragon Dynasty) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[The Art of Online Video]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/ifc-news-podcast-79-the-art-of.php Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:36:12 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look at short-form web video, which, if the hype is to be believed, is either the future of entertainment or the destroyer of all things. We take a look at online projects from indie talent like Isabella Rossellini, mumblecore figurehead Joe Swanberg and "The Blair Witch Project"'s Daniel Myrick, and debate how much of what's arisen from the web so far has artistic staying power.

Download: MP3, 30:30 minutes, 27.9 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9537 2008-06-02 09:36:12 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_79_the_art_of publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009537 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Art of Online Video (photo)]]> Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:36:12 -0500 1009537 2008-06-02 09:36:12 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_79_the_art_of_photo inherit 9537 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/06/opening-this-week-15.php Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:27:10 -0500 06022008_dreamswithsharpteeth.jpgBy Neil Pedley

Among this week's offerings: The pregnancy comedy goes pre-natal, the fate of all the jungle rests in the hands of the world's most lethargic endangered species, and Dario Argento has a new film, rendering the rest of this list mostly unnecessary.

"Dreams With Sharp Teeth"
Author Harlan Ellison is widely regarded as one of the finest writers of the 20th century. He is also, as this documentary readily highlights, abrasive, petulant, egotistical and prone to fits of belligerent rage. Collecting together more than two decades worth of footage and interviews, "Grizzly Man" producer Erik Nelson lifts the dust jacket off one of literature's genuinely larger than life characters and a man who has filed more lawsuits than the ACLU, proving that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, even Ellison's sci-fi tales.
Opens in New York.

"The Go-Getter"
On paper, it sounds like the dictionary definition of a Sundance Film (coming of age story, acoustic-indie soundtrack, quirky characters), so it's no surprise this whimsical road movie played the festival in 2007. Lou Taylor Pucci stars as a disaffected teen who steals a car and rediscovers his estranged brother by proxy as he tracks him across the country to tell him of their mother's death. Zooey Deschanel is the sympathetic owner of the stolen vehicle who aids his journey, and though she might have lost a car, Deschanel gained a singer-songwriter partner offscreen in M. Ward, who scored the film and joined her to form the musical duo She & Him following the shoot.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"Kung Fu Panda"
Movie theater patrons have already been acquainted with Po the Panda as the bear who bursts onto the screen just before the feature and threatens to kick your ass if you don't quit texting your buddy sitting two seats away. Looking to bolster DreamWorks's bottom line in the absence of a certain big green ogre this summer, the studio's first animated film in Cinemascope tells the epic story of Po (Jack Black), a slacker chosen by prophecy to be trained to be a warrior to battle against an evil snow leopard (Ian McShane). Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Seth Rogen and Jackie Chan help to round out an eclectic, all-star voice cast.
Opens wide and in IMAX.

"Miss Conception"
It appears that Hollywood has birthed yet another pregnancy comedy, though this one takes place across the pond. Desperate to be a mum, a flighty London professional (Heather Graham) has one month to get herself pregnant, since her family has a history of early menopause. Providing ample opportunities to mock the British for pre-conceived notions of their repressed attitudes towards sex, the film has supplied Graham's Georgina with a best friend, played by Mia Kirshner, who arranges for her to pounce on an ever more terrified selection of unsuspecting men.
Opens in Los Angeles.

"Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Kahn"
Don't let the fact that this was the official Kazakhstan [insert obligatory "Borat" gag here] entry into the best foreign film category at this year's Oscars fool you — this Eurasian epic is about as international as they come. Boasting a Russian director and Chinese and Japanese leads, this sweeping melodrama chronicles the legendary warlord's childhood, his struggle to survive in the wake of his father's assassination and his subsequent ascension to overlord of an empire stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Naturally, two hours can't cover such an epic life, but fret not, a second installment chronicling the final years of his life is currently in development.
Opens in limited release.

"The Mother of Tears"
Also known as "The Third Mother," this elegant supernatural thriller is the concluding installment of Italian director Dario Argento's "The Three Mothers" trilogy, which arrives a mere 28 years after the last installment, "Inferno." The final chapter of this gothic horror trifecta sees an American art restoration student, played by Dario's daughter, Asia, disturb an ancient urn containing cursed relics, the release of which heralds the return of the beautiful yet malevolent sorceress Mater Lachrymarum (Moran Atias). As frequent readers of the site may know, we'll see just about anything with Asia Argento, but don't take our word for it — non-horror fans might recall none other than Juno MacGuff prefers Dario Argento to Herschell Gordon Lewis. In English and Italian with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"On The Rumba River"
Out of one of the most war-torn countries on Earth comes the truly remarkable and inspirational story of Wendo Kolosoy, a man credited with pioneering the Congolese Rumba and one of the godfathers of African music. Against the backdrop of a 2004 reunion concert for Papa Wendo and his band, French filmmaker Jacques Sarasin charts Wendo's humble beginnings as a boat mechanic, his battles with the Belgian colonials who considered him subversive, his fall from grace and time spent as a beggar on the streets and his dramatic comeback under a new regime in the late '90s. In Lingala with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Operation Filmmaker"
The issue of media responsibility as it relates to the war in Iraq takes on a whole new meaning in this documentary from Nina Davenport about a young Iraqi filmmaker named Muthana Mohmed, who's taken under the wing of Liev Schreiber after the actor/director hears that his Baghdad school has been bombed. However, Mohmed finds that his job as a production assistant on Schreiber's film, "Everything is Illuminated," isn't what he had hoped for, and Schreiber and company are displeased to find their charity case is fond of partying and George Bush. As the reality of Mohmed's temporary status looms ever closer, Davenport documents how, much like the larger situation in Iraq, sometimes even the best of intentions can go seriously awry.
Opens in New York.

"The Promotion"
Writer/director Steve Conrad, the screenwriter behind "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness" once again goes to the well of somewhat failed men and their questionable professional accomplishments, this time adding a more comedic edge. John C. Reilly and Seann William Scott star as two competing grocery store employees, each vying for the job of manager of the new store opening in town while trying to conceal vast chasms of incapability. Debuting at this year's SXSW Festival, the film pulled sharply divided early reviews, with SpoutBlog calling it "one of the best comedies in years" and The Hollywood Reporter calling it "one of the unfunniest comedies ever."
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy"
With a release set to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the New York senator's tragic assassination, Shane O'Sullivan's investigative documentary explores the controversies surrounding the shooting and the conspiracy theories that persist to this day. Expanding on his reports for the BBC, O'Sullivan uncovers fresh forensic analysis and inconsistencies in the official account of the murder, and speaks to convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan's only surviving relative in an effort to discover the true sequence of events that took place. O'Sullivan is also going the Errol Morris route and publishing an accompanying book, "Who Killed Bobby Kennedy?" to reach shelves to tie in with the release of the film.
Opens in New York.

"Sarkar Raj"
Ram Gopal Varma's highly anticipated sequel to the acclaimed Bollywood hit "Sarkar," finally arrives, but while that film was a re-imagining of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Varma has loosely built this follow-up around the shady goings-on in the build up to the Enron scandal. Yet "Raj" is still a family affair, with Varma directing Amitabh Bachchan, Bachchan's son Abhishek and Abhishek's real-life wife Aishwarya Rai, who plays an ambitious CEO outside the family who gets in cahoots with Abhishek's clan leader to navigate the various factions populating a corrupt political minefield as they seek to establish a power plant in the local province. In Hindi with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Take Out"
One of the creative forces behind the inimitable "Greg The Bunny," writer/director Sean Baker teams with fellow NYU grad Shi-Ching Tsou for this contemporary, neorealist slice of life. Ming Ding (Charles Jang), a Chinese immigrant who makes his living as a takeout deliveryman, gets in over his head in debt to the loan sharks who helped smuggle him into the U.S. and is given 24 hours to make good on the cash. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Nashville Film Festival, the film drew much praise on the festival circuit for its commitment to a documentary-style aesthetic and its aversion to overt, clichéd sentimentality.
Opens in New York.

"When Did You Last See Your Father?"
After flirting with helming "The Golden Compass," director Anand Tucker adapts the far more intimate autobiography of poet Blake Morrison — think "Big Fish" minus Tim Burton's fairytale gallery of the grotesque and you have some idea. Colin Firth stars as the conflicted son who looks back on a lifelong struggle to reconcile his feelings for his distant father (Jim Broadbent) during his dad's final weeks battling terminal cancer. Matthew Beard co-stars as the young Blake and Juliet Stevenson as his mother.
Opens in limited release.

"You Don't Mess with the Zohan"
For comedy fans, only "Tropic Thunder" has more stars aligned this summer than the writers of "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," which teams former NYU roommates Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow with "Saturday Night Live" stalwart Robert Smigel, in the latter's feature writing debut. "Zohan" provides perhaps the most definitive answer for those who wondered what might have occurred had Derek Zoolander opted for a career in the Israeli Mossad as opposed to strutting it on the catwalk. Sandler stars as a metrosexual Jack Bauer who fakes his own death so that he can escape to New York to pursue his dream of becoming a hair stylist, but becomes the target of a bungling sleeper cell. Sandler regulars Rob Schneider, John Turturro, and Kevin Nealon all show up to lend their support.
Opens wide.

[Photo: "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," Creative Differences, 2007]

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9533 2008-06-02 09:27:10 closed closed opening_this_week_15 publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009533
<![CDATA[Wrapping Up Cannes 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/wrapping-up-cannes-2008.php Thu, 29 May 2008 12:32:38 -0500 05292008_hunger.jpgBy Matt Singer

It wasn't just the weather that was gloomy at the 61st Cannes Film Festival. By the time the skies above southern France briefly cleared for a few days during the second week of the festival, the international press corps had been infected by a mass plague, not unlike the one portrayed in this opening night selection "Blindness," done in reverse — instead of losing their sight, hundreds of journalists stumbled around in a fog, obliged to do nothing but look, and after 12-plus days of looking at a selection of tasteful, well-made and entirely bleak movies, society's rules were breaking down into sweaty anarchy. Those waiting in line for press screenings, always ready to devolve into contentious, multilingual shoving matches, were especially cranky. The traditional applause during a film's closing credits was muted at best, nonexistent or drowned out by boos at the worst. Walking out of a screening on the second Friday morning of Cannes 2008, a colleague turned to me and sighed, "I'm tired, I'm sick of movies, and I'm trapped here." That sense of imprisonment was no doubt fostered by a Cannes slate that included plenty of people wasting away behind bars, including the opening night selections, Fernando Meirelles's "Blindness" and Steve McQueen's "Hunger," respectively from the competition roster and the Un Certain Regard sidebar.

Of course, no movie held audiences captive longer than "Che," Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half hour epic about the Latin American revolutionary. Technically two different films, "The Argentine" and "Guerrilla," (though since neither screened with any opening or closing titles, no one's quite sure which is which), they played together at Cannes with a brief intermission. Each half informs the other — in the first, Che Guevara (played by Benicio Del Toro beneath an assortment of grotty beards) helps lead Cuba's revolution; in the second, he dies at the helm of a failed one in Bolivia — but even in concert, neither seems to give a full portrait of the man.

There's an urge to call any movie, particularly one about an important historical figure, an "epic," but Soderbergh's approach is micro in every way except its length. No attempt is made to explore Cuba or Bolivia or their political realities beyond the parts of it that Guevara sees trudging through their jungles; nor is any attention paid to Guevara's personal life or those of the thinly fleshed out supporting characters who make up his armies. Though Soderbergh originally intended to depict just the Bolivian segment of the film, before deciding later that the Cuban portion was needed to add the proper context, it's the first half, with its complex blend of time periods and visual styles, that feels the most fully formed. Though the second film opens with a particularly dramatic flourish of Guevara sneaking into Bolivia through the use of forged papers and an amazing disguise, the rest of it is almost stridently undramatic, a series of sad things happening without warning or context to a bunch of people we don't know very much about, with Guevara himself largely absent from several longer sequences. The film's running time is in gross excess of the insight it gives into its subject or his doomed campaign or the questions it raises or the emotions it stirs.

05292008_waltzwithbashir.jpgA more favorable ratio in a similarly themed film could be found in the "animated documentary" "Waltz With Bashir," in which the director, Ari Folman, investigates his loss of memory about his time serving in the Israeli army by interviewing the people who knew him then and who shared similar experiences during the Lebanon War of the early 1980s. A little bit "Apocalypse Now" with a dash of "Citizen Kane" (if Kane himself had visited Mr. Bernstein and Jed Leland), told with a visual style somewhere between the psychedelia of "A Scanner Darkly" and the heightened realism of "Chicago 10," the film manages to explore dark material without getting weighted down by it, and is enriched with a human component that felt missing from many of the competition films I saw. Its haunting ending proved a far better meditation on the sin of inaction than Meirelles's "Blindness"

Equally cartoonish but without the requisite animation was Jennifer Lynch's "Surveillance." Screening as a midnight movie out of competition, Lynch's first film since 1993's "Boxing Helena" went directly to cult status without ever passing through mainstream channels. Its midnight movie flavor is enhanced by its blend of dissonant genre notes and oddball casting (Cheri Oteri as an obnoxious mom? French Stewart as a douchebag cop? Michael Ironside as an obnoxious douchebag?). Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond play FBI agents who piece together a couple of serial killers' latest escapades through the varying testimonies of the crime's three survivors (viewed, simultaneously, by Pullman on a high-tech video rig). If "Surveillance" appears superficially interested in exploring "Rashomon"-ish themes and, yes, the effect of invasive video recordings, it quickly abandons it to become an increasingly trashy thriller with a twist ending both so ludicrously obvious and so endearingly silly as to seem like something from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman's tasteless screenwriting brother Donald in "Adaptation."

The real Charlie Kaufman had his own screenplay at Cannes — in fact, his first stab at directing his own script with "Synecdoche, New York." Once again, he picks an artist as his subject, this time, a floundering regional theater director named Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), who is left by his wife (Catherine Keener) and given a "genius" grant with an unlimited budget, which he uses to create a play about truth in his own life and the rest of the inhabitants of New York City as the focus, all performed on an enormous 1:1 mockup of Manhattan inside a giant derelict warehouse.

"Synecdoche," whose title was derived from a figure of speech used when a part of something is used to describe a whole, bursts with all the cleverness we've come to expect from a Kaufman creation — from Keener's art shows (paintings so miniaturized they must be viewed with magnifying glasses) to the box office girl Hazel's house, which is always on fire but never burns down. But the film is terribly messy, and while that may be a way of emulating the play-within-the-film (or the play-within-the-play-within-the-play-within-the-film, since Caden's project quickly begins to fold in on itself), it also forces the audience to view it at an emotional remove. Tellingly, perhaps even ominously, the Cotard theater piece never has an audience, even after its cast has been working on it for more than a decade. As "Synecdoche" left Cannes, it still hadn't found a U.S. distributor.

05292008_twolovers.jpgIt wasn't the only one. Like "Synecdoche" and "Che," James Gray's "Two Lovers" came to Cannes courtesy of independent financing and without a clear path to American theaters. Like Gray's "We Own the Night," which premiered in competition at Cannes last year, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as a young man living in Brooklyn trapped between his own confused desires and his familial responsibilities. In "Night," he played the lone drug-running fuck-up in a family full of cops; here he's Leonard, the suicidal son of a successful pair of Jewish immigrant dry cleaners (underplayed with quiet humanity by Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini). Moving back in with his patient parents hasn't done much for Leonard's self-esteem, but it reaps immediately dividends for his love life. His father's new partner introduces him to his available daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), yet Leonard becomes much more interested in his sexy-flighty neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Audiences were decidedly mixed on "Two Lovers" and many, particularly those in the con camp, compared the film dismissively to "Marty." We'll have to save the discussion on when it became fashionable to hate on Paddy Chayefsky for another time; instead, let me just note that the film, my favorite from Cannes, is small in scope, but perfectly executed within its means, with some superb touches in the areas of camera work and sound. Above all, the film is one of the single finest examples of the eternal dilemma best voiced by Chris Rock: "It's always the same [with] two women: the one you love, and the one who loves you." And as Rock points out, and Leonard ultimately learns, "nothing will bring you down harder." Except maybe spending two weeks in the south of France in the rain.

[Photos: "Hunger," IFC Films, 2008; "Waltz With Bashir," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008; "Two Lovers," 2929 Productions, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Stuart Gordon on "Stuck"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/stuart-gordon-on-stuck.php Wed, 28 May 2008 09:50:36 -0500 05272008_stuck1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Though cult filmmaker Stuart Gordon is most revered for his many screen adaptations of horror legend H. P. Lovecraft's work (including "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond"), his latest could be read as the final leg of an angry American trilogy that began with 2003's "King of the Ants" and continued with his 2005 adaptation of David Mamet's "Edmond." In just over an hour and a half, "Stuck" is at once a caustically funny economic drama, a moral thriller and a survival horror flick, all based on a bizarre but true story. Mena Suvari stars as Brandi, a nursing home caretaker who, after partying a little too hard one night, hits recently downsized sad-sack Tom (Stephen Rea) with her car. He doesn't die, but is slowly bleeding to death while half-embedded in her windshield, forcing a panicked Brandi to stupidly decide to leave him in the garage as she vies for a meager work promotion the next day. Events escalate disastrously for both parties, but to say another word would ruin the experience of this taut, nasty, giddily compelling little film that barks volumes about the state of the country today. I spoke with Gordon about "Stuck," Lovecraft and sneaking political agendas into gore flicks. [WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead.]

"Stuck" bounces between so many genres. How do you perceive what the film ultimately is?

It's based on a true story, of course, and that is what drew me to it in the first place. I was reading about it in the newspaper every day for weeks and couldn't believe what I was reading. I kept wondering, what would make a woman do something like this? Finding the answer to that question was what the movie was all about for me. My daughter had a great take on it — she said it's about how people are all walking around in these little bubbles of self-interest and no one really cares about anyone else. I think it's unfortunate that things have gotten to be that way, but that's the way they are.

What was the creative bridge between the story you read and the pointed sociopolitical critique the film contains?

I think those things fell into place. It wasn't a question of "let's do a movie about social criticism." It's part of telling the story, the idea that people are so afraid of admitting that they've made a mistake or taking responsibility for their own actions. We live in a world where no one apologizes anymore. People think it's weak to help other people. It's a real dog-eat-dog world, and I think that's the world we're all unfortunately stuck with right now.

Why are we like this?

I think people are afraid. It starts with our leadership, going all the way to the top. [George W. Bush] created this atmosphere of fear to get himself... he wasn't elected, but to get himself in power, to keep people afraid and afraid of each other. The Supreme Court appointed this guy, which is completely unbelievable — it's like a coup d'état. I'm hoping with a new administration coming in, God willing, things will get friendlier.

There's been a lot of talk about the anniversary of 1968, the same year you were arrested on obscenity charges for a college play ["Peter Pan"] you produced. How much has changed in the sociopolitical climate since then?

05272008_stuck2.jpgWhat I think is interesting is that this administration is still trying to destroy all of the work that came out of '68. I was getting depressed about that, and then I realized it's still about the strides that were made in all sorts of areas: civil rights, the environment, women's rights. All of that started with the things going on in '68. You've got these people who are now trying to question it, to wipe it out, to get us back to how things were in the '50s. I'm hoping that we can start undoing all the damage that's been done in the last eight years, and start getting back on track.

But there's so much apathy. How can you be cynical and progressive at the same time?

I think people have given up. They feel like they've been beating their head against a wall and it's pointless. I think what'll happen is that, bit by that, they're going to realize that they do have power. Again, I think that's been part of this administration's approach — it's like those old villains in movies who go, "It's hopeless to struggle, there is no escape, blah blah blah." That's what we hear all the time, and people just eventually throw their hands up: I can't do anything about it. One of the things that is exciting about this election is that people are getting engaged again, and hopefully that will lead to change.

Do you find it hard to get audiences to accept politics in a non-political movie today?

One of the great things about horror movies is that it's one of the only genres to address and make political statements. It's appalling when you think about how few movies have really made a statement of any kind. The biggest ones come from horror movies. One of the most obvious is Joe Dante's episode of "Masters of Horror," ["Homecoming"], where the dead soldiers come back from Iraq to vote out the president who sent them there. Since 9/11, horror movies have become the most important and popular genre because they're dealing with what's on people's minds. "Cloverfield," "War of the Worlds," "28 Days Later" — they're all making very strong political statements and they can do it because it's in the guise of fantasy, of something impossible. In actuality, they're dealing with the here and now.

"Stuck" is a bit booby-trapped with the ambiguities between heroes and villains. How did you approach the dynamics between Brandi and Tom?

We didn't want to make her into a monster — the idea is that she's an ordinary person who finds herself doing some terrible things. They always talk about the banality of evil. By making wrong decisions, she goes down this path and has to follow through with it. Both Stephen Rea and Mena Suvari pointed out that [in the script] both of their characters get stronger as the movie goes on. They're fighting for their lives. Stephen said, "After this movie is over, I don't think that Tom is going to be on the streets much longer." Tom has found that strength to get himself out of this situation. The same is somewhat true of Mena's character, that she has to take things into her own hands. She grows in the course of the film. It's fun watching it with an audience because their sympathies go back and forth between the two characters.

You have a long history in theater, but you're more renowned for your films. Artistically, how different are the two mediums for you?

Theater is the most difficult art form. It takes tremendous concentration. Unlike a movie, you can't stop and do it over again. It's also a real dialogue with the audience. The actors and the audience are communicating with each other throughout the performance, where a movie is an optical illusion projected on a wall. I try with my films to get that sense of involvement, to let the audience participate and engage their imaginations. My favorite kinds of movies are the ones where you forget you're watching a movie. You forget there are actors, a script, a director, and you just get lost in it. Theater has the power to change people, and I think films do, too.

05272008_stuck3.jpgI've never seen any of your theater productions, but here's a free idea for you: "Re-Animator: The Musical."

[laughs] It's funny, it's actually been suggested to me to do a musical version of "Re-Animator." I'm trying to figure out how to accomplish that. It would be a bad idea, really. The kinds of plays I like to do are [those in which] the audience actually plays a part. I did a play called "Dr. Rat" in which all the characters were laboratory animals, and the whole audience were put in cages. At a certain point, there's a revolution in the lab and the animals open the cages and let everyone out. The audience is given the choice to stay in their cages, or to join the characters onstage. By the end of the performance, there's literally 150 audience members onstage with the actors. It was quite extraordinary.

You've done so many H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, many of which were considered unadapatable. What makes him so vital to you in cinematic form?

You can't top Lovecraft for imagination, what a mind! His ideas are still so far out there. We haven't even caught up with him yet, 70 years since he's left us. He creates universes, and the thing I love about his work is there's a connection between his stories. How many writers have created a whole sort of mythology like Lovecraft has? He's so incredibly rich, and he's got so many stories. That's the other thing I discovered early on — they're all public domain. Anyone can do a Lovecraft story right now. There's a festival every year in October in Portland where amateur filmmakers do Lovecraft adaptations. I think they've done all of them at some point or another, so he's a treasure trove.

Have you made any plans for a sixth Lovecraft film, if we're including your "Masters of Horror" episode "Dreams in the Witch-House"?

I'm prepping "The Thing on the Doorstep," and I'm hoping that'll be the next thing I do. It's the only Lovecraft story that has a strong female character, and I really think it was written about his marriage. He was married for only a few years, and so it's a horror story about marriage. For a while, I was hoping to do "House of Re-Animator," but found that people were so afraid to do anything that might offend the Bush administration because the story was set in the White House. Thinking about it got me back in this "Re-Animator" world, and I would like to come back at some point.

[Photos: "Stuck," THINKFilm, 2007]

"Stuck" opens in limited release on May 30.

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<![CDATA[The Decline of the Longitudinal Documentary]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/the-decline-of-the-longitudina.php Wed, 28 May 2008 09:37:07 -0500 We're in a Golden Age of documentary filmmaking right now. Having been on the festival circuit recently with our film, "At the Death House Door," Peter Gilbert and I have been seeing firsthand the wealth and variety of accomplished documentary films being made here and abroad. And according to programmers, these festival films are being selected from hundreds and even thousands of submissions. Yet I don't see a commensurate growth in the number of "longitudinal documentaries" -- ones like "Hoop Dreams" or "Stevie" or Barbara Kopple's "American Dream" (which Peter shot) that track people's lives and stories over several years. For me, longitudinal docs are the most deeply satisfying form. Spending years following a story is the ultimate act of filmmaking discovery, because you don't know where the journey is leading, no matter how perceptive you think you are. Indeed, you hope and pray you'll be surprised, because if you stick with interesting people long enough, they'll always surprise you -- that's the beauty of human nature. I used to equate filming "Hoop Dreams" to living inside a Dickens novel, because the fortunes of the two young men and their families would change so frequently and dramatically. (I equate "Stevie" to living inside a Faulkner novel, but that's a different story.)

But as fulfilling as longitudinal filming is, it's also hard. It's hard to find funding, because many broadcasters like to know what they're paying for in advance. One once told me, "You're asking me to fund a fishing trip, and I don't know whether you'll bring back a big fish or a little fish." (They didn't give me any money.) Even when you get funded, it's hard for filmmakers to juggle their obsession with filming everything with their need to otherwise make a living: spending four or five years filming 200 days on a documentary budget doesn't work out to a very good "day rate."

And when you collect 500 hours or 1000 hours or 1500 hours of material, you've set for yourself a formidable editing challenge. The story is told in the editing of these films. Indeed, if "writing is rewriting," then "editing is reediting." One cannot do an adequate job -- much less an inspired one — in six months. A year is more like it, and I've been involved in editing films that have taken several years. Many a promising film has gone on to die in post because the filmmakers didn't have the time, or resources, or patience to keep editing.

Then there are the human relationships of longitudinal filmmaking. If you spend years filming people, they will grow to be something more than just a "subject." I've never thought of myself as a journalist, so I don't wrestle over notions of "journalistic objectivity" and dispassionate observation, but that doesn't prevent me from struggling with my desire to document a subject's life in an honest way and still feel like a friend. When misfortune happens to people in your film, it's usually good for the film, but not necessarily so for your relationship with them, or for how you feel about yourself. In short, you can feel like a leech on another's misery. Someone once asked me, "What's more important? To make a great film, to make an honest film, or to have a great relationship with your subjects at the end of the film?" They're not mutually exclusive, but every experienced longitudinal filmmaker I know asks him or herself that question. Handled right and with a bit of luck, the misfortune you document should bring you closer to your subjects and make both of you feel that you have an important story to tell.

To pull off a successful longitudinal documentary really means having the stars align on so many fronts -- no wonder it doesn't happen too often. But when it does, for the viewer and the filmmaker, there's no more compelling or moving a form. No other kind of fiction or documentary filmmaking can match its power to transport us deeply into the lives and experiences of others different from ourselves. And that is something that we need in this world now more than ever.


Steve James is the award-winning director, producer, and co-editor of "Hoop Dreams," which won every major critics award as well as a Peabody and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1995. His latest film, "At the Death House Door," is co-produced and co directed with Peter Gilbert and will make its television premiere on IFC on May 29th.

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<![CDATA[The Decline of the Longitudinal Documentary (photo)]]> Wed, 28 May 2008 09:37:07 -0500 1009397 2008-05-28 09:37:07 closed closed the_decline_of_the_longitudina_photo inherit 9397 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Cannes 08: "The Class" Graduates With Honors]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/cannes-08-the-class-graduates.php Tue, 27 May 2008 17:11:44 -0500 05272008_theclass.jpgThe 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival wrapped this past Sunday, having been the scene of big Hollywood premieres like "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and smaller but no less anticipated ones from filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers, Arnaud Desplechin and Atom Egoyan. In the end, it was a French film that won the Palme d'Or — the first homegrown feature to take the top prize since 1987's "Under Satan's Sun." The film, a late entry in the competition, was directed by Laurent Cantet, whose past work includes "Time Out" and "Heading South," and follows a year in the life of a teacher in an inner city Parisian school. Opening remarks from jury Sean Penn, who told the press that "We are going to feel very confident that the filmmaker of [the winning film] was very aware of the times within which he (or she) lives," had many guessing that one of the fest's many somber-themed flicks would end up getting lauded, but Cantet's critically acclaimed work was also applauded for being enjoyable and entertaining. Here's a complete list of the prizewinners.

IN COMPETTION - FEATURE FILMS

    Palme d'Or:
    "Entre les murs" (The Class), directed by Laurent Cantet

    Grand Prix:
    "Gomorra," directed by Matteo Garrone

    Prize of the 61st Festival de Cannes ex-aequo:
    Catherine Deneuve for "Un conte de Noël," directed by Arnaud Desplechin
    Clint Eastwood for "Changeling"

    Award for the Best Director:
    "Üç maymun" (Three Monkeys), directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

    Jury Prize:
    "Il Divo," directed by Paolo Sorrentino

    Best Performance from an Actor:
    Benicio Del Toro in "Che," directed by Steven Soderbergh

    Best Performance from an Actress:
    Sandra Corveloni in "Linha de Passe," directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas

    Award for the Best Screenplay:
    "Le Silence de Lorna" (Lorna's Silence), directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne


IN COMPETITION - SHORT FILMS

    Palme d'Or:
    "Megatron," directed by Marian Crisan

    Jury Prize:
    "Jerrycan," directed by Julius Avery


CAMÉRA D'OR

    Caméra d'Or (for best first film):
    "Hunger," directed by Steve McQueen (Un Certain Regard)

    Caméra d'Or Special Mention:
    "Vse Umrut a Ja Ostanus" (They Will All Die Except Me), directed by Valeria Gaï Guermanika (Critics Week)


UN CERTAIN REGARD

    Un Certain Regard Prize:
    "Tulpan," directed by Sergey Dvortsevoy

    Jury Prize:
    "Tokyo Sonata," directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

    Heart Throb Jury Prize:
    "Wolke 9," directed by Andreas Drese

    The Knockout of Un Certain Regard:
    "Tyson," directed by James Toback

    Prize of Hope:
    "Johnny Mad Dog," directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire


CINEFONDATION

    First Cinéfondation Prize:
    "Himnon" (Hymn), directed by Elad Keidan (The Sam Spiegel Film and TV School, Israël)

    Second Cinéfondation Prize:
    "Forbach," directed by Claire Burger (La fémis, France)

    Third Cinéfondation Prize:
    "Stop," directed by Park Jae-ok (The Korean Academy of Film Arts, Corée du Sud)
    "Kestomerkitsijät" (Roadmarkers), directed by Juho Kuosmanen (University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finlande)

[Photo: "The Class," Haut et Court, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Cannes Endpoint]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/ifc-news-podcast-78-cannes-end.php Tue, 27 May 2008 13:46:43 -0500 We've stuck a fork in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and that puppy is well charred. A day late and a Euro short, we take a look at the fest as a whole on this week's IFC News podcast, before discussing the pros and cons of two of the most talked-about films from American directors, Steven Soderbergh's "Che" and Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York," surveying the prizes and giving out a few of our own.

Download: MP3, 34:36 minutes, 31.6 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9504 2008-05-27 13:46:43 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_78_cannes_end publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009504 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Cannes Endpoint (photo)]]> Tue, 27 May 2008 13:46:43 -0500 1009504 2008-05-27 13:46:43 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_78_cannes_end_photo inherit 9504 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["The Delirious Fictions of William Klein," "All You Need Is Love"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/the-delirious-fictions-of-will.php Tue, 27 May 2008 10:10:40 -0500 05272008_whoareyoupollymaggoo2.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

Like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, famous photographer William Klein emerges on 21st century DVD as the great bullgoose Art Film-era satirist we never knew we had. Hallowed for his still images and his documentaries, the Paris-based Klein also made three furiously hostile lampoons that were nominally released, ignored and then forgotten. Until now, you could only find "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" (1966), "Mr. Freedom" (1969) and "The Model Couple" (1977) in scruffy bootlegs from pro-am vendors like Pimpadelic Wonderland — and given the movies' paucity of reputation, you would've had little reason to do so. A busy '60s shutterbug for the French Vogue, Klein more or less fell in with the Left Bank New Wavers (Resnais, Demy, Marker, Varda) and the Panic Movement (Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor both show up in "Polly Maggoo"). But his perspective was New Yawk pugilistic, his humor was mercilessly accusatory and his eye was unerringly sharp and expressive. The movies in the new Criterion Eclipse set are a revelation (arguably, they're the most astute left-wing mockeries of their day), but more than that, they appear to be timeless, and their blitzkrieg critiques are just as pertinent now as they were then.

Perhaps more so, since the brainless sociopathologies that Klein attacks have only grown more powerful and pervasive in the intervening decades, and precious few Western filmmakers today have the nerve to satirize the culture that feeds them. Klein's first and best feature, "Polly Maggoo" lays into a world Klein knew intimately — fashion, from the designers to the magazines to the TV media covering both. The titular heroine (played entrancingly by the rather Theron-esque Dorothy MacGowan in her only film) is a simple Brooklynite hitting the big time in Paris as a cover girl, accosted by slavering men on the street, chased down by a TV-exposé producer (Jean Rochefort) trying to fathom what he perceives to be her beautiful emptiness, and pursued by the bumbling emissaries of a mythical prince (Sami Frey), who's fallen in love with her photo. Chockablock with imagery and set pieces that are simultaneously gorgeous and thick with outrageous content, making vicious fun of men and sexism and media shallowness and Diana Vreeland and haute couture (the opening sequence plays out behind the scenes at a runway show where a designer has outfitted his girls entirely in giant shards of sharp-edged aluminum), Klein's movie is nothing less than Voltairean in its exactitude and Buñuelian in its sardonic wit.

05272008_modelcouple.jpg"The Model Couple," conceived and filmed years later, prophesies "The Truman Show," "EDtv," "The Real World" and "reality" everything, as a perfectly "average" French husband and wife (André Dussollier and Anémone) are sequestered in a government-analysis "model apartment" and subjected to tests and studies as the entire travail is televised live and commented on by panels of asinine pundits. Superbly acted, it has only a minor satiric bite (and, ironically, it dates more than either earlier film). But "Mr. Freedom" is the discovery of the moment, if only because its relentless, scabrous rip through American jingoism and xenophobic sloganeering remarkably expresses the Bush administration mindset (as well as its Rovian reasoning, press conference rhetoric and homicidal policies) even more accurately than it characterizes the American public personality during the 'Nam years. "Antifreedomism!" is the danger confronted by Mr. Freedom (John Abbey), a ludicrous superhero-spy whose uniform is a mélange of sporting equipment, whose theme song actually misspells "freedom" and who hollers at a huge-but-powerless inflatable SuperFrenchMan, "Are you with me, or against me?!?"

Mr. Freedom is the bloodthirsty tool of a mercenary corporation, sent to France to protect them from the "Reds," and in the process, from an underground bunker filled with hoochie-koochie acolytes painted red, white and blue, he manages to bomb half the country out of existence. This predates "Team America: World Police" by 35 years, and derisively howls in just the same way at how America views the world and itself — but don't overlook Mr. Freedom's bout of stigmata, Delphine Seyrig in a peach Afro and tissue-thin gownless evening strap rallying the troops with a percussion band of tubby wrestlers, Philippe Noiret as the evil Soviet Empire (in a massive foam-rubber suit), the U.S. Embassy-as-huge-discount-department-store-with-cheerleaders and Mr. Freedom's inspiring speech to his minions, a harangue of absurd sales pitches and meaningless aphorisms that'd fit perfectly in Bush's mouth. (Klein heard "freedom" being chewed into gristle by politicians during the Cold War, but he was also imagining the future of the Dubya reign.) There's a good deal more — nobody could accuse Klein of not having ideas, or not having a tireless sense of humor — and though it can get tiring, "Mr. Freedom" stands as a monument to irreverent dissent. "Duck Soup" and "Les Carabiniers" come to mind as companion pieces — is there higher praise?

05272008_allyouneedislove.jpgA more neutral archaeology, the DVD release of Tony Palmer's long-unseen British TV miniseries doc "All You Need Is Love" (1976) is a welcome look back upon the long history of pop music as it evolved piecemeal and at the behest of musicians, before the 24/7 market ubiquity of iPods, "American Idol," satellite radio and internet streaming. This is Ken Burns before Ken Burns (if not quite as polished as "Baseball" or "Jazz"), comprised of interviews and archival footage both common and rare (including footage of a singing Woody Guthrie, and a woeful Roxy Music performance that nonetheless affords a glimpse of a synthesizer-playing Brian Eno), and unfurling the whole story, from Scott Joplin to Earl Hines to Bessie Smith to Benny Goodman to Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Jethro Tull.

Palmer's 14-hour-plus odyssey is filthy with progressional details — as when it is made clear how the WWI upkick in urban munition factories mobilized southern blacks to northern cities, encouraging them to leave the harmonica and piano behind in favor of the steel guitar and what became the modern blues. Destroyed are the common beliefs that ragtime, jazz and blues grew out of one another (they were completely separate entities, culturally and geographically), and that the Mississippi Delta was some kind of ground zero for the blues (you needed to go hundreds of miles upriver). Palmer also dedicates, amid the swing and rock and country and folk, entire episodes to pivotal periods/manifestations you'd never think to include (or wish to endure), among them 'music hall' (featuring Liberace!) and The Musical (oh boy, "Tommy"). Pop music itself is by definition a very mixed bag, so some of the necessary digressions are painful, but the banquet is large and long and enriching. My favorite morsel: a live Roosevelt Sykes doing the best "St. James Infirmary" I've ever heard, and giving it credit as a 300-year-old Liverpudlian riff to boot.

[Photos: "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?", 1966; André Dussollier and Anémone in "The Model Couple," 1977; The Rolling Stones in "All You Need Is Love," 1977]

"The Delirious Fictions of William Klein" (Criterion Collection: Eclipse Series) and "All You Need is Love" (Zeit Media Limited) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Cannes 08: James Gray on "Two Lovers"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/cannes-08-james-gray-on-two-lo.php Mon, 26 May 2008 13:29:31 -0500 05262008_twolovers1.jpgBy Erica Abeel

When was the last time you heard someone drop a mention of Jacques Lacan? (I'll pause if you need to refresh your memory of the name at Wikipedia). If the answer is never, you haven't sat down with the delightful James Gray, who was at Cannes with his new film "Two Lovers," starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw and Isabella Rossellini. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that could pose a challenge to any interviewer, Gray also cited as influences Dostoevsky's novella "White Nights," Scorsese, Hitchcock, French poet Louis Aragon and a B-movie starring, uh... John Hodiak? There's a sense that Gray's in a hurry to put across his ideas now, since later can be a long time coming, given the gaps between his films. Bowing in 1994 at age twenty-four with "Little Odessa" (which took the Silver Lion in Venice), he didn't produce "The Yards" till 2000, "We Own the Night" following in 2007. He's emblematic of those creative strivers in it for the long haul, living with the material of his films for years; keeping his focus, determination and confidence, and, one would hope, some other means of financial support.

"Two Lovers" not only treads on the heels of last season's "Night," it moves away from the filmmaker's previous dark, violent films centered on Russian mobsters to explore a modern love story set in Gray's beloved Brighton Beach, Brooklyn locale. After a suicide attempt, Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix), an attractive but troubled guy, moves back with his parents in Brooklyn. Enter two women: ravishing blonde shiksa (Paltrow) who's involved with a married man and promises big trouble; and the daughter (Shaw) of his dad's new business partner, who's not only lovely, but eager to take care of fragile Leonard. An adept storyteller, Gray fleshes out the classic conflict between romantic rapture and the sensible choice. Critical response was mixed, but one thing's been clear: Gray, a three-time contender at Cannes, receives more esteem from the French than at home.

At the press conference you criticized current filmmaking in America. Could you elaborate on that?

It's a complex discussion because it involves so many different factors, very few of which are any good for the movies. You're seeing all these specialty film [distributors] literally going out of business. There are so few buyers, and the buyers that are here are so hyper-cautious it's insane. The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault, rather than American storytellers — it's what keeps textured movies from getting made. You're force-feeding crap into the population.

05262008_twolovers2.jpgSince 1980, with the end of United Artists, there's been a permanent sea change in the movie business. Directors stopped being the central creative force in the picture. UA was the studio behind "Raging Bull" and "Apocalypse Now" and "Annie Hall." When UA left the business, American films started to become more blockbuster-oriented, in itself is not a bad thing. I think Spielberg is one of the most talented people who has worked in the movies. I've never seen a guy who's better able to stage a scene. I went to see "Munich" with my wife and I was like... Some of the staging of the scenes was so good... [cites a moment in "Jaws"] You won't see moments like that in American movies today. That extra layer of tenderness is gone.

So the multinationals have bought the studios and you've got "Iron Man" — though I thought Downey was quite wonderful. Then you've got very small artsy films with no emotional connection that appeal to few people. And what's happened is that there's no middle. There's no narrative storytelling, a movie like "Vertigo" that has psychological complexity and uses genre in an innovative way. American filmmakers have lost their storytelling muscle.

If Fellini had made his movies today, you would hate them, because the intellectual component in "La Strada" is not right there in front of you. He's not jump-cutting his way to heaven. It's all emotionality. Am I making sense?

The critical response to you in the U. S. has also been somewhat divided.

I like that. Because if everybody loves you, you must be doing something wrong. It means there's no button being pushed... The only way that everybody loves you is toward the end of your career. Scorsese gets great reviews now, but Pauline Kael said "Raging Bull" was crap. Stanley Kubrick? Now, oh, he's the greatest — but Sarris said "Barry Lyndon" is the most boring movie of all time. That doesn't mean I'm good, I could stink. I don't read my reviews — I throw them in the garbage. If they're good, you believe them and that's bad. If they're bad, that's terrible for your confidence. If they say I'm terrible to the point where I shouldn't make films, then shame on them. Because even if you don't like the films, they're clearly not made for mercenary reasons.

How do you feel your movie fits in with the romantic genre?

I tried very hard not to watch other movies, not to steal from them. I tried to do something true to myself and let the chips fall where they may. We watched "Vertigo" in preparation and "A Short Film About Love" by Kieslowski. There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose. Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies — but dramatically, we don't really try to do it. I stole from literature. I was obsessed with a character from "White Nights" by Dostoevsky, an off-kilter, lonely, depressed soul. It was my idea to have Joaquin update the Underground Man. Leonard was crazy, too, but he was taking his meds. One day he didn't, he jumped off the bridge. I love Tolstoy even more. [Long riff on "Anna Karenina"]. You read that book and think, okay, that's a towering genius, I hate myself. [Segue to riff on the Beatles, followed by one on Coppola in the '70s, Jean Renoir, Godard, "The Conformist"] "Notorious"! A-plus plus! "Psycho"! But "Vertigo" is the masterpiece, she comes out of the bathroom with a green light behind her, you want to burst into tears... I don't get out much, as you can see.

05262008_twolovers3.jpgWhat's the appeal for you of working with Joaquin?

He's one of the few actors working in American film today who's able to convey great internal workings non-verbally. He's a thinking actor, and the camera doesn't lie. He cares for the same things as I. He has the same taste. We have a shorthand now. I'll say after a take, "I don't know..." And he'll say, "Yeah, yeah, I know." And he'll get rid of the problem. I was very disappointed he didn't come this year. He got sick and was literally throwing up. [To the publicist] Do we get lunch here?

Could you talk about Leonard's two lovers? He seemed to have an entirely idealized view of Michelle/Gwyneth, while Sandra/Shaw seemed an extension of his mother and family.

[After quoting Lacan and Aragon]: Romantic love is a projection of fetish and fantasy, which doesn't mean it isn't real to you. If the night I met my wife, she'd have been dressed in a different way, she might not be my wife. I tried to present a situation in which everything Leonard projected onto Michelle was both good and bad. And she was in love with her married guy for both good and bad reasons. And Sandra was in love with Leonard for both good and bad reasons. I didn't want to reduce everything to a schematic idea. The fact is, Michelle encourages him to be an artist. For all her negative shit, there was no question that she would encourage a side of him that his parents never would.

What was it like to watch the screening of your film in Cannes?

It was the longest one hour and 43 minutes of my life. I'm more process- than result-oriented. It was the best experience making a picture I ever had. I love working with actors and watching them do things I had no intention of putting in the movie. You want to constantly be surprised.

[Photos: Phoenix and Shaw; Phoenix and Paltrow; James Gray - "Two Lovers," 2929 Productions, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/opening-this-week-14.php Mon, 26 May 2008 12:47:37 -0500 05262008_biggerstrongerfaster.jpgBy Neil Pedley

There's something for everyone this week at the multiplex, what with Carrie and company offering something for the ladies with "Sex and the City," the Tae Kwon Do comedy "The Foot Fist Way" being an alternative for the guys, and "Savage Grace"... well, again, let's just say there's something for everyone.

"Bigger, Stronger, Faster*"
With everyone from Little League coaches to members of the U.S. Congress weighing in on the issue of performance enhancing drugs in sports, body builder (and former user) Christopher Bell injects his own story into this documentary that explores America's obsession with excellence and what it realistically takes to achieve it. Bell chronicles his own family's history of steroid use as a jumping off point to explore the wider love/hate relationship between professional athletes and performance enhancing drugs in a culture where winning is everything and there are no points for second place.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"The Foot Fist Way"
Their abusive infant short, "The Landlord," simply can't be ignored, and now Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's Gary Sanchez Productions is giving birth to the company's first full-length film — a low-budget, anarchic, offbeat martial arts comedy. Danny McBride, who co-wrote the film with his friends, stars as Fred Simmons, a graduate of the Crouching Moron, Hidden Ineptitude School of self-defense, who runs a dojo where he instructs old women and small children on how to deflect oncoming sand from their faces. After discovering his wife's affair with his movie idol, Chuck "The Truck" Wallace, Simmons snaps and dispenses his rage on anyone he can overpower — mostly the aforementioned old women and small children.
Opens in limited release.

"L'origine de la tendresse and Other Tales"
Alice Winocour, Guillaume Martinez and Alain-Paul Mallard are a few of the filmmakers whose work is showcased in this collection of six French shorts that have been honored at festivals like Cannes and Berlin.
Opens in New York.

"Savage Grace"
After a long absence from the film scene, "Swoon" director Tom Kalin returns to his roots with another retelling of a sensational real life crime of passion in this provocative adaptation of the acclaimed book by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson. Julianne Moore stars as Barbara Daly, a decadent socialite who marries above her station in tying the knot with plastics baron Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane). But Barbara's rampant insecurity and desperate need for acceptance drives her into an unhealthy and ultimately incestuous relationship with her gay son, Tony (Eddie Redmayne).
Opens in limited release.

"Sex and The City"
The devil may wear Prada, but the devil was in the details of getting a Prada bag back in the hands of Carrie Bradshaw. Despite reported contract disputes and trouble finding a studio home, HBO's hugely successful romantic comedy about, well, sex and the city, returns for a big screen outing four years after the show's final season. Written and directed by the series' executive producer Michael Patrick King, the two-and-a-half hour jaunt in Jimmy Choos finds Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) finally set to waltz down the aisle with Mr. Big amidst other complications for Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Also on hand is Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, who will perhaps try to turn the quartet into a quintet.
Opens wide.

"The Strangers"
Supposedly "inspired by true events," first-time writer/director Bryan Bertino proves there's no place like home with a visceral, claustrophobic thriller starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a young couple besieged in their isolated vacation house and terrorized by three malevolent masked assailants. Though postponed several times, the film has made good use of the time, putting teasers and trailers into circulation online as far back as August last year — and to be honest, we never thought we'd hear folk singer Gillian Welch on a soundtrack to a horror film.
Opens wide.

"Stuck"
B-movie icon Stuart Gordon ("Re-Animator," "The Pit and the Pendulum") directs and co-wrote this cruel. black-as-soot comedy based on real-life 2001 incident of a young woman who finds a homeless man lodged in her windshield after a hit and run accident. Fearing that this little snafu might scupper her new promotion, she decides it's best if she just leaves him there until he dies, except that the selfish sod refuses to cooperate, forcing her to conjure up creative ways to speed up the process. Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea star as the truly odd couple.
Opens in limited release.

"The Unknown Woman"
Winner of multiple awards on the European festival circuit as well as Italy's pick to represent at the 2007 Oscars, this dark and disturbing thriller is a change of pace for "Cinema Paradiso" director Giuseppe Tornatore. Kseniya Rappoport plays Irena, a Russian prostitute who robs her pimp and flees to Italy, only to become a maid for a family in Northern Italy, where her motives may turn out to be less than squeaky clean. In Italian with subtitles.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on June 27.

"Wonders Are Many"
How do you make an opera about an atomic bomb? "Wonders Are Many" is a documentary that tracks composer John Adams and director Peter Sellers as they work to do just that with their creation "Doctor Atomic." "Wonders" filmmaker Jon Else weaves in footage of the actual history of atomic weapons with behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the operatic production.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

[Photo: "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*", Magnolia Pictures, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Mark Leyner on "War, Inc."]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/mark-leyner-on-war-inc.php Thu, 22 May 2008 15:44:04 -0500 05222008_warinc1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Cult author Mark Leyner hit his stride in the '90s with meta-fictional novels ("Et Tu, Babe," "The Tetherballs of Bougainville") and short story collections ("My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist," "Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog"), all hilariously overstimulated, fantastical parodies of mass culture and ephemeral trends both highbrow and low. He created and voiced the audio series "Wiretap" (about a 19-year-old's conversations with pal Kim Jong Il), had columns in magazines like Esquire and George, and co-wrote two books of answers to unusual medical questions with Dr. Billy Goldberg ("Why Do Men Have Nipples?", "Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex?"). It was only a matter of time before Leyner's peculiar sensibilities wiggled their way into cinema.

Co-scripted by Leyner, John Cusack and "Bulworth" screenwriter Jeremy Pikser, "War, Inc" is an absurdist Iraq war satire set in the fake country of Turaqistan, where a privatized war has transformed the landscape into something sinister and cartoonishly capitalistic. Cusack stars as a Tabasco-addicted mercenary who, under the guise of a trade show producer, has been hired by Halliburton-esque clients to kill off the competition. Though it's Leyner's first foray into film, the project's high profile marks his sudden resurgence of sorts, which is why our interview kept meandering back to his literary roots.

Years ago, I'd read that Cusack wanted to adapt and direct "Et Tu, Babe," your take on celebrity culture and self-deification. What happened with that project, and why did it take so long for you two to finish a project together?

I wrote a couple of episodes for a show that Peter Berg was doing on ABC called "Wonderland." During that period of time, I guess Johnny had read "Et Tu, Babe," but he called me up and asked if I'd like to work with him on it. We started doing that and became good friends, and the screenplay ended up being... actually, I don't think it's accurate to call it simply a transposition of a novel into a screenplay. It's so different. It's almost one of these things where it's "inspired by." I wouldn't want to just recapitulate something I've already done. It's probably going to take a while to set up and make. It's a huge undertaking, kind of Wagnerian and epic. [laughs] So knowing that, we went on to write a more manageable screenplay, almost like a chamber piece in comparison, called "Pipe Dream." Then we wrote "War, Inc." with Jeremy Pikser, and it was unclear for a while what we were going to do first, and "War, Inc." sort of won out.

Unless it were animated, I can't even imagine how "Et Tu, Babe" would visually translate with such improbable, stream-of-consciousness imagery as giant marble babies or the steroid-addled you.

That's one of the things that made Johnny and I so completely, obsessively entranced with doing it. We're constantly adding to it and making it more impossible all the time. It's going to end up being a 50-hour movie. We actually thought about doing it in a series, like Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz." But I've had work of mine animated, and when you think about how to do what I do, animation comes to mind almost first. One of the great tricks for me to teach myself over this past couple of years is how to actually translate my sensibility and aesthetic into a movie. It's a tricky thing — you can't start dumping tons of rich prose into a movie. The way to do it is to densely layer the visual field of a movie with ideas, to keep a high-pitched kinetic expression of those juxtapositions I like, and the sense of being the most shocking thing and the most inevitable thing in the world at the same time.


0522208_warinc2.jpgYour last novel was 1997's "The Tetherballs of Bougainville." Why haven't we seen another since?

I made a conscious decision to step back and try something else for a while, and got caught up in it. I was writing about a book a year, or every two years, and I felt like I was in a cyclical production process. I loved doing it, but it felt like I was producing work with this cadence — like an automobile company, a new model every couple of years. I was so personally associated with the work as a character in the books, which was my doing. I'm now working on my first book of fiction since "Tetherballs." It's a book of new myths. It had occurred to me that there hadn't been new myths for quite a while. It just seemed like the most ludicrously hubristic, arrogant project to take on, coming up with a new mythology. The gods and goddesses all live in this high-rise in Kuala Lumpur on the top couple of floors. That's their Mount Olympus, all their opulent greed in one of the world's tallest high-rises.

How does your idiosyncratic style work with two writing collaborators? Are there characters, scenes or details in the "War, Inc." hodgepodge that are specifically yours?

Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity. But Johnny and I have a great working relationship based on never saying no to each other, being yeasaying enablers. If one person writes something, and the other doesn't get it, like it or understand it, we just encourage it more. When Jeremy joined us, it was more of the same. We work so closely and cross-pollinated each other's work so much that sometimes it's hard to remember who did what.

The name Yonica Babyyeah has you written all over it.

Some things are surprising, though. I've really tried to be scrupulous in not saying who did what because I think it's best if there's a collective creative entity. But since you brought that up, that's a great name. That sounds like it could be a name from one of my books, but that's actually Jeremy's invention. He's a wonderful machine for churning out odd and wondrous names for characters. Some of them are based on Pig Latin.

As a collective voice, your politics are obviously in sync when satirizing the military industrial complex or the privatization of war. But what do you want people to take away from the movie beyond some yuks? Are you concerned the film preaches to the choir?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My feeling about the movie is that it's more radical in its form, spirit and aggressively unhinged anarchy than in its small-"p" politics. At this point, for a movie to come out and satirize the debacle of the Iraq War isn't particularly novel, courageous or interesting. I think the movie forces people to go on this ride that I hope will cause [them] to question how they look at things, to celebrate their own unorthodox ways of being in this world. To me, those are the ways that a movie or a book or a piece of art could radically affect someone. It's more in that sense than about any specific issue or policy decision, you know what I mean?

05222008warinc3.jpgSure. I asked because it's an atypically angry focus compared to your novels, where politics are usually one small facet of a wider cultural view. Speaking of which, how do you feel about this election year?

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture. So it's unusual to be associated with something that has pointed, more localized politics to it. As far as the election goes, this is sort of a corollary of what I've been saying. I'm very skeptical about electoral politics in this country altogether. To me, it's so dependent on and supportive of the moneyed elite in this country that it's very hard for me to get particularly excited about anything that happens in either the Republican or Democratic parties. Having said that, there are moments when [Barack] Obama seems to me to be a reasonable, intelligent and well-informed person, unusually so for an American politician. So now and then, I get that feeling, whatever that Obama feeling is. But on a whole, I'm skeptical about it all. I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

I've heard your books called "post-postmodernist" in the past, but where can you go past postmodernism? Doesn't it eat itself and everything in its way by design?

It's not a term I've ever applied to myself, and in some ways, it's a fundamental misinterpretation of my books, to concentrate so energetically on the irony. I know this will sound peculiar or perverse to you, but I always thought of my books as being earnest and genuine. "Et Tu, Babe" was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it's my whole life. "Et Tu, Babe" was a fantasy of what seemed to me not only impossible, but probably inimical to being a writer — celebrity and power and things like that. It's very important that what I do offers someone something useful in some way or another. And I think you're completely right, you pose a very good question. If all you're doing is pointing out in a clever or snide way the impossibility of creating something of value, then it consumes itself and ceases to be of any use to anyone.

[Photos: John Cusack as Brand Hauser; Hilary Duff as Yonica Babyyeah; Mark Leyner - "War, Inc.", First Look International, 2008]

"War, Inc." opens in limited release on May 23.

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<![CDATA[Cannes 08: The Dardennes on "The Silence of Lorna"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/cannes-08-the-dardennes-on-the.php Thu, 22 May 2008 03:59:34 -0500 05222008_dardennes1.jpgBy Erica Abeel

Ever since "The Promise" in 1996, the prospect of a new film from Belgian siblings Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne has been cause for rejoicing. Impeccably constructed, uncompromising and emotionally searing, the Dardenne brothers' films give voice to a population often despised or ignored: illegal aliens, slumlords, corrupt officials and smalltime criminals. To their characters the brothers bring a compassionate view born of the understanding this underclass has, in part, been created by society's higher-ups. And though the pair might deny it, their films also suggest an ingrained Christian vision through insisting on the transformative possibility of the most debased being.

"The Silence of Lorna," their latest portrait, which premiered in Cannes, has failed to elicit the rapturous response received by some of the earlier work, such as the 2005 Palme d'Or winner "The Child." Yet despite an exposition that some found lengthy, the Dardennes bring great resonance to this fable of a young Albanian immigrant caught in a terrible dilemma who struggles to redeem herself. As in "The Promise," the film focuses on the machinations forced on illegals hoping to grab a morsel of the world's wealth — in this case through fake marriages for citizenship. This time the brothers have placed their camera in the more gentrified city of Liège, rather than their grimy industrial hometown of Seraing. Lorna has become a Belgian citizen through her sham marriage to junkie Claudy (Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier). A local mobster who engineered the union is planning to kill Claudy with a staged overdose so Lorna can remarry a Russian mafioso. But when Claudy threatens to start using drugs again, the two have passionate sex and form a sudden bond.

I got chance to speak to Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne in the Unifrance pavilion following the premiere of their film Happily for journos, Luc is forthcoming and responsive; Jean-Pierre is famously less so, often parrying questions that he seems to regard as, well, unanswerable.

Where do your characters originate? Did Lorna have a source in real life?

Someone among our acquaintances told us the story of a real-life Lorna, who made a false marriage — but we took her story in a different direction.

05222008_dardennes2.jpgHow do you apportion the directing of your films?

We discuss the script. We both do the casting. On the set we work solely with the actors for a long time, without any crew. Then the crew and D.P. come on board, and one of us goes to the monitor. Once we take a shot, we discuss it in front of the monitor and evaluate it. Then we discuss it with the D.P. We both edit. It's really not more complicated than if there were only one person.

Do you rehearse a lot before shooting?

Yes, we do — so we can be at our most free when we shoot. We're free when we're very familiar with the work. In fact, the rehearsals are the best period of the whole business — le plus beau moment. We don't discuss the psychology of the characters. It's something more instinctual. Rehearsals are like soccer camp. Then when we shoot, it's the championship.

The first shot of the film is bills being handed over at the bank. Could you talk a bit about the omnipresence of money in your films?

Money rules the relationships between us, and it changes things. Money gives you the means to change your life — and permits the characters to alter their lives. In other films money is treated as something shameful. For us it's just there. Money can also permit moral behavior. When Lorna opens a bank account to deposit money for Claudy's child — her unborn child — it's beautiful money.

I found something in Lorna's transformation rather mysterious. Through much of the exposition she seems irritated by strung-out Claudy and wants only to blow him off. What triggers the change in her feelings for him?

Not one thing alone. When she starts to help Claudy — for instance helps him get up from the floor — she starts to change as a human being. She undresses to keep him from leaving [in pursuit of drugs]; she makes an extreme gesture... and also feels desire. Claudy shows her he can stop and she admires that, and she feels guilt that they plan to kill him.

But bottom line, her gesture toward him is mysterious and can't be explained — in fact, it mystifies her, too. It's as mysterious to her as it is to us.

05222008_dardennes3.jpgWas the whole script planned? Or were there changes as you went along?

We tend to augment the physical aspects, add gestures when we shoot and reduce dialogue. And the actors bring something of themselves to it, the shoot is organic, and changes with the circumstances. Even so, the film you see is very close to the script.

There's an enigma at the heart of this film: is Lorna's baby real or imaginary? Of course the doctors say there's no child. Yet the question remains...

We first had the idea for the imaginary pregnancy when we decided not to show Claudy's corpse. This absence for Lorna is filled by the baby, though the baby is an absence, too. You know, if you want to believe she's pregnant, you can. An interesting thing: even with an added scene in which a doctor shows her she's not pregnant, audiences persist in believing she is. I think it's because the viewer wants her to redeem herself and protect a new life. She was careless with Claudy's life, but she'll be careful with the life of the baby, which represents the future and hope.

[Photo: Arta Dobroshi as Lorna; Jérémie Renier and Dobroshi; the brothers Dardenne - "The Silence of Lorna," Gemini Film GmbH & Co. KG, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Gallery: Cannes, May 19th-20th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/gallery-cannes-may-19th20th-20.php Wed, 21 May 2008 11:08:35 -0500 Angelina Jolie, Peter Coyote and Maradona — here are photos from Monday, May 19th and Tuesday, May 20th at the Cannes Film Festival. For more Cannes coverage, check out ifc.com/cannes.




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<![CDATA["La Chinoise," "Le Gai Savoir," "Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies" ]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/la-chinoisele-gai-savoir-silen.php Tue, 20 May 2008 06:12:17 -0500 05202008_lachinoise.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

"A Film in the Making" is how Jean-Luc Godard defined "La Chinoise" (1967) in the film itself, in one of its many aphoristic title card face-slaps, and it's a simple parameter with which to view all Godard: as a process, not a product; as interrogation, not "entertainment"; and as a refutation of commercial culture and every easy market-driven conclusion it encourages. Of course, a filmmaker can hardly take a more politically radical position, and here we have Godard entering, at the spiraling end of the '60s, into his most radicalized and notoriously forbidding period, when the youthful ardor for old Hollywood began to slip away and a maddened attention to the unsolvable political present gripped him like a fever. I know, I've had my randy libertine's way with Godard and Godard-love a good deal in this space lately, as his massive oeuvre gets digitized for home video posterity, but a few things always remain to be said, particularly since we're celebrating the anniversary of the May '68 strikes in France that Godard virtually prophesied — or perhaps inspired. Or perhaps he just became the atomic telescope lens through which his society could view itself (in 1967, he also released "Two or Three Things I Know about Her" and "Week-End," and two shorts), which would make him at the very least the Balzac or Hugo of the mid-20th century.

Godard was and is more than that, and "La Chinoise" — which uses an apartment full of Maoist students spouting dogma and half-assedly planning terrorist action as base materials to form a screaming, yowling, uneasy, tongue-in-cheek collage of capitalist and Communist chic — is a fabulously ambivalent film, embracing the hot contradictions in Paris culture at the time. It was decried as being pro-totalitarian and pro-terrorism, but presumably only by people who haven't seen it. In reality, amid its cacophony, "La Chinoise" explores the idea that Marxism in its Soviet and Maoist forms wasn't Marxism at all, but rather new "brands" to be hawked and consumed and argued over, like Coca-Cola and Marlboro. (In fact, nothing in Godard's filmography gets as much artillery shot at it as the cultures of advertising and marketing, especially if it's American.)

Jingled together with news photos, laughable faux-radical pop songs, play executions, sloganeering so incessant it begins to mock itself, arguments about piddling 1967 controversies surely forgotten by the next spring, vandalism (the apartment is not the kids' to deface, it turns out), and Godard's most explicit self-reflexivity (the camera operator and sound man are addressed, and filmed themselves), the movie's characters are simultaneously satirical caricatures and painfully realistic, and Godard loves them (Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Anne Wiazemsky) for their self-absorbed foolishness and youthful rage, even as they brandish weapons and rationalize sacrificing lives for the greater good.

"Le Gai Savoir" (1969) is Godard wrestling with the hungover aftermath of the short-lived utopia of '68, bringing Léaud and Berto back into a TV-studio field of complete darkness to reignite their arguments from nearly two years earlier, this time focusing on language and how it distorts history, and therefore any genuine political involvement. The resulting text, and the scrambled referential pop imagery around it, scans like the movie equivalent to an obsessive blog, inconclusively choked with links and downloads and pedantry. (Godard sticks a pin in his Truffaut doll with a sequence involving an absurd free-association-test session with a young boy, à la "The 400 Blows.") The pair of talkers point to the subtitles, talk back to the tumultuous soundtrack (Godard often cuts to black, and lets the bubbling stew of newsreel audio and political speechifying swallow the film), comment on the nature of unknowability in a world controlled by corporate commercialism — and so naturally, the discourse itself sometimes becomes nonsensical, incoherent, inadequate. This isn't a movie at all (as we know it), but an uncompromising statement of frustrated fury sent like a missile at the summer ground zero of 1969, as if it was meant to be witnessed just once, like a public protest, and then merely remembered.

05202008_iwasbornbut.jpgHere's an old-school tonic water to cut the grain alcohol of Godard's postmodernism — the new Criterion Eclipse set of three silent comedies from the first phase of Yasujiro Ozu's unassailable career, back when Japan was just acquiring talkie technology (the first sound film came in 1931, but Ozu, a lifelong heel-digger, waited a few more years), and when he, in his late 20s, was just finding the calm and observant syntax that made him happy for the next three decades. Naturally, none of them are simply comedic. "Tokyo Chorus" (1931) is a rather pathetic tribulation about a helplessly obstinate man failing as an insurance clerk and then scrounging for work; Ozu's gentle-at-a-distance and sympathetic eye suggests an almost Flaubertian sensibility hovering over the action, and the social satire blooms because of it, as in the scene where several salarymen attempt to spy on each other's bonus checks and end up pissing on them in the office urinal. "Passing Fancy" (1933) is more assured, set in and around a low-rent boarding house and evolving into a portrait of a dazzlingly dimwitted single dad day worker (Takeshi Sakamoto, an infectious presence who acted in 22 other Ozu films) and his bumbling relationship with his impetuous son, which builds to a lacerating and tragic pitch. In synopsis, all Ozu films sound mundane, and the early comedies even more so — but visually there's something mysterious going on here, as Ozu exercises his personality on the camera, the cuts, the actors and the length of shots, and comes away with experiences that feel just as large as our real lives, and just as poignant.

The masterwork here is "I Was Born, But..." (1932), which again lands on the tatami mats of a struggling salaryman family, this time blessed with two young brothers, who battle their new neighborhood's complex and contentious schoolboy society as they reflectively confront their father's low position on the company totem pole. It's a film about power as it's prized and exchanged and used on every social level, but it's also outrageously and hypnotically funny, with the most precise and eloquent camera placement outside of Keaton, and the best cast of implacable child actors ever assembled for a comedy. Remarkably, the visual palate Ozu used until his final film is here (low angle mid-shots, skies cut by eaves and telephone wire, etc.), as well as his battery of endlessly affecting gestures (i.e., the reaction shot that begins with an inexpressive pause, as if still registering the pleasure or hurt that came before). But here, the kids rule — no crisis is so intense that the action can't pause for a crotch scratch or the urge to pick up an odd rock off the road.

[Photos: Godard's "La Chinoise," 1968; Ozu's "I Was Born, But...", 1932]

"La Chinoise" & "Le Gai Savoir" (Koch Lorber Films) and "Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies" (Criterion Collection: Eclipse Series) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Cannes Midpoint]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/ifc-news-podcast-77-cannes-mid.php Mon, 19 May 2008 14:07:19 -0500 The 2008 Cannes Film Festival is halfway through, and so this week on the IFC News podcast we're coming to you straight from France to discuss the festival so far, focusing on a few of the films we've liked and Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," on which we're very divided.

Download: MP3, 33:59 minutes, 31.1 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28159 2008-05-19 14:07:19 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_77_cannes_mid publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028159 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Cannes Midpoint (photo)]]> Mon, 19 May 2008 14:07:19 -0500 10028159 2008-05-19 14:07:19 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_77_cannes_mid_photo inherit 28159 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Gallery: Cannes, May 18th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/gallery-cannes-may-18th-2008.php Mon, 19 May 2008 13:03:48 -0500 Bullwhips, boats and karaoke — here are photos from Sunday, May 18th at the Cannes Film Festival. For more Cannes coverage, check out ifc.com/cannes.




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<![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/opening-this-week-13.php Mon, 19 May 2008 04:50:09 -0500 05192008_childrenofhuangshi.jpgBy Neil Pedley

It's a battle of filmmaking titans this week, the kind of event that comes around once in a lifetime — Steven Spielberg and Uwe Boll will duke it out at the multiplexes. (Forgive us, but that might've been our only opportunity to ever get to put those two names in the same sentence.)

"The Children of Huang Shi"
Set during the Japanese occupation of China during the 1930s, this sweeping historical epic comes from Roger Spottiswoode, the director behind both "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" and the narrative remake of "Shake Hands with the Devil." The first official co-production between Australia and China, the film tells the true story of Australian nurse (Radha Mitchell), who with the aid of a British journalist (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), escorts 60 orphaned children 700 miles through the Liu Pan Shan Mountains to evade Japanese secret police. "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat reunite onscreen to lend their support as sympathizers to the cause.
Opens in limited release.

"The Edge of Heaven"
A year removed from its win for best screenplay at Cannes and a subsequent bid as German's official entry for the Oscars, "The Edge of Heaven" is writer/director Fatih Akin's three-chapter tale that links two divergent cultures through companionship, love and tragedy. When an unlikely relationship between Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), an elderly widower in Hamburg, and Yeter (Nursel Köse), a jaded prostitute, ends in a fatal accident, Ali's son Nejet (Baki Davrak) travels to Istanbul in search of Yeter's daughter, unaware that she's already in Hamburg searching for her mother. In English, German and Turkish with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull"
Harrison Ford dusts off his fedora for the return of the world's most athletic archaeologist. Although there've been fears that Indy's whip might have lot some of its snap in the intervening years (not to mention co-creator George Lucas' regrettable track record with revisiting past works), there are plenty of other indications that Dr. Jones needn't be retirement-bound just yet. 19 years have passed since the events of the "Last Crusade," and the Nazis have faded into history, leaving Indy to battle the Soviet Union across the jungles of South America in a race to capture an ancient and powerful Mayan relic. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" veteran Karen Allen is joined by Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf and Ray Winstone, who'll hopefully breathe life into the franchise and give way to new fears for Indy such as, 'Stairs, why did it have to be stairs?'
Opens wide.

"Insidious"
A young New York filmmaker falls in and falls out with the mob in this debut movie written and directed by Jerry Schram.
Opens in New York.

"A Jihad For Love"
At a time when Islamic culture is increasingly scrutinized, gay Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma lifts the veil on a dark underbelly of the faith and challenges a society where homosexuality is not only illegal but also punishable by death. Filmed in 12 different Muslim countries, "A Jihad For Love" explores homosexuality in relation to the Muslim faith and shows the daily struggle of those who live in fear for their lives. Despite premiering at Toronto Film Festival to great acclaim, the film has sparked controversy and was banned from screening at the Singapore Film Festival due to its taboo subject matter.
Opens in limited release.

"The Machine Girl"
Long-suffering schoolgirl Ami has been taking care of her brother since their parents killed themselves after being falsely accused of homicide. When he's murdered by yakuza-fathered bullies who also take her arm, she snaps on a prosthetic machine-gun limb and before you can say "Holy Cherry Darling!" she... oh, just watch the trailer. In Japanese with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Postal"
Statistically speaking, Uwe Boll should have accidentally made a good film by now, given the sheer number of cracks he has been given, but given what our own Alison Willmore said in last week's podcast, we're inclined to think "Postal" won't improve Boll's batting average. Partially based on an ultra-violent video game that began life as one game developer's April Fool's joke before popular demand made it a reality, "Postal" stars Zack Ward as a slacker who enlists the help of his uncle Dave (Dave Foley) and his cult to rip off a local amusement park where he unexpectedly winds up doing battle with the Taliban. Recently, the "world's most hated director" claimed that exhibitors have reduced the number of screens "Postal" will play from 1500 to four because of the film's political content — all we know is there's a nation of grateful cats who didn't want to be used as gun silencers.
Opens in limited release.

"War, Inc"
Loosely inspired by the work of political lefty Naomi Klein, this John Cusack pet project envisions the world's first totally outsourced war. Set in the not-too-distant future in the fictional country of Turaqistan, the film finds Cusack once again plays a troubled assassin sent by the U.S. vice president (Dan Aykroyd) to off a rival war profiteer named Omar Sharif. This scathing satire directed at companies who make a killing from foreign wars is the narrative feature directorial debut of documentarian Joshua Seftel, but Cusack co-scripted, produces and stars along the likes of Ben Kingsley, Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei and Hilary Duff, who manages to send up both foreign policy and Britney Spears as a Russian pop star. And in case you're wondering, Cusack crony Tim Robbins didn't make the cast, but the film was scored by his brother, David.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

[Photos: "The Children of Huang Shi," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Gallery: Cannes, May 17th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/gallery-cannes-may-17th-2008.php Sun, 18 May 2008 07:03:38 -0500 Press conferences, Penélope Cruz, Mike Tyson and live music at the beach — here are photos from Saturday, May 17th at the Cannes Film Festival. For more Cannes coverage, check out ifc.com/cannes.




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<![CDATA[Cannes 08: Walter Salles on "Linha de Passe" ]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/cannes-08-walter-salles-on-lin-1.php Sun, 18 May 2008 01:24:01 -0500 05182008_linhadepasse1.jpgBy Erica Abeel

The abiding humanism we've come to expect from Walter Salles is abundantly present in "Linha de Passe," his luminous competition entry in this year's Cannes. Co-directed with Daniela Thomas, the film explores the Brazilian underclass through the lives of four brothers who live with their mother on the outskirts of teeming São Paulo. But though the family leads a hardscrabble life in an unforgiving milieu, "Linha" is no "City of God." The brothers may skirt violence and crime, yet they struggle to reinvent themselves, continuing to search, however misguidedly, for a way to rise above their circumstances.

One son (Vinícius de Oliveira from Salles's "Central Station," sole actor in a cast of non-pros) hopes to use soccer as his ticket out. A second braves the mockery of friends and family to embrace religion and assist a local pastor. Touchingly, the youngest boy, fathered by a black bus-driver, becomes obsessed with learning to drive a city bus. The matriarch — a sort of Latin Mother Courage — is middle-aged, worn, and, shockingly, pregnant, yet she manages to support the family as a housekeeper and hews to her own brand of morality.

Shot in a breathless quasi-documentary style and often indifferently lit, "Linha" alternates close-ups with rocketing rides down São Paulo's jammed roadways. There's a sometimes uneasy mix of lyricism — conveyed through the repeated motif of raised hands — and gritty realism. Unlikely to do the boffo business of "The Motorcycle Diaries," "Linha" is nonetheless an inspiriting installment in Salles's ongoing examination of Brazil.

To what extent are the characters in "Linha de Passe" drawn from real life?

05182008_linhadepasse2.jpgGenerally, the film's based on real stories that we've integrated into a single story. For instance, Reginaldo [the youngest son] was inspired by a real life story in Brazil: a fourteen-year-old boy went searching for his father, knowing only that he was a bus driver. The boy ended up driving a bus for three hours before getting stopped.

How did you share the directing with Daniela Thomas?

We just did it, I can't really define how. Because we're two, we become ten or twenty. The film is a team effort. There's also lots of discussion with the crew and actors — things are up for grabs. We've tried to return to the concept of film as a collective adventure, enriched by different perspectives. When I shoot with Daniela the result is harsher, grittier than if I were alone. It becomes more immediate with her on board. There's a dialectic, everything's shared, made with four hands. What I like about making a four-handed film is that it fosters the possibility of destabilization.

How much of "Linha de Passe" was improvised?

We didn't block the actors — the camera serves them. And there was constant improvisation — at least twenty percent was not written. The actors had a lot of freedom in their gestures, action and language, which is very interesting.

Elsewhere you've stated that through film, you'd like to periodically take the pulse of life in Brazil. Is there a recurring theme?

Yes, there's a chronic absence of the father in Brazil — 25 percent are absent from the family. Women who run the family are a moral force. In the film there are ersatz fathers: the pastor, the bus driver, the trainer. But the mother in "Linha" says something very telling to her son: "I'm both the father and mother of all of you." That's also true for me and Daniela!

05182008_linhadepasse3.jpgIt seems as if São Paulo is almost a 6th character in "Linha de Passe." Could you explain how the city is used in the film?

São Paulo is huge. There's no escape from it, like in Rio, where there's the sea. São Paulo is overwhelming — its streets, underpasses, new neighborhoods and constant growth. It's like a city at the end of the world. We dove into the city's outskirts. We knew where the family lived, which buses they took. The characters lived together in the house where we shot the film

There are many intersecting stories in the film. What was your organizing principle?

We saw the script not only as a single dramatic structure, but as about characters who dive into each other. In the editing room we tried different ways of breaking up the scenes, but in the final montage we returned to our original vision. It's a dysfunctional family, a family in collision. But there's also a deep connection between them. This film goes in search of that connection, in search of that fraternity. You can't romanticize Brazil. What you can do is make a film that includes violence, yet rejects it. The fact is 90 percent of Brazilians try to surmount violence. I wanted to make a film, for once, that portrays Brazil as a place where people want to find a way out.

[Photos: "Linha de Passe"; director Walter Salles - Pathé Pictures International, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Gallery: Cannes, May 14th-16th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/gallery-cannes-may-14th16th-20.php Sat, 17 May 2008 06:33:49 -0500 The red carpet set-up, the city at night, Jack Black kung fu and a trip to the local market — here are photos from Wednesday, May 14th through Friday, May 16th at the Cannes Film Festival. For more Cannes coverage, check out ifc.com/cannes.




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<![CDATA[Cannes 08: Fernando Meirelles on "Blindness"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/cannes-08-fernando-meirelles-o.php Thu, 15 May 2008 12:17:49 -0500 05152008_blindness1.jpgBy Erica Abeel

Take it as a sign of some general anxiety disorder gripping the planet, but Cannes 2008 kicked off on a distinctly somber note. In "Blindness," the fest opener by Fernando Meirelles, civilization as we know it goes to hell and back when a group of urbanites in an unnamed city succumb to an epidemic of mysterious blindness. Only a character known as The Doctor's Wife (Julianne Moore, in a powerful turn) remains immune to the malady. Finding herself a leader in a world of savagery and chaos, she helps forge a new form of community that takes the film to a happier place (cue Kumbaya on the soundtrack).

Based on the celebrated allegorical novel by José Saramago, the film displays the ability first demonstrated by Meirelles in "City of God" to choreograph large groups of beleaguered folks through explosive situations. He's ably assisted by an international cast — who were coached by an expert in blindness — that also includes Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Alice Braga. In adapting this story, Meirelles confronted a daunting new task: finding an equivalent in cinema, the visual art par excellence, to convey the milky white sightlessness visited on his characters. Add to this the challenge of both bringing a human face to nameless characters who are generic stand-ins for humankind and striking a balance between gripping drama and the wider philosophical connotations of blindness intended by Saramago.

Whether or not Meirelles successfully met these challenges has been a hot topic of debate on the Croisette. I sat down to speak with the engaging, forthcoming filmmaker following the premiere of his film.

Part of "Blindness" was set in São Paulo — but how important was it to keep the city unidentified?

It was very important because it becomes, really, a generic story, a story about mankind. That's why I chose a multinational cast. If we were to identify São Paulo, people would think it was a story about Brazil. But it's about our common plight.

05152008_blindness3.jpgDid the actors mind not having a backstory for the characters?

Well, Gael had an interesting reaction. He said, I never think about the character's past. I think about his desire, what my character wants. The film goes forward, so for me it doesn't matter what's behind. I start and I know what I want, and that's what I think all the time. I love Gael's performance as a bad guy.

How did you strike a balance between the allegorical aspect and the human drama?

The book suggests a film that's very allegorical, like a fantasy outside of space, outside the world — especially in the Portuguese Saramago writes, a bit like Old English for you.

But I went in the opposite direction. I tried to do a very naturalistic film, to engage the audience, make them ask themselves, "What would I do if put in this situation? How would I react?" I tried for a more naturalistic register so people could identify — otherwise it would be a very cold film. It's a hard film to get involved with, but it could be even harder.

Saramago feared some filmmaker would make a "zombie film" out of his book.

That was sort of a joke. We worked with the characters on the experience of being blind. It's very well done and consistent — though a couple of the extras look like fakes...

Why doesn't Julianne's character take action sooner? Instead of just going through the rapes?

You know, it's a cultural thing, that question. In the book there are two rapes and the third time she kills the guy. I show the film to British people, and in Canada and Brazil, and no one reacts that way. I show the film in the U.S. and the first thing people say is, "Why doesn't she kill them, why doesn't she attack them?" There are some moral dilemmas in this film that I love.

05152008_blindness2.jpgIn what larger sense, according to your film, is humanity blind?

Sometimes you don't see the person next to you — like your wife. When you have a fight, it's because you can't see what the other person sees, so you disagree. You don't see the same thing. There's some blindness involved in most conflicts. And there's a more obvious blindness — what happens in Sudan doesn't affect us. Two weeks ago 35,000 people were dying from the cyclone there. We don't want to see this thing. There's blindness in all levels, from the personal to the larger. Even in ourselves — we don't want to face ourselves, we find excuses. That's what I like about this theme. Maybe we go blind to protect ourselves. I really think if you can look at the person next to you, it's liberating. But we're afraid. That's what the story's about — people who can't see lose their humanity, and then they get it back. They're able to create a family and love and respect each other. And they get their sight back. I think it's a nice parable.

[Photos: Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo; Danny Glover; Gael García Bernal - "Blindness," Miramax Films, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Live from Cannes, It's IFC]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/live-from-cannes-its-ifc.php Wed, 14 May 2008 12:21:18 -0500 05142008_cannescam.jpgThe third annual Cannes Cam is a go — check it out for a live, 24/7 stream of the red carpet of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. IFC News host Matt Singer will be around for all of the major premieres, providing commentary along with a rotating cast of special guests that includes New York Times critic A.O. Scott, Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League and Variety's Anne Thompson.

You can find the Cannes Cam here.

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<![CDATA[Joachim Trier on "Reprise"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/joachim-trier-on-reprise.php Wed, 14 May 2008 07:05:15 -0500 05142008_reprise1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Joachim Trier's mother was a documentarian, his father a sound department tech, his grandfather a Cannes-selected filmmaker, and his distant cousin Lars von Trier, so is it any surprise that the feature debut of this Copenhagen-born, Norwegian-based director has already turned out to be one of the year's best imports? An invigoratingly kinetic punk rock ode to young intellectual camaraderie that's as funny and sexy as it is haunting and sad, "Reprise" knocks chronology and narrative structure on their standardized asses to detail the friendship between twentysomething writers Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie). Beginning with the two dreaming rebels standing at a mailbox about to ship their first novels to publishers, "Reprise" digressively dazzles in the moments long after, way before, and several hops in between as one becomes famous, the other hustles in his shadow, and the pressures of reality bring them both closer to depression and madness. (All that, plus a soundtrack featuring Joy Division, Turbonegro, Le Tigre, and the theme from Godard's "Contempt" — so hip!) I spoke with Trier about the film, his collaboration with co-writer Eskil Vogt, and his unexpected airborne abilities as a teenager.

Though "Reprise" is not autobiographical, did you find any ironic or uncanny parallels between two writers who were writing about two writers?

Yeah, not only are we both writers, we're also good friends, so we could ask the imaginary question, "What would have happened if one of us didn't want to write or make movies anymore?" It's the question we pose to Erik and Phillip in the film, because Phillip has other things he needs to deal with in his life and gives up on his literary ambition. [There's also] that question of "What's left of a friendship that was initially based on shared passions when that ambition is gone?" Sometimes it's good to have a friendship where you can imagine certain dynamics between you, even though the film is not autobiographical — I haven't exactly tried to write a book or gone mad. [laughs]

In fact, your director's statement proclaims that you wanted to depict characters you know intimately, which made me wonder — how competitive do your friendships get?

A lot of people have said that Phillip and Erik are competitive, but I never saw it quite like that. There's an ambivalence whenever you have friends who do similar things to you. You want to succeed together. I never felt competition with Eskil. I always wanted his films to do well. But there's always an aspect of anxiety: "What if I was left out? What if I'm not able to continue?" It's a complicated process.

"Reprise" largely concerns the wild spectrum of emotions that springs from the creative minds of twentysomethings. Now that you're in your thirties, how different is your worldview compared to when you were Erik and Phillip's age?

05142008_reprise2.jpgI'm probably learning something about both myself and what I'm doing. For example, I'm not afraid of the mixture of high and low culture. When I was younger, I remember thinking, "Goodness, with all those bad jokes me and my friends are telling each other, how can I ever create something serious?" I felt ambivalent about the multiple curiosities I had in life, a bit like Erik, [in that scene] the publisher comes to see him when he's on the beach with his friends, they're all talking about silly things, he wants to talk about something very serious, and he feels an inability to combine those parts of his life. With time, it all comes in. You don't need to cut one away to do the other.

Is that duplicity why you wanted to bring levity and excitement to such heavy themes in the film as psychosis, depression and suicide?

That was our ambition to take that chance. The ultimate challenge of this was to combine serious themes of mental illness with the lightness that I believe is a part of life. Having said that, we certainly didn't want to take the subject of mental illness [lightly]. We have a close friend that has been through a schizoaffective period in his twenties, which we've seen as a big tragedy. There's enough culture out there that romanticizes people with mental illness, "the crazy artist." We wanted to work against that cliché.

In a recent interview, you suggested that "a lot of young people don't feel a strong sense of cultural identity as a Norwegian." Why do you think that is?

Norway is a young culture, and growing up in Norway, everyone's into sports. There was a feeling I remember — at least in the '80s, when I was kid — that there were no movies or bands worth listening to that came from Norway. This has changed, but a lot of people still look out to other cultures and countries for their inspiration. There's also a tradition of writers going abroad to do their literature. For example, Ibsen went to Italy to write "Peer Gynt." So there's a [stereotype] of this small country where people just want to leave, but there's a creative dialectic that is fueled by the alienation and self-doubt. A lot of great art has come out of that as well, so I don't think it's one-sidedly negative.

What about your own impact? Has the international success of "Reprise" affected the Norwegian film scene, either to energize other filmmakers or help get more indies to be made?

It has, actually, which is great. What's happened is there's a bigger political emphasis now on financing different types of films. You have 4.5 million people speaking Norwegian — not a lot, so the commercial potential of any given film isn't great, and you need government support to be able to do movies in Norwegian. A few years ago, everyone was concerned with the audience numbers and trying to get people into the cinemas. The next [step] is to make more sophisticated movies with more thematic ambition. I hope this will continue, and there seems to be the possibility that more heterogenic films will be made.

05142008_reprise3.jpgIf it's so difficult getting Norwegian art films made, why did you cast mostly non-professionals?

We didn't have any choice. There weren't that many great actors that age who could play those parts, and we needed to find a bunch of guys who were both intellectual and had a good sense of humor. We looked at stand-up comedians, people off the street, musicians — we saw around a thousand people. Ultimately, I found the biggest challenge was trying to create the relationships of the story. Erik and Philip are almost a couple, and Kari and Phillip certainly are. So, the dynamic was just as important as the individual characters.

With your family's background in film, it makes sense why you might have chosen this career path. But what led to you twice becoming the National Skateboarding Champion of Norway as a teen?

Skateboarding was banned in Norway, the only country in the world that had a complete ban, from '78 through '89. Some politician and his great self-protecting social democracy of Norway had misinterpreted some statistics about people from America hurting themselves. My little brother Emil Trier has just made a wonderful [documentary short that screened at SXSW 2008] about this phenomenon, called "Board Control." In that film, you figure out that it was actually a big misunderstanding. They misused the law that was trying to ban, say, a doll that would suddenly light up and burn a child. For some strange reason, skateboarding ended up being perceived as a dangerous toy.

So people kept importing skateboards, and we kept skating. We built ramps out in the woods, skated in secret spots, and ran away from the cops. Obviously, growing up in a boring Norwegian middle class, everyone wants to do something rebellious. When it was legalized in '89, there was a huge boom commercially, and there were all these competitions. I was sponsored and got sent all around the world to skate. All those things that had been underground, all that punk music and American indie rock we listened to, suddenly became mainstream. It's like what happened when Nirvana went on MTV over here, and a lot of people asked themselves, "Why hadn't [we] listened to Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü or Dinosaur Jr. three years earlier?" Sometimes things just change, and it's interesting to observe. [laughs]

Now that you've mentioned film, literature and music, I have to ask about your own media consumption. What are you watching, reading and listening to?

I've been listening to lots of Jens Lekman and a [Swedish pop] band called Doktor Kosmos. I just spoke yesterday to this friend of mine in L.A. that has a band called Bigbang, and it's funny because they're a huge rock group in Norway, but over here, they're slowly building momentum. It's great to see Scandinavian musicians going abroad and doing that. What I'm reading at the moment? Too many scripts and too many books related to work. I wish I had more time to just freely read whatever I'm curious about like I used to. In terms of movies, I think "Falkenberg Farewell" is a wonderful recent Swedish film. I don't know if it's been picked up over here, but fingers crossed, because it's honestly a masterpiece. It's like Terrence Malick making a Dogme movie. It's become a big cult hit in Europe, a genuine art movie made over a period of five years with a group of friends who are [playing] themselves. Then they got master editor Michal Leszczylowski — who has worked with Tarkovsky and Bergman — to edit it for them. So it's an interesting mixture of something very sophisticated and something very raw. That's inspiring.

[Photos: "Reprise"; director Joachim Trier, Miramax Films, 2006]

"Reprise" opens in limited release on May 16.

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<![CDATA["I'm Not There," "La Roue"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/im-not-there-la-roue.php Tue, 13 May 2008 05:52:32 -0500 05132008_imnotthere.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" (2007) is such a risky, ambitious, passionate conceptual big-brain freak of a movie that, whether you find yourself loving it or hating it or not knowing what in hell to make of it, you can sympathize and even agree with anyone who ends up with the opposite takeaway. Ambivalence is an appropriate response, and one Haynes probably intended, given his subject: Bob Dylan, or, rather, the elusive, chameleonic, deliberately free-associative nature of Dylan's public personality, and the idealized and sometimes ridiculous ways we've conceived it for ourselves, and hence the absurdity of pop culture celebrity in general. A lot of abstracted meat and potatoes for one film to tackle, and Haynes, easily the most theoretical and analytical indie filmmaker at work today, goes for the gusto, crafting a weave-movie made of strands that only occasionally cross each other's dreamscapes and more often launch out into the ether. He's not telling us anything about Dylan per se; he's building a kind of sculptural study of the very hectic shape of the icon's mythified story.

Which sounds as if it might not be stampede viewing at times, and sometimes it isn't. Haynes works with roughly six threads, each of which playact through or simply comment upon one aspect of Dylan's arc: Christian Bale as a Dylan-esque folk god who goes evangelical; Cate Blanchett in drag as the '60s acoustic-to-electric, interview-disaster Dylan; Marcus Carl Franklin as a self-legendizing black 12-year-old who hops trains, calls himself Woody Guthrie and visits the real dying Guthrie on his deathbed; Heath Ledger as the James Dean-ish movie actor who attained crass fame by playing Bale's character in a biopic; Ben Whishaw as a talking-head "Arthur Rimbaud," dispensing cryptic observations straight into a documentary camera; and Richard Gere as a kind of lost outlaw wandering through a surreal Old West full of circus dwarfs and giraffes. Haynes' strategy for organizing this snake pit of narrative ideas is not to have one; the film bops from one to the other, again, much like Dylan always slipped like a blob of mercury from one high-flying story about himself to another.

The period details are ironically immaculate — the autumn exteriors have the extra-golden glow otherwise found only on old folk album covers — and though Haynes has his Fellini moments, mostly the stew of styles is balanced between the all-Americana of "Bound for Glory" (Hal Ashby's 1976 biopic of Guthrie) and strictly faux-documentary. (The fake Pennebaker stuff is on the money, but how did Haynes resist the temptation of reconsidering the mid-'60s filming of "Dont Look Back"?) The performances are all edgy and fine, though it's an injustice that Blanchett's fidgety gag riff got Oscar-nominated and not Bale's far more convincing and grounded turn. Obviously, "I'm Not There" works best for Dylan obsessives, who will know which song lyric or bogus interview tale or biographical hiccup is being alluded to, even as the red carpet of Dylan songs (performed by Dylan and others, though none by the cast) rolls out over them. (The DVD even indexes the movie by song as well as by chapter.) It's safe to say, being less than obsessive, I missed a few ligaments, but the overall thrust of the movie, which clocks in a two and a quarter hours, is not one of revelation or, certainly, dramatic accumulation. Sometimes it dawdles and loafs and stumbles, much like the Dylan characters in their off-stage highs. Sometimes, pretension creeps in like mold. We can expect no less from such an eccentric gamble; Haynes is right in not making a safe or orthodox film about Dylan, even if it's at a cost.

05132008_laroue.jpgMonster epic pioneer Abel Gance was an even bigger gambler, and it's stunning to consider that "La Roue" (1923), the official running time of which clocks in at over five hours, wasn't his biggest cinematic project (that'd be, famously, "Napoleon," four years later, although "La Roue"'s initial length in France was said to have been over seven hours). Gance was also a restless, relentless re-inventor of cinema, and his best films can play like a mad scientist's laboratory at full crank, filthy with inexplicable angles, double exposures, impossibly moving cameras, crazed speed montages ("La Roue"'s came before Eisenstein), etc. "La Roue" is a massive, tragic melodrama, but it's also a high-gear modernist landmark, and its restoration and DVD release is an event; probably due to its length, Gance's movie was never released in the U.S., and it's remained one of the most elusive and rarest of monumental silent classics. The current edition runs four and a half hours, which, since "La Roue" was butchered down to modest sizes wherever it went, is as long as it's been seen anywhere since 1923.

The milieu, which Gance felt possessed a titanic symbolic vitality, is the railroad yards and workers' habitats of early century France — no other film, not even Keaton's "The General," has ever iconicized locomotives, and the labor they require, so intensely. The story seems simple: a trainwreck-orphaned girl is taken in by a gruff rail worker and grows into a luminous beauty, and nearly everyone falls in love with her — including, tortuously, her stepfather and her violin-making stepbrother, whom she thinks are her birth family. But Gance packs in enough narrative and moral agony and mad poetry for three Greek plays, stretching the timeframe out to years and ending up, for real, on the snowy cliff-edges of Mont Blanc. For all of Gance's heedless image-making and Herzogian risks (Gance never took the easy way out when he could instead place the camera where a train might obliterate it or a cast member might fall into an Alpine ravine), the physical-visual torrent of "La Roue" is almost overshadowed by the presence, as the rail worker, of Severin-Mars, a grandstanding legend in his day with an unforgettable face like a saddened, demon-eyed stallion. The scholarship-heavy DVD package comes with a rare short made during production by Gance's assistant director, Blaise Cendrars.

[Photos: Christian Bale in "I'm Not There," Weinstein Co, 2007; "La Roue," 1923]

"I'm Not There" (Genius Products) and "La Roue" (Flicker Alley) are now available on DVD.

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9391 2008-05-13 05:52:32 closed closed im_not_there_la_roue publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009391
<![CDATA[Get (Uwe) Bolled Over]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/ifc-news-podcast-76-get-uwe-bo.php Mon, 12 May 2008 10:01:11 -0500 There are petitions just to stop him from making more films. Stride has offered to give away free gum if one million people sign. He's punched out the scrawnier of his critics in a boxing ring. He's the filmmaker the world loves to revile, and in honor of (or maybe just to warn you about) the upcoming "Postal," this week on the IFC News podcast we discuss the career and films of Uwe Boll, and whether or not he's the contemporary Ed Wood.

Download: MP3, 29:50 minutes, 27.3 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9392 2008-05-12 10:01:11 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_76_get_uwe_bo publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009392 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Get (Uwe) Bolled Over (photo)]]> Mon, 12 May 2008 10:01:11 -0500 1009392 2008-05-12 10:01:11 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_76_get_uwe_bo_photo inherit 9392 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/opening-this-week-12.php Mon, 12 May 2008 09:36:25 -0500 05122008_princecaspian.jpgBy Neil Pedley

After last week's ridiculously crowded release schedule, this week's is somewhat more manageable.

"The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian"
Fans salivating at the prospect of some post-Middle Earth fantasy creature smackdown were left disappointed last time around as, for all its promise, initial "Narnia" installment "The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe" possessed about as much bite as a hibernating tortoise. Looking to fill the hole left by a certain boy wizard in the summer release schedule, the second adventure into Narnia sees the four Pevensie siblings summoned back to the fantastical world to find that 1300 years have passed and their former kingdom lies in ruins. Joining forces with heir to the throne Prince Caspian (Ben Bames), the children lead a renegade army into battle against the tyrannical King Miraz, seeking to restore Narnia and bring about peace once more.
Opens wide.

"My Father, My Lord"
The winner of the Best Narrative Feature award at last year's Tribeca Film Festival is an Israeli drama from first time director David Volach set in an Orthodox community where a rabbi struggles with his relationship with his doting son. In Hebrew with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Quantum Hoops"
Caltech students are famous for many things, but athleticism isn't one of them — the university basketball team hasn't won a game in 21 years. Rick Greenwald's debut documentary, narrated by David Duchovny, follows the Beavers at the end of their 2006 season as they try to break their 240 game losing streak.
Opens in New York.

"Reprise"
A staple on the European festival circuit since its debut two years ago, this playfully melancholic drama about friendship and ambition was Norway's bid for the 2006 best foreign language film Oscar. Written over the course of five years by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, "Reprise" tells of two idealistic young writers whose friendship is threatened when one's manuscript is published and the other is not. "Reprise" has won critical praise for Trier's audacious blend of a highly kinetic directing style with a classic French New Wave sensibility, but it wasn't until uber-producer and tastemaker Scott Rudin stepped in that the film found a U.S. distributor in Miramax. In Norwegian with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Sangre de Mi Sangre"
The debut feature from writer/director Christopher Zalla netted a Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where it was known as "Padre Nuestro." With a new title (which translates in English to "Blood of My Blood"), this drama follows Mexican immigrant Pedro as he travels to New York City in search of his successful (and estranged) father. Along the way, he meets Juan, a charismatic young con man who steals Pedro's identity and abandons him in the city. The two race to find Pedro's father first, one in search of his love, the other in pursuit of his money. In Spanish with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Yella"
Germany's Christian Petzold, who has been compared to Claude Chabrol, directed this disquieting thriller about a woman who flees an abusive husband for a new job in Hanover, only to become involved in a cutthroat corporate scheme that offers its own dangers. This film, which won over critics at its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival last year, is the first of Petzold's to get a U.S. release. In German with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

[Photo: "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," Walt Disney Studios, 2008]

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<![CDATA["Speed Racer"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/speed-racer.php Fri, 09 May 2008 06:37:35 -0500 Nothing in "Speed Racer" is real: not the cars, not the buildings, not the physics, not the stakes, and certainly not the danger. If the Wachowski brothers, creators of "The Matrix" trilogy, were trying to make a movie that looked like a video game, they've accomplished their mission — more than once, "Speed Racer" reminded me of something I'd seen just hours before while playing my new copy of Mario Kart Wii. But while absurd racing games that laugh in the face of Sir Isaac Newton can be fun to play, they're certainly not very fun to watch, especially for two hours straight burdened by merciless editing and lousy subplots.

The story, adapted from a variety of "Speed Racer" cartoons through the decades, involves a threat to the Racer family from a greedy tycoon named Royalton (Roger Allam). He wants Speed (Emile Hirsch) to race for his team and he wants his mechanically inclined Pops (John Goodman) to come with him to build cars for his company. The Racer family is proudly free of sponsors and corporate influence, but the Royalton deal offers financial security and all the luxurious purple clothes that come with it. If there is a meaning buried beneath the gaudy colors and outlandish visuals of "Speed Racer," it is here, where one could conceivably see the Wachowskis speaking about themselves and their art through Speed's dilemma. The world of racing in "Speed Racer" is one dominated by big businesses more interested in making money and selling products than real entertainment; it's not hard to see the similarities to the Hollywood moviemaking machine. The theory is given additional weight by an awkward scene between Speed and his mom (Susan Sarandon) where she makes the argument that Speed's racing is "everything art should be" and by the fact that, as film is for the Wachowskis, the Racers treat racing as a family business.

Still, tantalizing subtexts aside (I haven't even gotten into the whole Racer X leather fetishist thing), "Speed Racer" still aims to deliver action and thrills that it never really provides, especially in its leaden, flashback-laden first hour. When Speed does hit the track, the driving sequences are so frenetic and the onslaught of the "Wacky Races"-esque gimmicks is so unrelenting that it's difficult to keep track of who is doing what to whom, and why, and most importantly how, a question the Wachowskis are clearly not interested in addressing (their screenplay tosses around phrases like "interpositive transponder" as if they mean something).

Paying close attention to the film isn't necessarily rewarded, though it does reveal a few choice plot holes (like when Pops Racer inexplicably claims that they don't have a car to use in the Grand Prix, even though we saw Speed driving his Mach 5 without complication just one scene earlier). You're better served trying to appreciate the races as a sort of technological ballet; at one point at the climax of the film, the swirl of candy-colored car bodies actually morph into an abstract collage of shapes and light. But, c'mon — who goes to "Speed Racer" looking for that?

When the nefarious Royalton teaches Speed a lesson about the "real" history of racing, the Wachowski brothers make the mistake of cutting to old archival footage of real daredevils performing stunts such as hanging onto the hood of a car as it plows through a pile of flaming logs. That's an awesomely stupid act but it's also real; a certifiable lunatic driving through some fiery wood and not some actor in a stationary car husk on a green screen stage being shaken by stagehands. The history of movies is littered with great moments of audacious automotive idiocy all made exciting by the fact that real people did them in real cars. The Mach 5 and the rest of the four-wheeled cast of the Wachowski's digital garage do spectacular things. But I fail to see the point.

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<![CDATA["Speed Racer" (photo)]]> Fri, 09 May 2008 06:37:35 -0500 1009356 2008-05-09 06:37:35 closed closed speed_racer_photo inherit 9356 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Chris Eigeman on "Turn the River"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/chris-eigeman-on-turn-the-rive.php Thu, 08 May 2008 14:20:37 -0500 05082008_turntheriver1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

One of Chris Eigeman's favorite performances in his directorial debut, "Turn the River," comes from an actor who has all of three lines and plays a pimply faced donut shop employee who tells his potential customers that he already drank the coffee. It's the kind of droll one-liner that one could easily imagine rolling off Eigeman's tongue during his heyday as the quick-witted star of Noah Baumbach's "Kicking and Screaming" and Whit Stillman's trilogy of "Metropolitan," "Barcelona" and "The Last Days of Disco." But "Turn the River" isn't the intellectual yukfest one might expect from an actor with a reputation for snark and smarts, but rather the heartfelt character study of Kailey (Famke Janssen), a mother forced to give up her son Gulley (Jaymie Dornan), who attempts to raise enough money through hustling at pool and poker to steal him away from his father. It's an ill-conceived plan, to be sure, and Eigeman doesn't pull any punches in its execution, nor does he shortchange any of the group of fine character actors he's assembled, including friends like Matt Ross ("Big Love") and Marin Hinkle ("Once and Again") or veterans Rip Torn and Lois Smith. Eigeman recently sat down to talk about his first film as a writer/director, how pool scenes are like sex scenes, and the moment when he realized he was no poolhall hustler himself.

How did "Turn the River" come about?

I'd written a few little pieces of it, a couple of scenes here and there. I did a job with Famke as an actor called "The Treatment," and as she and I were working together, it was a really good experience. I'd never known [Famke] before — she has a great cowboy spirit about her, both in her life and in her work. There's a fearlessness about her. After that film finished, I went back to writing ["Turn the River"]. I wrote one of the bench scenes between the mother and the son, and it was incredibly evident I was writing for Famke — there's something very defining about her, and it became a real path through the woods, having that as a sort of lodestone.

The interesting thing to me about the film was that it seemed more interested in the characters than the story it was telling. Were you conscious of that?

I'm a Jesuit when it comes to structure, but I really think that structure is defined by character. Everything serves that master. People will ask me "Why did Kailey do this?" I always wanted that if I turned the film off halfway through, the audience's reaction would be "Well, I really loved Kailey and I really loved Gulley and I really loved Kailey and Gulley together, but I think this is a terrible plan of hers." And that was something that propelled me through.

05082008_turntheriver2.jpgDid you feel like this was the right time in your career to direct your first film?

I don't think there's ever a great time, but a lot of this was born out of the fact that when I was just starting out, working with directors like Whit [Stillman] and Noah Baumbach, those scripts were bulletproof. Those were great scripts, and I got incredibly spoiled by that because as you go down the road in all sorts of mediums, you aren't going to have those great scripts all the time. So I set about trying to write as well as I could, and that would be defined by every actor in the movie being able to do good work and to have fun.

This is a little bit of a technical question, but I remember listening to the commentary on "The Hustler" DVD and they were talking about how hard it was to shoot the pool scenes. Was that a challenge for you?

Oh. My. God. Are you kidding? It was truly fucking terrifying. There are a number of films out there with pool, but the two biggies are "The Hustler" and "The Color of Money," [and] it's interesting, you think of "The Hustler" as being wall-to-wall pool, but actually there isn't that much. There's a lot at the top and there's a little at the bottom and that's about it. There's a huge middle section. I knew that wasn't going to work for us because that can take an incredibly long time. The other way is "Color of Money" and we could't do [that] because we just couldn't afford it. Scorsese shot every possible point of view on that pool table, [with] those huge, long tracking shots with Tom Cruise singing "Werewolves of London" in synch to the music and sinking three shots. We didn't have the support structure to try and pull something like that off, so we found a third way which was very controlled and very loose.

The controlled was we built maybe 20 or 30 pool shots — we took pictures of them, put them in a notebook and named them: Ann, Betty, whatever...all the way down. So we had these shots, and the last shot that Famke makes — Zelda — and we knew that was the shot that we would end all the pool with. Famke got good enough and John [Juback, who plays Duncan, the pool czar of the picture] is good enough that we could just let them play. We'd shoot 360 degrees and let them go.

I was always interested in how much I had to show. It can get really uninteresting watching balls fall into pockets — it's a lot like sex scenes, here [what's] going is infinitely less interesting than [the expressions on] people's faces.

This might be my naïve view of the films you were making with Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach, but this one had a similar feel of "let's get together and make a movie in New York," which it seems fewer films have these days. Has that changed over time?

05082008_turntheriver3.jpgIt has absolutely changed and I genuinely miss it. I worked very hard to bring these people together [on this film] and to try to form a tribe for at least a little while. To me, I look back on Whit's films, on Noah's, on "Kicking and Screaming," [and] not only is that a movie I really like, but the experience of making it was so enjoyable. I never wanted to just be an actor for hire — that's actually why I liked doing television a lot. Doing a year on "Gilmore Girls" was fun because I liked the tribe [aspect] of it. It's like extreme sports — at this budget level, you're either going to cling to each other with affection and hope for salvation or you're going to knife each other. Somebody's going to get poked in the eye. In this case, it was the former, which is great — if my next shoot is half as enjoyable as this one was, I will die a happy man.

This film has already surprised some people because of the kinds of characters you played as an actor. What have you made of the expectations that people have of you and the reception this film has received?

Look, if you're an actor and the first movie you do, you're wearing a cummerbund and cracking wise in a Noël Coward template, that is what people are going to assume and you can't blame them. But yeah, I know. All the pool stuff came about because when I got out of college, I was shooting a lot of pool and thought I was good. I came to New York, and when I wasn't parking cars to make money, I was shooting pool and getting my ass handed to me by people who were smarter, better players and very crafty about taking money out of my pocket. I still play, but I won't play for money anymore. It's important to know, if you're in the land of gambling, what you're good at. [laughs]

This was during the time of New York City when there were some great poolhalls that are gone now — you could easily spend a day shooting pool against people who were kind of famous. There was a poolhall called Chelsea Billiards which isn't there anymore, but it was the last great room in Manhattan and I lost to this one guy so many times [it] drove me crazy. He was incredibly good, but I didn't realize how good until I was out a lot of money and it turns out it's this guy named Kid Delicious, and he just wrote a book about what it is to be a pool hustler. That's where all that came from.

Are you planning to go back to acting any time soon?

I think basically I am an actor. Sometimes I'm an actor who's writing and sometimes an actor who's directing, but I think if I'm forced to fill out a form for my tax return, actor is the first thing I write down. I try not to fill out forms, but when I do, actor is what I write down.

[Photos: Famke Janssen in "Turn the River"; writer/director Chris Eigeman - Screen Media Films , 2007]

"Turn the River"opens in New York on May 9 and in Los Angeles on May 16.

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: Tracey Hecht on "Life in Flight"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/tribeca-08-tracey-hecht-on-lif.php Thu, 08 May 2008 09:28:24 -0500 05082008_lifeinflight1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

There's a moment late in "Life in Flight" when Will (Patrick Wilson) tells his young son, "I haven't been paying a lot of attention lately." It's a difficult thing to admit for the harried husband and father, who spends most of the film kowtowing to his wife Kate (Amy Smart), who'd rather see him land a major commission for his architectural firm than have him attend their son's biodiversity science fair. As Will finds out, such choices have left him with the life he might once have imagined for himself, but not one he wanted. Though he's become a successful architect, the lines that have defined his life have become blurred, particularly when he meets Kate (Lynn Collins), a free-spirited designer. Writer/director Tracey Hecht knows something about those kinds of decisions, having recently broken away from a career in design to make her feature debut, which made its world premiere at Tribeca, and had time to talk about her own career path and why there's something for everyone to take away from her first film.

How did "Life in Flight" come about? What was it about this particular story that appealed to you for your directorial debut?

To be honest, my day job was going through a boring stretch — as in really boring — so I started to get up early before work and write. I wrote the story for this film over three months and showed it to a friend who suggested I turn it into a script. Translating narrative into the discipline of a script format was a lot more work than I thought it'd be, but I love to write and the story plays with themes I think are prevalent in life today, so I enjoyed the process as well.

05082008_lifeinflight2.jpgYour director's biography mentions that you were a founder of several small design businesses. Did that help you visualize things as a filmmaker? Also, the characters obviously come from that world, so did you want to write something relatable?

My husband teases me that I'm aesthetically cursed — that I art direct everything. It's not that bad, but for me, writing is very visceral. As I writer, I have a clear sense of how the scene looks and feels, both in tone as well as look and styling. That's something I probably do with all things — that sense of conceptualization on a broad scale. As for the characters being relatable, the themes in the film are very broad and universal — career, marriage, responsibility, family — I think you need real grounded characters to communicate those themes. I'm glad I was able to create them that way, but maybe more important is how well Patrick and the rest of the cast portrayed them as real and relatable.

You've mentioned before that you felt each of the main characters were a different facet of one person — could you elaborate on that idea and how that informed the story you were telling?

There's this tendency in life and in movies to qualify and classify people — there are bad people, there are good people, there are nice people, there are mean people. I actually don't believe that. I think we're all capable of all those things, so when I wrote those four characters, I wanted to write the spectrum that we're all capable of. I didn't want there to be a bad guy and a good guy and I didn't want there to be someone who was capable of greatness and someone who was capable of terrible failure. It was a real craft to try and create these four characters all dealing with similar themes, but because of where they were in their lives or different tools that they had, revealing their different capabilities around them. We all have the ability to be a Catherine and be afraid and not able to say something and we have the ability to be Josh [Will's freewheeling friend, played by Zak Orth] and be totally free. And most of the time, most of us are Kate and Will, trying to figure it out in the middle.

05082008_lifeinflight3.jpgYou've said that this is a story about fear — while you were filming, do you think the fact that you were a first-time filmmaker added a resonance to that theme as you were making the film?

Ironically, once I was making the film, I felt pretty adept and comfortable. The fear for me was all the work leading up to getting the film made. You write this story and then you toss it out there to people in an industry that you know nothing about. That part was scary! But pre-production, principal photography, editing, etc., I had strong bearings and felt focused and good.

At Tribeca, the film received divergent reactions, which you cited when you said that even your husband has seen it a hundred times and likes different characters each time out. Was it your intention to get different reactions and how do you feel about the reception the film's been getting?

It wasn't the intention, per se, but I think it's a byproduct of having that openness to ambiguity. Depending on your place — there was a woman who was in that Monday screening [at Tribeca] where she said, "I feel like Catherine and Catherine's just such a bitch." [laughs] It's not intended to strike people differently at different times, but I think it does because I think that the emotional spots of those four characters are so representative of when you're in a good place or a bad place that, depending on your mood, they can really speak to you differently. In all the screenings, even from people who've read the script and also seen the film, everyone's reaction to the characters really evolves and changes. To me, I think that's one of the more gratifying things about the film — it has the ability to transform itself depending who you are and what you're going through in your life.

[Photos: "Life in Flight," Plum Pictures, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Nick Broomfield on "Battle for Haditha"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/nick-broomfield-on-battle-for-1.php Tue, 06 May 2008 18:37:12 -0500 05062008_battleforhaditha1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

It was only a matter of time before renowned British documentarian Nick Broomfield ("Kurt & Courtney," "Biggie & Tupac," "Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer"), whose on-camera muckraking begat Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, would tackle the Iraq War. But what's surprising for a guy who's been developing his doc style since the early '70s is that "Battle for Haditha," based on a 2005 tragedy in which U.S. Marines slaughtered 24 Iraqi men, women and children as kneejerk retribution for an IED attack, isn't a documentary at all. A progressive but blisteringly angry re-enactment that may be the first Iraq-themed narrative with any intelligent sense of the complexities at hand, Broomfield's drama casts real-life Iraqi civilians, insurgents and U.S. marines to depict the humanity from each side of the story. I sat with a no-nonsense Broomfield at NYC's Film Forum to discuss the film, political apathy and his thoughts on how cinema may be more effective than the media.

Why did you want to make a film about this particular event, and what led you to casting non-actors?

Before this, I did a film called "Ghosts," using the same technique with non-actors. It was about illegal Chinese immigrants coming to England, and I used illegal Chinese to basically be themselves. I got amazing performances from them because, obviously, they knew what that world was.

I also wanted to make a film about what happens in the vocabulary of war — generally portrayed as good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians. Both sides always think they're right or have their vision. I'm very anti-war and mindful that, at the end of the Second World War, there were all these pronouncements that this was to be the war that ends all wars, and warfare is not a way of resolving disputes because it would always involve the killing of innocent civilians.

This film happens to look at Haditha, a symbolic incident of the Iraq War, which I think the American public will remember. It's something that I think happens every day because of the situation, the uncertainty, suspicion, paranoia, and the desire to live longer — all those pent-up emotions that happen in any war. Innocent people get killed because they bend in the wrong direction. As much as anything, I think people need to think through what war represents, and it's not enough to blame the Marines who are, in a sense, doing what we want them and have trained them to do. It's the bigger thing: what is this conflict going to achieve? Hopefully there will be a desire to move forward and establish a real dialogue with the Iraqis; have a sense of them, their culture and their civilization, which is, as we know, one of the oldest in the world. Dialogue can never happen when there's warfare, and there's a circle of violence that emanates inevitably from it.

05062008_battleforhaditha2.jpgThough it's loosely scripted, what made you decide that narrative was a better medium than non-fiction to tell this story? Did you need more control to get specific points across?

Depending on what medium you're working in, you choose the subjects to fit. A documentary couldn't have done of this particular story, certainly not on this emotional level. Members of the insurgency would not take part in the film. I met the insurgency, and you know, they don't want to be filmed. Marines wouldn't be identified on camera either, those we had met from Kilo company. You can't get [within] that emotional proximity to the people who were involved. Also, in order to show that circular motion that has the inevitability of doom and clash, that sort of repetitive worsening of the situation, I think you need to see an event or drama unfolding in front of you to really appreciate what happens. I'm not saying that talking heads aren't useful in another kind of context, but I don't think they would've worked here.

You mentioned before that ending the war requires the start of a dialogue. What part in that conversation do you hope people will instigate after seeing your film?

What cinema can do is stand back from the plethora of information we get from the television — which tends to become very inhuman after a while — and establish a sense of humanity. Put a face on the Iraqi people. You're never going to achieve a peace or a lasting solution until you have some respect — you need to personalize the Iraqis as one needed to the Vietnamese. Cinema can do that on a very emotional level. I think people can empathize with an Iraqi family trying to raise kids, have a love affair, or just exist in this situation. It can bring humanity to the Marines at the same time, and the insurgency, and it all becomes much more complicated.

How do you get people to engage when they're shying away from Iraq-themed films in droves? To many, it seems like an extension of the news, or homework, or eating one's vegetables.

It's any political film, really. People keep comparing this to the Vietnam films. I think it was a different time. People were marching about everything and felt like their vote counted, that they could register their feelings. The whole civil rights movement was based on being listened to, that somehow taking to the streets mattered and would have a significant impact. I don't think people believe that anymore. There's a feeling of impotence, that everything is beyond our control: "I'm going to get on with my life, raise my kids, make money, laugh at Britney Spears, and that's all I can deal with."

So once again, how do you convince people to pay attention when there's a collective apathy?

05062008_battleforhaditha3.jpgI guess no one has really come out with that solution. Maybe when there's a feeling of a new vision, that there's some statesman-like character leading us to a new way of seeing the world, apolitical people will take control of their lives and what's happening around them. I think there's a lack of empowerment at the moment, a lack of belief that anyone's views are represented. The cinema, entertainment and everything else reflects that. It comes from the top, doesn't it? It comes from the administration and the overall political situation of the country.

Have any conservatives reacted to the film, and is it preaching to the anti-war choir?

Funnily enough, the conservatives in Jordan and places like Dubai, where the film has been shown, feel it doesn't portray the freedom fighters in as strong or patriotic a way as it should. They shouldn't be shown accepting money, they should be the conscience of Iraq, total heroes, you know. Here, the conservatives on both sides are essentially the same: "There shouldn't be any criticism whatsoever of what's happening because it's an unfolding conflict. This is a conflict we've got to win, and this isn't helpful."

I think the film will people [who] don't have any information on both sides. The Iraqis have very little idea of what is going through the minds of the marines. They just see them as evil, as the devil. I think by humanizing the marines — showing that these are vulnerable kids who have problems with what they're doing, and they're kind of victims, too — is a revolutionary thought for a lot of Iraqis who've seen the film. I hope the same will be true with the Americans who get a sense of what the Iraqis are going through, that the insurgency is not "the insurgency." They're not all Al-Qaeda members. A lot of them are guys who were in the army, who became disillusioned with the liberation when they realized they weren't able to vote, their army was disbanded, they didn't have electricity, their kids couldn't go to school. They saw what was actually a — I wouldn't say an amazing economy, but certainly people could function and drive across their city — disappear, and they felt they had to take things into their own hands. It's humanizing both sides, and that's the way forward.

[Photos: "Battle for Haditha"; director Nick Broomfield, Hanway Films, 2007]

"Battle for Haditha" opens in New York on May 7.

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<![CDATA[GERO TEST GERO TEST]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/gero-test-gero-test.php Tue, 06 May 2008 12:31:41 -0500 gero gero gero gero

THIS TEXT IS NEW

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<![CDATA[GERO TEST GERO TEST (photo)]]> Tue, 06 May 2008 12:31:41 -0500 10025324 2008-05-06 12:31:41 closed closed gero_test_gero_test_photo inherit 25324 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Bamako," "The Films of Morris Engel"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/bamako-the-films-of-morris-eng.php Tue, 06 May 2008 07:44:34 -0500 05062008_bamako.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako may have made the one African film everybody needs to see — at least for its disarming fugue of frank political awareness and state-of-the-quotidian African life. In most other ways, though, "Bamako" (2006) is a challenge to orthodoxy, because it's not driven by its narrative, and hardly even provides an establishing context for itself. Before we know it, we're in a sun-dappled Mali courtyard (Sissako's family home, as it turns out), in which a kind of tribunal is going on, complete with black-robed jurists, waiting witnesses, anxious journalists and stacks of documentation. This is, we slowly realize, a fantasy trial in which the African people have taken civil proceedings against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and American-led global capitalism in general, for the crime of exploiting and loan-sharking the continent and its peoples. The testimony is not from actors, but from real African citizens, writers, activists, tribal leaders, etc.; the lawyers, European and African, on both sides are also genuine advocates.

It sounds like a Peter Watkins film, except "Bamako"'s primary thrust is mitigated, colored and accented in a distinctly African fashion: in, behind and around the trial courses a never-ending flow of relaxed, workaday life full of loiterers, babies, laundry, troubled families, goats, sunglasses salesmen, fabric dyers, well-women and so on. Every one of Sissako's shots is a deep-focus study in the irresistible press of life; beyond every passionate witness who gives testimony is Africa itself, working and lazing and surviving. A beautiful nightclub chanteuse, whose marriage is dissolving, stops the court in mid-morning to have someone, anyone, tie up the back of her dress. The locals listen to the proceedings on loudspeakers until they no longer wish to and watch TV instead. (Sissako doesn't let that opportunity slip by, inventing for broadcast a cheesy spaghetti western parable on cowboy diplomacy starring Danny Glover and Elia Suleiman.) At one point, a wedding ceremony plows through the courtyard.

But the witnesses are never deterred, and the core of "Bamako" is intense, eloquent testimony against the state powers that systematically, under the guise of aiding developing nations, rape them of resources and drain them through intolerable debt. For Americans who generally accept the spin about the IMF and the G8 being philanthropic or, at best, error-prone organs of national assistance, getting the picture from the African perspective could have an awakening effect. The IMF's lawyer, embodied by French decolonization advocate Roland Rappaport, cannot muster much of a proposed defense, but who could, given the vocabulary and priorities Sissako has established? (The name "Paul Wolfowitz" is spat out like a swallowed bug.) There's no denying the integrity of Sissako's assembled voices, especially once an elderly tribesman takes the stand and belts out a wailing, and unsubtitled, Bambara elegy of cultural woe, making everyone in the vicinity stop dead and go grave. Humanistic agitprop, "Bamako" may be African, but it is aimed outward at the world with global unrest in its heart.

05062008_littlefugitive.jpgThe integrity located at the nougat center of Morris Engel's three modest features — "Little Fugitive" (1953), "Lovers and Lollipops" (1956) and "Weddings and Babies" (1958) — is just as undeniable, just as it's virtually impossible not to feel charmed and even a little blessed by the movies' affectionate attention to realistic details (despite their cloying titles). They are, in fact, such an unassuming clutch of cinema that it'd be easy to overlook the revolution they represented — without "Little Fugitive," there might not have been a French New Wave or John Cassavetes, and therefore, perhaps, no new wave movement at large. Before Engel, "indies" were exploitation and genre rip-offs, destined for the grindhouses. Before Engel, American film characters had heavily plotted actions to carry out — they didn't live in real rooms, speak in convincing cadences, or lallygag around watching children or laying in parks or dallying over luncheon counters. Before Engel, shooting an entire dramatic film as if it were a spontaneous documentary was unheard of. From the late '40s noirs onward, American films were tentatively, nervously, edging toward a street-savvy realism, but it took Engel to push the zeitgeist over for real, with no studio behind him and with a handheld camera, into the sawdust of Coney Island and onto the sidewalks of Little Italy.

Engel, working with his photographer-editor wife Ruth Orkin at every stage of production, had a crafty and expressive eye, but his films feel as natural as daylight through an old apartment window. "Little Fugitive" is a tiny story — a Brooklyn seven-year-old thinks he killed his bullyish brother, and escapes alone to Coney Island — slogged by post-dubbing and amateurish performances, and yet it's a miracle; it's as if no one had ever photographed a real child doing authentic childish things before. Freckly, beady-eyed Richie Andrusco is just a paradigmatic kid (no extraordinary resources of charisma or camera love here), but essential, unfettered boyness was rare in movies, and it's what makes him compulsively watchable. Similarly, "Lovers and Lollipops" dawdles over little Cathy Dunn as a fatherless girl whose lonesome mom (Lori March) finds a new, and not terribly kid-savvy, boyfriend (Gerald O'Loughlin); the people are just as interesting to Engel as the landmarks of Manhattan, including Central Park, Macy's and the Statue of Liberty (source of a typical Engelian moment: as the adults talk high in the statue, kids run along its shadow's perimeter on the grass).

"Weddings and Babies," the only Engel film to be made with synch-sound and without Orkin, is a stunningly intimate view of a working couple at odds about marriage and offspring. (Viveca Lindfors, coming to Engel's penniless improv New Yawk after 10 lackluster years in Hollywood, gives one of the best performances of the '50s.) "Little Fugitive" won a top prize at the Venice Film Festival, played in 5,000 U.S. theaters, and has since been inducted into the National Film Registry. (It is, in addition to everything, an anthropological portrait of Coney Island in the early '50s.) But all three movies are sincere and true and powerfully expressive love letters to kids, to lower-middle-class Americans, and to New York and its outer boroughs, in a day of thriving street life. Influential or not, Engel was a hardcore independent who struggled to get his films made. He made a fourth feature, "I Need a Ride to California" (1968), which still has never been seen; otherwise, he and Orkin made their livings as photographers and occasional commercial directors, outcasts from a culture-scape they pioneered.

[Photos: Aïssa Maïga in "Bamako," New Yorker, 2007; "Little Fugitive," Joseph Burstyn, 1953]

"Bamako" (New Yorker Video) and "The Films of Morris Engel" (Kino Video) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: James Mottern on "Trucker"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/tribeca-08-james-mottern-on-tr.php Mon, 05 May 2008 22:19:45 -0500 05052008_trucker1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

It's typical to assume when you sit down with a director that they have a love of film, but in James Mottern's case, his enthusiasm for the medium is infectious. When asked why he cast the perennially underrated Michelle Monaghan as the lead in his first film, "Trucker," he'll simply ask in return, "Did you see 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'?" That leads to a conversation about the little-seen 2005 drama "Winter Solstice" and the way Monaghan caught his eye in the background of a scene, and the next thing you know, you're talking about the way her eyes crossed in a segment for "North Country." That attention to detail is what might also be most impressive about Mottern's nuanced directorial debut, which premiered at this year's the Tribeca Film Festival. Though he'll rattle off his influences and the films he loves from the 1970s with reckless abandon, Mottern's "Trucker" is an original concoction that stars Monaghan as a mother whose hard living is interrupted by retaking custody of a young son she left long ago, with enough cursing between the two to make, well, a trucker blush. Mottern recently sat down to talk about his gritty character study, his war against sentiment and why not getting your film into a particular festival shouldn't be the end of the world.

Was this an attempt to class up a genre previously dominated by "Over the Top" and "Black Dog"?

[laughs] Yeah, it was conscious in the sense that when I was little, one of my favorite movies was "Smokey and the Bandit." It's a great film because it's exactly what it is. It's an interesting movie in that way. But this film is more informed by certain classic '70s movies, like "Five Easy Pieces" or "The Last Detail" — I know these are all Nicholson movies — that almost are genres unto themselves because they're usually about one character going through this process and, a lot of times, there's a breeziness to their character. There's a sense of humor about it, but there's an undercurrent of melancholy, a real human feeling to it, so that was what appealed to me about the story as I was writing, the subtext of it. Michelle's like that. You look at her and she's very beautiful, there's a lightness to her but at the same time, whatever she's got runs very deep. It's a depth that some of the greatest actresses that we know have.

It was surprising that you could read the plot synopsis for this film and think it probably couldn't avoid being melodramatic — there's an estranged mother taking in her young son as his father languishes in a hospital — but there's no sentimentality to this film whatsoever.

Because you've seen that story about 500 times.

Was that something you had right from the start and had to protect?

I think of sentiment, any sentiment, as a constructed emotion that's been created by movies. I don't know where it comes from because I don't think it's a real human emotion. I don't think people have "sentiment." I think they have love, fear, anger, compassion, but "sentiment" is not an emotion, it's a reflex to emotion. So from the very beginning, I wrote it with restraint against that. It was a challenge. The beauty of the story was that it was familiar, but you have a mother and a son — if you want to be sentimental, it's all there for the picking, but I really wanted to let the story tell itself and have an openness to it.

05052008_trucker2.jpgPeople want you to do it. When they read the script, they're like, "I don't really like it. I don't like her... you could get more tears out of this.' It would never appeal to me. In a movie like "The Last Detail" where there's no sentiment at all, there's a shot where Randy Quaid does the semaphore and then [gets] the crap beaten out of him. There's a tragedy to that, but there's no music, just the sound of the leaves and the flailing far away. You feel it because you've been allowed to feel it. It was a '70s movie, and there's no sentiment in those films because they're trying to tell a true story. Those films informed me that it's important to tell the story, not the sentiment of the story.

The other thing that was interesting in the film was how gender roles was defined — having Monaghan play a role that usually would be reserved for man and you have dialogue referring to what makes a good man — was that a thread you wanted to follow through?

A lot of this film is about identity, that you live your life and you think you have free will. But as you walk around in the day, whether it's the way you look, your gender, the way you behave, the sound of your voice, you're immediately identified and categorized by people. They're trying to tell you who you are at all these points and you begin to believe it, it chips away at your freedom until you have no free will. You're beholden to these people who are identifying you. [Monaghan's character] Diane says "That's not who I am. That's not who I am." To me, that's why she's a hero — she does resist that categorization by other people. It wasn't so much role reversal, because I never thought of this movie as being a woman's movie. It was always [about] a human being first.

Knowing your background with Slamdance, where you were once a festival producer, what's the experience been like to switch sides from producing a festival to participating in one as a filmmaker?

The thing I like about those films [at Slamdance] is that not all of them are great, but there's always some little nugget that's good in each one of them. It's always like filmmakers first, and to me, Tribeca is very similar in that sense that it was started not by a city to promote the city, but in a response to 9/11. I'm religious about movies anyway, that some of the great films would suggest somebody is finding redemption or salvation or freedom. It's a very American phenomenon to have that feeling.

The other thing about Tribeca is that they have a very high regard for the history of film in terms of American history and influence and what films have meant to people beyond the box office. It depresses the shit out of me when I'm listening to Indie 103 in L.A. and they have the Sundance Report. You tune in and you're like alright, tell me what the movies are, and the first thing they do during the Sundance Report is tell what the sales were of these films and it's pathetic.

"Trucker" was bandied about as one of the titles that might've been selected for Sundance. Were you actually aiming for that before Tribeca?

Yeah, but I think that when you're making a film you'd hope that everyone's working together for what they believe in — that's why you'd do it. An independent film, no one's paying you any money to do it. You do want your film to sell because you want people to see it — you don't make it to put it in your bureau. But when there are these big festivals, you find yourself almost making a film for the people who run the festival — will it get in? Who's there? Who will like it? Who knows someone who's at the festival? It's almost like the festival becomes a distributor who you haven't even sold the film to.

For Sundance and this film, it was being bandied about because I always thought it was great and people will tell you, "This is a Sundance film," but I always thought this is any festival film because it's going to be great. For me...and Sundance, God love 'em... I wanted to finish my film. I didn't have a score in, so we were all like let's just finish it, you know, because it's going to be a good film.

05052008_trucker3.jpgI was curious about it because I knew it did have that history.

And that's the other thing — so it's bandied about that it's going to get into Sundance, right? And so people then say "What is wrong with it that it didn't get in?'

It comes off as damaged goods when you don't get in.

But it's.... not done. [laughs] I learned a valuable lesson — the movie that you are going to make you should make, come hell or high water. I'm [actually] very positive about that experience, but it discourages me when I see filmmakers have that feeling that their film didn't get into a particular festival. I have friends that didn't get into this festival and it's divisive. It makes it so that these filmmakers that have worked together or have tried to nurture each other are suddenly divided by a festival because the festival is suddenly qualifying the value of your film.

What's next?

I would like to be in the Michelle Monaghan business for the rest of my life, because I really think she's one of the greats. When she agreed to do the film, we went through the script and talked about this character and by doing that with her, I found things in the script that I hadn't seen before and it informed me about things that I wanted to do that I hadn't thought of. So for me to be able to work with Michelle, it's what I would consider as almost joint filmmakers. It's a symbiotic relationship. I'm working on a few things for her and then I just finished a Hal Ashby-ish kind of comedy and we'll see what happens with that. But I'm always working on a bunch of different things.

[Photos: "Trucker," Plum Pictures, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Not Another Teen Movie Podcast]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/ifc-news-podcast-75-not-anothe.php Mon, 05 May 2008 11:18:17 -0500 This week, "Juno"'s Ellen Page is back in theaters with "The Tracey Fragments," playing another troubled but eloquent teenager girl. Is it safe to say that Page is the wide-eyed, smart-mouthed face of the MySpace generation on the indie screen? In honor of her role, this week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look at some of the better representations of teens on screen, from "Kes" to "Ghost World."

Download: MP3, 27:56 minutes, 25.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9329 2008-05-05 11:18:17 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_75_not_anothe publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009329 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Not Another Teen Movie Podcast (photo)]]> Mon, 05 May 2008 11:18:17 -0500 1009329 2008-05-05 11:18:17 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_75_not_anothe_photo inherit 9329 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/opening-this-week-11.php Mon, 05 May 2008 11:05:23 -0500 05052008_thebabysitters.jpgBy Neil Pedley

This week sees the return of the Wachowski brothers, Tarsem Singh ("The Cell") and Henry Bean ("The Believer") to the big screen, not to mention new films from documentarians Nick Broomfield ("Tupac and Biggie") and Doug Pray ("Scratch"). On the other hand, after running around Tribeca, we still need to catch up on last week's releases.

"The Babysitters"
The idea of the spunky teenage boy succumbing to the allure of an experienced older woman is the kind of Hollywood golden goose that launches major careers (think Dustin Hoffman). But when the roles are reversed, the result is the directorial debut of David Ross that sees an entrepreneurial high schooler (Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam) and her friends turn their babysitting ring into a call girl service, realizing there are alternative ways to pay for college besides waiting tables. It stars when one local dad (John Leguizamo) goes a little too far one night, and Waterston's Shirley sees the opportunity for a full scholarship (and a phone call to Chris Hansen).
Opens in New York.

"Battle For Haditha"
UK documentarian and provocateur Nick Broomfield, perhaps best known for his controversial music doc, "Kurt and Courtney," once again takes a factual event and offers to fill in the blanks in "Battle For Haditha," a fictional dramatization of the events surrounding the 2005 death of a U.S. Marine in Haditha, Iraq and the subsequent killing of 24 Iraqi noncombatants, reportedly in retaliation. In keeping with the speculative nature of the project. the film was shot without a script with actors being given a detailed scene outline and then left to improvise their roles within it.
Opens in New York.

"The Fall"
Tarsem Singh's debut, the psychological mindbender "The Cell," was much like its leading lady, Jennifer Lopez — extremely beautiful and more than a little excruciating to watch on screen. His sophomore effort, which arrives in theaters after six years in production and the aegis of "presenters" David Fincher and Spike Jonze, is certainly at least one of those things. Using the gloriously ripe cinematography of classic Bollywood to paint a visceral steampunk adventure story, Singh lets "Pushing Daisies" star Lee Pace impart a grand, epic tale of warriors and tyrants to the little girl in the hospital bed next to him (Catinca Untaru) in an effort to enlist her in a bid to end his life.
Opens in limited release.

"Frontière(s)"
That this film was originally deemed too gruesome to premiere at even the 2007 Horrorfest festival and had to be toned down for an NC-17 rating should tell you everything you need to know. The demonic lovechild of Eli Roth and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this nasty survival story stars Karina Testa and Aurélien Wiik as young thieves on the run who take refuge at an inn where they are made to earn their freedom by running the gauntlet of a vast underground labyrinth filled with neo-Nazi torturers and sub-human cannibals. The film was directed by Xavier Gens, who went Hollywood with "Hitman" last year.
Opens in limited release.

"Noise"
Based on the real life exploits of writer/director Henry Bean, "Noise" finds Tim Robbins as a white collar vigilante who harbors a deep-seated hatred of that pre-dawn terror, the faulty car alarm. Driven to distraction by their perceived incessant interruptions of his otherwise serene inner city existence, Robbins dons a mask, grabs a tire iron, and fights back under the guise of his preposterous alter ego, "The Rectifier." Following his credited screenplay work on "Basic Instinct 2," Bean attempts to rectify his own cred with this black comedy.
Opens in New York.

"OSS 117: Cario, Nest of Spies"
The espionage novels of Jean Bruce were the inspiration for this gloriously silly riff on Cold War spy fiction. Though the film isn't the first adaptation of — are you ready? — the series of 265 stories, it's certainly a jab in the eye for the Bond films of Sean Connery, especially since the story's hero, the impossibly named Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, actually predates Ian Fleming's character by several years. Arming our man in Egypt with the wardrobe of Harry Palmer and the brains of Inspector Clouseau, director Michel Hazanavicius takes the customary innuendo, thinly veiled misogyny and spectacularly oversimplified geopolitics, mixes them with classic French farce, and shakes them like a vodka martini.
Opens in limited release.

"A Previous Engagement"
Perhaps best known for her BAFTA-nominated performance in the late Anthony Minghella's "Truly, Madly, Deeply," Juliet Stevenson stars as Julia, a bitter and aging librarian who decides on a whim to drag her family to Malta where she can wallow at the site where she promised to hook up with the real love of her life (Tchéky Karyo) 25 years ago. When she finds he's actually there, along with his young, attractive new girlfriend, she is completely unprepared to deal with her former lover and her foppish husband (Daniel Stern), who sets about making himself a new man she'll be unable to resist after discovering the trip's true purpose.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"Speed Racer"
Lounging around development hell since as far back as 1992, with everyone from Johnny Depp and Julien Temple (cheer) to Vince Vaughn (shudder) attached at one point or another, it took the resolve of Joel Silver and clout of the Wachowski brothers to get "Speed Racer" up and running. After his acclaimed turn in "Into the Wild," Emile Hirsch feels the need to be Speed, the prodigal driver who must be taken out after he refuses to play ball with the racing industry's corporate stooges, who're looking to fix races for profit. Perhaps the single prettiest thing ever committed to celluloid, the film received its world premiere as the closing night film of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival.
Opens wide and in IMAX in select theaters.

"Surfwise"
"Scratch" documentarian Doug Pray chronicles the life of bohemian surfing legend Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, who's credited as being the man who introduced surfing to Israel. Pray charts Doc's amazing transformation from successful, middle-class doctor in Hawaii into a wandering, nomadic beatnik, living in a camper van on the California coast with his wife and nine children. Blending archival footage, interviews with former surfing students, his now-grown children and the aging guru himself, "Surfwise" tells the incredible story of a man who decided to wave goodbye to society and never looked back.
Opens in limited release.

"The Tracey Fragments"
Using an abstract fusion of mosaic and montage imagery, cult Canadian auteur Bruce McDonald directs a pre-"Juno" Ellen Page in an adaptation of Maureen Medved's novel about the titular Tracey, a traumatized girl found naked on a bus who reveals through a series of vignettes her story and her search for missing little brother, Sonny. In preparation for its domestic release, the film's footage was made available to users online who were encouraged to assemble and submit their own version of the story, with the best entries then featured on the official website.
Opens in New York.

"Turn The River"
Another week, another card film, this time starring Famke Janssen as Kailey Sullivan, a down-on-her-luck mom who hustles at the poker table and the local poolhall to raise the cash to take her son (Jaymie Dornan) away from her ex-husband (Matt Ross). Praised by some critics as an authentic character study and for its gutsy gender reversal, the film was written and directed by Chris Eigeman, who picked up a screenplay award at last year's Hamptons Film Festival, which also bestowed a jury prize to Janssen for her gritty performance. Rip Torn and Lois Smith also star.
Opens in limited release.

"Unsettled"
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Slamdance Festival for best documentary, Adam Hootnick's intimate film follows the Israeli withdrawal of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the varied impact it has on the lives of a group of young people made to leave their homes. Some support the withdrawal, while others vehemently oppose it, and others still are indifferent yet equally powerless against a mandate for them to leave peacefully, or be evacuated by force.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on May 16th.

"Vice"
Ah, so this is what Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah do in between Tarantino movies. With a commendation from no less than Dennis Hopper, who's quoted as saying "Vice" "is one of the best cop movies I've ever seen," this low budget pulp noir stars Madsen and Hannah as members of a narco squad who have to stay alive long enough to hunt down an inside man responsible for jacking a bust's worth of heroin. Mykelti Williamson co-stars in this "Max Payne"-lite crime caper.
Opens in limited release.

"What Happens in Vegas..."
Ashton Kutcher is certainly no stranger to walking down the aisle with good-looking older women, but Demi Moore's other half gets more than he bargained for in this anarchic rom-com from "Starter for 10" director Tom Vaughan. Hard as it is to believe anyone wouldn't be overjoyed to wake up and discover he's hitched to Cameron Diaz, both parties are decidedly unhappy when a one night stand turns into a battle of will when it comes to divvying up the $3 million they won together on the slots, and the only way to get the money is to drive the other so crazy that he or she leaves voluntarily. Rob Corddry, Queen Latifah and "Saturday Night Live"'s Jason Sudeikis round out an eclectic support cast.
Opens wide.

[Photo: "The Babysitters," Peace Arch Releasing, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: Lucas Jansen, Adam Kurland and Spencer Vrooman on "This is Not a Robbery"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/05/lucas-jansen-adam-kurland-and.php Fri, 02 May 2008 17:24:19 -0500 05022008_thisisnotarobbery1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

When Lucas Jansen, Adam Kurland and Spencer Vrooman had to come up with a title for their first documentary, "This is Not a Robbery," they looked to the René Magritte surrealist painting "This is Not a Pipe" for inspiration. While there was very little that was artistic about the robberies attempted by the film's subject, J.L. "Red" Rountree — who merely went into a bank and handed a teller an envelope with the word "robbery" scribbled on it — there was something positively surreal about the fact that Rountree was 86 years old when he decided to first rob a bank. Rountree died in 2004 after starting out with great success in the oil business and ending in prison, though not before a series of incredible twists and turns of fate led the octogenarian to turn to a life of crime. Jansen, Kurland and Vrooman recently sat down to reflect on Rountree's legacy, how they got cozy with law enforcement and how they're getting away with things of their own at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

How did "This is Not a Robbery" come about?

Adam Kurland: Basically, we came across the story in the L.A. Times obituary section and I was just fascinated by this guy's life. There were so many questions left unanswered by this story that I just wanted to know what happened. Lucas, Spencer and I have all known each other since we were really young. Lucas [and I] were both living in New York and we decided we were going to do a doc on this guy and plan the whole trip, got everything together and met up with Spencer in Los Angeles.

Because you've known each other for so long, did you guys find out anything new about each other while working so closely together on a film?

Lucas Jansen: If you basically live off somebody else's nose for three and a half years of your life, even if you've known them since you were a little kid, you find out more about people. I think anything you want to know about Adam or Spencer or me, you could ask any of the three of us and you're pretty much covered.

AK: But the truth is that the three and a half years making it were also huge periods of time where we changed drastically. It was a long process, a difficult process and an amazing process, but I would say the people who started making this movie are not who we are now necessarily.

Spencer Vrooman: It's like going from "Saved by the Bell" to "Saved by the Bell: The College Years."

I'm assuming that you'd never been to Central Texas before, where there are such great natural characters, as you discover in the film — what was that experience like?

SV: We're very much big city boys, as painful as it is to admit it, but when we went down, people took us in, were completely generous all along our travels, even people we weren't used to being friendly to us, like police officers and the wardens of jails. Everyone was so accommodating...there's a broad interest in this story that I think led people to want to help us because they wanted to learn more about [it].

05022008_thisisnotarobbery2.jpgWhile the story of an elderly bank robber is quite funny on the surface, was there anyone who you talked to who didn't have a sense of humor about Red or the crimes he committed? You mentioned that Red's family didn't want to talk much following one of the screenings.

SV: We really hit very few obstacles. The thing about [Red's] family, they just didn't know Red, so they weren't appropriate for the film for that reason. Any estrangement had taken place earlier in Red's life and was unrelated to the robberies. As far as anyone else, probably the worst reaction to Red Rountree was the bank teller who developed the phobia of elderly people. And even with her, we shared a lot of the information we'd found out about Red's past history and I think she may have taken steps towards reconciling [her fears and memories of being robbed] after discussing it with us. Part of the fun thing is Red lived two lives — one as a law-abiding citizen and one as an elderly criminal — [and] we have been able to show people who only knew one side of Red the other side, and I think they come to understand it better. That's been a huge part of the process for us.

One of the most clever conceits of the film is the timeline, which shows how Red went from a man who made a fortune in the oil business to someone who decided to rob banks, but not necessarily in that order. How did you come up with the chronology?

AK: It was in post-production when we realized that we were going to go back and forth. We all love Akira Kurosawa and "Rashomon," which used that back and forth. It was obviously an unconventional style of filmmaking where you were going back to a point that happened before. Coming into the post-production, we knew we had to find some similar way to that to tell the story.

SV: Once we had the time wall [a series of interludes throughout the film that mark the time in Red's life by using framed pictures of Red], we were good.

AK: We went through a couple different transitions that went from the past to the future, from the future to the past, and we eventually came up with the idea of this wall in a room that could've been the audience's room or Red's room or any room, really — time flies on it as if someone is trying to put these back in order.

The film also has bits of the audio interview Jim Lewis conducted for an article in GQ. While that must've been a bit of a holy grail to have his actual voice for the film, how much did you want to rely on it versus finding your own story?

LJ: Process-wise, we found all of the other elements of the story came to us before those tapes, actually. We finished our shooting process before Jim Lewis offered the tapes to us — they were an after-the-fact revelation. We'd already got the chance to fall in love with all of our secondary characters and had to fight to find ways to tell the story with the secondary characters before we even got the tapes with Red. We went through a slow uncovering process of getting into those tapes and falling in love with our lead character in a whole new way that we could then retell.

So now that the film has premiered, what has the festival experience been like for you guys?

LJ: it's been a thrill and we've only had limited screenings for other people. We've kept a tight lid on it and to be able to open it and show it to so many people and get the response that we've gotten has been incredible.

SV: I think when we jumped into the project back in 2005, our attitude was kind of like, hey, Red Rountree at 86 with no previous criminal experience started robbing banks, well, then fuck it, at 23, with no previous cinematic experience, we can probably make a documentary film about it. And now we've got that feeling like we're on the way out of the bank with our envelope... which probably means at any second, we're going to get caught and locked up for the rest of our lives, so we're just enjoying this short high now while we have it.

[Photos: "This is Not a Robbery," Andrew Lauren Productions, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith on "Son of Rambow"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/garth-jennings-and-nick-goldsm.php Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:59:22 -0500 04302008_sonoframbow1.jpgBy Matt Singer

Every film lover remembers that first adult movie they were too young to see. For Garth Jennings, that movie was 1982's "First Blood." "It was brilliant," remembers Jennings. "Here's this guy with a stick and a knife taking on 200 men. We just thought it was the business — so much so that we then decided to make our own home movie version of this using my father's video camera."

Jennings's home-brewed movies eventually led to a career working in collaboration with Nick Goldsmith under the name Hammer & Tongs, in which Jennings would direct and Goldsmith would produce first a string of remarkably creative music videos and then features, starting with 2005's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The team's second picture brings Jennings full circle: a semi-autobiographical story of two British school kids who become amateur filmmakers after watching — what else? — "First Blood."

The result is the hilarious and deeply touching "Son of Rambow" — the extra "w" of the title, as Jennings and Goldsmith note, is to avoid reactions like the one they got after an early test screening, when a man was furious to discover the movie was not an actual Rambo sequel. "He wrote on his test sheet, 'How dare you trick me? Where are the guns?'" Goldsmith told me with a laugh. During our interview, Jennings and Goldsmith talked about their own "Rambo" sequels and the pleasures of growing up children of the 1980s.

I assume that the film is in some way based on things that one or both of you did as children.

Nick Goldsmith: The first draft we wrote was sort of autobiographical, but we both had fairly ordinary, nice upbringings, so it was a bit of a dull script. But then we had this peripheral character who was a Plymouth Brethren, this religious group that goes to ordinary schools, but aren't allowed any form of entertainment in their lives. We found by moving the story next door to this little kid who'd never seen a film before or any form of entertainment, we could have it so that when he sees "First Blood," it blows his mind. It was a way for us to get that feeling across of how it was when we were kids, when you see a film, and it really has an effect on you in a much more filmic way.

04302008_sonoframbow2.jpgWhat sorts of movies did you create in the wake of that "First Blood" viewing?

Garth Jennings: Well, the movie that we were inspired to make by "Rambo" was called "Aaron: Part I," and Aaron is a sort of Rambo-esque character. I played the head of the military of defense, and I get kidnapped by the PLO, and the PLO hold me hostage in my mother's shed at the end of the garden, and they're gonna burn me alive unless the government coughs up some money and makes their lives better. And so Aaron comes running in, kicks everyone's ass and then burns them alive in the shed. The name Aaron came from the fact that we always wanted our hero to have one big singular name, and I had seen the name Aaron Spelling going up at the end of "Dynasty," and thought, "Aaron. Aaron's a hard name. Aaron's coming! Be afraid!" I didn't know that in real life, Aaron Spelling was a tiny man.

The kids start making their movie, and there's something wonderful and pure about it. Then at a certain point, everyone in their school finds out about it, and it mutates into this huge production. Are there any comparisons to be drawn there with the story of a pair of independent filmmakers getting sucked into the Hollywood machine?

NG: Well, you can't help but have that. Even though we were conscious of that [parallel], it's a function of the fact that once you start doing things as kids and it's exciting, people tend to join in. So it is a sort of comparison to what happens in the real world. We tried not to make too much of that — it's too easy to start going, "Hey, we're making a particular dig at the Hollywood system," or something.

The movie is very much a product of people who grew up in the 1980s. Can you talk about what made it such a great time to be a kid?

GJ: I didn't realize it at the time, but when I look back, I think that was pretty good. There were great records. There was good clothing. Very big hair.

NG: I think it was probably the worst looking decade ever.

GJ: It was definitely the most garish, stupidest looking decade. I think the '70s have got nothing on the '80s in terms of just stupidity.

04302008_sonoframbow3.jpgWith your film and the recently released "Be Kind Rewind," there seem to be the rumblings of a movement to reclaim VHS as a technology now that it's been completely supplanted by DVD and digital. Do you think that's true?

GJ: It was the first time we were able to do something immediately that felt very professional. It was a feat when we all got video cameras — well, we didn't all get video cameras.

When I grew up, you usually had one kid who had one and you'd make friends with him so you could play with it.

GJ: It was actually my dad who got one because his friend was emigrating and selling off all of his electrical equipment. We never would have had one otherwise. We got this thing, and it was amazing. I haven't seen "Be Kind Rewind," but I understand it's from a similar generation of people that just grew up discovering they could make something and then play it back. There was something wonderful about putting on a show at the end of the day and not having to send it off to a processing plant. It felt like we'd been given the keys to the car.

With very few exceptions, we don't see the kids' imaginative view of what we're seeing. When they create a "flying dog," we see what it really is — a plastic dog strapped to a kite. Yet one of the kids says "It looks just like my drawings!" which is a great moment. Was it difficult to decide how to represent what Will and Lee do?

GJ: None of it was actually difficult to do because it's so based on the fact that we never saw anything as impossible at that age. You never worried about making a mistake. You just thought, "Wow, yeah, it's a dog tied to a kite. It's a flying dog." I like that ludicrous ambition.

NG: The flying dog was an idea we came across and we thought, "Oh, yeah, of course, flying dog. Easy. We'll just tie a dog to a kite, and it will fly," and then the special effects guys come in, and they're like, "Of course it's not going to fly. You'd need a kite the size of a small country in order to fly this dog." We ended up having hundred-foot cranes and men with wires and rigging and that sort of thing. It always gets more complicated. It's easier when you're a kid.

[Photos: Bill Milner as Will Proudfoot; Will Poulter as Lee Carter; writer/director Garth Jennings — "Son of Rambow," Paramount Vantage, 2007]

"Son of Rambow" opens in limited release on May 2.

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<![CDATA[When Mixed Martial Arts Meet the Movies]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/kickin-it-with-mamets-mixed-ma.php Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:25:18 -0500 05012008_redbelt1.jpgBy R. Emmet Sweeney

Mixed martial arts (MMA) have come a bloody long way since John McCain legendarily dubbed the sport "human cockfighting" in 1996. Its flagship organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), aired eight of the top 15 pay-per-view programs in 2007 (boxing had four), while two smaller outfits (Strikeforce and EliteXC) have recently inked deals to air events on NBC and CBS. With major media outlets slowly offering more coverage and the sport's popularity continuing to crest, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got its opportunistic hands on those tantalizing cauliflower ears... right?

Uncharacteristic of the movie business, producers are showing restraint in capitalizing on the fad, perhaps still haunted by McCain's "cock" slam. David Mamet encountered fierce resistance to his new MMA influenced film, "Redbelt," as he tells Sam Alipour of ESPN.com: "Everybody in Hollywood passed on it. One of the things I talked about (in the pitch) was the demographics of UFC. Look at who goes to these fights. Look at how many follow on TV. It's huge among young males, exactly the demographic studios are trying to reach. You're wondering how you can get these people to see a film? Well, this is your answer. The reaction was baffling."

Much of the reason still lies in the sport's "barbaric" reputation, a holdover from the early days of the UFC, when they advertised, "There are no rules!" and trumpeted supposed mismatches between heavyweights and lightweights. Editorials are regularly churned out about the "bestial" nature of the sport (shockingly, Don King and Bill O'Reilly have joined the chorus), despite the UFC's relatively clean bill of health (no life-threatening injuries to date), at least in comparison to pro boxing's spotty history. After McCain virtually bankrupted the business by encouraging governors to outlaw the fights (which 36 states obliged), the UFC was bought out in 2001 by the marketing-savvy company Zuffa. Although the UFC had already instituted a series of new regulations (no blows to the back of the head, etc.) that cleared them to hold an event in New Jersey in 2000, the new owners claimed to be innovators of the sport, and started to convince regulatory commissions, state by state, that they were safe enough to be allowed into their fair cities. In other words, they were no longer barbarians, but could still get fans to pay at the gate. Now even McCain says that "the sport has grown up," and most states have legalized it.

05012008_neverbackdown.jpgAnother reason for Hollywood's reluctant embrace of MMA is the question of whether these fighting styles can even translate effectively to the screen. Mamet brings this up in a 2006 Playboy piece he wrote about the sport — how do you film the jiu-jitsu fights themselves? He claims that the form never broke into national consciousness like kung fu or karate because it is inherently uncinematic: "A fight, to be dramatic, must allow the viewer to see the combatants now coming together, now separating... Jiu-jitsu involves tying up — that is, closing the distance and keeping it closed...It is not dramatic. It is just effective." Fights that employ this style tend to look like especially sweaty make-out sessions that go on for three rounds. "Never Back Down," an MMA version of "High School Musical" released earlier this year, dealt with this issue by literally skipping over the foreplay, utilizing MTV-style montage to jump to the submissions, eliding the minutes of groping and intricate body contortions it takes to get there. On "Redbelt," Mamet and cinematographer Robert Elswit (hot off of "There Will Be Blood") take a more intimate route, employing very tight handheld framing to capture the technical skill involved in these grappling battles. These fights are not about thrills, but as the main character Mike Terry says, "I train to prevail, not to fight." They are merely the most efficient means to an end. The main visual interest in the film, as Mamet noted in the New York Times, are the faces, which Elswit tends to shoot in profile on extreme edges of the widescreen frame, their bruised faces as purple as Mamet's prose is lean.

The film continues Mamet's obsession with secretive male societies on the edge of the law (gamblers in "House of Games," security officers in "Spartan," thieves in "Heist"). "Redbelt" follows the moral path of Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an ascetic jiu-jitsu instructor who intones that "competition weakens the fighter." Mamet, a jiu-jitsu student for over five years, treats the martial art more as a philosophy than a physical skill, a conduit for self-discipline and moral purity. Terry is like a masterless samurai planted into modern day L.A, his codes of honor ridiculous to the more practical-minded citizens (and viewers) around him. Terry's refusal to compromise on the ethics of fighting leads him on a collision course with the market economy that's dying to exploit both his mind and body. Mamet's Manichean setup can be overwrought at times, but it's the necessary backdrop for his passionate defense of martial values. It ends in an improbable PPV fantasy, an alternate floodlit universe where the old samurai ways triumph for a night and momentarily silence the bloodthirsty bleatings of the marketplace.

In other words, not good tie-in material for the UFC, which is still too busy trying to land a cable deal with HBO or Showtime to concern themselves with the movie business yet. But at this point it seems inevitable that an MMA movie genre will shortly work itself out, likely plotting a middle road between the populist street fights of "Never Back Down" and the angsty existential battles of "Redbelt." The visual grammar of MMA is in its infancy, but I hope the Mamet film provides the template: an economic, unobtrusive style seems appropriate for such brutally efficient fighting — a science more salty than sweet.

[Photo: "Redbelt," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008; "Never Back Down," Summit Entertainment, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Tribeca Tale of the Tape: Mariah Carey vs. Dave Matthews]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-tale-of-the-tape-maria.php Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:43:04 -0500 By Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

In a festival that's boasted such fine music docs as "Lou Reed's Berlin" and "Playing for Change: Peace Through Music," along with an appearance from Madonna to promote the non-musical Malawi doc "I Am Because We Are," Tribeca has also turned out to be a place where musicians put down their instruments and pick up scripts. Though acting is nothing particularly new for either Mariah Carey or Dave Matthews, the two have taken on supporting roles in the low-budget films "Tennessee" and "Lake City," respectively, both in this year's line-up. Here's a look at how they measured up.


04292008_tennessee.jpgMariah Carey, "Tennessee"

Albums sold: Over 160 million worldwide.

Previous acting experience: "Glitter," the straight-to-DVD "WiseGirls"

Role believability: We're inclined to believe that Carey's early moments in the film, as a forlorn waitress longing for a better life, might've been inspired by the fact that shooting in New Mexico was probably not that exciting to Mimi. And once we see her sitting by the side of the road in front of the Route 66 Restaurant where she works with a notebook, humming, we know "Tennessee" isn't going to be a real stretch for Carey as an actress. The same can't be said for her character's plunging neckline.

Stunt double justification: Mariah can't drive...sort of. For a relatively slow speed chase away from her husband, who just happens to be a state trooper, Carey's character Krystal manages some nifty wheel work to evade a fast-approaching tractor. Although Krystal gets away by hopping a train, Carey can't escape the end credits, which reveal that she had a stunt driver.

Huh? Moment: There are a few, but if we have to choose, the gem is when Krystal overhears a guy who she just met telling someone on the phone how great she is — she's really nice and boy, she should go to Nashville with him and his brother. He then asks her to greet the mystery person on the other end of the line. When she picks up the phone and realizes no one's there, she continues the conversation. The runner up for this category is Carey's delivery of the following phrases: "You don't know your limits. You know what happens to people who don't have limits? They cross the line."

Interesting character quality: Teaches the guys how to drink tequila shots at an Oklahoma dive bar.

Does she sing? Well, yeah. In fact, the more cynical members of the audience might wonder if the only reason Carey signed on was to sing "Right to Dream," a sort of "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" for those old enough to be in the latter category, but who've come of age since watching Britney Spears cover the same territory in "Crossroads." Never mind that Carey's coming out moment happens during a Nashville talent competition where her R & B stylings seem strangely out of place.

Scene partner from acting royalty: Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory, plays the leukemia-stricken man who, along with his brother, invites Carey's character to Nashville.

Hit song that needs reevaluation after "Tennessee": "Shake It Off," because really what else can Carey do?

Should she give up her day job? No, though we'll give her some credit, since the three gentlemen sitting next to us during Sunday night's screening of "Tennessee" came ready to laugh, complete with a flask of booze, which they managed to get to the bottom of without even letting out a chuckle.


04292008_lakecity.jpgDave Matthews, "Lake City"

Albums sold: Over 35 million worldwide.

Previous acting experience: "Because of Winn Dixie," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," that episode of "House"

Role believability: We would never have thought of Matthews as a badass drug dealer, but those nervous ticks he usually gets when hitting a high note pop up in his performance, making him an unpredictable and engaging villain. He also sports a surprisingly creepy beard.

Stunt double justification: Less than five minutes into the film, Matthews' thug Red is interrogating Troy Garity's Billy over some missing drugs, and unwisely allows Billy a drink and a smoke. Alas, Billy swished his drink rather than swallowed, creating a blowtorch effect when Red offers him a light and Billy spits the alcohol in his face. The action in the scene in seamless, but we're assuming Matthews' credited stunt double Chris Moore was the one who took the heat.

Huh? Moment: In the opening credits, Matthews is credited as "David," which may be an attempt to separate his acting career from his music career. We'll gladly call him whatever he'd like as long as he doesn't kick our ass, and we'll even apologize for mocking that Tribe of Heaven album.

Interesting character quality: Has a hard time getting out of bed. Red makes a point of yelling repeatedly how he just got out of bed before answering a knock on the door to his hotel room.

Does he sing? No, and his character is not a man with a song in his heart, but rather a gun stuffed down the back of his pants.

Scene partner from acting royalty: Troy Garity, son of Jane Fonda (and Tom Hayden), plays a man who returns home with a dangerous past, which includes Matthews' drug dealer.

Hit song that needs reevaluation after "Lake City": "What Would You Say?" now suddenly seems like less of a come on than a terse directive.

Should he give up his day job? Probably not, but while Matthews is likely never going to make leading man, "Lake City" demonstrates that his quirks might allow for a nice career as a character actor in supporting roles.

[Photos: Ethan Peck and Mariah Carey in "Tennessee," Lee Daniels Entertainment, 2008; Dave Matthews and Troy Garity in "Lake City," Mark Johnson Productions, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: Dori Berinstein on "Gotta Dance"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-08-dori-berinstein-on.php Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:30:37 -0500 04292008_gottadance1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

It's not unusual to see a filmmaker appear at two different festivals in two months, but usually, it's with the same film. If Dori Berinstein is aiming to be the most popular documentarian around, she's certainly not wasting time.

After wowing audiences at SXSW only a month ago with "Some Assembly Required," a film that followed a kiddie competition to build a new toy, Berinstein is back at Tribeca with another crowd-pleaser, "Gotta Dance," which goes to the opposite end of the age spectrum to chronicle the inaugural season of the Netsationals, a dance squad comprised of 60-year-olds and above. (It actually makes sense that their jersey numbers reflect their ages, which top out at 83.) While some of the dancers in "Gotta Dance" have a reverse legacy — their granddaughters are on the official Nets dance team — most are amateurs there to find fun and in some cases, themselves. If that sounds a lot like another senior citizen documentary making the rounds, trust us when we say these seniors follow the beat of a different drummer — or rather, Fat Joe.

Berinstein is no stranger to multitasking, considering that she also produces Broadway shows, a subject that became the inspiration for her first documentary, "Show Business." Still, in the midst of her festival two-step, she found time to talk about the senior dancers that brought a smile to Walt Frazier's face and her own complicated dance during the past year.

"Some Assembly Required" and "Gotta Dance" are opposites in many ways, but geographically, you had to cover so much ground on "Some Assembly Required" that it must've been kind of a relief to do "Gotta Dance," which was all set in New Jersey.

Yes and no. It was more complicated than that because I did post-production on "Some Assembly Required" in Los Angeles. I really wasn't expecting to be shooting "Gotta Dance." It just came up, and I can explain how it happened, but I was much more West Coast when I was shooting this East Coast movie. I produce Broadway shows, and when we were launching production on "Gotta Dance," I had to be in San Francisco with "Legally Blonde" [for preview performances], so I basically spent last spring on an airplane.

04292008_gottadance2.jpgWhy did you choose to make your life so crazy?

I didn't think it was going to be a problem to do a film and a Broadway show at the same time. They both gestate for a long time and there was no way to avoid overlap there and that would've been fine. But in the back of my mind, I'd been thinking about wanting to do a film on the issue of aging. I didn't want it to be talking heads, I didn't want it to be in your face. I wanted it to be fun and celebratory and all about taking advantage of this time to chase your dreams. I had no plans to start a new project. No plans! But I read in the paper that the Nets were holding this audition for a senior dance team and I had to check it out. I went to the Nets headquarters and started to get to know these incredible people, and I had to tell their story.

Was it an interesting experience to go from being around young kids in "Some Assembly Required" to seniors?

It was fantastic. With both the kids and the seniors, everybody got comfortable with the cameras and we became just a familiar fly on the wall. I find that with kids and with the senior group, it's easier than shooting with...let's just say 18 to 55, who are more aware of the camera and are thinking about consequences. Both the kids and the seniors were completely lost in what they were doing and so passionate [it] that they forgot the camera was there.

During the film, the Netsationals get quite a bit of media attention. Did their growing celebrity pose a problem for you?

The only thing I noticed after they received so much attention from the press and made so many appearances is that they knew the drill. When I had to put a lav on them, they knew exactly what to do. [laughs] They were seasoned in that way. But I wasn't there to capture their performing, I was there to capture their struggle, their adventure. I was with them when it was all happening for the first time — their joy and surprise, looking at themselves in newspapers and on TV. They were, overjoyed and it was exciting to capture that.

Between the dance performances, you let the camera roll on some interesting dinner conversations. How did those come about?

When we were with [the Netsationals] as a group, they were rehearsing, moving, very focused on what they were doing. The conversation was not about their lives and their families and their past, it was about how you do a swivel hip, how you do that kick. It didn't give us the chance to see them in a broader way.

When they started to get comfortable with each other and started to go out together to meals and dinners, we asked to tag along because that was when the conversation became much more diverse. They started to talk about issues having to do with their lives and, in a bigger way, what they thought about what they were doing, that wouldn't have happened while they were taking a break from their rehearsals. They enjoy each other so much — when Fanny [one of the older Netsationals] took them all line dancing, that was so much fun.

04292008_gottadance3.jpgThere are a lot of poignant moments in the film — one I found particularly moving was when Betty (a school teacher who becomes one of the dancers) is shopping at Macy's and tells the other dancers how she never wanted to wear heels because she didn't want to appear to be taller than her husband — did those moments catch you off guard?

I loved it. [laughs] I adore Betty so much because she wears her heart on her sleeve, her struggle to figure out who she is now in her sixties. I know people of that age who are going through the same thing, so I was thrilled to be able to capture that honesty, that everybody was so supportive of her as she was trying to figure out who she is. That camaraderie and the support that they all have for each other was a lovely thing to capture.

Do you have a particular favorite moment?

I would say that first performance, when they were so nervous and they have such self-doubt not only about their ability to remember everything and to put on a good show, but [because] they had no idea how the audience was going to react. It was thrilling to be there with them when they took a deep breath and went for it out on there on center court and the roof of the Meadowlands just went flying off. They were just embraced by the fans, and their joy afterwards, their exhilaration, was really exciting. We all had goosebumps.

So many documentaries are serious, and between "Some Assembly Required," "Gotta Dance" and your first documentary "Show Business," it seems like you're rebelling against that. How did you decide to become the fun documentary filmmaker?

I'm glad that you feel they're fun, but I think that, to me, what's common about all of them is that they're about people chasing their dreams and giving their dream everything they've got, throwing their complete passion into something, regardless of the risks. You have that in "Show Business," you have that with the kids starting from a blank page and surprising themselves at what they've been able to create together as a team and then certainly with the seniors, most of them really in a million years never thought they'd be doing what they're doing. They're very much about chasing your dreams and being the best you can be — that that's the common thread. I love stories like that. All these people that I've been able to capture really inspire me.

[Photos: "Gotta Dance," Dramatic Forces, 2008]

For more on "Gotta Dance," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA["The Guatemalan Handshake," "Hypocrites"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/the-guatemalan-handshake-hypoc.php Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:12:46 -0500 04292008_guatemalanhandshake.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

Todd Rohal's "The Guatemalan Handshake" is one of the most inventive, most poetic, most disarmingly authentic indies of the last few years — so, of course, you've never had a chance to see it. It's a movie that seems to have dropped out of the sky, inexplicably, like a satellite fragment landing on Main Street. Naturally, it's not a project constructed around a traditional idea of storytelling propulsion — Rohal has whipped his world from the weedy ground up into a fiery, relentless storm of quirk, but he's original enough in his cataract of details to keep us in a constant state of enchanted disorientation. Why was "Napoleon Dynamite," with its relatively stereotypical uber-misfit, a hit, while this 2006 daydream foundered out of sight?

Set in some Forgottentown, Pennsylvania, "The Guatemalan Handshake" encounters characters undramatically, and its narrative gradually coalesces around them: Donald the triangular-electric-car-driving nebbish (Will Oldham); his pregnant girlfriend and one of "dozens of sisters, each with a different mother" (Sheila Sculin); Turkeylegs, the willowy, surreal-minded 11-year-old free spirit (Katy Haywood) who narrates the film; Donald's elderly and obsessive father Mr. Turnupseed (Ken Byrnes); a manic Guatemalan bus driver; a lactose-intolerant skating rink worker who may be the most socially inappropriate man ever devised for an American film; a woman in search of her lost poodle (who we find out got electrocuted by a power station mishap early on, but who reconstitutes magically anyway), and so on. Early on, Donald disappears (literally, he just walks off-frame), and Turkeylegs endeavors to understand why and how, as her already dipsy community reaches several sorts of ridiculous yet dead serious crisis points at once.

Shot in deep, humid colors, the film is fairly unpredictable, and the wealth of mysterious touches (endless phone cords, unexplained band-aids, glimpses of a man running from bees, mundane miracles) suggest a fully realized magical realism just out of view, hidden by American poverty. Rohal is a subtle fiend as well with his largely amateur cast — several geysers of drooling, stilted overacting begins to make sense when you realize it's the damaged, inarticulate characters that are overacting, not the actors. Obviously, this flyaway quilt needed glue, and it has it with Turkeylegs, whose point of view Rohal lovingly attends to, lending "The Guatemalan Handshake" the periodic glow of a secretive, innocent child's natural happiness.

04292008_hypocrites.jpgAnother revelation, Lois Weber's "Hypocrites" is a deeply eccentric, troublingly lyrical vision, for its day — 1915! — and ours. Whatever its daring and innovation, it's a film that needs to be seen through the scrim of pioneering feminist filmmaking, which is the political hook upon which the four-feature Kino set it's part of hangs (work by Alice Guy-Blaché, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison and "Mrs. Wallace Reid" is included). Talk about a secret history within a history; bizarrely, women directors were common in the day of reactionary-bigot bigwig D.W. Griffith, and within what quickly became just a few years later an almost completely male industry. The scholarship exploring these newly recognized careers is far from done, and you'd stump your average film school prof by asking them to name a single title from these filmographies. But in the teens audiences were well aware — the title sequence of "Hypocrites" begins with a statement and signed portrait of the filmmaker.

Weber herself was an acute visualizer, with a moral sense that easily outgrades Griffith's neo-Victorian ethos, and "Hypocrites" is infused with a quite feminine sympathy even as it excoriates entire chunks of society for their amoral selfishness and fake piety. For a 50-minute movie, it has a dazzling complex structure, layering (but not paralleling, exactly) the story of an old-time monk persecuted for a nude statue, and a modern minister troubled by his congregation of middle class four-flushers and gossipers. The same actors serve both tales, but then Weber falls into a third mode, mixing the first two in guided tour (our hostess is Naked Truth, played by an anonymous nude woman) of the modern American's iniquity hidden within his and her public lives. Weber could shoot, too; the exposure of the ascetic's statue to a medieval community of fair-goers is performed in a breathtaking series of long dollies, encompassing vast amounts of human activity and emotion at a point in the history of cinema when Griffith's cramped-room-tableaux were supposed to be the height of eloquence.

[Photos: Will Oldham in "The Guatemalan Handshake," Benten, 2006; Lois Weber's "Hypocrites," Kino]

"The Guatamalan Handshake" (Benten Films) and "Hypocrites" (Kino Video) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[The IFC News Podcast is at Tribeca]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/the-ifc-news-podcast-is-taking.php Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:32:24 -0500 The IFC News podcast is taking this week off -- catch us in video form instead in our coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival right here. Want to download these video dispatches? Here's the link to the feed.

+ IFC News Festival Video Podcasts (XML)
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9285 2008-04-28 18:32:24 closed closed the_ifc_news_podcast_is_taking publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009285 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The IFC News Podcast is at Tribeca (photo)]]> Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:32:24 -0500 1009285 2008-04-28 18:32:24 closed closed the_ifc_news_podcast_is_taking_photo inherit 9285 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Tribeca '08: "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-08-bigger-stronger-fas.php Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:57:48 -0500 04282008_biggerstrongerfaster.jpgBy Matt Singer

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

On February 16, 2007, Sylvester Stallone was busted in Australia with 48 vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin. To some, this was a non-story; after all, Stallone was not "cheating" in the same way a professional athlete might be if he were caught with the same performance-enhancing drugs. Stallone is an actor, and he's not competing against anyone. According to his lawyer, he was using Jintropin under medical supervision.

But Stallone is also the man who plays Rocky Balboa and John Rambo — in fact, he was training to play Rambo for the first time in 20 years when the seizure took place. In "Rocky IV," murderous Russian boxer Ivan Drago is vilified for using steroids. On the other hand, Rocky trains the all-natural, old-fashioned way, with backbreaking labor. The message: Hard work and determination always triumphs over shortcuts. Hard to stomach when you know that the guy playing Rocky was probably getting some kind of liquid assistance with his training regiment of carrying enormous logs across great distances in the snow.

Christopher Bell's clear-eyed, impassioned documentary "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*" puts this preposterous hypocrisy front and center. Narrated throughout by Bell himself, it begins with the director's recollections of his youth, one spent idolizing hard-bodied '80s muscle man icons such as Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hulk Hogan. Bell and his two brothers became so fixated on these Herculean figures that they put themselves on the training regimens these men publicly espoused. When they didn't see the same results, they turned to steroids. Though it's not fair to blame those men for the Bells' actions — I watched all those movies and wrestling matches and only took steroids when I had mono — it's not unfair to speculate that watching them is what first sparked his and many other young men's interest in bodybuilding. Bell's brothers still use performance enhancers, but they have a hard time admitting it to their loving parents (though, thanks to the siblings' collective desire for fame and stardom, they're incredibly comfortable discussing it with a movie camera).

Bell's approach is both micro and macro, chronicling his own family's steroid use and the strain it puts on the family's ethos (one that jives with that clean living over cheating one that was discussed earlier), while putting their struggles into a larger cultural context through interviews with noted physicians who've studied the effects of steroids and athletes whose lives have been touched by their impact. Though Bell himself considers steroid use by athletes to be unsavory, he's open-minded enough to discuss the drugs' positive medical benefits (an HIV-positive man speaks of how they give him a standard of life) as well as question a father who blames them for the death of his son.

Above all, what Bell portrays better than anything else is the mountain of lies buried beneath the controversy surrounding performance enhancers. He gets a professional bodybuilder and model to admit that his chiseled build is a direct result of the steroids he takes, not the dietary supplements that he pimps in magazine ads; a photographer later shows Bell how the "before" and "after" pictures in a lot of these advertisements can easily be manipulated using digital airbrushes. While Ronald Reagan was declaring a war on drugs, he was also publicly saluting actors and their on screen creations that had more to do with injections than squat thrusts.

That American myth that Reagan used Stallone and Schwarzenegger to prop up in the 1980s is one built on the idea that everyone is given equal opportunity to succeed, and that those who work hardest are the ones that ultimately accomplish the most. Telling people with aspirations of a perfectly sculpted body that you've accomplished things through nothing more than grit when you've really been given a chemical boost isn't just immoral; it is, as Bell points out, a competitive advantage. We like to imagine that our enemies — the Ivan Dragos of the world — are the ones sticking the needles into their butts. But consider this: Captain America, the flag-draped superhero, wasn't born with incredible talents, and he didn't earn his great strength through years of pumping iron. He was a scrawny weakling who was given a shot of "Super-Soldier Serum." Yes, even our nation's greatest comic book representation is a juicer. Coming to terms with that will ultimately be the true legacy of this so-called era. Bell's fine film may well be remembered as one of the steps on the road that got us there.

[Photo: "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*," Magnolia Pictures, 2008]

For more on "Bigger, Faster, Stronger," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/opening-this-week-10.php Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:45:08 -0500 04282008_thefavor.jpgBy Neil Pedley

The Tribeca Film Festival is in full swing, but if you don't live in New York, there's no need to fret. No less than three films ("From Within," "Mister Lonely" and "Redbelt") on this list of coming attractions have played the festival in recent days. Then again, if you are in New York and want to catch something outside the fest, there's always that intimate character drama starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and a red and gold metal suit of armor.

"The Favor"
Writer/director Eva J. Aridjis brings us a quiet tale of angst and alienation starring former New York subway busker Ryan Donowho as Johnny, a high school loner who's taken in by Lawrence (Frank Wood), a quiet pet photographer, after his mother (Paige Turco) is killed in an accident. In order to be the father he needs, Lawrence must fight through Johnny's rebellious behavior and enlist the help of the one person he responds to — Marianna (Isidra Vega), a gentle neighborhood girl.
Opens in limited release.

"Fugitive Pieces"
Premiering at last year's Toronto Film Festival, this adaptation of Anne Michaels's novel was written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa, who last made a splash with the Mary-Louise Parker drama "The Five Senses." Robbie Kay stars as the young Jakob, a boy rescued and smuggled out of occupied Poland after his parents die at the hands of a Greek archeologist (Rade Serbedzija). Jakob is played later in life by Stephen Dillane as a man still haunted by his memories and hiding behind his writing as he struggles to reconnect with his humanity and the woman who loves him (Ayelet Zurer).
Opens in limited release.

"Iron Man"
It just wouldn't be summer without superheroesm and "Iron Man" is turning on his jet pack and taking the maiden voyage of this year's blockbuster season. Robert Downey Jr. stars as the other man of steel by night and by day, rogue billionaire and military industrialist Tony Stark, a man who constructs an armored suit for himself after realizing the potential devastation his weapons could cause in the wrong hands. Director Jon Favreau, whose own alter ego was the host of IFC's "Dinner for Five," was entrusted to make sure this flagship Marvel franchise turns out more like "Spider-Man" than "Ghost Rider."
Opens wide.

"Made of Honor"
Brit Paul Weiland, who directed more made-for-TV "Mr. Bean" movies than is probably healthy, helms this big screen adventure that continues the current fad of romantic comedies told from the male perspective. Patrick Dempsey fills in for Rowan Atkinson as a confirmed bachelor who feels he will never find a woman as good as his best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), but when he finally realizes that she's indeed the one, he has a small problem — she's gotten engaged to someone else. We don't want to give spoilers, but we think we know how this ends if the former "Can't Buy Me Love" star pulls out that seductive riding lawn mower of his.
Opens wide.

"Mister Lonely"
Harmony Korine, who rose to prominence with shockingly provocative films like "Julien Donkey-Boy" and "Gummo," shows his softer side in this whimsical story of love and identity, co-scripted by his brother Avi. Diego Luna stars as a Michael Jackson impersonator who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) while in Paris and leaves with her for a self-contained commune in Scotland populated exclusively by look-a-likes. Denis Lavant and Werner Herzog are also part of the film's eclectic supporting cast.
Opens in limited release.

"Redbelt"
As surprised as we were to see a David Mamet film without William H. Macy, we might have been a little bit more shocking to see UFC titans Randy Couture and Enson Ionue in one. Regardless, the acclaimed playwright once again makes the world safe for the F-word while classing-up what would otherwise a lowbrow martial arts vehicle starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a self-defense instructor forced to approach the world of pay-per-view fighting after his training regimen is stolen and employed as a gimmick by an unscrupulous promoter. But Mamet's mixed martial arts film is no joke — the writer/director holds a purple belt in jujitsu and is said to be an ardent fan of MMA.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"Son of Rambow"
Hammer & Tongs (a.k.a. director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith) revisit their intended first production, which was put on hold while they brought us the brave but flawed adaptation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy." Pint-sized debutants Bill Milner and Will Poulter star as two boys — one raised in a puritanical community, the other spawned from the local black sheep — who form an unlikely friendship as they decide to make their own version of "Rambo: First Blood." Already a hit with critics in the U.K., it remains to be seen if '80s nostalgia and the unmistakable backdrop of Thatcher's Britain will translate as well for an American audience.
Opens in limited release.

"XXY"
A hit on the international festival circuit last year, this offbeat drama tells of a family's struggle to cope with their child's intersexuality once she turns 15. Inés Efron stars as Alex, the young hermaphrodite who is trying to reconcile an identity in the face of a turbulent sexual awakening due to a family friend, Alvaro (Martín Piroyanski), and their families' mutual fears and prejudices. At last year's Cannes Film Festival, the film secured a Critic's Week prize for its director, Lucía Puenzo.
Opens in New York.

[Photo: "The Favor," Seventh Art Releasing, 2006]

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: Robert Drew on "A President to Remember"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-08-robert-drew-on-a-pr.php Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:22:32 -0500 04272008_apresidenttoremember3.jpgBy Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

If there's any truth to the idea that what's old can become new again, Robert Drew's "A President to Remember: In the Company of John F. Kennedy" is a prime example. Free of the pressure to film sound bites and be caught up in a campaign's spin room, Drew simply let the camera roll during the campaign and all-too-brief presidency of John F. Kennedy, creating an influential group of documentaries between 1960 and 1963: "Primary," "Adventures on the New Frontier," "Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment" and "Faces of November." With an assemblage of filmmakers and journalists from his days as an editor at Life magazine (including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles) by his side, Drew pioneered the practice of cinéma vérité on what now seems like the least likely of subjects — the president. While Drew's four films on the Kennedy Administration have been long available on DVD, "A President to Remember" is a bit of a CliffsNotes for the uninitiated, weaving together fly-on-the-wall footage from Kennedy's early days on the campaign trail to his invasion of Cuba and his untimely death, with narration from Alec Baldwin tying everything together. But what sets "A President to Remember" apart from being just a greatest hits collection is how innovative Drew's approach to filmmaking still seems (aided by the eternally fresh-faced Kennedy), especially when compared to the coverage of the current election cycle. On the eve of the film's premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Drew discussed why Kennedy was such an appealing subject and why, with no false modesty, all his films are masterpieces. (No disagreement here.)

How did this film come about?

I was struck by the fact that a number of generations have gone by since Kennedy's death, which means that a number of generations of people never knew him or weren't around when he was alive. The memory fades fast. At the same time, we've had a series of presidents and vice presidents who were quite different than Kennedy and some people feel badly about that and I had all this wonderful footage. I wanted to make a film that would tell people what it was like when we had a man who was generally admired in this country, 70% admired, and generally heralded around the world. I had a feeling that the country really needs a picture of itself at its best and people need to have hope and feeling that we have the right stuff, and so I thought if I made a film that showed this man the way he is, it might help establish a better feeling about ourselves.

What was it like for you personally to revisit the material and editing it together?

I'll tell you I was stunned. I thought I had all this stuff in my mind already, but that man's sense of humor and his wit kept me rolling in the aisles, especially the stuff which I didn't shoot of his press conferences. He had a way of answering a hostile conference question — everybody would laugh, but he wouldn't. Then he would. [laughs] And there are many other parts of the film where his decency and sense of honor and good thinking and good humor all came through — early on in the film, he responds to questions about his Catholicism and in the middle of it, he breaks into a laugh. And he's quite serious. He doesn't want to break into a laugh, but I have a feeling we're seeing the man in a new way. Even though we might've seen some of these things before, being able to put them together like this moved me.

Had it long been an idea of yours to put these films together in some form?

Yes, but it had been back in the back of my mind. I'll tell you, George W. Bush gave me a real impulse.

04272008_apresidenttoremember1.jpgDid you have to add footage to what you previously had?

Oh, yeah. It turned out that when I wanted to make a Kennedy film, not just [about] getting elected, not just about moving into the White House, not just about dying, but when I wanted to put all that together, I wanted material that I hadn't shot, so I looked through all the Kennedy material that exists and selected items that would help connect the pieces I had.

Does it surprise you how fresh this still feels nearly 50 years later?

Yes, it did. It's funny — when I'm editing, I'm usually a very serious guy and it's usually a painful process for me, but in this film, I found myself laughing here and there and admiring here and there and wondering here and there. I was reacting to my own work and other people's work, but it was more of an enjoyable experience than I've ever had editing a film.

You've said that Richard Nixon approached you to make a film about his presidency, but that it would have been a disaster. What was it about Kennedy that appealed to you as a filmmaker and what was it about Nixon that didn't?

I'm going to give you the negative side first — people who are trying to fool you always reveal they're trying to fool you. I don't know how they do it — eye movements or word movements or stuttering, whatever — but Nixon simply gave himself away whenever he spoke, whatever he did — not enough not to get elected, but when his people came to me and asked me to make a film like "Primary" on Nixon, I said, "Listen, the worst thing you can do is make a candid film on Nixon." And they said, "Oh, but he's changed." [laughs] I got a big laugh out of that, but I actually did put them in touch with a filmmaker who'd worked for me, knew how to do these things. They did commission a film and they liked it, but I thought it was devastating.

The main thing [with Kennedy] was the story. My job at Life magazine had been finding good stories for good photographers and that meant that some time in the future, something will happen and if we're there and shooting in the right way with the right photographer, we can get something wonderful or amazing. I was looking for a story to use our first lightweight camera, which only weighed 50 pounds, and I saw the story of this young senator running for president — his own party was against him. Harry Truman, the previous president, was against him. His religion was against him — there had never been a Catholic president. And he was rich and he was campaigning mainly when I first saw him in the Midwest with a bunch of farmers who distrusted eastern people and rich people. So I thought what a wonderful story, and then I went to talk to Kennedy and I was confirmed that he would be a wonderful character.

How do you feel about your own legacy being tied to Kennedy's?

Well, I considered that every film I made was a masterpiece and I thought that every film I made was worthy of whatever attention it gained, but as the time goes by, and it has — I'm now 84 — it turns out that the subject matter matters too and the subject matter of Kennedy has gained more attention for my films than any genius I could've display in editing them or making them. So it's definitely helped shape my career in the sense that it helped shape the backing I could get for making other films.

How do you feel about how politics are being covered during this current election cycle?

From my standpoint, politics now are impossible to cover. That is, the network nightly news or CNN are about as good as you can get because none of the candidates have the confidence that Kennedy had to make their own decisions and let things happen. Everything is planned and plotted, and for somebody who wants to make candid films about what's really happening, that's impossible. You've got people looking over your shoulder when you shoot, people looking over your shoulder when you edit, and I would rather bow out than jump into it. If it were possible somehow to find a candidate who could allow the camera to shoot what happens, I would change my opinions, but right now, it's much too organized to hope that you could shoot candidly.

[Photos: "A President to Remember," Drew Associates, 2008]

For more on "A President to Remember," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: Trisha Ziff on "Chevolution"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-08-trisha-ziff-on-chev.php Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:17:56 -0500 04252008_chevolution1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

Che Guevara probably never envisioned his image on a crystal-encrusted T-shirt as he traversed the Cuban countryside with thoughts of political upheaval. But there's the rub of featuring front and center in the most reproduced photograph of the 20th century.

"Che died, but thousands of Ches were born," remarks Diana Diaz during "Chevolution," a documentary making its world premiere in the Encounters section of this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Diaz is the daughter of Alberto "Korda" Diaz, a Cuban photographer who took the iconic shot of the revolutionary that originally went unused by the newspaper it was commissioned for and existed only as a print on Korda's wall. It wasn't until after Guevara's death in 1968 that the image called "Guerrillero Heroico" found its way into his memorial service and became the inspiration for protests and pop art the world over. For the past three years, Trisha Ziff has been collecting Che items from around the globe and putting them into a wildly popular exhibition that's still touring. With the help of "Election" producer Ron Yerxa and co-director Luis Lopez, Ziff decided to turn the exhibit into a film, which serves as a fascinating history of a single snapshot that became the legacy of two men — Guevara and Korda.

How did "Chevolution" come about?

I knew Alberto Korda here in Mexico — when he died, all the obituaries only mentioned this image. They only talked about "Guerillo Heroico." I thought how strange for somebody to live such a huge and full life as an artist and be remembered for a single image, and what that must do to a person. I had the idea to put together an exhibition with the idea that I would assemble as many different versions of that image that artists have done, that have been done in the history of posters, that are quoted in other photographs and objects, and do an exhibition that was just about the narrative of a single image. It was a real challenge to me — you get your audience into a museum and they're essentially walking around looking at different versions of the same image again and again in different contexts. Can you sustain somebody's interest in that for a long period of time as a storyteller? My personal fear was "Oh my God, am I just making a slideshow that's 90 minutes long?" You can tell it's a film made by a curator. [laughs]

I found things that just blew my mind and I had to find a way to put them in, and [co-director] Luis Lopez was able to transform that through his graphics. The scholarship and the narrative and the imagery comes from me and I think the pace, the energy, the modernity of it as a documentary comes from him.

04252008_chevolution2.jpg How much of the story did you know beforehand and how much of this was a treasure hunt?

Because I've written a book on the subject and done an exhibition, the foundations were there, and because I'm a curator of photography, I have a history of working with photographers, especially in Latin America. I've worked with a website called Zone Zero in Mexico, the most visited website of photography in the world, so I put a small ad on Zone Zero for people who'd taken [photographs involving] the Che image. We got pictures back from all over the world. It wasn't a treasure hunt — t was waiting for the treasure to come in. Finding Tom Morello was a treasure hunt. (laughs) That was hard.

Harder than Gerry Adams [who also appears in the film, along with Gael Garcia Bernal and Antonio Banderas]?

[Adams] is very cultured and that comes from the mural tradition in the north of Ireland. What we wanted to film and didn't, for a good reason in the end, was on the 40th anniversary of the death of Che, they painted a mural in Derry in the west coast of Ireland. We were all set to go and film this community painting the mural, then they chose to do it with a different image, not the Korda image, so that went out the window. But Gerry knew Jim Fitzpatrick [one of the artists most responsible for proliferating Korda's Che image]. I thought that was amazing, but he's a very rounded, well-read, curious person, so it's not surprising. Few politicians talk, obviously, about art. The crossover's not there. I wish more did.

How receptive was the Diaz (Korda) family to a film?

Diana Diaz and the estate are represented in Los Angeles by a gallerist called Daryl Couturier, who represents a lot of Cuban artists and he's very trusted in Cuba and I think a combination of Daryl being there through this film as the voice of the family because they obviously couldn't have come to the States and left Cuba now because of the embargo.

There's a history of trust because Diana Diaz knew me, she knew my work on other exhibitions and I live in Mexico. We've had consistent dialogue over five or six years. That's not to say she's liked everything that I've done. She is, which I value immensely, very respectful of a vision that isn't necessarily her own of her father's image, and I put images into the show that she really doesn't like. It's hard for her to see [something] that she feels disrespects the history of that image, either taken to a place of humor or maybe used in a sexual way. She is appalled by those things and it's a stretch for her to feel comfortable allowing me to do my work, so it's a complex relationship but it's based on a lot of discussion and.

04252008_chevolution3.jpgIt may be purely coincidental, but the timing of this precludes Steven Soderbergh's Che biopics — is there something about right now that lends itself for reflection about Che?

I think it's totally relevant. It's a Che wave, no? I think it comes back to another question, which is why do we need heroes? What is it that's so appealing that we're seduced into hearing the story again and again in all these different versions, or to wear it as a t-shirt, or to have a poster on our wall? There's something very seductive about him, or the fiction of him, and I think it's because we live in a time where people are lost, where there is no leadership, where life isn't about making choices because you believe in them.

I think we live in a diminished moment, from that point of view, where there isn't the idealism that existed in the '60s — people really had this notion that they could make changes. We've lost something, so whether it's that we revisit him in a real way or it's this sentimentality of revisiting something that gave people hope at a certain time, I think there's a seduction. We need leadership. Within that image is this desire, this hope, and it doesn't go away.

Finally, out of all the Che items you've accumulated, which is your favorite?

I have Che matryoshka dolls from Russia and I love them because they're different iconic photographs of Che — there's obviously the Korda Che, but then there's the René Burri Che — he took the very famous one of Che smiling with a cigar. Then inside that, there's a Che, a Christo — Che as Christ. And then you go right to the little tiny matryoshka doll in the center and it's just a candle. It's just an image of light, an image of hope. So I love those. I bought them on eBay. I think, as a curator, eBay is brilliant because you can search and get extraordinary artifacts. I have a fantastic packet of cigarettes from Barcelona where the Che image on the package is so distorted, such a bad version that's it's brilliant. It's hilarious. And people bring me stuff all the time. I mean, I'm kind of Che'd out.

[Photos: "Chevolution," Red Envelope Entertainment, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: "Fermat's Room"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-08-fermats-room.php Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:06:05 -0500 04242008_fermatsroom1.jpgBy Matt Singer

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

Four Spanish mathematicians convene for an evening of puzzle-solving at the house of a man named Fermat. But almost as soon as they arrive, their mysterious host is called away to attend to his ailing daughter. A PDA rings, giving the group a question they're told they must solve in just one minute. When they don't, the walls of Fermat's room inch towards one another. Now, they must answer the riddles while trying to find an escape before they're all squeezed to death. In other words, "Fermat's Room" is sort of "Saw" for arithmetic dorks.

The characters are all supposed to be geniuses, but the problems they have to solve require less advanced calculus than your average brain teaser from "Die Hard With a Vengeance" — lots of trick questions and doors you have to choose between or vessels of different sizes. That's probably beneath what these sort of people normally do with their brains, but it's a decision that makes sense from an audience perspective; if writer/directors Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña were really to put four math professors to work solving hardcore theorems, viewers would probably die out of sheer boredom well before the characters on screen do.

The characters all act pleasant and innocent enough at first, but impending doom in these sorts of movies has a habit of revealing people's darkest secrets. So while there might not seem to be a reason for Fermat (Federico Luppi) to want to destroy Pascal (Santi Millán), Galois (Alejo Sauras), Oliva (Elena Ballesteros) or Hilbert (Lluís Hobar), revelations that they're all some combination of liars, thieves, adulterers or murderers are inevitable. Three out of four are also remarkably good-looking as far as mathematicians go. Heck, three out of four of them are remarkably good-looking as far as models go. But, hey, that's moviemaking for you.

04242008_fermatsroom2.jpgFrom the moment the four walls begin closing in with the aid of "Poseidon hydraulic presses," "Fermat's Room" unfolds roughly in real time, and we only leave the location occasionally to check in on Fermat's journey to a hospital. Co-directors Piedrahita and Sopeña rely on the puzzles, the arguments between the prisoners, the deceptions and revelations to keep you on edge, though visually, the movie suffers from a lack of establishing shots. Piedrahita and Sopeña use tighter and tighter close-ups to convey the claustrophobia, and there's lots of cutaways to the corners of the room as they grind ever closer, breaking light fixtures or knocking pictures off the wall, but after the room starts to shrink, there's only a handful of shots wide enough to give us a full sense of its diminishing size. More images of that ilk would give us a better grasp of how small the room is and how little time the hottie nerds have left at any given point, which would greatly improved "Fermat's" tension.

Like most movies about people stuck in inescapable death traps, the ultimate solution to "Fermat's Room" is, frankly, a little dopey, a particularly egregious problem for a movie about people who are allegedly really, really smart. But for most of its run, it moves briskly as a fun whodunit (and, I suppose, as a howdoit) and Piedrahita and Sopeña's work manages to be sinister without being grisly — which should please audiences weary of overly gory horror movies — and the film is dotted with little touches that encourage careful viewing (dig the cheeky pattern of the wallpaper). It could still be a little smarter though. The movie doesn't insult your intelligence, but it doesn't exactly tax it either.

[Photos: "Fermat's Room," Notro Films, 2007]

For more on "Fermat's Room" (albeit in Spanish), check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: Julie Checkoway on "Waiting for Hockney"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-08-julie-checkoway-on.php Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:18:18 -0500 04232008_waitingforhockney2.jpgBy Stephen Saito

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

Last year, when New York magazine celebrated Richard Avedon's portrait of a pensive Marilyn Monroe by publishing reinterpretations of the famous photograph, they probably didn't think to ask Billy Pappas for a contribution. A waiter and busboy from Baltimore, Pappas devoted almost a decade to painstakingly recreating the Avedon snapshot as a hand-drawn sketch, a labor he called his attempt "to take a drawing where Lindbergh took the airplane."

Pappas was brought back to earth when he decided it was time to introduce his piece to the art world. After rounding up a motley band of supporters to find a way to showcase his work, he settled on trying to get an evaluation from David Hockney. One would think that with a title like "Waiting for Hockney," the feature debut of director Julie Checkoway would be about Pappas' pursuit of the famed artist, but that's only half the story. What Checkoway discovered was a story as riddled with complexities as Pappas's intricate drawing of Monroe. While the documentary evokes the age-old discussion of what is art, "Waiting for Hockney" also asks the far more fundamental question of what it means to be successful. Recently, I asked a few questions of my own to Checkoway, a former producer for NPR's "Morning Edition" and "This American Life," whose film makes its world premiere in the Discovery section of this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Why did Billy's story appeal to you?

I felt like I was meeting someone from my own family. I came from a big ethnic working class family that had aspirations of greatness as well, and when I met Billy, I was like "Oh my gosh, he's my brother or my father." And when I met his family, I thought "These are my people. I'm going to have to make a film about them." I'm obsessed with the way that suffused through our whole culture is this whole notion that you can come from nothing and become something, and that's not a bad thing. That's an American dream. But the thing that bothers me about contemporary culture is this notion that many of us walk around thinking that someone is going to save us from our ordinary lives. It's this "American Idol" syndrome.

I was talking to someone the other day who said he thinks the reason is that we've lost a sense of a road map for how a life can be lived, so all we have is this trajectory of being invisible and suddenly being incredibly visible and fixed and fine and redeemed. When that happens for Billy, I was really dubious, but I was also happy for him. At the same time, I'm almost 45 years old and I've had many of my own career ups and downs and dreams, so it'd be impossible for me to tell a story about fame that was in some way simplistic, because I think fame is really scary.

04232008_waitingforhockney1.jpgSince you'd never made a film before, how did this idea become a film?

I was doing freelance work for NPR in Baltimore when I encountered this story. 30 hours of audio later, I realized I had something that wasn't going to make it into a 20-minute slot and that was raising all these bigger issues and that was very visual, but I was in denial. My older brother, who's one of ["Waiting for Hockney"'s] producers, said to me, "You know, you really need to think seriously about whether you could make a film of this, because I'm telling you, it's a film." I was like, "Don't tell me that." [laughs]

It felt very assured for a first film, including your use of archival footage to illustrate how Billy's sketch evolved and his eventual pursuit of David Hockney. How did that come about?

I wanted to use the vintage footage to give the film this feeling of a caper, like it was antique in a way — not the film, but the behavior of these people seemed out of another century. It's like the 1930s — we're going to put a show on in the barn and, gosh darn it, we're going to be famous! That was what I wanted to get across — this hopefulness about America and "We can do it!" One of the things that didn't make it into the film [was Pappas's patron and primary supporter] Larry Link saying, "I'm the best mind of the 19th century," because he is completely retro in his desire to go back to the pencil. He's this dandy figure from the 19th century, and Billy is Horatio Alger, and it was stunning to me how they were still living out this story: "I'm going to come up from nothing and I'm going to be an oil baron."

As someone who needs to tell a story, was there ever a conflict with Billy and his team, since they might have a different agenda in promoting their artwork?

There are two questions in what you're asking and they're both good questions. The first is they totally used me [laughs], but because they're not stupid. There was a point at which we had to make it clear that the film was not an infomercial for Billy's piece. What was hard was that I loved Billy so much and I loved the piece — for journalistic integrity, I had to pull away from him and he had to pull away from me. I remember him saying "Look, I get it. My art is this portrait and your art is the film, and you just have to do your thing and I have to trust that maybe you'll present me well." And I didn't know if I was going to present him well.

There is a way in which, certainly, he and his team considered the film to be an advertisement for a portrait, but it's more complicated than that. He's sort of tied his hopes to the launching of the film to the reveal of the portrait, which is going to happen in New York the night of the [Tribeca Film Festival] premiere [on April 24th]. He waited for Hockney. Now, he's waiting for "Waiting for Hockney."

04232008_waitingforhockney3.jpgHas Hockney seen the film yet?

Yeah, he's been great. Initially, he didn't want us filming. Then he didn't want anything to do with the film at all. Then, of course, we had a lot of images of his we put in, and we started to vet them for public domain or fair use and finally our partners in New York said, "Just show him the film." And they showed [Hockney's former assistant] Charlie Scheips the film. He loved it and took it to London and showed it to David Hockney, and David Hockney will not endorse the film, but he adored [it]. Being a working class guy himself who came up from humble origins, the film touched him, and so he gave us full permission without having to pay to use images. He will not endorse it, and I completely respect that.

This film took four years to complete, including a hiatus for the birth of your daughter. Do you think that the changes that you went through over that period of time impacted the final cut?

Absolutely. Billy's narrative arc is not unlike my own. He practically bankrupted himself making this one piece of art. I wouldn't say I totally financially bankrupted myself, but I strained my family and myself for at least half the [length of] time that Billy did. There's a way in which his expectations and his desire for the portrait to come out and be seen and loved, and how he then responds to what happens to him, [that] made me that much more realistic about this being just a film. This whole film is about things being just what they are and not more than that. Was I inspired by him? I wouldn't do what he did, but in a way, by taking on something I've never done before, I certainly put myself in the same position. At the end of the day, I have kids, a husband, a house, a family, a full-time job — Billy, you know, he has the portrait. At one point, Billy said to me, "Julie, who would've thought it'd take you half as long to make this movie as it took me to finish 'Marilyn'?" [I said,] "It isn't funny. Billy." [laughs]

[Photos: "Waiting for Hockney," Littlest Birds Films, 2008]

For more on "Waiting for Hockney," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[Errol Morris on "Standard Operating Procedure"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/errol-morris-on-standard-opera.php Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:11:11 -0500 04222008_errolmorris.jpgBy Nick Schager

Since his masterful 1980 debut "Gates of Heaven" — and, more specifically, after 1988's "The Thin Blue Line" — documentarian Errol Morris has boldly expanded the notion of documentary filmmaking, pushing the boundaries set by his cinema vérité forefathers in an effort to discover, if not kindred spirit (and admirer) Werner Herzog's "ecstatic truth," then at least an essential truth. Whether examining the life of Stephen Hawking, the ruminations of Robert S. McNamara, or the study of eccentrics like those featured in his "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control," Morris has sought to explore fundamental questions about life through a combination of traditional nonfiction interviews and fictionalized reenactments. That hybridized aesthetic design is at the forefront of his latest, "Standard Operating Procedure," an in-depth look into the infamous photos taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib in which, amidst stylized reenactments of the controversial pics, the director affords a platform for the thoughts of the soldiers-turned-amateur-photographers at the heart of the story. Meticulously crafted and methodically argued, it's an inquiry into what actually happened at the prison, but also into the nature of images, both topics that Morris took time to discuss with me.

"Standard Operating Procedure" is a film about images — how they're constructed, and what they tell us. As your film is itself a collection of still and moving images, did it require a more conscious or careful approach?

I'm always conscious about how I'm making the film. This time around, more or less, I don't think so. I'm well aware of the fact that I'm making a movie about photographs, and there's something inherently different about doing that, than anything I've really done before. But careful? You want to put it together in a way that makes sense, that conveys some sort of idea of what you're trying to say. I was interested in how pictures can often mislead us, they can reveal things and also conceal things at the same time. And that irony is something which I believe is the heart of the movie.

How did you decide upon the style used for the reenactments, given their stark aesthetic dissimilarity from the photos themselves?

The photographs are always clearly identified as photographs. You see white borders on them, and they're all presented without zooming in or zooming out. Occasionally, I think there are one or two repositions when I'm calling attention to the fact that something has been cropped or reframed, or I'm identifying a character in the frame or trying, as in the case of Roman Krol, to match his point of view as he's looking into the prompter at himself in a photograph. But it's the do-nothing approach, it's the anti-Ken Burns approach to photographs. There's very little movement on them, and the reenactments are really quite different. I mean, they're different in so many, many, many, many ways. It's the first film that I've shot in scope, 2.40:1, and the photographs are, if anything, much closer to square-shaped. They're very different in aspect ratio from the frame. And they're still images. The reenactments, no matter how much slo-mo I use, it's still motion picture film. It's not a still, although at places, it may approach still photography.

04222008_standardoperatingprocedure1.jpgWhy create such a heightened contrast — glossy and professional vs. grimy and amateurish — between the photos and reenactments?

I wanted a contrast. I think it is heightened contrast. It's deliberate, and they look completely different. They're not meant to blend together in the same kind of thing. It's a different ingredient, if you like. Think, for a minute, of the ingredients of the movie. The movie has these retrospective interviews and people reenacting, in words, things that occurred in the years previously. Then there are photographs, which are the real pieces of evidence from Abu Ghraib. They're digital photographs, I didn't alter them in any way — I didn't frame them, crop them. Those are the photographs themselves. And there are the reenacted elements, which are designed to set up a scene around the photograph. They are designed to take you into that moment that the photograph was taken. Often, I'll design a reenactment around a phrase, someone will say something and I'll think of an image. So you add all those ingredients.

Just to go back, I was talking about Roman Krol looking into the prompter at himself. He tells you this story about how he was just throwing this Nerf ball, and how he was really, really angry, and they [the soldiers] were doing this because they wanted to show the people in the cells, the prisoners, their disapproval regarding the inmates possibly raping a young boy (and, in fact, they were found innocent). I have the hands coming through the bars, and it's a way to bring the audience into the moment that those photographs were taken, and into what he's saying. The idea that they [the soldiers] are creating these scenes [i.e. throwing the Nerf ball] for people watching in the cells. I think all of that is really, really interesting.

Why, out of all the stories and images from Iraq, did you choose this story and these images?

That was not the intention. The thing is, I made a movie about photographs. Actually, some of the most famous, or if you prefer, infamous photographs taken in the last 10 years. They happen to be perhaps the central photographs of the Iraq war, and photographs that we know little or nothing about, heavily politicized, people with lots and lots of opinions about them, but very few people having asked any questions about them at all.

04222008_standardoperatingprocedure2.jpgLike all of your work, the film is quite journalistic in nature. Was "Standard Operating Procedure" an attempt at providing a corrective to the mainstream media's coverage of the photos?

I would say not correction, in the sense that I knew what the correction was supposed to be. It was curiosity, that people talked about the photographs as though they knew the circumstances under which they were taken, or they knew who had taken them, or why they were taken. It seemed to me they knew very little. No one had bothered to talk to these people about the pictures, no one had bothered to find out why they were taken, what they thought they were doing, what actually was depicted in the photographs. It seems that they just preferred to theorize about them rather than actually investigate them.

Why not choose to investigate — and attempt to uncover the identities of — the higher-ups whom the film argues are the real culprits of the Abu Ghraib crimes?

People think there's only one thing to say about the Iraq war, and that's that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush did it. What I find so very odd about this war — you would hear, while I was making the movie, "Have you found the smoking gun?" The smoking gun is very easy to see. People prefer not to see it. They just released the full document of John Yoo's OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] torture memo. It's not substantially different from anything that we knew already. We knew that the administration had relaxed rules and regulations governing the treatment of prisoners and torture. This can't really come as a surprise to anybody. There isn't one story to be told about Iraq, about the war, about America, about these pictures, about Abu Ghraib. There's a myriad of stories, and I chose to tell a story which I believed, and I still believe, is important. If people want to read some kind of screed against Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, they're easily available, and I'm sure they can find many of them in order to satisfy themselves.

[Photos: Errol Morris; "Standard Operating Procedure," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008]

"Standard Operating Procedure" opens in limited release on April 25th.

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<![CDATA["Hannah Takes the Stairs," "The World According to Shorts"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/hannah-takes-the-stairs-the-wo.php Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:02:33 -0500 04222008_hannahtakesthestairs.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

Though it may seem unfair at first, let's pick up Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs," heft it in our grips for a moment, and then use it to beat this thing called "mumblecore" to a pulp. Implicitly a kind of low-budge, ultra-spontaneous, all-HDV answer to the glossy fatuousness of current American film, mumblecore has a number of inherent problems (the least of which is its inherited moniker; using "-core" as a suffix in this way has no meaning). The fad's general strategy — naturally lit shaky-cam coverage of semi-inarticulate twentysomethings with bedhead speaking entirely in casual small talk and having or ruining relationships — is easy to peg as narcissistic and lazy, if you're not finely attuned to the genre's nonchalant sense of cool. But more than that, mumblecore movies strive for an interpersonal intimacy they never achieve, because intimacy requires skill, real acting and visual wisdom, not merely amateurishness. In the pursuit of realism, mumblecore characters spend enormous amounts of time amusing themselves in variously immature ways, the upshot of which is less realistic than, well, immature. No one is actually witty, sex isn't on anyone's mind, and everyone, even when they're being goofy, is tediously earnest.

Is it even a movement? Is anyone outside of the ticket buyers at a handful of smallish American film festivals passionate about these movies, and if not, why are they getting so much press? Still, any cost-benefit analysis of the genre must admit that flowers do arise out of the sludge, and in "Hannah Takes the Stairs," it's the title character, as conceived by Swanberg's ensemble and defined by Greta Gerwig's performance. Hannah is a lovely-but-not-too-lovely production assistant at some kind of small-time production company, sharing an office with two geeky writers (Kent Osborne and Andrew Bujalski). Swanberg's story merely follows her as she bounces from an unemployed boyfriend through relationships with her officemates, but Hannah herself is a fascinating concoction: she's sweet and thoughtful, but at a loss in her own life, a little dull (and painfully aware of it), never the smartest person in the room and hardly at grips with what she wants out of a man. Gerwig has a dazzlingly guileless smile and big startled eyes (she's more than a little DeGeneres-esque), and she imbues Hannah with an essential insecurity that remains mostly hidden — as in real life, you detect the weakness and uncertainty by way of the defenses propped up to cover them. Watch Gerwig's hands — Hannah never knows where to put them. Organically, a clear sense of Hannah's situation dawns: she can't articulate her frustration, but she's condemned to play second fiddle to every man she knows, because though she's beautiful, she's not creative or dynamic enough to dominate them. You don't go to Swanberg's movie because the cast is a veritable who's who of mumblecore filmmakers (all of whom get screenplay credit as improvisers), or because it's the genre entry the industry [including IFC.com's sister company IFC First Take] thought would break through to the mainstream. You go for Hannah.

04222008_unitedwestand.jpgAnother sort of ultra-indie phenom, the Brooklyn Academy of Music's annual program "The World According to Shorts" (eight years and running) simply makes the world's festivals' commercially unviable short films available on the big screen for New Yorkers, and now a sampling has been packaged on DVD. Appropriately, it's a mixed bag: I thought Daniel Askill's digital trickery "We Have Decided Not to Die" (2004) was crashingly pretentious, but Hans Petter Moland's "United We Stand" (2002), a deadpan Norwegian comedy about old men and quicksand, was refreshing and sharp. Hugo Maza's "La Perra" (2002) — a Chilean bourgeois farce — may be obvious, but Adam Guzinski's "Antichrist" (2002) fiercely and mysteriously limns a landscape of feral children self-destructing in a post-industrial wilderness, and it's mesmerizing. Best of all is Andreas Hykade's "Ring of Fire" (2000), a German-made gout of black and white vaginal psychedelia that riffs on the Western's clichés and the aura of Johnny Cash just as it suggests the impact of a new mind-altering substance you didn't know you took.

[Photos: "Hannah Takes the Stairs," IFC First Take, 2007; "United We Stand," New Yorker, 2008]

"Hannah Takes the Stairs" (Genius Products) and "The World According to Shorts" (New Yorker Video) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Your Indie Summer Movie Preview]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/ifc-news-podcast-74-your-indie.php Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:26:52 -0500 The weather's warming, the days are longer and "Iron Man" ads are getting inescapable -- clear signs that summer's on the way. This week on the IFC News podcast, we present ten indie alternatives to the season's blockbusters that we haven't seen and are really looking forward to.

Download: MP3, 28:41 minutes, 26.2 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9211 2008-04-21 11:26:52 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_74_your_indie publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009211 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Your Indie Summer Movie Preview (photo)]]> Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:26:52 -0500 1009211 2008-04-21 11:26:52 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_74_your_indie_photo inherit 9211 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/opening-this-week-9.php Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:24:52 -0500 04212008_babymama.jpgBy Neil Pedley

While we pace the carpet back and forth in anticipation of the fast-approaching Tribeca Film Festival (kicking off on Wednesday), we can bide our time with a puppet kidnapping, some Bollywood royalty and an Ewan McGregor sighting.

"Baby Mama"
If the fad of pregnancy movies began with last year's "Knocked Up," it reaches its second trimester with "Baby Mama," which stars comedy goddess Tina Fey as a wannabe mom who's fast approaching 40 and Fey's one-time Weekend Update deskmate Amy Poehler as the uncouth oddball who offers up the use of her womb in exchange for a bit of cash. Appropriately enough, former "SNL" scribe Michael McCullers makes his directorial debut with the offbeat comedy, which could serve as "Juno" for people deemed too fuddy-duddy to find the term "home skillet" amusing. "Baby Mama"'s also serving as Tribeca's opening night film.
Opens wide.

"Deal"
Gil Cates Jr. follows in the shaky footsteps of Curtis Hanson ("Lucky You") and John Dahl ("Rounders") with this tale of a young cardshark ("Reaper" star Bret Harrison) and his mentor (Burt Reynolds) who seek an upset at the World Series of Poker. Real life part-time poker mavens Jennifer Tilly and Shannon Elizabeth round out the cast, and we have to give credit where it's due — this is the first film we've ever seen that used pullquotes from poker champions in its marketing campaign.
Opens in limited release.

"Deception"
Ewan McGregor stars as an awkward accountant inducted by Hugh Jackman's smooth talking lawyer into a secretive world of anonymous sexual encounters in this debut feature from director Marcel Langenegger that's part erotic thriller and part elaborate heist. Michelle Williams further complicates matters for McGregor's character, who quickly realizes that his new friends might not be all that they appear when he becomes chief suspect in the disappearance of a woman (Maggie Q) he knows only as S.
Opens wide.

"Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay"
Following their 2004 sleeper comedy hit, Kal Penn and John Cho reprise their roles as the Cheech & Chong of the MySpace generation in another absurd and surreal stoner escapade. After a mix-up on a flight to Amsterdam, the pair are mistaken for terrorists and shipped off to Cuba, where they duly escape. "Daily Show" vets Rob Corddry and Ed Helms are hot on their trail, along with the returning Neil Patrick Harris, who is officially as camp as a row of tents, reprising his role as himself in a way that just begs for an action figure, complete with unicorn accessory.
Opens wide.

"A Plumm Summer"
Caroline Zelder makes filmmaking debut with a family adventure laden with an eclectic cast that appears so wholesome it should by rights only exist in a pastry dish cooling on some old lady's open window ledge. Based on an actual event that occurred in Montana in 1968, this idyllic vision of Americana stars Billy Baldwin, Henry Winkler, Clint Howard and former Fox Sports announcer Lisa Guerrero as residents of a small town that's rocked when their beloved local kids TV star — a puppet, Froggy Doo — is kidnapped and held for ransom. Jeff Daniels narrates.
Opens in limited release.

"Rogue"
Following up his gruesome and disturbing debut serial killer thriller "Wolf Creek," writer-director Greg McLean returns to the vast, untamed wilderness of the Australian outback. Radha Mitchell stars as a feisty tour guide who leads an embittered travel writer (Michael Vartan) and a boat full of tourists into forbidden waters where they are stalked by a gigantic, ancient man-eating crocodile. Perhaps because of the lukewarm reception the film received at the Aussie box office, "Rogue" is getting a smaller release than its predecessor in America, which can only be good news for Australia's tourism industry.
Opens in limited release.

"Roman de Gare"
This multi-stranded tale of friendship, fate and murder was self-financed and shot under a pseudonym, only revealed to be the work of acclaimed French director Claude Lelouch upon its release at Cannes. In fact, identity is a theme of the 70-year-old filmmaker's latest film, which tells the story of a mystery writer (Fanny Ardant) who is a bit mysterious herself, since her books are ghost written by Louis (Dominique Pinon), an enigmatic ex-teacher who may or may not be a real life serial killer called "The Magician." In French with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Standard Operating Procedure"
The nonstop slew of films examining the Iraq war continues, this time courtesy of Oscar-nominated filmmaker and self-proclaimed "detective director" Errol Morris. "Standard Operating Procedure" takes us inside the notorious Abu Ghraib POW camp via reenactments, seeking to uncover the truth behind one of America's most shameful military scandals. With testimony from witnesses, those implicated by evidence of prisoner abuse, and those who tried to speak out, Morris explores the psychology of such an institution and asks how such activities could go unchecked for so long.
Opens in limited release.

"Stuff and Dough"
After the international success of his 2005 film, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," Romanian writer/director Cristi Puiu's darkly comic debut is riding the Romanian New Wave to a limited U.S. run, seven years after its initial release. A low-budget road movie that racked up awards on the European film festival circuit, "Stuff and Dough" follows an ambitious young hustler and his two friends in their beat-up van and listen in as they travel to Bucharest to deliver a strange package to a local gangster. In Romanian with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Tashan"
One of the most eagerly anticipated films in its native India, "Tashan" pairs Bollywood royalty Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor on screen together for the first time since they became a couple in real life. The celebrated couple stars alongside Akshay Kumar as three strangers taking a journey across India together under the watchful eye of Anil Kapoor's sadistic gangster. In Hindi with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Then She Found Me"
Helen Hunt told the audience at this year's SXSW that everything that was important to her could be found in her big screen adaptation of Elinor Lipman's novel about a school teacher who yearns for a child of her own when she is reunited with the mother she never knew (Bette Midler), a woman determined to get to know her daughter, whether she wants to or not. In addition to starring in the film, Hunt also gets behind the camera for the first time to direct. Keep your eyes peeled for a cameo from Salman Rushdie.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"Without The King"
Documentary filmmaker Michael Skolnik travels to Swaziland, a country that has earned the dubious designation of having the lowest life expectancy of any place on Earth, thanks to an out of control HIV epidemic. The African nation is also home to the world's last remaining absolute monarchy where King Mswati III lives in ignominious luxury while his people struggle in abject poverty. With access granted by both the king and his subjects (who are plotting his ouster), Skolnick juxtaposes the struggle of the people and the increasingly volatile political climate with a monarch who is out of touch with reality. The film earned a Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs 2007.
Opens in New York.

[Photo: "Baby Mama," Universal Pictures, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Tribeca '08: "Man on Wire"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/tribeca-08-man-on-wire.php Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:32:03 -0500 04182008_manonwire.jpgBy Matt Singer

[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]

As a boy, Philippe Petit enjoyed climbing things. Many boys do. But Petit never grew out of it, the way many boys do, and when he learned about wire walking, he found his calling in life. When he heard about a pair of towers being built in lower Manhattan — even though they were still years from completion, even though he'd never been to America, even though the very act was sheer suicide — he immediately decided that someday, he would walk on a wire at the top of the World Trade Center.

His journey to accomplish his goal is the story of the documentary "Man on Wire," and we know that it ends happily because we see Petit as an older man, recounting and reenacting his story with the sort of boundless enthusiasm a person must have if he is going to sneak into a heavily guarded landmark and perform an audacious and incredibly dangerous crime in the name of art. The fact that Petit obviously survives could potentially sap the suspense from the documentary, which has the structure and tone of a lighthearted heist film. But those sorts of considerations fall away whenever Petit gets up on a wire hundreds or thousands of feet in the air. The sight of him balancing on this tiny rope without a care in the world is enough to make the steeliest of nerves jangle and the steadiest of palms sweat.

Petit's excitement is contagious enough to convince everyone around him to help with his caper. I'd never do anything this illegal, nor, certainly, this dangerous. I don't understand the allure of doing what Petit did and I don't necessarily see artistry in his quest. Yet I can't deny that his enthusiasm won me over; the man really does have what one of his conspirators describes in he film as "the pitching skills of a timeshare salesman."

Director James Marsh ("The King") has a bit of a tightrope to walk of his own. To Petit, the Twin Towers meant hope and excitement and wonder. To many people, especially in New York, the destruction of the buildings on September 11th redefined them with a whole new set of darker meanings and associations. Marsh never directly addresses 9/11 — and we never get to hear Petit's reaction to that day — but Marsh begins the movie by juxtaposing images of his subject's childhood with archival footage of the WTC being built. After seeing nothing of the Trade Center but its destruction for so many years, there's something uniquely poignant about watching the care that went into its construction. At a dedication ceremony, an official promises that the Twin Towers will promote "harmony and communication between the nations of the world," an ironic statement now, but one that Petit's illegal, reckless and jubilant act affirmed.

As I watched Petit risk life and limb to traverse the summit between the two tallest buildings in the world, I kept asking myself, "Why? Why would anyone do this?" As Marsh shows us, after Petit's performance, that's what the entire country wanted to know. They were understandably mystified when he revealed that, in fact, there was no reason. Americans, Petit chuckles, always want the concrete — and my initial reaction only supports his stereotype. "The beauty of it," he says, "is I didn't have a why." Until I saw "Man on Wire," I would have been just as confused as the public was in 1974. But upon seeing the documentary, and feeling the very visceral reaction I had to the images of Petit 1300 feet in the air on that wire, audaciously smiling in the face of death, I think I have a better understanding.

[Photo: "Man on Wire," Magnolia Pictures, 2008]

For more on "Man on Wire," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[Morgan Spurlock on "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/morgan-spurlock-on-where-in-th.php Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:06:27 -0500 04162008_whereintheworldisosama1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Eating nothing but McDonald's for a month allowed "Super Size Me" director and star Morgan Spurlock to humorously illustrate to the masses just how toxic fast food can be. Apparently the guy likes to put his body at risk. Buzzed about since Harvey Weinstein bought the film after only watching a few minutes of it, "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" is Spurlock's new pop docu-quest, in which the handlebar-mustachioed filmmaker — concerned about the world he's about to bring his baby son into — ventures to the Middle East to talk with various Arabic people in an attempt to locate the terror-monger himself. I spoke with Spurlock not long after the film's SXSW premiere about his controversial intentions, his journalistic ethics and how best to groom one's beard.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on John Anderson's Variety review from Sundance, which said the film "serves up a rehash of others' 9/11 reportage, bin Laden biography, Islamic theology and suicide-bomber psychology." What do you think your film brings new to the conversation?

The goal for me is to try and put these [topics] into the realm of a mass audience. While some of this stuff may not be new, I think it's going to be new to a lot of people. Countless people came up to me after South by Southwest who had never seen any of those other documentaries — who don't read the newspaper every day or watch the news every night — and I think we present stuff in a fresh, fun, accessible way. The other thing the Variety review says is that the film will surely be a hit, so I will embrace that part. [laughs]

But aren't you concerned that the news-literate might be turned off by presenting a Middle Eastern history lesson that's so rudimentary? I'd imagine you'd want them to see the film, too.

Well, absolutely. I think what the film does is it starts to bridge a gap. I spoke to a writer who took her son to see one of the early press screenings. Her son is 14 years old, and he loves the movie; it enabled them to have a conversation about things that were happening in the world. This is a kid who doesn't watch the news or read the paper. I mean, most kids don't. I didn't when I was 14. But if we can somehow start to make this information accessible, it serves as a fantastic primer to begin a dialogue.

It's probably not a spoiler to say you don't answer the titular question, as people would have known long before the movie was distributed if you did. Is that title more a hook than an end goal?

Everybody who buys a lottery ticket thinks they're going to win. So when we first came up with the idea, we thought we had as good a chance as anybody to get over there, actually find this guy, and get him to talk to us. As we started going on the journey, it became more and more evident how unimportant that really was, and how potentially dangerous it was becoming. I think I personally made the smartest decision to not go into the tribal areas, and to come home.

04162008_whereintheworldisosama2.jpgA lot of doc filmmakers have been criticized for putting themselves in front of the camera. I was curious why you put yourself into it when you don't have a direct connection to the subject matter?

I don't know if I agree with that. I think I do have a direct connection to the film. From my point of view, it is a personal journey that the viewers are vicariously going along with the ride for. I try to come into a situation honestly, portray how I'm feeling, what I think is happening, and just try to create a vicarious journey. As I learn things, you learn things. As things happen to me, they happen to you. I'm trying to explore something a lot more personal, I think.

Could the film have been made without you being in the limelight?

I think you could have, but then who would you be following? What would be the impetus? Is somebody else going to go find Osama bin Laden? There still has to be this protagonist that you're following along this journey to find the most wanted man on the planet. Otherwise, it just becomes a doc filled with talking heads. What I want to try to avoid is making films that seem like everything else that you see.

So many traditionally structured docs are bland, I agree. But with this, there's so much flair and pop entertainment to it. Do you consider it film journalism?

I'm a filmmaker. I think there's a journalistic quality to it because there is discovery. There is information that comes out of it, and it's accessible. Whereas a lot of news and stories I see on television go down like spinach. They go down like medicine. They're not going to resonate with an audience of 18-year-olds, college kids, even young adults at times. So I think that if, in some way, I can lessen the blow of that really heavy, dense material, then it can at least serve as a jumping-off point for [audiences] to go off on their own and learn more about a subject.

Are there still ethical rules you need to follow in your brand of filmmaking?

I think you have to tell the truth. The biggest ethical thing for me is you can't create a false situation. Nothing in this is fake. Everything that happens, happens to me as it goes along. It's still a documentary. For me, the definition of a documentary is you're capturing events as they unfold in real time. And that's what we do. We're capturing these things as we start at "A" and end at "Z."

Though I'm thinking about when you visited the ultra-orthodox Israeli neighborhood where you were assaulted by the locals. Once the crowds became unruly and aggressive towards you, why did you stick around? Were you egging them on a little?

04162008_whereintheworldisosama3.jpgNo, when we got there, we were just trying to ask questions. We had an Israeli producer who was there too, helping us produce within the country. They said we should go there, we should talk to these people, we'll get great answers, and even they were completely taken aback by what happened. I mean, this really unfolded in a matter of 20 minutes. Nobody thought it was going to get to where it was. Once things started to get more hands-on and confrontational, that's when he said, "Listen, we gotta call the police and help them get us out of here. We shouldn't just walk away." This was all coming from their advice. For me, the most telling thing about that scene is the guy who makes it a point to come up to me and say, "What you see here, the majority of people who live here don't think like them." I think that speaks volumes about all these other countries that we start to travel to where we hear these crazy, angry people on the news all the time, and that's what we get fed everyday by the media.

Throughout the film, you show terrorists comically collected like onscreen baseball cards, and animated video game fights between yourself and bin Laden. For such a weighty subject, do you feel any responsibility to set boundaries to your snark? Is there too far in the name of taste?

Well, I think I'm surrounded by a fantastic bunch of "no" people. I'm not surrounded by "yes" men. I'm surrounded by "no" men, which I think is the best thing you can have as a filmmaker. We run things up all the flagpoles of people in our office, people who have all their alarms and whistles about [not just] what could and couldn't be accessible, but what should and shouldn't be in the movie. So long as we can continue to get feedback from audiences, and address as accordingly, that's where we'll draw the line.

You're known for your trademark handlebar mustache, and in the film you end up growing a big, bushy, Middle Eastern-friendly beard. As someone just letting my facial hair grow out for the first time ever, could you offer me any tips on beard maintenance?

I think the key is you have to work past the scratchy phase, because that's where it will start to feel a little more bearable. Don't be afraid to shampoo and condition regularly; that's the key to a good, comfortable beard. Otherwise, it's going to get all crunchy and women won't want to kiss you. If you just let it grow out animal style, you'll start to see how you should shape it and what you should do. Like, do you want to go full-on Grizzly Adams, where it looks like a hedgehog landed on your face, or do you want to trim it up so it's more sleek in tone and fits the contours of your jaw? That's all personal choice.

[Photos: "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?", Weinstein Co, 2008]

"Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" opens in limited release on April 18th.

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<![CDATA["Lars and the Real Girl," "The Dragon Painter" ]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/lars-and-the-real-girl-the-dra.php Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:11:03 -0500 04152008_larsandtherealgirl.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

One of 2007's breakout indie hits, "Lars and the Real Girl" was just high-profile enough, profitable enough, acted-by-Ryan-Gosling- within-an-inch-of-its-life enough and conspicuously life-affirming enough to, in the end, warrant a substantial backlash. But a backlash descends every year on overpumped movies as naturally as autumn comes to summer, inevitably, and we need to keep in mind that backlash is as irrelevant to the movie in question as is the hype and popularity that spawned it. In an ideal world, we'd see movies in a vacuum unpoisoned by publicity plague dogs and self-aggrandizing bloggers and clueless critics. Instead, we're inundated with cant that is predominantly interested in itself and its opponents, not in the movie as it would be seen, by itself, a year or ten down the road. We need to remember, for instance, that while "Juno" didn't deserve any sort of Oscar, and was far too irritatingly snarky in its dialogue, and bordered on racism in its conservative narrative set-up, the film was still witty and sharply acted and made even Jennifer Garner seem like an actress.

Craig Gillespie's "Lars" deserves better than backlash, despite — and I'll say this up front — being finally too sentimental by half, and mysteriously oblivious to the issue of mental illness. Written by Nancy Oliver, who put in her years in the "Six Feet Under" writers' room, "Lars" more or less begins with a Buñuelian idea (shades of "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz"): a mentally impacted man, grieving for his dead mother, solves the problem of his lonely neurotic existence by ordering a life-sized, anatomically correct sex doll, and then puts her forward to his family and close-knit Midwest community as his new, wheelchair-bound girlfriend. What comes of that for us, in the endurance of scene after scene, is a queasy balance between ghastly comedy and devastating melancholy — we're never instructed by the movie to react one way or the other about Lars's blank-eyed insistence on the doll's humanness, so every sequence is an undulating bout of subjective seasickness, a feat achieved solely through the concept and its sincere execution. Every shot featuring "Bianca" is a masterpiece of painful surrealistic farce. But then the film becomes something else; the focus imperceptibly shifts away from Lars-as-problematic-protagonist and onto the busily populated neighborhood around him, who for their own reasons accept Lars's doll as a real person, and end up inadvertently allowing Lars to find an emotional escape hatch out of the impossible corner into which he's painted himself.

That "inadvertently" is a key to the shapeliness of Oliver's story. True, someone in such a cohesive community would think to get Lars professional help, and the movie's ultimate resolution is a little hard to swallow. But along the way, Gillespie's film begins at a unique spot, balancing cataclysmically hilarious social unease and beautifully wrought family tragedy, and then, as an answer to both, paints one of the most convincing and generous portraits of small town American life that audiences have seen in years. It's an easy movie to be cynical about (though impossible to ignore the performances; even Gosling's characteristically leveling portrayal was overshadowed, I thought, by Paul Schneider as Lars's guilty, exhausted brother and Emily Mortimer as his relentlessly proactive sister-in-law). And if only the film arrived at its pathos and affection cheaply, unoriginally and/or dishonestly, then I could understand why.

04152008_thedragonpainter.jpgAn antique sample of outsider cinema also produced within the American system, William Worthington's "The Dragon Painter" (1919) comes to DVD as if returning from the underworld, where lost films are ordinarily consigned to flames. A gentle, unpretentious fable about a crazy hermit artist in the mountain wilds of Japan who, when he finds true love, loses his genius, the film is a historic remnant of a bygone age of specialized-audience moviemaking, when films (silent, and therefore without language barriers) were made with ghetto markets in mind. So, alongside the Yiddish cinema, the silents dedicated to Eastern European immigrants and the post-slave culture barnstormers of Oscar Micheaux, there was a subgenre of melodrama made in Hollywood exclusively for expatriated Asian viewers. Naturally, "The Dragon Painter" may therefore be the only American film we've seen from the first 60 years of the medium's existence that treats Asian characters with respect and dignity. That is, until any of dozens of other films featuring its star Sessue Hayakawa emerge from the darkness — Hayakawa became famous again in 1957 with an Oscar win as the camp captain in David Lean's "The Bridge On the River Kwai," but in the silent years, he was enough of a Hollywood star to warrant the formation of his own production company, Haworth Pictures, under which auspices "The Dragon Painter" was made. (With the advent of sound, he moved his career to Japan.) The DVD comes with a bonus feature, 1914's "The Wrath of the Gods," multiple DVD-ROM texts, original scripts, and a 1921 comedy short in the "Screen Snapshots" series, co-starring Hayakawa and Fatty Arbuckle.

[Photos: "Lars and the Real Girl," MGM, 2007; "The Dragon Painter," New Yorker/Milestone]

"Lars and the Real Girl" (MGM) and "The Dragon Painter" (New Yorker Video) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Movies in Real Time]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/ifc-news-podcast-73-movies-in.php Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:13:29 -0500 The moment the phone rings in "88 Minutes" and Al Pacino is told he has the titular amount of time left to live, the film joins the small group of flicks set in real time -- every minute that ticks by in the film is equal to a minute of the audience's time. "24" may have conditioned us to follow narratives as they unfold (and wonder if the characters will ever manage a bathroom break), the real time feature remains tricky and often gimmick-driven. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at some of the directors, from Hitchcock to Linklater, and some of the structures, from dinner parties to hostage situations, of films set in real time.

Download: MP3, 28:10 minutes, 25.7 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9163 2008-04-14 10:13:29 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_73_movies_in publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009163 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Movies in Real Time (photo)]]> Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:13:29 -0500 1009163 2008-04-14 10:13:29 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_73_movies_in_photo inherit 9163 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/opening-this-week-8.php Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:48:11 -0500 04142008_anamorph.jpgBy Neil Pedley

With such variety this week, we could be tempted to go nuts and combine them into one super movie. Osama Bin Laden would have 88 minutes to paint an anamorphic picture that disproved Darwinism while riding the winner of the Kentucky Derby through ancient China with his gay lover who is also an Oscar nominated composer moonlighting as a zombie stripper...we smell a Golden Globe!

"Anamorph"
Utilizing the painting technique of anamorphosis, whereby the nature of an image changes depending on the viewer's vantage point, filmmaker Henry Miller marks his directorial debut with this intricate and cerebral thriller that reads like "Saw" by way of "The Da Vinci Code." Willem Dafoe stars as the dogged but haunted Detective Aubray, on the trail of carefully placed clues and elaborate puzzles, trying to catch a serial killer whose crimes bare a striking resemblance to an old case he is desperate to forget.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on May 2nd.

"88 Minutes"
Producer and occasional director Jon Avnet helms his first feature for 10 years — a ticking-clock thriller starring Mr. Shouty himself, Al Pacino, as a forensic psychiatrist with a checkered past who's targeted by a copycat serial killer and told he has just 88 minutes to live. Though Pacino's character may not have long to live, the film itself has actually sat on the shelf since 2005, but after pirate copies of the international release found their way into the U.S., Sony, along with the film's — are you ready? — 19 producers, had to rethink the release date and spare Al the indignity of going straight to DVD.
Opens wide.

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"
Veteran character actor ("Bueller? Bueller?") and recently christened New York Times op-ed columnist Ben Stein is turning his outspoken advocacy for intelligent design theory into the backbone of this controversial documentary. Stein, who co-scripted along with Kevin Miller and Walt Ruloff, highlight what they believe to be a relentless campaign of persecution within the scientific community directed against anyone who attempts to contradict Darwinist theory. While they build a case that their claim is far from baseless, the film has already sparked a backlash from some participants and interviewees who claim that they were misled as to the film's intentions.
Opens wide.

"The First Saturday in May"
Filmmakers Brad and John Hennigan capture the inside track of horse racing's most prestigious annual event, the Kentucky Derby, through the eyes of six trainers, and document what it takes to breed, train and maintain a thoroughbred that has a chance to win this most coveted prize. The film also explores the colorful galaxy of people that populate the racing world, complete with sporting hats that cost more than most people's rent.
Opens in limited release.

"The Forbidden Kingdom"
Rob Minkoff, the man behind "The Lion King" and "Stuart Little", is going PG-13 with this highly anticipated clash between two of martial arts' greatest icons, which pits the elegant finesse of Jet Li against the circus acrobatics of Jackie Chan as the two rival fighters must escort an American teenager transported back in time to ancient China by a mystical weapon that must be returned to its owner. The film is (very loosely) based on "Journey to the West," one of the most cherished works of Chinese literature, which makes one wonder even more why it took an American production to finally bring Li and Chan together.
Opens wide.

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall"
Sarah Marshalls around the country won't soon forget the guerrilla marketing campaign for the latest Judd Apatow-produced romantic comedy, involving posters blaring "You suck, Sarah Marshall." But even they might need to check out their namesake, played by Kristen Bell, as she ditches her boyfriend for a pop singer, only to discover that her ex is staying at the same hotel in Hawaii. Jason Segel, who stars as the jilted party, wrote the film's script and based it on real life experiences.
Opens wide.

"Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts"
Scott Hicks, who received an Oscar nomination for "Shine," returns to music to follow a hectic and eventful year in the life of composer Philip Glass. Shot to commemorate Glass' 70th birthday, the film looks back at his life and illustrious 40-year career and divides his story into twelve separate chapters, slowly building to a pulsating crescendo that celebrates the work of one of the great composers of our time — but in a way that doesn't overdo it, of course.
Opens in New York.

"Kiss the Bride"
Tori Spelling rarely makes the pilgrimage from the small screen to the big screen, so imagine our excitement when we saw that the star of "Mother, May I Sleep With Danger" shows off her comedy chops in this low-budget gender reversal rom-com from the pen of first time writer-director Tyler Lieberman. Philip Karner stars as Matt, a man who sets out to crash the wedding of his high school buddy and secret sweetheart, Ryan (James O'Shae) and his bride-to-be Alex (Spelling). Joanna Cassidy and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"'s Amber Benson are there for the nuptials, even if Spelling finds herself the odd woman out.
Opens in limited release.

"The Life Before Her Eyes"
After his no-frills adaptation of "House of Sand and Fog," director Vadim Perelman is turning his lens towards Laura Kasischke's eerie novel, with Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood splitting the lead role as Diana, a once capricious and restless teenager who's haunted later in life by an event from her past. As the anniversary of the tragedy approaches, Diana's adult life begins to fall apart and the line between perception and reality becomes more and more illusory.
Opens in limited release.

"Pathology"
"Heroes" own Peter Petrelli, Milo Ventimiglia, takes center stage as a promising med student who enters into one of the country's top pathology programs, and by extension, a competition in which each student proves their expertise by committing the perfect, untraceable crime. Of course, Ventimiglia discovers his fellow classmates, led by Michael Weston and Alyssa Milano, might be one scalpel short of a full operating table in this dark and moody gothic thriller from German director Marc Schoelermann and the producers of "Crank."
Opens in wide release.

"The Tiger's Tail"
It's fitting that this enigmatic tale of guilt and capitalism in the height of Ireland's economic booms snuck up on us, because otherwise we would have spent weeks obsessing about the reunion of Brendan Gleeson with "The General" director John Boorman. Gleeson stars as Liam O'Leary, a successful Dublin businessman who begins to believe he's being stalked by a malicious doppelganger with dark intentions in Boorman's darkly comic portrait of Ireland's princes and paupers at a time when rich and poor were deeply divided. We expect co-star Kim Cattrall to look fabulous, even if her "Oirish" accent isn't pitch perfect.
Opens in limited release.

"Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden"
After taking on the evils of McDonald's, the public education system and...er..Christmas, Morgan Spurlock, goes after his most high profile target yet, Osama Bin Laden. Traveling through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Israel and Pakistan, Spurlock uses his unpretentious approach and trademark humor to hunt for the world's most wanted man while gaging the climate and engaging the people. Though the film's cinematographer Daniel Marracino told Variety "we've definitely got the Holy Grail," we may just have to settle for seeing Spurlock rock a full-on chin curtain.
Opens in limited release.

"Zombie Strippers"
Robert Englund (a.k.a. Freddy Krueger) slaps the scenery between two pieces of bread and takes a huge bite in this tongue-in-cheek (at least we certainly hope so) horror comedy that, much like peanut butter cups, combines two of the average twenty-something male's favorite things. When a secret government virus is accidentally released onto the sleepy town of Satre, Nebraska, the resulting zombie stripper becomes the town's new sensation, which leaves co-star Jenna Jameson and her cadre of living dead ladies of loose morals to run wild.
Opens in limited release.

[Photo: "Anamorph," IFC Films, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Still Rolling: 40 Years of the Rolling Stones on Film - "Cocksucker Blues" and "Shine a Light"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/still-rolling-40-years-of-the-3.php Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:10:34 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, starting with 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil," and continuing on with "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" and 1970's "Gimme Shelter," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn. In our final tour date, we offer the rarely screened "Cocksucker Blues" and an encore featuring the Stones' most recent cinematic return to the stage, "Shine a Light."


04112008_cocksuckerblues.jpgCocksucker Blues (1972)
Directed by Robert Frank

The Film: Returning to the United States for their first American tour since 1969 (covered in all its glory and tragedy in "Gimme Shelter"), the Stones hired filmmaker Robert Frank to document the trip. Frank gave cameras to all the members of the band to record their own experiences, and then edited their footage together on his own. Though the '72 tour is widely considered one of the Stones' best, "Cocksucker Blues" is less a chronicle of the band's rock and roll triumph than of their druggy attempts to stave off boredom in between performances. Those indiscretions includes on-camera masturbation by Mick Jagger, trashed hotel rooms, ruminations on the impossibility of cocaine addiction ("It's just too expensive to develop a habit!" remarks one incredibly high moron) and an inflight group orgy on the Stones' private jet. According to Rolling Stone, when Jagger saw the result for the first time, he remarked, "It's a beautiful film, Robert, but if it ever shows in America, we'll never be allowed there again." Frank battled the Stones for control of the film, but the best he ever got was the right to screen it once a year as long as he was in attendance.

The Rolling Stones Are:...still Jagger, Richards, Taylor, Wyman, and Watts, but their entourage has swelled to huge proportions with all manners of roadies, groupies and a full horn section to blast away on songs like "Brown Sugar." Jagger even brings along his first wife Bianca, who, in one scene that speaks volumes about their relationship come tour time, glumly and silently listens to a music box in her hotel room.

With Special Guests: Eagle-eyed viewers will spot Andy Warhol snapping pictures of the band, and Truman Capote and Tina Turner hanging out backstage. But that all pales before the musical hurting Stevie Wonder puts on the Stones, first on his own "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" and then when he joins the band for an absolutely crazy version of "Satisfaction."

Best Performance: As mentioned earlier, "Cocksucker Blues" contains few musical performances, and even fewer complete ones. But there are fiery bits of "Street Fighting Man" and "Midnight Rambler" and a raucous version of "Happy," no doubt included for the peppy, ironic counterpoint it provides to the tedium of life on the road that the majority of the documentary details.

04112008_cocksuckerblues2.jpgYou Can't Always Get What You Want: Since the film can only be screened with Frank in attendance, the only way to really watch it is on a well-worn bootleg. The one I found had long since lost most of its color and clarity. Plenty of scenes are blurry messes of blue and white splotches, and often it's hard to tell who's doing what act of debauchery. On the other hand, the disorienting effect caused by too many bad dubs approximates the experience of being lost in a dope fog with the Stones quite nicely.

Keith Richards is Weird: Though we don't really see Richards doing much of anything wrong in "Cocksucker Blues" (as a general rule, most of the worst behavior comes from the entourage, not the band itself), the evidence of his worsening drug addiction is on full display. In one sequence backstage after a concert, Frank's camera keeps moving from room to room, and each time it returns to check on Richards, he's slumped lower and lower, until he's passed out in the lap of a groupie. Later, a deeply confused Richards tries to finagle some fresh fruit out of an unhelpful room service operator. After failing to communicate his desire for some apples, he nearly gives up; "This is too complicated!" he moans. Near the end of the film, he performs that great ritual of rock band excess &151; he tosses his television off his hotel room balcony. In four Stones documentaries, I've never seen Keith laugh so hard.

Aftermath: Drugs helped to ruin the Stones' good intentions at Altamont and by 1972, they'd completely erased whatever political idealism the band had. The contrast is shocking. In "Gimme Shelter," the most prominently featured audience member is handing out pamphlets supporting the Black Panther party. In "Cocksucker Blues," the most talkative fan complains to Frank that the state's taken her child away just because she likes to drop acid. ("So what? He was born on acid!" she boasts.) Altamont was a free concert. but outside one of the venues in '72, Frank finds a scalper boasting about how much money he's making off the band.

It's easy to see why The Stones didn't want the public getting their hands on such footage, but you have to wonder why they'd let Frank record all the excess in the first place. Then again, given how excessive the excess was, maybe they weren't in the right frame of mind when they made the decision. In an interview reprinted on Shock Cinema's website, Frank suggests that the Stones didn't really want him to shoot them, but they liked having him around because his friend had good connections for dope, so they acquiesced. He also acknowledged that the infamous private plane sequence where the roadies forcefully strip some groupies naked while the band approvingly pounds on some hand drums was staged after he complained that nothing ever happened on their flights. That made me rethink the chuckle I had over the film's opening disclaimer: "Except for the musical numbers, the events depicted in this film are fictitious. No representation of actual persons or events is intended."

To be sure, the footage is scandalous and at times, pornographic, at least in the legal sense. Still, if I were the band now, I'd strike a new print, release the movie on DVD, complete with extras that contextualize the film (and explain away all the worst bits as things that were also staged). In 2008, their image as the greatest rock and roll band in the world comprised of rocking grandfathers could probably use the edgy publicity.


04112008_shinealight.jpgShine a Light (2008)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

The Film: In the fall of 2006, The Rolling Stones played a series of concerts at New York City's Beacon Theater to benefit former President Clinton's foundation. They invited director Martin Scorsese — who hadn't made a concert documentary since "The Last Waltz," almost 30 years earlier — to film the shows and turn them into an IMAX documentary. Scorsese inserts a mélange of archival interview footage from the band's long career between every couple of songs. The most commonly asked question: When will the Stones hang it up? In one clip, Dick Cavett asks Mick Jagger if he can imagine himself still playing when he's 60. "Easily," he says without a moment's hesitation. Cut to Jagger, age 63, rocking the Beacon to "Brown Sugar." As he did for "The Last Waltz," Scorsese recruited a veritable murderers' row of cinematographers to operate his seventeen cameras, including Robert Richardson, Robert Elswit, Ellen Kuras, Emmanuel Lubezki, John Toll and Albert Maysles. It's not the Stones' first IMAX experience either — 1990's "Live at the Max" anyone?

The Rolling Stones Are: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, with Ronnie Wood on guitar. A few years after the tour seen in "Cocksucker Blues," Mick Taylor left the group because of a dispute with Jagger and Richards over writing credits. Wood, then a member of the Faces, had filled in for Taylor and began recording and touring with the Stones, and eventually joined full-time after the Faces broke up in 1975. As for former bassist Bill Wyman, he left the Stones in 1993 to start his own band, the Rhythm Kings. He's never been officially replaced.

With Special Guests: The Stones are joined on stage by guests during three numbers — Jack White shares vocals and acoustic guitar duties with Jagger on "Loving Cup," Christina Aguilera sings and dirty dances with Jagger on "Live With Me," and best of all, Buddy Guy joins the guys for Muddy Waters' "Champagne and Reefer." Guy's no spring chicken (he turns 72 later this year) and he absolutely wipes the floor with the rest of the geezers on stage. It's the one must-download song from the soundtrack.

Best Performance: There's a few other strong numbers besides Guy's to choose from: the set list runs 18 tracks and there are very few duds. Of the old standards, the best is probably "Sympathy for the Devil," if only for the showmanship of Jagger, who's spent a couple songs offstage while Richards warbled a few ditties, and bursts through the backdoors of the orchestra section as he announces "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste."

04112008_shinealight2.jpgYou Can't Always Get What You Want: Though Scorsese has used "Gimme Shelter" on the soundtrack of three of his films, it doesn't appear in "Shine a Light." Also, given President Clinton's role in the concerts and his appearance early in the film hanging out with the band, was it too much to ask for him to join them onstage? He'd be perfect for the sax solo in "Brown Sugar."

Keith Richards is Weird: Well, right off, his ensemble is weird. He's got a Silent Bob coat with a "Pirates of the Caribbean" pin and a weird schmata — it's not a hat, it's not a bandana — hanging off his head, and the full regalia of earrings and beads and who knows what else. It's also curious to note that, at 62, Richards is far more active on the stage than he ever was back in the '60s and '70s. Obviously, wireless technology has made some of that possible; but watching the Richards of "Gimme Shelter" — who was nearly as stiff as the positively Lurchish Bill Wyman — it's hard to believe he's the same guy in "Shine a Light" who gets down on his knees to tease the front row, tosses guitar picks to fans mid-solo and strolls over to Ronnie Wood to lean on his shoulder every now and then. This, too, is weird, but like most of Richards' antics, it's endearingly so.

Aftermath: Scorsese's involvement necessitates comparisons to "The Last Waltz" which are hard to live up to. After all, that was a concert commemorating the end of a band (The Band, technically). In Scorsese's eyes at least, the moment was something of an end of an era as well. Though "Shine a Light" is a similarly structured concert doc from the same director, it's tonally quite different. As the interviews in "Shine a Light" stress, the Rolling Stones have never and probably will never quit. Members have died, members have gotten ill and come back, members have taken more drugs than Scarface, but the band has persevered. The movie, then, is less about something ending than something that is endless. And why shouldn't such a movie be in IMAX, where every wrinkle is clear as crystal? It's a testament to longevity. These guys are like war vets showing off their scars.

Scorsese offers no reason why the Stones have carried on for so long; I think we need only look to their biggest hit. Only a band in such a perpetual state of dissatisfaction would still be doing this shit well into retirement age. It's not the greatest concert doc I've ever seen; it's not even the best movie I've seen starring The Rolling Stones this week. But with their tickets now going for upwards of $100 a pop, it's a pretty good deal. You'll never get a seat this good at a live Stones concert.

[Photos: "Cocksucker Blues," Robert Frank, 1972; "Shine a Light," Paramount Vantage, 2008]

Part 1: "Sympathy for the Devil"
Part 2: "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus"
Part 3: "Gimme Shelter"

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<![CDATA[The Demon Dog Eat Dog Film Career of James Ellroy]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/the-demon-dog-eat-dog-film-car.php Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:50:22 -0500 04112008_streetkings.jpgBy Stephen Saito

Hollywood has never known what to do with James Ellroy. Then again, the man who calls himself "the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction" has never had much use for it. As he told the Toronto Star's Peter Howell in 2004, "Books are much more profound than movies. Books are not way stations on the way to motion pictures."

That may be true, but that hasn't stopped Ellroy from optioning all of his novels to be made into films. Although there's no such thing as a quick incubation period on adapting one of his dense noirs for the big screen, the author has established quite a filmography, including this week's release of "Street Kings." While Ellroy has appeared in front of the camera for documentaries on himself (and at one time, was set to be played by David Duchovny in an adaptation of his memoir, "My Dark Places"), here's a look at the behind the scenes history of Ellroy's film career that's nearly as tangled and tortured as one of his novels.


04112008_bloodonthemoon.jpg"Cop" (1988)

The Lowdown: Considering "Blood on the Moon," the novel on which "Cop" was based, was rejected by 17 publishers due to its violent content before finally making it to bookshelves, it made sense that Ellroy was also initially a tough sell to Hollywood. Indeed, many believe the big screen adaptation didn't preserve Ellroy's complex prose in the telling of the first Lloyd Hopkins novel (the other two, "Because the Night" and "Suicide Hill," have been optioned, but never made into films). James Woods stars as Detective Hopkins, who's on the path of a serial killer of women, but the film largely forgoes Hopkins's backstory involving his legacy in the L.A.P.D. and his struggle to keep faithful to his wife in favor of a rough and tumble procedural with an awkward feminist bent. (Woods's long lament of the plight of prostitutes is at odds with the fact that he tries to bed a feminist poet with seeming disinterest.)

Ellroy's Input: The author flew to L.A. to write a few scenes for the film, but the script was ultimately streamlined to become a more straightforward murder mystery.

On the Hush-Hush: During a 1995 Q & A following a screening of the film at the National Film Theatre in London, Ellroy amused the audience by simulating oral sex with the microphone, letting out a howl and yelling, "Bring back the dead... and give them head," before asking them, "Who thought the book was better than the movie? Who thought I should have played Detective Lloyd Hopkins? Who thought I should have played the killer?"

The Fallout: Even though Ellroy was said to have been disappointed by "Cop," Woods starred as the gangster Mickey Cohen in the small screen adaptation of "Since I Don't Have You" for the Showtime anthology series, "Fallen Angels."The short story turned vignette became the first screen appearance of future "L.A. Confidential" murder victim Buzz Meeks (played in the short by Gary Busey), who was then a bag man caught in between Cohen and Howard Hughes (Tim Matheson). It would be the last appearance of Woods in an Ellroy-related film, though the actor was mentioned to play Ellroy in "My Dark Places" before Duchovny was cast in 2003.


04112008_laconfidential.jpg"L.A. Confidential" (1997)

The Lowdown: No one was expecting a sophisticated take on Ellroy's naturally bombastic story of three cops of varying degrees of integrity who pursue corruption within their department following a massacre at the Nite Owl coffee shop, especially from the director of "Losin' It" and the screenwriter behind "976-EVIL." But after the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, director Curtis Hanson and screenwriter Brian Helgeland became Hollywood A-listers and Ellroy became as established in the film business as he had become in the literary industry.

Ellroy's Input: Helgeland told Variety in 1996 that Ellroy invited the scribe and Hanson out for dinner, after which he approved the script. As Helgeland recounted, "It would have been a disaster for us if Ellroy read the script and said it was garbage. As it turned out, he was very happy with it. He understood why things couldn't work out exactly like his 500-page book. But he had weird casting ideas — people who hadn't been in the business for decades."

On the Hush-Hush: Ellroy told SPLICEDwire at the time of the film's release, "When I read the script, I thought the shoot-out [at the end] was preposterous. And you know what? In the movie, it's preposterous. Two guys holed up in a room where they kill fifteen guys — it's bullshit. But you know what? It's inspired bullshit."

The Fallout: Besides restoring Ellroy's credentials in Hollywood, the film reinvigorated the career of Hanson and launched the careers of Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce in America. It also earned Oscars for Kim Basinger's supporting turn and Helgeland's adapted screenplay. Yet though Ellroy has long maintained he was pleased by the final cut, he told Empire Online in 2001, "[I've] seen two British crime movies that are better than 'L.A. Confidential.' I'm talking about John Boorman's film 'The General' and Mike Hodges's film 'Croupier'; both are better than 'L.A. Confidential.' Still, the Fox Network greenlit a pilot starring Kiefer Sutherland in the Pearce role that never went to series.


04112008_brownsrequiem.jpg"Brown's Requiem" (1998)

The Lowdown: As a 31-year-old caddy working for tips at the Bel-Air Country Club, Ellroy had given up alcohol and got drunk on Raymond Chandler's hardboiled novels instead. The result was "Brown's Requiem," Ellroy's first book about Fritz Brown, an L.A.P.D. refugee turned private investigator whose latest gig following a young woman involved with a significantly older man with mob ties leads to a possible police corruption scandal concerning the ex-internal affairs officer who kicked Brown off the force. Director Jason Freeland had wanted to make the film for eight years before he found a nascent production company willing to put up the $5 million.

Ellroy's Input: Very little, though director Jason Freeland stayed true to the book. As he told The Glasgow Herald in 1998, "When I was editing the film, I realized that I was closer to Fritz Brown than I wanted to admit. I saw that the obsession and addiction that flows through the book were very true of me, I had little control over drugs and alcohol and was becoming increasingly isolated. In getting the film made, I had been distracting myself from my own problems."

On the Hush-Hush: According to the comprehensive and no longer active Ellroy site Modesty Arbor, star Michael Rooker thought he had ruptured a kidney when one of the actors administering a fake beating on him actually kicked the lead in the ribs.

The Fallout: Now, "Brown's Requiem" is better known as the DVD one confuses with "L.A. Confidential" in the used bin since the film's distributor made no bones about playing up the Ellroy connection. But the film, with its obvious budget restrictions, failed to get on nearly anyone's radar, let alone Ellroy's.


04112008_darkblue.jpg"Dark Blue"(2003)

The Lowdown: It was Ellroy's first original screenplay to be produced, but it took eight years for the film, originally titled "The Plague Season," to finally congeal when "Bull Durham" writer-director Ron Shelton signed on to direct. Ellroy had always wanted Kurt Russell to play Sgt. Eldon Perry, the veteran L.A.P.D. detective who takes a young up-and-comer under his wing to investigate a particularly gruesome robbery homicide, though all the corners that Perry is used to cutting come back to haunt him in the days leading up to the 1992 L.A. riots.

Ellroy's Input: According to producer Cotty Chubb on the film's DVD, Ellroy's treatment for the film was 105 pages long and "had no dialogue." Around the same time, Chubb had gotten hold of David Ayer's script for "Training Day" and signed him on to bring Ellroy's tough talk to the screen. Upon seeing the changes, Ellroy demanded that his name be taken off the final product.

On the Hush-Hush: Ben Affleck was first slated to play the part of newbie officer Bobby Keough, but by the time production started, Scott Speedman took his place. More surprisingly, the first draft of the screenplay was set in the 1960s before the Watts riots.

The Fallout: As Shelton says on the DVD when criticizing Ellroy's original title, "You can't put 'plague' in the title of a movie. Nobody's going to say on a Friday night, 'Let's go see something with plague in it.'" Apparently, "Dark Blue" wasn't much of an improvement, since the film grossed a measly $9.2 million during its theatrical release. It does have its fans, including those who regard it as the second best film from Ellroy's source material.


04112008_blackdahlia.jpg"The Black Dahlia" (2006)

The Lowdown: As the film version of "L.A. Confidential" became a sensation, David Fincher became interested in adapting what fans of Ellroy consider his most definitive novel, "The Black Dahlia." The book follows two detectives on the trail of the real-life Elizabeth Short case, the notorious homicide of an aspiring starlet that paralleled the murder of Ellroy's own mother (who died when the author was just 10). Fincher teamed up with "War of the Worlds" screenwriter Josh Friedman over the course of six years to flesh out the script for the film, which the "Se7en" director saw as a three-hour dissection of the mystery in black and white. Ultimately, Fincher decided three hours would be better spent on the Zodiac killer, and Brian De Palma came on, cut out parts of the script regarding L.A.P.D. infighting and started shooting the $45 million flick in 2005.

Ellroy's Input: De Palma didn't skimp on the graphic violence in Ellroy's book and Ellroy didn't skimp on promoting the movie, which he did more extensively than on any of his previous films. Naturally, that meant the outspoken author would have to make amends for things he had said earlier, such as the comments he made to the Seattle Times about the leads, "Josh Hartnett as Bucky Bleichert. He's too pretty to live. And this stupid kid actress Scarlett Johansson as Kay Lake — she's about 20 years old. She's a little young, a little short in the tooth."

On the Hush-Hush: Financing for the film fell apart several times, which meant original lead Mark Wahlberg had to drop out of the Det. Lee Blanchard role, which ultimately went to Aaron Eckhart. On the other hand, the timing was right for co-stars Hartnett and Johansson, who reportedly struck up a romance on set.

The Fallout: Ellroy told Premiere Magazine's Tim Swanson in 2006, "[If] 'L.A. Confidential' was the Protestant version of my work, this is the Catholic." But even with that endorsement, "Black Dahlia" couldn't muster more than $22.5 million and the usual divergence in opinion that greets De Palma's films.


04112008_streetkings2.jpg"Street Kings" (2008)

The Lowdown: "Black Dahlia" wasn't actually the first Ellroy adaptation David Fincher wanted to direct. When the film was still called "The Night Watchman," Fincher intended to helm the film after he finished "Fight Club," but when fate intervened, Ellroy's script passed through the hands of both Spike Lee and Oliver Stone before "Dark Blue" scribe David Ayer stepped in to direct the second contemporary (and original) Ellroy story about a ruthless cop who becomes disillusioned when he's suspected in another cop's murder and begins to question the motives of his colleagues. The script would've never come to fruition had it not been for "L.A. Confidential" producer Arnon Milchan, who put up the money for Ellroy's screenplay after Warner Bros. initially passed.

Ellroy's Input: It may be Ellroy's story on screen, but Ayer reworked the dialogue while the intermediary writers on the film updated the script from its original post-O.J. Simpson trial setting to current times.

On the Hush-Hush: Despite the film's depiction of widespread corruption in the L.A.P.D., former police chief Daryl Gates makes a cameo as the chief of police in the film.

The Fallout: It's yet to be seen, but Ellroy has been mum on the subject.


04112008_whitejazz.jpg"White Jazz" (TBA)

The Lowdown: The film that would be the next great Ellroy adaptation remains on the back burner — "Narc" director Joe Carnahan's version with George Clooney fell apart last year when Clooney needed more time to tweak his own directorial effort, "Leatherheads." Considered perhaps Ellroy's hardest novel to read with its mix of police jargon and 1950s slang, "White Jazz" is the final chapter in the author's "L.A. Quartet," which started with "The Black Dahlia" and continued with "The Big Nowhere" and "L.A. Confidential." Told in the first person by corrupt vice cop Dave Klein, the story pits Klein against his dirty fellow officers who seek to protect themselves from the feds. Initially, Fine Line got the rights to the film and tapped frequent Martin Scorsese cinematographer Robert Richardson to make his directorial debut with a cast that included Nick Nolte as Klein and John Cusack as his partner, Junior Stemmons.

Ellroy's Input: Appropriately, Ellroy did the honors on the first few drafts of what would've been his most lurid film to date, if this review from IGN is to be trusted. However, since Carnahan came onboard, he and his brother, "The Kingdom" scribe Michael Matthew Carnahan, rewrote the script, which Joe has said he intends to direct following his next film, "Killing Pablo."

On the Hush-Hush: When Winona Ryder was caught shoplifting in 2002, she attempted to explain away the crime by saying she was preparing for two films, "Shopgirl" and "White Jazz." At one point, Uma Thurman was also attached to play the female lead.

The Fallout: "Jazz" may be in limbo, which could fuel further discussions about a competing project — a sequel to "L.A. Confidential," which shares the same universe and the character of Ed Exley.

[Photos: "Street Kings," Fox Searchlight, 2008; "Blood on the Moon," Vintage; "L.A. Confidential," Mysterious Press; "Brown's Requiem," Harper; "Dark Blue" poster, United Artists, 2002; "The Black Dahlia," Mysterious Press; "Street Kings" poster, Fox Searchlight, 2008; "White Jazz," Alfred A. Knopf;

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<![CDATA[Still Rolling: 40 Years of the Rolling Stones on Film - "Gimme Shelter"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/still-rolling-40-years-of-the-2.php Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:20:34 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, from 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil" to last week's release of "Shine a Light," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn.


04102008_gimmershelter1.jpgGimme Shelter (1970)
Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin

The Film: The Rolling Stones watch the events of their recent American tour as they play out before them on a flatbed editing machine. Though their return to the States was filled with plenty of highlights, including a triumphant series of concerts at Madison Square Garden and a successful recording session at Muscle Shoals Studios, all that really seems to matter is the disastrous result of their free concert held outside of San Francisco at the Altamont Speedway. Intended as a companion event to the recent Woodstock Festival, the day was regularly interrupted by outbursts of bad vibes and outright violence, culminating in the death of Meredith Hunter, an African-American teenager in front of the stage during the Stones' set, forever marking the show as one of the unofficial signposts on the road to the end of the 1960s.

The Rolling Stones Are: Mick Jagger on vocals, Keith Richards on guitar, Charlie Watts on drums, Bill Wyman on bass, and, for the first time on screen, Mick Taylor on guitar. When founding member Brian Jones couldn't get a visa for their upcoming American tour, the rest of the Stones fired him in the summer of 1969. (Jones died less than a month after his sacking.) On the recommendation of blues musician John Mayall, Taylor got the job, and though he doesn't utter a single line of dialogue in "Gimme Shelter," his presence is felt in all the musical numbers, which are grittier and tighter than any of the performances in "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus."

With Special Guest Stars: Opening for the Stones on the tour were Ike and Tina Turner and B.B. King. The latter never appears in "Gimme Shelter," but the former give a memorable rendition "I've Been Loving You Too Long," in which Tina lovingly and ever-so-suggestively caresses the microphone throughout. Watching the luckiest mic stand in history, Albert Maysles notes on the film's DVD commentary track that "this was a different period of time... when sexuality was more direct." Boy, I'll say. At Altamont itself, the lengthy bill included The Flying Burrito Brothers and Jefferson Airplane. The Grateful Dead were scheduled to appear but backed out after learning of the chaos and violence; the Maysles' cameras captures their arrival at the venue and the looks of concern on their faces as they learn of the injury to one of the members of Jefferson Airplane.

Best Performance: About 40 minutes into the film, the Stones play "Honky Tonk Woman" and just before the chorus, the first of a string of fans bursts onto the stage and tries to tackle Jagger. Some might just be groupies; others are a bit more intimidating looking; the dude in the dark green jacket sure wasn't after Mick just to give him a kiss. Nevertheless, Jagger barely misses a beat, and seconds after he's nearly been dragged to the ground, he's wiggling his hips and pogoing to the words "She blew my nose and then she blew my mind!" The incidents are altogether terrifying, and seem to portend the even more aggressive audience outbursts that await the Stones at Altamont, but Jagger laps up every second of the attention. After the song wraps, he works the audience up some more. "I think I busted a button on my trousers! I hope they don't fall down!" he announces with a tinge of faux naughtiness. "You don't want my trousers to fall down now do you?" Cue the girls' squeals.

04102008_gimmershelter2.jpgYou Can't Always Get What You Want: Pretty much every second of the footage of the Stones' set from Altamont is remarkable, but there are only two numbers: "Sympathy For the Devil" and "Under My Thumb," the track the band was playing when Meredith Hunter brandished a gun for reasons unknown and was stabbed to death (in self-defense, according to a jury) by several Hells Angels. The Stones played more; who knows what sorts of fascinating moments the Maysles captured but didn't share with us.

Keith Richards is Weird: There's a famous scene in "Gimme Shelter" where the Stones are listening to "Wild Horses" at Muscle Shoals, and the camera captures Richards sitting on a couch, head back, eyes closed, singing along more intensely than any fan every could, tapping his feet along to the rhythm in garish snakeskin boots. But that one moment overshadows a cornucopia of Richards's antics; earlier in the same scene, he produces some kind of food label from his product and announces "Cousin Minnie says, 'How delicious!'"; checking into the local hotel a short time later, Richards unlocks his door with the line, "Is my local groupie in?"; during the "Love in Vain" sequence, Richards is lying on the floor between the wall and the audio mixer. Still, credit where credit's due: when the shit starts to hit the fan at Altamont, it's Richards who makes the most passionate call for sanity when he points his finger directly at some of the scuffling and announces "Either those cats cool it, or we don't play!" With that, order is restored, if only for a moment.

Aftermath: This is the third film in this informal series, but only the first time we see the Stones in something resembling an interview. In "Sympathy for the Devil," they provide the soundtrack to a political tableau. In "Rock and Roll Circus," they dress like buffoons while singing songs praising the working man and his hard life. In "Gimme Shelter," the Maysles convinced the band to allow them to record their reactions as they sit and watch the rough cut. Not surprisingly, they say little. It's clear that the band is very comfortable performing as The Rolling Stones, but not terribly comfortable being the Rolling Stones.

Ironies abound: While the Stones' last movie was a playfully staged carnival, "Gimme Shelter" documented a real circus. The last time Jagger appeared singing "Sympathy For the Devil," he painted a big picture of Satan on his chest; this time when he sings it, something truly evil is about to happen. And yet, as Godfrey Cheshire noted in a New York Press article that's included with the DVD, the images from Altamont are all the more alluring "for being so damned and damning." For all the genuine horror contained in the footage — per Jagger's request, you watch Hunter's stabbing twice, first as it plays in real time and then again in slow motion on the Steenbeck — it's also sort of mesmerizing, and as good an ad for the Maysles' style of direct documentary cinema as there could be. As the ship sinks and the Stones keep right on playing, the Maysles' cameras, primarily perched behind the band and shooting out into the crowd, record all these strange, vivid characters. Every time I watch these scenes, I'm enthralled by the girl in the front with long brown hair mockingly flashing peace signs until she realizes Jagger is looking at her, whereupon she self-consciously tosses her hair and starts dancing to the music, and the random guy who spends half of "Under My Thumb" standing next to Mick Jagger, tripping on acid, or the blond girl a few yards away who sits silently crying and nodding. There's a prominent shot of Hunter in his mint green suit before his stabbing, playing with something in his pocket (the gun perhaps?) and another of Hells Angels leader, Sonny Barger, sizing up Mick Jagger while he sings "Sympathy for the Devil."

"Gimme Shelter" shows the power of the camera and also its impotence; the Maysles managed to record this murder in the middle of this massive scuffle, but they couldn't stop it. It does the same for rock and roll: All these tens of thousands of people come to Altamont to hear the Rolling Stones, but their most important plea falls on deaf ears.

[Photos: "Gimme Shelter," Cinema 5 Distributing, 1970]

Part 1: "Sympathy for the Devil"
Part 2: "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus"

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<![CDATA[Thomas McCarthy on "The Visitor"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/thomas-mccarthy-on-the-visitor.php Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:40:00 -0500 04102008_thevisitor1.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Though he's the writer-director of the acclaimed 2003 dramedy "The Station Agent," Tom McCarthy is probably not the first face you associate with the film (Peter Dinklage was the bigger breakout, no pun intended). But that doesn't bother the New Jersey-born McCarthy, who has had his own share of on screen recognition (more on that later) since he began acting in film and television in the early '90s. (If his name still doesn't ring a bell, then you certainly didn't watch the brilliant final season of HBO's "The Wire," in which he co-starred as the morally skewed Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Templeton.) McCarthy's second feature behind the camera is "The Visitor," a poignant and lightly funny drama about a widowed and utterly disillusioned economics professor named Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins, "Six Feet Under") who discovers, on a business trip from Connecticut, that a Syrian percussionist and his Senegalese girlfriend have been living in his New York apartment. Rather than kick them out, Walter allows them to stay, filling the void in his life through this act of kindness until a police encounter pulls the rug out from under them all. I spoke with McCarthy about his new film, liberal guilt, and why he's incapable of acting and directing the same project. [Warning: Minor spoilers follow.]

There have been so many films about stolid white people brought out of their shells by spirited people of color. While writing the script, what were your intentions to avoid a rehash?

I think you're always, at least I am, writing away from what would be considered a cliché. At the same time, as you've pointed out, there are only so many stories. Eventually, you're going to find yourself in the vicinity of a story that's been told, or a cliché that's been overused. It's always about getting back to the characters, trying to keep it as honest as possible, and not manipulating the story, characters' actions, or the audience in a way for purposes of some emotional payoff. If you stay true to characters in that, you're staying true to what happens in life.

I had a journey, an immigration stance on this movie, that's not too different from Walter Vale's. I stumbled into it as research, got very involved in the story of a Nigerian guy, became very close to him, and got emotionally connected to his fate. I think those kinds of things happen all the time. Unfortunately, for some stories, they get manipulated in a way that reeks of something not quite real.

What kind of research put you in the path of this Nigerian gentleman?

It was someone I met when I started visiting detention centers, more out of curiosity than research. I didn't know necessarily that it was going to be a story point at that time. When you go to visit, you are assigned visitors. You don't know these people, you just sit across from them — much like Walter does with Tarek in the movie — and have conversations. One time, I was assigned this Nigerian man, and we kind of hit it off, so each time I'd go back, I'd visit with him specifically. He was a guy who was in detention for three-and-a-half years and was really, at this point, just trying to get deported. He wanted to go back to Nigeria; he didn't want to stay in this country any longer. He didn't believe in it. He didn't trust it. But he couldn't get deported because they didn't have all his paperwork, so it was one of those things where I kept visiting him, trying to do what I could with as little legal knowledge as I could, and you know, you get very involved. I'd find myself visiting him on holidays, or leaving Manhattan early from work situations to go see him. You know, it's someone you care about.

04102008_thevisitor2.jpgDon't shoot the messenger, but I thought a lot about something a colleague said after we saw "The Visitor" together. He called it a "liberal guilt" movie. Being a white man telling a story like this, are you damned if you do, damned if you don't?

Yeah, I think you are damned either way. If people want to pigeonhole a movie like that, they can, but all I would say is, I'd like to have a conversation with that person. And not out of... look, it's a movie. A lot of people have different opinions, but I don't know what the "liberal guilt" is. I would offer, in fact, that by the end of the movie, we find out that the lovely Arab woman broke the law and did it knowingly. Her son should have, for every right, been deported. They don't have a leg to stand on, and she admits that. Why does she do it? That's the question we have to ask ourselves, and can we do a better job at how we're handling these situations. So yeah, I understand immigration, and I would venture to guess more than most American citizens do right now, because I spent a couple years researching it and listening to case after case after case. Do I have liberal guilt? Yes, absolutely. Why do I feel guilty? Because I quite honestly don't think our country is doing the best we could. I think liberal guilt leads to a lot of great change, whether it's for race or sex or whatever. I'm all for liberal guilt, so I take that as a compliment. [laughs]

As an "actor's director," what do you bring to the table? How do you work with actors?

That's a good question, and maybe my actors are better placed to answer that question. I would offer that one of the advantages of being an actor first — more than I've been a director — is that I've worked with a lot of directors. I've had an opportunity to test-drive directors and realize what works and what doesn't. Quite honestly, it's something actors talk about a lot: "Oh, how did you like working with that director? What's he like? Oh, really, no kidding?" It's common green room talk for actors. It's water cooler talk about how certain directors operate. By the time I'm ready to work with my actors, I have at least a pretty good feel for what will help them and what might possibly not be able to help them.

How about any specific techniques, though? I ask this as I've often had a difficult time interviewing actors about what they do beyond process, process, process.

I hear you. I think to address what you just said, actors who work a lot and are pretty good, the more years they work, they start to let go more and more of their process, right? I mean, a guy like Richard Jenkins is just so damn good, or I was just working on a film with Tom Wilkinson. Both of these guys, you don't think they're doing anything. You're watching them, and you're like, "They're not even acting." [laughs] Then you watch them on film, and they're some of the most compelling actors working today. That's just because their craft, or whatever word you want to assign to that, has become second nature. It's not something that they'll readily talk about because it's diffusing that in some weird way.

But to that end, so many directors out there who go to film school — and learn all the tricks and trades of the camera — they aren't used to communicating with actors in a way that actors learn. Many actors are trained, right? They spend their lives working with coaches in a way that they develop a language, that doesn't just say, "Okay, do it this way. I'm going to demonstrate how you should act in this moment," because then you're sort of playing a quality. But maybe it's reminding them, "Hey, remember where you're at right now. Remember that you're a guy who, in the first 10 minutes of this movie, wants nothing to do with anybody. And right now you're asking these people to stay in your apartment. That's probably not the easiest thing, and you better have a reason for wanting to do that." If anything, it gets the actor thinking, and a camera picks that up. A camera picks up an actor processing information and making a decision, and that's the beauty of film. That's something you don't see on a stage quite as easily.

04102008_thevisitor3.jpgYou have yet to act in a project that you've directed. You haven't felt capable of doing both, why not?

Actors have a reputation for being coddled on-set, because if you're a director or producer worth your salt, you want the actor to be thinking about nothing else but the role. You want them to be in a little bubble and when the camera starts rolling, they stay in that bubble. [laughs] You don't want them thinking about money, food, lunch or getting home. You just want them to be gliding in and out. You want that effortlessness to the performance. I think I understand and appreciate that. Quite honestly, I'm a mess when I'm directing. My mind is going in a million directions. I'm thinking ten steps ahead, ten steps behind. I am the writer, I'm constantly evaluating the script and the dialogue, and to shut all that down and try to find this calm place to act... I really just marvel at the people who do it, and do it well. That said, I don't think there are many who do it well.

Since one of your greatest advantages as a filmmaker is your ability to work with actors, how would you describe your directorial style? What do you think makes a Tom McCarthy film, even three films from now that you haven't yet made?

[laughs] I don't know, because I hope it will continue to evolve. Not to dodge the question, but I'd almost hesitate to answer that. You know, in interviews — we were just talking about this last night — you have to provide answers. Sometimes in doing so, it's not like you're manipulating the truth or anything, but you're providing sound bites, and I'd never want to start believing those sound bites about any part of the process. Whether it's acting, writing, or directing, it's ultimately much more complex than what you can boil down to three- or four-sentence answers.

So I don't know if I have a style yet. I'm anxious to make three more films, look back on it, and say, "Ah, there's my style." It's like careers, right? People are like, "How did you forge this career?" You don't forge a career, you look for the next job. You scrap and you scrape, and if you're lucky enough, you have a career to look back on, and then you can say, "There it is." [laughs] I think my style is something I'm still developing with the cinematographer and production designer, people I've worked with on the first two films. I will refrain to answer that question until after film number five.

Now that the series has ended, what was it like acting in the greatest television drama in history?

You mean "Boston Public"? [laughs] Yeah, it was great. It's funny, David Simon called while I was editing my movie and offered me the role. I couldn't resist because I loved "The Wire" so much, but I remember my agent and I thinking, "Oh, this could not come at a worse time." It may have been a little bit grueling, but it was such a pleasure to work on that show, and when you're working with writing of that caliber, you just have to show up and participate; the rest takes care of itself. It was a hell of a job, and I was really proud to be a part of that show.

As a director, you have so much more artistic input on a project, but you're far more identifiable as an actor. Is it strange being more widely recognized for "The Wire" than say, writing and directing "The Station Agent"?

It's great, I love it. The thing I like about my career comes from not being famous. I usually get stopped by people who think I work at their company, or we went to school together, or I mowed their lawn when I was younger. They rarely put it together that they've seen me on television or a film. I don't mind that, actually. Especially as a writer, when I'm doing my thing there, or researching, it allows me to disappear a little bit more. But it's always fun when people appreciate your work and let you know.

]Photos: Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman and Thomas McCarthy on set; Jenkins and Sleiman; Danai Jekesai Gurira and Hiam Abbass - "The Visitor," Overture Films, 2008]

"The Visitor" opens in limited release on April 11th.

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<![CDATA[Still Rolling: 40 Years of the Rolling Stones on Film - "The Rock and Roll Circus"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/still-rolling-40-years-of-the-1.php Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:15:41 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, from 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil" to last week's release of "Shine a Light," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn.


04082008_rockandrollcircus.jpgThe Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg

The Film: In order to promote their new album "Beggars Banquet" (whose recording we watched yesterday), the Stones put on a televised concert in December of 1968 featuring themselves and a couple of friends, all set inside a big circus tent and featuring real circus performers like a trapeze artist and a fire eater. At least, that was the intention; the Stones were ultimately so displeased with the finished film that they didn't release it for almost 30 years.

The Rolling Stones Are: Mick Jagger on vocals, Keith Richards on lead guitar, Charlie Watts on drums, Bill Wyman on bass, and, for the last time publicly, Brian Jones on maracas, rhythm and slide guitars. Looking a bit unsteady on his feet and meekly strumming his guitar, Jones is a striking and even unsettling physical contrast to the vivacious Jagger, who deploys his standard routine of preening and strutting (with the admittedly novel twist of peeling off his shirt at the coda of "Sympathy for the Devil" to reveal a large tattoo of Satan plastered across his chest). As in "Sympathy for the Devil," Jones is totally inaudible (save for some slide work on "No Expectations") and he is physically isolated from the rest of the band; in this case, cloistered all the way to the extreme right of the stage while the rest of the band stands together on stage left. It looks like he's got a disease and the rest of the Stones are afraid of catching it. Jones' performance and those from other musicians at the Circus who would go on to die young lends the film what Janet Maslin quite accurately described in her 1996 New York Times review as an "accidental poignancy."

With Special Guest Stars: The Stones' set is preceded by performances from a young Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull and a supergroup called The Dirty Mac consisting of John Lennon on vocals, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass, and Yoko Ono on shrieks and burlap sack. But best of all are The Who, who perform a turbo-charged rendition of "A Quick One While He's Away." On his DVD commentary track, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg acknowledges the rumor that the film was long kept out of circulation because the Stones were unhappy with their performance specifically as it compared to this unforgettable appearance by The Who. Though he doesn't confirm that's the reason it was ultimately kept from the public, he doesn't exactly deny it either.

Best Performances: The Stones do pale in the face of the thunderous might of The Who, in part because their performance was delivered at the end of a marathon 15-hour shoot. Even the indefatigable Jagger looks visibly groggy as the Stones kick off their portion of the show with "Jumpin' Jack Flash." But once the adrenaline starts flowing, they make out just fine, particularly on the then-unreleased "You Can't Always Get What You Want," with particularly emphatic vocals from Jagger (and tons of flirting with the camera). Speaking of which...

You Can't Always Get What You Want: According to Lindsay-Hogg, the Stones wanted "a band which was not yet famous" to kick off the "Rock and Roll Circus" and ultimately selected Jethro Tull to fill the spot. But before you give the band too much credit for their foresight and prescience, consider this — in picking Jethro Tull, they turned down another young band, because, according to Lindsay-Hogg, their sound struck Jagger as "very guitary." That runner-up? Led Zeppelin. Oops.

Keith Richards is Weird: All of the Stones wear goofy, circus-themed outfits, but Keith's getup is from a circus on Mars or something. He wears a top hat and jacket with no shirt (though, strangely, he does have a shirt collar), along with an eye patch, perhaps an indication of the impending pirate costumes that would help define his look as well as Johnny Depp's in a certain later Disney movie. Best of all? He smokes an enormous cigar as he encourages the audience to "dig" The Who. Keith Richards is weird. Then again, the worst outfit of the night belongs to Eric Clapton, rocking a grandma sweater so absurdly polychromatic it makes Bill Cosby's wardrobe in the 1980s look comparatively subdued.

Aftermath: An opening quotation from author David Dalton says that the "Rock-and-Roll Circus" "in many ways [captures] the spontaneity, aspirations and communal spirit of the entire era." Fair enough; it also captures some of its pervasive druggy weirdness, for both good and bad. It's the sort of devil-may-care creative energy that might bring together talented musicians like John Lennon and Eric Clapton, only to have them play second fiddle to a woman wailing incoherently at the top of her lungs. Plus, even when the performances sparkle, the film itself is a bit of a mess; lots of Jethro Tull's performance is overlit and out of focus, and great sections of the other supporting acts are marred by giant blobs of gunk floating on the edges of the camera lens. Whether you consider these markings of rock and roll authenticity or hazy, disinterested sloppiness may depend on your perspective on this particular endeavor; from my seat, it's sort of an interesting piece of history, a couple of great performances, and not much of a concert film. The Stones could, and would, do better.

[Photo: "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus," ABKCO, 1996]

Part 1: "Sympathy for the Devil"
Part 3: "Gimme Shelter"

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<![CDATA["The Night of the Shooting Stars," "Diva Dolorosa"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/the-night-of-the-shooting-star.php Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:29:52 -0500 04082008_nightoftheshootingstars.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

A distinctive force in European cinema for over 35 years, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani achieved from their first films an eloquent stylistic bridge between Rossellinian stringency and Fellinian braggadocio. Their movies are often framed like friezes, but the chaos of human whim always muddies the compositions. Appropriately, the Tavianis began as political barnburners, fashioning absurdist parables and sometimes cosmic commedia from Italy's lunatic flirtations with extreme movements. No European filmmaker has ever been as dedicated to their nation's peasant legacy, and no one on the continent since the '70s has made such potent and revealing use of their native landscape. Still, if the Tavianis' penchant for old-fashioned narrative folkiness has grown tedious over the last decade or two, there's still 1982's "The Night of the Shooting Stars," their premier achievement, and arguably the best Italian film of the '80s.

Right off the bat, with its framing device of a fantastical war story told by a mother to a sleepy child as the stars fall in the sky outside the bedroom window, the movie has the cut-to-the-point grip of a grim fairy tale. The narrative is an extrapolation of a real incident, retold as history in the Tavianis' first short, "San Miniato, Luglio '44" (1954), in which the villagers of the eponymous town obeyed the Nazis, took shelter from their supposedly bomb-rigged homes in the village's church and then were collectively massacred. In the brothers' re-imagining, a small mob of the peasants, following a laconic patriarch (Omero Antonutti), disobey the Germans and set out on foot in the middle of the night in search of the American forces.

Of course, the eyes through which we witness this anti-Odyssean journey belong to the narrator, who in 1944 was an impetuous six-year-old prankster in a print dress. And so the story itself is imbued with a child-like lyricism and irreverence — death comes and goes without much ado, hiding in the forest with 30 adults feels like nothing so much as a great game, and every disruption of the ordinary is a bolt of magical living. The Tavianis' details accumulate like special knowledge: the villagers shielding their ears against the pleading barks of their own dogs, left behind; the way the procession walks, arm in arm and chatting and free in the sunshine, the next morning; a dying girl's daydream of meeting Sicilian soldiers from Brooklyn; the way the villagers all sleep jumbled in a bomb crater, like mass grave victims waking up and stretching. This poetry crests in the film's climactic passage — a great, ironic battle of guns and pitchforks with Black Shirts in a vast wheat field, where no one knows who precisely the enemy is until they meet on their knees, nose to nose. "Even true stories can end well," someone says, despite heavy tragedy and scores of corpses, and so the Tavianis make their case, with an unimpeachable observational style and sense of the gritty absurd. "The Night of the Shooting Stars," defying genre but embracing comedy as well as horror, remains one of those rare movies that can inspire faith in living and history.

04082008_divadolorosa.jpgThe legacy of Italian cinema is the primary axe being ground in "Diva Dolorosa" (1999), making its long overdue appearance on DVD almost a decade after it dazzled authentic cinephiles at film festivals all over. Even so, it's a Dutch film, a found-footage assemblage constructed by professional archive plunderer Peter Delpeut ("Lyrical Nitrate," "The Forbidden Quest") out of footage from a particular genre of Italian silent films: the Black Romantic melodramas of the 1910s, in which tragically willful, independent fin-de-siècle aristocratic women self-destructed, dramatically and hyper-tragically, in the name of love. The genre, which pervaded other mediums as well, might be the first and last word on the communion between sex and death, and the clips Delpeut uses are chockablock with swoony melancholy and suicidal ardor. Despite their age, many of them look remarkably accomplished as pieces of cinema; perhaps the archives will eventually DVD-up complete editions of "La Donna Nuda" (1914) and "Rapsodia Satanica" (1915) (both of which star the Black Romantic Garbo, Lyda Borelli). But Delpeut is crafting a found-object poem here, with a rhapsodic orchestral score and a sure sense of how so much weepy, proto-campy mega-sadness can collect in your head as a statement about its own culture, and also as a palpably beautiful, tragic spectacle despite the odor of antique cheese. But of course, "Diva Dolorosa" is really about cinema itself, and therefore about lost time, and therein lies in deepest and loveliest sorrow.

[Photos: "The Night of the Shooting Stars," United Artists Classics, 1982; "Diva Dolorosa," Zeitgeist, 1999]

"The Night of the Shooting Stars" (Koch Lorber) and "Diva Dolorosa" (Zeitgeist) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Still Rolling: 40 Years of The Rolling Stones on Film - "Sympathy for the Devil"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/still-rolling-40-years-of-the.php Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:15:24 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, from 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil" to last week's release of "Shine a Light," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn.


04082008_sympathyforthedevil1.jpgSympathy for the Devil (1968)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

The Film: Godard captures the Stones during the recording sessions for "Beggars Banquet" in the summer of 1968 and charts the evolution of the song "Sympathy for the Devil" through a series of uninterrupted long takes. The Stones' progress is intercut with a series of vignettes about, amongst other things, black revolutionaries, an interview with a woman named "Eve Democracy," graffiti artists defacing public property with sarcastic slogans like "Cinemarxism" and "Freudemocracy," and a bookstore where people pay for their purchases of pornography and comic books by giving the shopkeeper a Nazi salute. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 1960s.

The Rolling Stones are: Mick Jagger on vocals and percussion, Keith Richards on guitar and bass, Charlie Watts on drums, Bill Wyman on bass and percussion and Brian Jones on guitar. It's the classic Stones lineup that first brought the group worldwide fame, but by this point, it was already close to the end. Jones, increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol, found his role in the band he started and, as legend has it, named (after glancing at a Muddy Waters album cover) shrinking. "Sympathy for the Devil" contains no interviews or commentary from the Stones, so a lot is left to interpretation; in light of Jones' firing from the group almost one year to the day from the events depicted in the film, it's easy to read a subtext into almost all of his appearances. Though Jones has moments of connection with the rest of the Stones, as in a scene where he shares a cigarette and some chit-chat with Keith Richards, most of the time he seems isolated from his bandmates. In some shots, he's playing acoustic guitar and there's no microphone set up to record him; in others, he's got a microphone, but his audio is buried deep beneath Richards' electric guitar riffs. During one scene, he delivers his take completely surrounded by veritable cage of soundproofing, an eerie representation of his outsider status. Shortly thereafter, he vanishes from the sessions completely.

With Special Guest Stars: The Stones are the only musical performers in the film, but in a key scene — the first time we hear "Sympathy" with the trademark chorus of "woo-woos!" — the camera pans behind Mick Jagger to reveal the refrain being sung by a group that includes Richards, Jones, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, though according to Wikipedia, the scene was phony, staged specifically for the camera.

Best Performance: My favorite moment comes near the end of the film,when the band and several studio musicians are jamming on an instrumental. Godard's camera glides past the guys and passes behind some soundproofing to spot a mysterious woman in a black suit, quietly tapping in rhythm on top of an upright piano. She gives a suggestive glance to the camera and eventually disappears behind the soundproofing panels as the band comes back into view.

04082008_sympathyforthedevil2.jpgYou Can't Always Get What You Want: Although the film hypothetically follows "Sympathy for the Devil" from its earliest incarnation to its finished form, Godard omits the crucial moments where the song transforms from a slower ballad into its classic, percussive boogie.

Keith Richards is Weird: Actually, to be fair, Keith Richards is pretty normal in this picture (especially when compared with some of the stuff we'll be seeing in the coming days), and his creativity and musical talent is never on better display in any of the Stones' movies as when he casually teases out the memorable "Sympathy" guitar solo in between takes. But consider this: In this film, and all the movies from this period, he's credited as "Keith Richard" without the "s." Though no definitive reason has ever been given for the temporary name change (Keith changed it back in the mid-'70s), it is said that it might have been done for cosmetic purposes. One website even claims that Stones management thought Richard-without-the-"s" was "more hip." It was also exactly one letter easier to spell.

Aftermath: "Sympathy for the Devil" was made during a particularly political period of Godard's career, and the half of the movie that dives into those waters is now almost entirely divorced from whatever contemporary relevance it had. At times, it's difficult to tell what was intended sincerely and what was intended satirically; the "Eve Democracy" segment, with its absurd interview questions ("Does marijuana do something to the sense of time?" "On LSD, do you begin to die a little?" "Is it urgent to replace the word culture with another one?") and one-word responses ("Yes" to all of the above) strikes me as particularly ambiguous. Today, the effect of all this weirdness is to cast the Rolling Stones in an unusually serious light. While a generation seems to be collectively losing their minds outside the studio, inside its soundproof walls, the band goes about its business with a pragmatic attitude.

It's possible to read the movie as a comparison between different segments of the youth movement who might hold up the Rolling Stones (as a call to arms for Satan on the one hand, or as an example of white oppressors stealing black culture on the other) and the band itself, which doesn't seem to be concerned with anything except making a catchy pop tune. As mentioned earlier, even though he's recording the creation of a single song from start to finish, Godard doesn't seem terribly concerned with fully charting its progress, leaving out the seemingly crucial period where its tempo congeals into the state we'd eventually come to know it as, and refusing to include a finished version of the track. He's ultimately more interested in the act of creation than what ultimately gets created — an idea he echoes in the way he repeatedly cuts away from his graffiti artists before they can complete their tags.

[Photos: "Sympathy for the Devil," New Line Cinema, 1970]

Part 2: "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus"
Part 3: "Gimme Shelter"

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<![CDATA[Seniors of the Silver Screen]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/ifc-news-podcast-72-seniors-of.php Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:22:50 -0500 Looking at the posters of the adorable New England senior citizens that make up the chorus featured in doc "Young@Heart," it's hard not to think about how, with the exception of rapping grannies, you just don't see people over the age of 65 in movies that often. Certainly not as the focus of a film -- which is why, this week on the IFC News podcast, we look over the small selection of features centered on older casts, and the films that seem specifically intended for the neglected 65-plus demographic.

Download: MP3, 26:45 minutes, 24.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9130 2008-04-07 09:22:50 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_72_seniors_of publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009130 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Seniors of the Silver Screen (photo)]]> Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:22:50 -0500 1009130 2008-04-07 09:22:50 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_72_seniors_of_photo inherit 9130 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/opening-this-week-7.php Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:00:00 -0500 04072008_bodyofwar.jpgBy Neil Pedley

Prom queens and street kings hold court this week at the multiplexes while the college professors of "Smart People" and "The Visitor" preside at the art houses.

"Body of War"
Talk show legend Phil Donahue hands over the mic to Iraqi war veteran Tomas Young in this hard-hitting documentary that contrasts Young's struggle to re-enter civilian life as a paraplegic and anti-war activist with archival footage of an overeager U.S. Congress and what the filmmakers view as their hasty decision to greenlight the invasion. Although the film, co-directed by Donahue and Ellen Spiro, was named best documentary of 2007 by the National Board of Review, "Body of War" has earned equal attention for its soundtrack led by two tracks from Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, with all proceeds going to the non-profit organization Iraq Veterans Against The War. (Check out our interview with Spiro and Donahue.)
Opens in New York.

"Chaos Theory"
Van Wilder continues to grow up, as Ryan Reynolds plays a neurotic control freak at the center of this colorful comedy from Marcos Siega, the man who brought us the provocative "Pretty Persuasion." When his compulsive organizing only succeeds in bringing his carefully ordered world crashing down around him, an efficiency expert (Reynolds) decides to live his life entirely in the moment by transforming his much-prized index cards that outline his daily routine into a random deck of chance. Stuart Townsend and Emily Mortimer co-star.
Opens in limited release.

"Dark Matter"
Premiering at the 2007 Sundance Festival where it picked up the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, "Dark Matter" follows Liu Xing (Liu Ye), an exceptionally gifted cosmology student from China who takes the U.S. scientific community by storm with his origins of the universe theories, but encounters unexpected resistance in the form of his jealous professor (Aidan Quinn), leading to events eerily reminiscent of the tragedies at the University of Iowa (which provided the inspiration for the film) and Virginia Tech. The controversial subject matter has led to more than a few changes for the film's opening date, but its pedigree is undeniable with Chinese opera and theater director Chen Shi-Zheng at the helm and Meryl Streep in a supporting role.
Opens in limited release.

"The Dhamma Brothers"
Filmmakers Jenny Phillips, Andrew Kukura and Anne Marie Stein head down to an Alabama maximum security prison to follow the "Dhamma Brothers," a group of inmates who undertake a 10-day Vipassana retreat involving silent meditation, introspection and self-discovery. While the effects of "dhamma" (the Pali term for "Dharma," or enlightenment) work to startling effect on the prisoners, the film also documents the valiant efforts to keep the program running in the heart of America's bible belt.
Opens in New York.

"Prom Night"
Nestled somewhere between non-alcoholic beer and solar-powered flashlights on God's desk, one might find this equally unnecessary PG-13 semi-remake of the 1980 slasher cult classic. Brittany Snow fills in for Jamie Lee Curtis as the platinum angel whose dreams of limos and corsages are hacked to pieces by a recently escaped sadist from her past who shows up looking for a little romance. Veteran television director Nelson McCormick helms from a script by J.S. Cardone, who last brought us "The Craft" for dudes with 2005's "Covenant."
Opens wide.

"Smart People"
After wisely dropping out of the less than impressive "Ring Two," acclaimed commercial director Noam Murro made this oddball comedy his feature directorial debut. Dennis Quaid stars as a pompous English professor who receives an extended visit from his estranged brother (Thomas Haden Church) that spurs him to try to rebuild his dysfunctional family, which includes a pre-"Juno" Ellen Page as Quaid's preppy, genius daughter and Sarah Jessica Parker as a fragile former student who finds her way back into her old professor's life.
Opens wide.

"Stalags"
Financial journalist turned documentary filmmaker Ari Libsker explores one of Israel's dirty little secrets and the 50-year-old misconceptions surrounding it with this investigation of "Stalags," a notorious series of 1960s dime novels (named after the German P.O.W. camps) that depicted pornographic S&M stories centering around the abuse of allied soldiers at the hands of luscious female Nazi officers. Libsker's film explores the origins of the books and their cultural impact on a generation of adolescents growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust.
Opens in New York.

"Street Kings"
With everyone from Oliver Stone to Spike Lee attached to the project at one point or another, it finally fell to "Training Day" scribe David Ayer to follow up his directorial debut, "Harsh Times," with another stylish tale of gangland Los Angeles, sprinkled with a dash of noir mystery. Keanu Reeves stars as Tom Ludlow, a cop devastated by his wife's death who is forced to turn to the criminal world for help when he is framed for the murder of a fellow officer. Reeves is front and center of a strong ensemble boasting the likes of Forest Whitaker, The Game, Common, and, er, Hugh Laurie.
Opens wide.

"The Take"
Reportedly shot guerrilla-style with no sets in the Latino neighborhoods of Los Angeles for a mere $800,000, "The Take" follows Felix De La Pena (John Leguizamo), an affable armored car driver shot in the head during a heist. Waking up brain-damaged and more than a little unhappy that he's apparently the robbery's chief suspect, De La Pena vows to track down those responsible. Josh and Jonas Pate, who first hit the indie scene in 1997 with "Deceiver," collaborated on the script for the film, which is directed by first-timer Brad Furman.
Opens in Los Angeles and New York.

"The Visitor"
Thomas McCarthy, the acclaimed writer/director of the 2003 indie smash "The Station Agent" returns for his second feature with this tender tale of Walter Vale, an isolated, aging academic from Connecticut whose weekend trip to New York becomes a life-changing experience when he discovers an illegal immigrant couple that has taken up residence in his apartment. Coen brothers regular Richard Jenkins takes the lead as Vale in a film that manages to both serve as an intimate character study and questions America's priorities in a post-9/11 world. (Check out our interview with Jenkins.)
Opens in limited release; expands on April 18th.

"Young@Heart"
Everyone at some point or another has dreams of being a pop star on the world stage. Stephen Walker's curious documentary shows that some of us harbor that dream a little longer than others. "Young@Heart" takes us inside the singular world of a New England chorale populated entirely by senior citizens who regularly rock out hits from the likes of The Rolling Stones, James Brown and Sonic Youth, to name but a few. Walker tags along on for the final weeks of rehearsal before this truly inspirational group and their musical director, Bob Cilman, hold a concert in their hometown of Northampton, MA.
Opens in limited release.

[Photo: "Body of War," Film Sales Company, 2007]

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<![CDATA[The New York Underground Film Festival's Last Hurrah]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/the-new-york-underground-film-1.php Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:14:08 -0500 As film festivals proliferate like strip malls in nearly every city on the globe, say sayonara to the seminal anti-fest fest, the New York Underground Film Festival, giving up the ghost and closing shop after 15 years of courageously struggling to commercially showcase the inherently uncommercial. Over the years the fest has been the nation's premier landing zone for every type of film no one else would show: screaming punk sci-fi, optical abstractions, found-footage statements, transgressive fiction features, counter-culture homage, post-Waters camp, video installations, ageless-teen rebellion, radical politics and what have you. It's been a sack full of fighting rats every year as festival dockets go, but that's been part of the festival's charm and, frankly, its necessity, abetting and fueling as it has an entire secret film culture that has always had a hard time finding screens, and will now find times only tougher.

As usual, the fest this years favors shorts over features — "feature-length" being a construction of the marketplace, after all — although Thomas Bender's "Hoopeston" is a sharp-eyed and ironic portrait of a small, NIMBY Illinois town beset by an influx of Wiccans; the Vice boys' "Heavy Metal in Baghdad" punches out your lights limning the pressurized lives of the war-torn city's only headbanger band; James June Schneider's "The End of the Light Age" adeptly evokes a comatose hyperfuture by way of relentless tedium (even with Lou Castel in the house); and Josh Koury's "We Are Wizards" offers up a queasy but endearing look at extreme Harry Potter fandom, including the perfectly awful phenomenon of wizard rock.

The shorts, from time immemorial the best-suited form for "underground" cinema, or underground anything really, play with fire. Amid works from vets like Leslie Thornton, Jem Cohen, Michael Almereyda, Peggy Ahwesh and James Fotopoulos, there's Kevin Jerome Everson's "Playing Dead" — a found-news-footage minute-and-a-half as painful as a dull knife used quickly — and Ahwesh's sublime "Beirut Outtakes," pieced together from old, decaying reels of American films, Arabic pulp, trailers, underwear commercials, etc., found in an abandoned theater in the titular city. Hito Steyrel's "Lovely Andrea" follows the filmmaker's investigation through the bondage-porn industry of Tokyo to find a trussed-up photo she'd modeled for 20 years earlier; unfortunately, Steyrel's simplistic political points are made with a flat shovel. Takeshi Murata's op-art loop "Untitled (Pink Dot)" is a rapturously sludgy orgasm of oozing pixels (I only watched it once), while Jennet Thomas's "Black Tower" shorts smack too much to me of a tourist jaunt through Lynchistan.

04042008_californiablue.jpgThere's no resisting, however, Abbey Williams's "CALIFORNIA/blue," which essentially crafts a Joni Mitchell music video from surreptitiously-shot scenarios played out in the fake rooms of an IKEA store, nor John Smith's "Dirty Pictures," which begins and ends in a Jerusalem hotel room with mysterious moving ceiling tiles, but embraces the entire dilemma of Palestine in the process. Almereyda's work-in-progress "Paradise" sticks to my skull wall, though, because it is unfinished — an off-hand diary film of inconclusive real moments and minor ecstasies, often shot in night vision, the pieces we get climax in Pleasantville watching a pale Jersey girl in the ghostly video shadows trying to catch fireflies. What more could you want?

[Additional photo: "CALIFORNIA/blue," Abbey Williams, 2007]

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<![CDATA[The New York Underground Film Festival's Last Hurrah (photo)]]> Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:14:08 -0500 1009055 2008-04-04 13:14:08 closed closed the_new_york_underground_film_1_photo inherit 9055 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[When Major Leaguers Play Themselves: "Safe at Home!" and "Seinfeld" - The Boyfriend]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/when-major-leaguers-play-thems-4.php Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:30:52 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of the start of the 2008 baseball season, IFC.com has been paying tribute to the national pastime's long relationship with the movies every day this week by giving you everything you'd ever want to know about the odd little quasi-autobiographical ditties in which baseball players have played themselves. Peanuts and crackerjacks not included.


04042008_safeathome.jpg"Safe at Home!" (1962)
Directed by Walter Doniger
As Themselves: Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle

Game Story: A young baseball fan living in Florida named Hutch (Bryan Russell) boasts to his Little League team that his inattentive father is, in fact, best friends with Yankee greats Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. When his teammates call his bluff, Hutch hitches his way to Fort Lauderdale and sneaks into the Yanks' spring training complex, where he's befriended by — who else? — Maris and Mantle, over the objections of coach Bill Turner ("I Love Lucy"'s William Frawley). Though the Bronx Bombers admire Hutch's determination, they refuse to return home with him in order to teach him a lesson about the dangers of lying, shortly before they throw all that out the window by inviting Hutch's Little League team to train with the Yankees back in Fort Lauderdale. And thus did a generation of young baseball fans learn that it's okay to run away from home, break into private property and harass baseball players.

On-Field Achievements: Maris is best remembered for breaking Babe Ruth's record for the most home runs in a single season with 61, much to the chagrin of many in baseball, including those who would have preferred that the record belong to Mantle, who was then the most popular Yankee. The record has since been broken twice more, first by Mark McGwire in 1998 (70) and then by Barry Bonds in 2001 (73). Mantle never did top the Babe, but he still holds the career records for the most home runs and RBIs in the World Series.

On-Screen Achievements: Does sheltering a minor who's run away from his loving family count as an achievement?

Errors Committed: In his attempt to convince Bill Turner not to turn their underage guest over to the authorities, Mantle tells the coach that Hutch reminds him of a bunch of kids "who couldn't get enough of baseball and used to follow the players around wherever they went," implying that he and Maris were boyhood chums, a blatant fabrication probably designed to combat reports in the press that the two didn't get along at the time. Not surprisingly, there's no mention made of Mantle's legendary off-field debauchery, though the movie does pause long enough for a few maids at the Yankee hotel to look at a framed picture on the Mick's nightstand and remark, "That Mr. Mantle sure has a lovely family!"

Discoveries: Based on the brief glimpses we get in "Safe at Home" — since the movie takes place during the spring, there's lots of conditioning drills and not a lot of competitive play — Mickey Mantle may have had the prettiest swing in baseball history.

Substitutions: The rivalry between Maris and Mantle during the 1961 season and the fight to claim Babe Ruth's record was captured, with a good deal of eloquence, by Billy Crystal's telefilm "61*" (the asterisk represents the one that was allegedly going to be placed after Maris' record by Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick because he accomplished the feat in eight more games than Ruth). Mantle was played by Thomas Jane, Maris by Barry Pepper.

Final Score: Baseball fans would expect Maris to be a poor actor — he was quiet by nature and never particularly good with the press — and he doesn't disappoint. But it's a bit surprising to see that the famously magnetic Mantle perform about as badly. Sure, he's got that great smile, but his line readings are delivered just as blandly as his less photogenic co-star.


04042008_seinfeldtheboyfriend.jpgExtra Innings: "Seinfeld": The Boyfriend (1992)
Directed by Tom Cherones
As Himself: Keith Hernandez

Game Story: Jerry meets former New York Met first baseman Keith Hernandez in a health club locker room and the two become friends, much to the chagrin of Kramer and Newman, who claim that Hernandez spit on them after a particularly painful loss. Jerry and Keith's relationship is tested when Keith becomes interested in Elaine, while George is busy trying to extend his unemployment benefits by claiming that he's close for a job as a latex salesman at an imaginary company named "Vandelay Industries."

On-Field Achievements: Hernandez was a member of the 1986 Mets team that defeated the Red Sox for the franchise's second (and, thus far, last) world championship. As Jerry and George repeatedly mention, he played in the legendary "Game Six," where the Buckner Ball helped propel the Mets to the title. Though his bat was always strong, Mex's reputation wrests on the quality of his defense at first base, where he won eleven consecutive Gold Glove awards. From my subjective perspective, he had one of the best gloves of any first baseman and unquestionably, the single finest mustache of the 1980s.

On-Screen Achievements: Hernandez isn't a natural thespian — the former first baseman has recounted how "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David had to provide him with line readings for his immortal line "I'm Keith Hernandez!". But he's better than a lot of the other guys we've looked at this week, and he fits into the "Seinfeld" ensemble pretty nicely. He makes out with Julia Louis-Dreyfus (the action that prompts the aforementioned declaration) and takes part in the show's classic spoof of "JFK"'s "Magic Bullet Theory."

Errors Committed: Kramer and Newman explain that the infamous spitting incident took place on June 14th, 1987 after a home game against the Phillies. In fact, the Mets were in Pittsburgh on that date, where they beat the Pirates by the score of 7-3.

Discoveries: Roger McDowell — the real expectorant in Kramer and Newman's story — has five-tool saliva glands.

Substitutions: Sadly, there is no "Keith Hernandez Story" to speak of, and the 1986 Amazin' Mets haven't gotten their own movie yet, either. We'll have to keep our fingers crossed for that one — but hey, ya gotta believe. The Hernandez casting would be crucial to any such endeavor — that would be some big facial hair to fill.

Final Score: Hernandez's mustachular contributions help make the two-part "Boyfriend" saga one of the finest episodes in "Seinfeld" history.

[Photos: Poster for "Safe at Home!", Columbia Pictures, 1962; "Seinfeld" - The Boyfriend, Castle Rock Entertainment, 1992]

Part 1: Babe Ruth in "Headin' Home"
Part 2: Joe DiMaggio in "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round"
Part 3: Lou Gehrig in "Rawhide"
Part 4: Jackie Robinson in "The Jackie Robinson Story"

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<![CDATA[When Major Leaguers Play Themselves: "The Jackie Robinson Story"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/when-major-leaguers-play-thems-3.php Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:53:56 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of the start of the 2008 baseball season, IFC.com will be paying tribute to the national pastime's long relationship with the movies every day this week by giving you everything you'd ever want to know about the odd little quasi-autobiographical ditties in which baseball players have played themselves. Peanuts and crackerjacks not included.


04032008_thejackierobinsonstory.jpg"The Jackie Robinson Story" (1950)
Directed by Alfred E. Green
As Himself: Jackie Robinson

Game Story: "This is the story of a boy and his dream, but more than that, it is the story of an American boy and a dream that is truly American," an off-screen narrator says as we watch a young African-American boy walk down a suburban street. The boy grows up to be Jackie Robinson and the film shares his struggle to reach — and later be accepted as an equal by — Major League Baseball. That opening narration, as well as many of the conversations between Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey (Minor Watson) couch Robinson's efforts in patriotic terms. "We're dealing with rights here," Rickey tells one of his advisors. "The right of any American to play baseball, the American game."

On-Field Achievements: In his ten major league seasons, Robinson would play in six All-Star games, win one Most Valuable Player award, the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award, and help Brooklyn win its only World Series in 1955. Most importantly, of course, on April 15, 1947, he broke baseball's color barrier in a game against the Boston Braves. On the 50th anniversary of that day, Robinson became the first player to have his number retired league-wide in recognition of his contributions to the game.

On-Screen Achievements: Look, no one would ever mistake Jackie Robinson for Laurence Olivier. But Robinson's presence in his own life's story adds an incalculable sense of authenticity, particularly when he steps out on the diamond, where "The Jackie Robinson Story" gives as good a display of his remarkable physical abilities as I've ever seen. Unlike a lot of the movies that we're looking at this week, this one features lots of baseball footage and plenty of opportunities to see its star in action. Robinson was a notorious base-stealer and I particularly appreciated the opportunity to see him show off his patented hook slide.

Errors Committed: Rickey discovers Robinson while he's playing for a team named the Black Panthers. In fact, that was the nickname of Robinson's tank battalion during World War II. (Interestingly, Robinson never saw any combat during the war after he was court-martialed and honorably discharged after refusing to give up his seat on a segregated bus). Robinson spent his Negro League career with the Kansas City Monarchs.

Discoveries: It's somewhat astonishing to see such a powerful and direct movie about race from the year 1950; you'd expect this sort of film to come out least a decade later, when the political climate would be more receptive to this story. But having the courage to make a movie like this one — one that does not shy away from its subject's beliefs — was exactly what made Robinson so special. The film's stirring finale gives Robinson the chance to speak directly to the American people. He says "I know that life in these United States can be tough for people who are a little different from the majority. I'm not fooled because I've had a chance open to very few Negro-Americans. But I do know that democracy works for those who are willing to fight for it, and I'm sure it's worth defending. I can't speak for any 50 million people; no one person can. But I'm certain that I and other Americans of many races and faiths have too much invested in our country's welfare to throw it away, or let it be taken from us."

Substitutions: This autobiographical pic remains the definitive cinematic version of Jackie's life, but Robinson was played later by Blair Underwood (in a nice physical match) as a member of the ensemble of the 1996 HBO movie "Soul of the Game," a docudrama about how Robinson's exodus to the majors impacted Negro League stars like Satchel Paige (Delroy Lindo) and Josh Gibson (Mykelti Williamson).

Final Score: Like a fastball high and inside, "The Jackie Robinson Story" is blunt but effective. It would make an ideal film to show to school children learning about civil rights — they'd get excited by the baseball (and the idea that they're watching the real Jackie Robinson), which would make them receptive to the film's lessons, which are delivered clearly and passionately, and in just the right tone for a kid audience.

[Photo: Poster for "The Jackie Robinson Story," Eagle-Lion Films, 1950]

Part 1: Babe Ruth in "Headin' Home"
Part 2: Joe DiMaggio in "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round"
Part 3: Lou Gehrig in "Rawhide"
Part 5: Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in "Safe at Home!"; Keith Hernandez on "Seinfeld"

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<![CDATA[Wong Kar-Wai on "My Blueberry Nights"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/wong-karwai-on-my-blueberry-ni-1.php Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:01:36 -0500 04032008_wongkarwai.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

A master of impulses, images, textures and moments, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai ("In the Mood for Love," "Chungking Express") surprised many at last year's Cannes Film Festival (where, in the past, he won Best Director for 1997's "Happy Together" and presided over the jury in 2006) with his first English-language film. A luscious, dreamily romantic slice of road trip Americana, "My Blueberry Nights" features the acting debut of singer-songwriter Norah Jones, whose soul-searching wanderer Elizabeth may be on her way to iconic status, if only for that kiss — asleep in a diner with blueberry pie on her lips, love-struck proprietor Jeremy (Jude Law) cleans her face with his. Besides being shot in this country, the film also gave the acclaimed auteur a chance to be surrounded by different personnel: Rather than working with his longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle ("2046") — who went off with Gus Van Sant to shoot "Paranoid Park" instead — Wong broke in a new lenser, Darius Khondji ("Se7en," "The City of Lost Children"), and an exquisite supporting cast: Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn and Chan "Cat Power" Marshall. A somewhat intimidating interview thanks to his exalted career and ever-present sunglasses, Wong was gracious enough to sit with me in New York to discuss his new collaborators, "Ashes of Time Redux" and why his latest wasn't called "My Key Lime Nights."

I saw "My Blueberry Nights" in Paris a few months ago, a version that was apparently longer than the one hitting U.S. theaters. What's different about the new cut?

It's not much shorter. When we discussed it with the Weinstein Company, I think from an American perspective, there were a lot of things that could be [left] unexplained; it's understood already. We took out some [exposition] that was obviously self-explanatory to the American audience.

You seem to have a predilection for working with singers-turned-actors, like Leslie Cheung, Faye Wong and Tony Leung. Does this have anything to do with how Norah Jones became your lead?

No, no, the thing is, the process is actually different. I didn't create the role looking for actors to play it. Actually, the whole project happened during the summer a few years ago. I met Norah in New York, and somehow, we had an idea to make a film together. For both of us, it's something we haven't done before. For her, it's to be in a film. For me, [it's to] shoot the film in this country, in this language. So, then I created the story. Basically, for the role of Elizabeth, I took a lot of reference from her own spirit and character. She's the first [facet] to that character.

You co-wrote this with crime novelist Lawrence Block. How did your collaboration work?

I'm a big fan of Larry, and especially his books [with his popular private eye character] Matthew Scudder. Our collaboration is more like the business in his book, because we're very secretive. We didn't talk much; we didn't meet much. I explained to him about my idea and then he would just say "Okay." A few days later, he'd come back with a draft. We'd meet in a restaurant, and then I took it home and have my comments. We'd meet again, I'd pass it to him, he'd take it home, and a few days later, he'd turn out another draft. It's like a spy story. It's not like a director's and writer's session. It's more like he's a contract killer and I'm the agent, something like that. [laughs] We always deal in envelopes.

04032008_myblueberrynights2.jpgWas the process of making your first English-language film on American soil that different from what you've been accustomed to?

The process is not that different except there are certain rules to be respected, like the union regulations. Creatively, for me, because it's not my own language, my vocabulary and references are limited. I realized that, at the very beginning, you feel a certain stiffness, a [self-consciousness] about this process. Later on, you just think, "Well, you have to stick to what are the most essential things." It's like a telegraph because you're very economical in all these words and expressions, and it also opens up yourself to... you need to collaborate with your crew, so basically, I'm sending telegraphs, and they have to fill in all the blood and flesh and details.

You say "essential things" as if everyone knows how to make a film like Wong Kar-Wai.

I'll give you an example. When we talk about the kiss between Norah and Jude, my "essential" is that there will be a kiss at that point, because I think this is the moment that Jeremy is trying to reach over the distance between them and have physical contact with Elizabeth. I have to ask Jude, "Normally, the way you would do it in my country, the guy would touch the lips of the girl to wipe up this cream before he starts kissing," because this is the first intention — he wants to make sure she is clean and tidy. I'm not sure about Americans, what would you do? Jude said, "Well, we don't do it this way, we just go directly into the kiss." And most of the guys on the set [agreed]: "We would do it this way." But all the girls said, "No, we prefer that [other] way." So there was a debate, but we decided to stick to the original idea.

How different was your working relationship with Darius Khondji compared to Christopher Doyle? As Doyle is known for having a strong personality, did you guys clash more in comparison?

I've worked with Chris Doyle since my second film, almost 15 years. When we work together, we try to do something that's not our standard old tricks. I know exactly where he's going to place his camera, and he knows exactly where I'm going to start the scenes. So we try to do something different each time. With Darius, because this is the first time we've worked together, and Darius has great respect for Chris's works, he'd always want to know, "Oh, what would Chris do [if he] shot this scene?" I'd say, "Darius, forget about Chris. You should do something on your own. I'm not going to tell you." [laughs]

You're premiering a re-edited version of "Ashes of Time" at Cannes. Were you previously unsatisfied with the cut that premiered in 1994? Why revisit it now?

A few years ago, we realized the master of the film was locked somewhere in pieces. So we were trying to save the film, to get material from other distributors to restore the master. But later on, when we opened this Pandora's box, we could see a lot of possibilities [to rework it]. Basically, you have to decide: Is it only a restoration, or are you going to do something differently? This is what we plan to do next.

04032008_myblueberrynights1.jpgWith "Ashes of Time Redux," and all of your films for that matter, is it difficult to stop tinkering with it? When linearity isn't your primary concern, how do you know when you're ultimately satisfied?

When it's time to let go, I don't look back, and I start another project as soon as possible. One thing I remind myself is that I don't want to Photoshop my past. Today, I could do a lot of things with this film, but it's not necessarily true to the idea that I had at that point. I just want to complete that version, because when we released "Ashes of Time," it was not in the best of conditions, so I tried to preserve that. During the process, we also discovered something we hadn't used or hadn't thought of at that point. I'm trying to put these things together, and I'm really curious to see how the film turns out.

Do you ever find time to watch films?

I watched, like, five films on the plane to New York. I watched "No Country for Old Men," which is a very nice film. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was also very nice. I don't have a specific genre, "I only like this kind of cinema." I really enjoy watching films and as long as it's sincere, that's fine.

As a filmmaker who has been working long enough to see the transition firsthand, what do you think about cinema in the digital age? Is the glut of new and portable media failing cinema in any way?

Well, I think all this — the digital platform — gives more chances, exposure and opportunities for art and independent films. Because I'm very traditional, I still think in terms of screens and film footage, and when I work, my final destination is to put the film on the big screen. But obviously, when I look at my son, it's a different perspective. They have all this information on the Internet, on digital [media], so I'm sure there will be a [great] future on this platform. In a way, it will change a lot about the form, something that has been defined in the last 40, 50 years [in terms of] durations and expressions. I'm quite curious to see what is going to happen. I don't want to be a grumpy old man or too pessimistic, because if I have a chance, I would prefer to watch a film in the cinema with an audience on a big screen instead of watching it on a cell phone. It's a very different experience, but somehow I think this form will have its own future and life.

Lastly, what makes blueberry pie so cinematic? Why not key lime pie, or a parfait?

Actually, I found that blueberry pie is not very cinematic because the color is so dark. I had to put all this [whipped] cream and melting ice cream on it. I must say, too, it's very challenging to present flavor on screen.

[Photos: Wong Kar Wai on set; Norah Jones and Jude Law; Norah Jones and Natalie Portman; "My Blueberry Nights, Weinstein Company, 2007]

"My Blueberry Nights" opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 4th.

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<![CDATA[When Major Leaguers Play Themselves: "Rawhide"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/when-major-leaguers-play-thems-2.php Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:12:22 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of the start of the 2008 baseball season, IFC.com will be paying tribute to the national pastime's long relationship with the movies every day this week by giving you everything you'd ever want to know about the odd little quasi-autobiographical ditties in which baseball players have played themselves. Peanuts and crackerjacks not included.


04022008_rawhide.jpgRawhide (1938)
Directed by Ray Taylor
As Himself: Lou Gehrig

Game Story: Celebrated ballplayer Lou Gehrig announces he's through with the game and is moving out west to live on his sister's farm and become a cowboy. "I'm gonna wallow in peace and quiet for the rest of my life!" Gehrig vows to the incredulous reporters who come to Grand Central Station to see him off. But when he arrives at the family homestead, he discovers some hoodlums have turned the local ranchers' association into a protection racket. Gehrig teams with a local singing lawyer/cowboy/pugilist (Smith Ballew) to clean up the town. Yes, that's right — the Lou Gehrig Western is a musical, too.

On-Field Achievements: Until he was diagnosed with the crippling disease that now bears his name, Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games, a record that stood for more than half a century until Cal Ripken Jr. broke it in 1995. But the Iron Horse was more than some guy who just played every day — he still holds the records for the most runs scored and driven in by a first baseman, as well as the record for the most career grand slams by any position player — 23.

On-Screen Achievements: As you'd expect, Gehrig smashes the evil syndicate and does it in style. In one major fight scene set in a saloon, Gehrig, who performs a healthy portion of his own stunts, takes out the bad guys by hurling pool balls at their heads. Later, when a bunch of goons keep him from seeing his sister, who's about to be coerced into signing a contract to join the syndicate, he gets her attention by finding a bunch of local kids, commandeering their bat and ball and busting the villain's window with a well-placed liner.

Errors Committed: If only this movie were true, and if Gehrig, who passed away in 1941 at the age of 37, had been able to live out his retirement sitting on his sister's porch in a rocking chair. In reality, his decline was brutally swift; When "Rawhide" was filmed in the winter before the 1938 season, he had no physical symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Within months of opening day, Gehrig's illness had already begun to significantly affect his performance. For a player who prided himself on consistency, it was a devastating blow. Gehrig retired a little over a year later.

Discoveries: The final title card reads "The characters and events depicted in this photoplay are purely fictional. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." So, apparently, Lou Gehrig was an invention of screenwriters Daniel Jarrett and Jack Natteford working in concert with a cabal of journalists and members of the New York Yankees organization.

Substitutions: Gehrig spent most of his career in the shadow of Babe Ruth, but in the cinematic arena, he's got the Babe beat. Ruth has had more features devoted to retelling his life story, but the one about Gehrig, 1942's "The Pride of the Yankees" with Gary Cooper in the lead, remains more popular than all of them put together and routinely appears on lists of the greatest sports movies of all time. (Moviefone.com recently ranked it #13 in just such an article.)

Final Score: Gehrig may well be the greatest acting baseball player to play himself in history. The film takes him well out of his element — allegedly, Gehrig never rode a horse before commencing filming on "Rawhide," yet onscreen, old Biscuit Pants is a charismatic and charming presence and even a gifted physical comedian. In one scene, he draws laughs with the exaggeratedly confused way he rides his horse ("Awfully... rough... road!" he groans to his traveling partner). Throughout history, baseball players have routinely been treated like movie stars and they've often looked like movie stars. But when actually got in front of the camera, they rarely acted like movie stars. Gehrig comes the closest.

[Photo: "Rawhide" poster, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1938]

Part 1: Babe Ruth in "Headin' Home"
Part 2: Joe DiMaggio in "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round"
Part 4: Jackie Robinson in "The Jackie Robinson Story"
Part 5: Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in "Safe at Home!"; Keith Hernandez on "Seinfeld"

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<![CDATA[Daniel Waters on "Sex and Death 101"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/daniel-waters-on-sex-and-death.php Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:25:21 -0500 04022008_sexanddeath101.jpgBy Stephen Saito

For once, timing is in the favor of Daniel Waters, the prodigiously talented writer behind "Heathers" who admits to "taking forever to write a script." Waters's latest film, "Sex and Death 101," opens in theaters April 4th, but the dark comedy actually begins on April 2nd, when a playboy (Simon Baker) is accidentally e-mailed a list of all his future sexual conquests before dying. While a life of musical lap dances and "an embarrassment of bitches" await Baker's Mr. Roderick Blank, so does a sense of mortality and ennui.

It's a bit reassuring to see Waters's second directorial effort arrive in theaters a week after many pondered the disappearance of John Hughes, whose earnest '80s teen classics were redefined by Waters's sardonic satire of high school life. In the years since "Heathers" was released in 1989, Waters turned a development deal with producer Joel Silver in the early 1990s into perhaps the strangest and most subversive run of studio action movies ever ("Hudson Hawk," "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane" and "Demolition Man") before returning to teen territory with the underrated "Happy Campers" in 2002, a film he never intended to direct. That isn't the case with "Sex and Death 101," a film that bears Waters's trademark wit as well as his "Heathers" star Winona Ryder as a feminist death dealer named Death Nell. I recently sat down to Waters to discuss his reunion with Ryder, his writing process and how originality became a dirty word.

When you get a clever line in your head, is that something that lingers in your head long before it finds its way into the script?

I'll do anything to not write — like I won't open up my computer. I have to write everything by hand. I call it collecting acorns, writing these scribbles..."embarrassment of bitches!" It ends up collecting over time, and then when I sit down to actually start to put my little scraps of paper in order, I have this dialogue. To me, it's worth cooking the chili that much slower in order to get that extra flavor. I think it's funny that a lot of books about how to write a screenplay [teach] the importance of structure. That's like a book about horseback riding that says you need a horse. You shouldn't even start anything until you have the structure down. But these little individual bits [are] what's fun for me to write and makes [my movies] unique.

But unique can be used as a pejorative too. "It was unique. It was original." I find that people, especially in the world of independent film, like originality as long as it's an originality they're comfortable and familiar with. "What's this real originality thing going on?" "Wait, you have like five different tones. That's against the law."

04022008_danielwaters.jpgHow did this movie come together?

Obviously, it's a long journey, this 15 years away I call the "island of misfit toys" part of my life — I was working on bigger movies doing rewrites, and I ended up inadvertently being hired to put giraffes' heads on rhinoceroses' bodies. I had to force myself to break away from the studio films, which are kind of like having sex wearing 50 condoms. "Sex and Death 101" is this conscious thing of going back to the basics, to my Ralph Nader side where I open up the newspaper and say, well, as a consumer advocate, what movie's not out there that I'm not seeing? With "Heathers," it was like a high school movie that didn't end with them saying when you grow older, your heart dies... because your heart dies way before then. (laughs)

I wanted to do a movie about sexuality, because there was a realm in the '70s that I think is missing now. Independent films seem to be very punishing about sexuality — nobody seems to be enjoying themselves, it's like "Oh my God, I've had sex with my daughter!" or something like that. On the other end of the scale, you've got these immature ejaculation movies about boobies that have nothing to do with actual sex. Mainstream comedies don't even have sex. They just run after a cab at the end and the sex happens during the closing credits.

I wanted to go back to "Shampoo" and "Carnal Knowledge" and "Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice," popular movies that dealt with sexuality, but in a way that was still humorous. I liked the idea of that kind of movie, but it was important that I update the zeitgeist of it all. Back in the '60s and the '70s, the men were still playing offense and now, I think we're playing defense. The world has overwhelmed the typical male. The one realm of sexuality I didn't mention [is] Judd Apatow's. I think they're terrific films, but he's got a very comforting thesis that men are these sex-obsessed beasts, but if you just scratch the surface, they're warm and fuzzy inside. I've got a less popular dictum in my film that a man can be well-adjusted, mature, and remembers Valentine's Day and to complement your haircut, but you scratch the surface and he's still a sex-obsessed beast.

You have a great foil for your leading man in the character of Death Nell. Did you write the part for Winona Ryder?

When I started writing the script, she was going through her troubles, so I did think it was a great idea because people didn't know where she was coming from and I liked that. It dovetailed into the character quite nicely because it's a character that you think is one way, but is really another. I didn't want the man-eating Angelina Jolie femme fatale that would eat you up and spit you out. I wanted to have that threat out there looming, but then when you actually meet the character and there's this sweet wobbly human being playing it, you know there's no more femme fatale out there. It's like a role she's feebly trying to take on, just like he tries to take on his role of the guy that's got it all together.

04022008_sexanddeath101a.jpgBesides Ryder, how did you attract such a strong supporting cast?

It didn't hit me until I was actually filming that, except for Mindy [Cohn], there are no supporting characters in the movie. When an actress shows up on the set, she's the lead of the movie — it is almost like ten different movies, [each] with a new female lead, so they bring their A-game because they don't feel that they're scenery. Obviously, I made the movie before "Good Luck Chuck" [which has a similar premise about a womanizer] came out, but I knew there was going to be a movie like that, and I didn't want to make it. I didn't want that montage sequence, the dreary cavalcade of Maxim whores. I wanted it not to be a movie about a guy who just bam, bam, bam, fucks a lot of women, that the women are fucking him as much as he's fucking them.

Was it actually a conscious decision on your part to direct your own scripts at a certain point or did it just work out that way?

I was very obstinate about [it] — "Oh, don't worry. I'm not the guy that wants to direct" — when I was starting out, and it was great because I'd been so prepared that they always ignored the writer. But "Heathers" is one of the few movies where they put a spotlight on me and taped sparklers to me, so I was getting credit. It's funny that what you think is the most simple, littlest detail that you put in a script — and my scripts are very thick and dense — gets lost in translation, and it can be one stroke if the writer is also the director. I'm never going to be quite comfortable directing — I think I did a good job this time around. I had a $12 million film school course called "Happy Campers," but I still think the writing process and the editing process are the warm cave, and that directing is like me with a spear trying to kill a woolly mammoth. But it's exciting, and it is where the movie gets made, and so if you really want to be a filmmaker, you can't kid yourself that you're going to have this pristine [experience], because nothing goes through a gang bang more than a script, so it's just good to be there.

[Photos: Winona Ryder in "Sex and Death 101"; Daniel Waters, Simon Baker and Sophie Monk; Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2007]

"Sex and Death 101" opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 4th.

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<![CDATA[When Major Leaguers Play Themselves: "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/when-major-leaguers-play-thems-1.php Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:40:21 -0500 By Matt Singer

In honor of the start of the 2008 baseball season, IFC.com will be paying tribute to the national pastime's long relationship with the movies every day this week by giving you everything you'd ever want to know about the odd little quasi-autobiographical ditties in which baseball players have played themselves. Peanuts and crackerjacks not included.


04012008_manhattanmerrygoround.jpg"Manhattan Merry-Go-Round" (1937)
Directed by Charles Reisner
As Himself: Joe DiMaggio

Game Summary: This mostly tepid musical revolves around a bunch of mobsters who take over a record company and then use their muscle to convince a bunch of popular acts to play for them, which precipitates musical performances in the film from Gene Autry, Cab Calloway and Louis Prima, who actually performs on a working merry-go-round planted on the middle of a nightclub dance floor. DiMaggio's in the wrong place at the wrong time; he shows up late to a radio show and is mistaken for his own replacement (cue the clown hooter). Unable to explain the mix-up to the Italian stereotype who runs the radio show's orchestra, he reluctantly croons a few lines of "Have You Ever Been In Heaven?" before the mistake is clarified, a few shots of the 1936 World Series flash and DiMaggio makes an early trip to the showers.

On-Field Achievements: The Yankee Clipper is best remembered for his remarkable 56-game hitting streak from May 15 to July 16, 1941. To date, no one's even come within 10 games of eclipsing the mark. DiMaggio played 13 seasons, all of them as an All Star, took the Yankees to the World Series 10 times and won nine of them.

On-Screen Achievements: ...are, in contrast, comparatively mild. I wouldn't want to hear DiMaggio sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," let alone warble a rendition of a Peter Tinturin and Jack Lawrence ballad. He doesn't fare much better when he's not singing either; DiMaggio isn't even very convincing signing autographs, something he should have been able to do without much direction.

Errors Committed: Only those against better judgment.

Discoveries: DiMaggio met his first wife, actress Dorothy Arnold, while on the set of "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round." The marriage was as uneven as DiMaggio's performance. He'd later go on to marry and then divorce Marilyn Monroe, all in less than a year.

Substitutions: Joltin' Joe has never gotten his own film, but his likeness appeared on screen throughout the years whenever someone makes a movie about Monroe, such as the Emmy-nominated HBO biopic "Norma Jean & Marilyn" where two different actresses played Monroe, before (Ashley Judd) and after (Mira Sorvino) her rise to stardom. There, DiMaggio is played by Peter Dobson. His most famous on screen appearance so far has been in name only, in the lines of Paul Simon's song "Mrs. Robinson" from Mike Nichols "The Graduate," which asks "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / A nation turns its lonely eyes to you." Perhaps, but when Joe himself sang in "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round," the only thing he was turning was stomachs in the audience.

Final Score: As performances — and movies — go, DiMaggio and "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round" is a golden sombrero.

[Photo: Poster for "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round," Republic Pictures, 1937]

Part 1: Babe Ruth in "Headin' Home"
Part 3: Lou Gehrig in "Rawhide"
Part 4: Jackie Robinson in "The Jackie Robinson Story"
Part 5: Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in "Safe at Home!"; Keith Hernandez on "Seinfeld"

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<![CDATA[Revenge of the Nerd: The Rise of Simon Pegg]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/revenge-of-the-nerd-the-rise-o.php Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:50:37 -0500 04012008_simonpegg.jpgBy Neil Pedley

Last week finally saw the U.S release of the long-delayed directorial debut of David Schwimmer, "Run, Fat Boy, Run," a comedy about a directionless loser running a marathon to win back the woman he jilted at the altar. While not dreadful, the film hews terribly close to the standard rom-com formula, with each crippling setback and pivotal redemption of its archetypal players arriving exactly as it has in a hundred films before. "Run, Fat Boy, Run," does have one inimitable thing going for it that singlehandedly carries it to someplace approaching enjoyable. That thing is its star, Simon Pegg, for whom "Run, Fat Boy, Run" is but a blip on his upward trajectory from obscure cult television in Britain into one of most sought-after comedic actors in the business.

Pegg's hardly the first to attempt the transition from Britain's small screen and the global market, but he's one of the few to have succeeded in establishing himself as something beyond a passing curiosity. It's partially timing — Pegg's become one of the representative faces of the geek-as-the-new-cool. He began his career as a stand-up comic in London, and was quickly drafted by Channel Four to help develop a series of new comedy shows, most notably the anarchic '60s satire "Hippies" and the darkly sardonic sketch comedy show "Big Train." Through these series, Pegg met much of the ensemble that would feature so prominently in his later film work, along with his long-standing writing partner and director Edgar Wright. Pegg and Wright, along with Jessica Stevenson, went on to create "Spaced," the series that confirmed Pegg as one of the singular comedic voices of his generation.

"Spaced" followed Tim and Daisy, two directionless twenty-somethings who pretend to be a couple in order to secure a lease on an apartment. The show employed a blend of classic sitcom precepts, calculated surrealism and a non-stop homage to movies and television that also served as a drawing board for things to come — an episode where Tim takes speed and mistakes an art scene crowd for zombies after playing Resident Evil all night was a dry run for "Shaun of the Dead." This brilliantly observed series ran for two seasons and stands as a fine confirmation of how popular culture has become a universal language.

Part of Pegg's great appeal comes down to the fact that he's an unabashed nerd of the highest order, a Dungeon Master of movie trivia and a Gandalf of pop geekiness. The two features he co-wrote (rather than just adapted), "Shaun of the Dead," the story of a man trying to win back his ex in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and "Hot Fuzz," a buddy cop film set in a bucolic village, smack of a man who's likely forgotten more about genre cinema than most will ever know. But Pegg's is a uniquely inclusive nerdiness, one that has nothing to do with a self-delusional sense of superiority stemming from encyclopedic knowledge of some obscure corner of music, television or movies. He wants nothing more than you for to get the joke or spot the reference.

04012008_simonpegg2.jpgTo Pegg and his creative partner Wright, the line between real life and film is simply a question of emphasis and presentation. They hone in on those universal moments in life that are inherently cinematic and frames them in a genre code or a homage that we can all come together with and appreciate. For instance, a group of demoralized restaurant workers having their self-esteem slowly eroded by the condescending speeches of a passive-aggressive boss might indeed feel like they're in one of Nurse Ratched's sessions in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" — a parallel made in another episode of "Spaced" — and the only difference between that and what most of us suffer through daily is the absence of a seven-foot-tall Native American to throw a washbasin through the window.

It's this eagerness to seek out the absurd parallels between life and fiction and have us laugh not only each other but ourselves that separates Pegg and company from the previous wave of fanboys-turned-filmmakers, epitomized by Kevin Smith. While they have plenty of reference points in common (Smith has done "Scooby Doo" and "Spaced" sent-up plenty of "Star Wars"), Smith prefers the mocking exclusion of those he deems less worthy (according to Clerks II; those who obsess over "Star Wars" are cool, while those who obsess over "Lord of the Rings" are losers). Smith's pop culture barrages can come across as self-indulgent, dialogues done for his own benefit in a kind of quest for validation. Pegg and Wright's work is always clearly about audience enjoyment first, and trying to reach out, safe in the knowledge that pop appreciation is not some kind of competition — a collective experience for the many, not an elitist one for the few.

Also important to realize is that while they're riotously funny, "Hot Fuzz" and "Shaun of the Dead" don't lampoon the works that were their inspiration. They aren't spoofs — while their comedic momentum is founded on an chaotic quality, both film play entirely by the rules and tick all the requisite boxes of the genre to which they belong. They're at heart a pure exercise in overindulgence, an excuse to gorge on guilty pleasures at the behest of Pegg, a leading man whose sincerity and gleeful enjoyment of the work explodes off the screen like a particularly gratuitous exit wound. This respect for the work, combined with the giddy excitement of a schoolboy, generates his infectious charm and widespread appeal.

"Run, Fat Boy, Run" might fall well short of what we have come to expect from Pegg, but the fact is it wasn't his show this time around — while he shares a writing credit, his role in scripting the film was revealed to be little more than to retool the pre-existing script to ease the transition from New York, for which is was originally written, to London, where it was eventually shot. Pegg's strength as an actor is in his reactive qualities to the world around him and the ridiculous situations he and his troupe imagine themselves into. "Run, Fat Boy, Run"'s London feels lazily painted over an unmistakable New York sensibility (antique piano stores, high-rise apartment block parties, spin class), which makes it all the more challenging for the characters to have any sense of authenticity. But even saddled with some depressingly unimaginative material, Pegg manages to make do with physical comedy, and to stretch the visual gag of a pair of short running shorts a long way.

Next up for Pegg is his highest profile role yet, as Scotty, the iconic chief engineer of the starship Enterprise in J.J. Abrams "Star Trek." It's one that may see him forced to leave his comfort zone for, arguably, the first time, as early indications are that Abrams is looking to inject a sobering sense of realism into his vision of the final frontier. I'm looking forward to what will likely be a stern test of Pegg's acting chops, as he looks to boldly go where no geek has gone before.

[Photo: "Run, Fat Boy, Run," Picturehouse, 2008; "Shaun of the Dead," Focus Features, 2004]

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<![CDATA["The Ice Storm," "Mélo"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/04/the-ice-storm-melo.php Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:45:00 -0500 04012008_theicestorm.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

On its surface, Ang Lee's career has been distinguished by a seemingly aimless ricochet between nations and milieus (Taiwan, New York, Wyoming, Devon, Shanghai, Connecticut, etc.), and between adapted disparate source materials (Jane Austen, Rick Moody, Annie Proulx, Wang Du Lu, Stan Lee) — and from both perspectives, you can find something to carp about. Indeed, Lee is rarely considered in serious debates about contemporary heavyweights, and his cultural rootlessness (read: opportunism) and dependence on literature may well be the reasons. We commonly like our auteurs to come packaged as purebred cultural expressors, and as artists largely independent of old narrative voices. But Lee's case can also demonstrate, movie by movie, the irrelevance of location, and the depth-finding force of deft adaptation.

"The Ice Storm" (1997), newly Criterionized, makes the point with a cudgel: Lee may have been Taiwanese, but his first all-American movie couldn't have been more American. Neither did its attentive filmization of the Moody novel ever seem archly literary, or uncinematic. Bizarrely underrated and unawarded in its day (not a single Oscar nomination, though it did net a Cannes trophy for screenwriter James Schamus), the film on its face is a melancholic but bemused Mona Lisa portrait of a very particular time and place: wealthy Connecticut bedroom communities in the early '70s, when polyester suits were in, Nixon haunted the airwaves, cocktails flowed like monsoon rainwater, and the sexual revolution began to sour the lives of restless suburbanites. Focusing humanely yet sardonically on the implosion of a prototypical upper-middle class suburban family, it's the kind of scrupulously adult, deeply imagined piece of work Hollywood should be able to generate regularly (and used to, in the '70s); as it is, and despite the big name cast, it was pure indie. The time capsule details are formidable — from the leisure suits to the "Fantastic Four" comics to the old fashioned levered ice trays, "The Ice Storm" is a masterpiece of anthropological reincarnation. (Give it points, too, for the most convincing bong hit in film history.) What unfolds amid the martinis and "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" paperbacks is less of a story than a multiple character study: the affable dad (Kevin Kline) equally bewildered by his affair with a trendy neighbor (Sigourney Weaver) and his slowly disintegrating family, the mom (Joan Allen) lost somewhere between girlhood and disillusionment, the rebellious daughter (Christina Ricci) experimenting with shoplifting and mock sex with the neighbor's boys (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), the sweet-natured son (Tobey Maguire) impassively grappling with puberty. It's Thanksgiving weekend 1973, when Watergate rages on the TV and the worst ice storm in 30 years hits the East Coast, a metaphoric arena for the family's eventual rendezvous with tragedy.

Lee is adept, as few other directors are today, at limning inexpressible emotional tumult, which here pertains to every character, creating a frustrated web of incident and cross purposes that culminates, in more ways than one, with Kline and Allen's unhappy attendance of a suburban-roulette swingers' party. The key to "The Ice Storm"'s ambiguity and unexpected depth is the fact that the events of the story mean wholly different things to different characters — there's no moral, just life sliced like a loaf of bread. What sticks most clearly to your skull are the lyrical moments, from Ricci impulsively donning a rubber Nixon mask for her first awkward dry hump, to the awful silent slide of a boy's prone body down the ice-covered street. Of course it's an actor's movie, giving Kline one of his genuine opportunities to really etch out a character, but from the moody opening of the night train spinning its wheels on the frozen track, it's the peaceful, pensive gaze of Maguire, still only a mysteriously hypnotizing teen star-to-be, that pulls the strands together into a single poetic statement about family, about the '70s, and about America.

04012008_melo.jpgAnother neglected auteur, French New Wave vet Alain Resnais has crafted a career that few critics and cinephiles know how to approach — he began as the movement's fashionable philosopher, with years of high-culture shorts, and then the epochal smart-cool splash of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" (1959) and "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961). But then Resnais, always inquisitive and original, pursued theatrical intellectualism and metaphoric science fiction, and quickly used up the collateral he'd established with international art film audiences. The '80s saw a Resnais renaissance, insofar as the director's touch got lighter and less pretentious, and his attraction to movies-as-gameplay became clearer. Kino has released four of this unpredictable and energetic master's '80s films, two of which — "Love Unto Death" (1984) and the Gerard Depardieu-starring "I Want to Go Home" (1989) — have never been released in this country, even on video. The burning heart of the set, though, is "Mélo" (1986), a four character proto-melodrama (hence the title) based on a 1929 French play that in itself appears intent on boiling down the basic elements of romantic tragedy into a three-act iconography. There's Marcel (André Dussollier), a famed concert pianist, visiting the domestic home of his conservatory-era pal Pierre (Pierre Arditi) and his young, elfin wife Romaine (Sabine Azéma). Marcel is a heartbroken loner despite his success, while Pierre is content and devoted. It's Romaine that transforms, in the space of one long conversation, from a devoted spouse into a manipulating femme fatale, and from there, the sexual and emotional entanglements of the three (Fanny Ardant shows up later as the fourth, less crucial wheel) careen through betrayal, mental instability, marital espionage, suicide and even attempted murder. It's an enveloping experience, filthy with rich talk and fascinating performances (you underestimate the cyclonic Azéma, and then you don't), and Resnais captures it in breathtakingly long, fragile takes, emphasizing the play's theatrical nature only enough to suggest the theater's quaint inadequacy in truly conveying the firepower of romance and agony on display.

[Photos: "The Ice Storm," Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1997; "Mélo," Kino, 1986]

"The Ice Storm" (Criterion Collection) and "Mélo" (Kino) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[When Major Leaguers Play Themselves: "Headin' Home"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/when-major-leaguers-play-thems.php Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:47:04 -0500 03312008_headinhome.jpgBy Matt Singer

Baseball players and movie stars aren't all that different, really. They both entertain people for a living. They both make obscene amounts of money. Fans want autographs from both. And certainly, many movie stars have wanted to be baseball players — just last month, Billy Crystal risked potential humiliation by playing in a spring training game for his beloved New York Yankees.

In his one at bat, Crystal struck out, which is kind of fitting considering that in the few times that big-time major leaguers have ventured onto the silver screen, the results have generally been equally unsuccessful — despite the fact that these men have often played themselves, roles they really should have had more than a passing familiarity with. Then again, Hollywood has so often mangled the truths of these guys' stories, who's to blame them for looking so lost in their own lives?

In honor of the start of the 2008 baseball season, IFC News will be paying tribute to the national pastime's long relationship with the movies every day this week by giving you everything you'd ever want to know about these odd little quasi-autobiographical ditties. Peanuts and crackerjacks not included.


03312008_headinhome2.jpg"Headin' Home" (1920)
Directed by Lawrence C. Windom
As Himself: Babe Ruth

Game Summary: An old codger from George Herman Ruth Jr.'s hometown of Haverlock reminisces about the Babe's rise to stardom from the right field stands of the Polo Grounds. Through flashbacks, we see Babe, a town misfit who towers over everyone he meets, help his foster sister, Pigtails (Frances Victory), out of a few mild scrapes. Eventually, a traveling baseball squad comes to town to challenge Haverlock's best. Babe isn't permitted to play, but an illness on the opposing team forces him into the their lineup, a development upon which he wins the game with a prodigious home run. Unfortunately for Babe, that drives a wedge between him and the rest of the community (as in they chase him through the streets with pitchforks). Ultimately, Babe's heart and his newfound baseball stardom endear him to the townspeople.

On-Field Achievements: Do they even need mentioning? Look at it this way: A lifetime .342 hitter, Babe Ruth remains the only guy in history who could hit .393, win the Most Valuable Player Award and consider it an off year. Two seasons earlier, Ruth hit for a lower average (a paltry .378) while knocking in 59 home runs and a staggering 171 RBIs. By the way, he also had 16 triples. That's four more than Jose Reyes had last season.

On-Screen Achievements: As if he's Paul Bunyan or something, Babe actually chops down a tree and spends half the movie whittling it down into a workable, if impressively massive, bat. He also tosses one character he doesn't like into a lake with such nonchalance, it's flabbergasting. Those old newsreels of Ruth show him hitting the ball, but you never get to see where they land, so watching him just manhandle his co-stars like they were made of cardboard really gives a good sense of how this guy could routinely launch balls 450 feet into the air.

Errors Committed: Practically too many to mention. Though the film purports to be the true story of the Great Bambino's formative years, it bears almost no resemblance to his real life. If there is a real Haverlock, Ruth isn't from there; he was born in Baltimore, and grew up mostly in a reformatory. He didn't have any foster sisters, and I'm guessing he got his bats from Louisville Slugger just like everybody else. It's also worth noting that while "Headin' Home" was made after Ruth had spent just one year with the Yanks, no mention is made of his time with the Boston Red Sox. Interestingly, the film is produced by an entity called the "Yankee Photo Corporation." Hmm...coincidence?

Discoveries: Growing up in Little League, the one thing you never wanted the other kids on the team to see you do (other than kissing your mom goodbye when she dropped you off at practice) was choking up on your bat. This was a sign of great, unforgivable weakness; you were better off using your little brother's T-ball bat than choking up on the one the coach gave you. What, then, to make of Ruth at the plate in "Headin' Home" where he visibly chokes up every time he gets his hands on a piece of lumber? If only I knew about this movie when I was 11 — a lot of mockery could have been avoided.

Substitutions: Though the Babe's popped up in small roles here and there (Ruth even played himself again in the Lou Gehrig biopic "The Pride of the Yankees"), he only took center stage in two other films, where he was played by other actors: 1948's "The Babe Ruth Story," in which he's portrayed by William Bendix, and 1992's "The Babe," featuring John Goodman and a gelatinous layer of flop sweat as the Sultan of Swat.

Final Score: As biography, "Headin' Home" is just about worthless. As a silent comedy, it's not terrible, and the always charismatic Ruth manages just fine in his role; the fact that he didn't need to worry about dialogue doesn't hurt him either. The picture ends with a beautifully edited Ruth at bat. As the pitcher looks in, there's a flurry of close-ups: Ruth's feet in the batter's box, his meaty hands gripping the bat, and a shot focused on his eyes peering intensely into the camera, with the rest of the frame blacked out. Cut back to the pitcher as he winds up and with an effortless swing, the ball is launched and the game and movie is over.

[Photos: Babe Ruth in "Headin' Home," 1920; Poster for "Headin' Home]

Part 2: Joe DiMaggio in "Manhattan Merry-Go-Round"
Part 3: Lou Gehrig in "Rawhide"
Part 4: Jackie Robinson in "The Jackie Robinson Story"
Part 5: Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in "Safe at Home!"; Keith Hernandez on "Seinfeld"

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<![CDATA[Gambling on the Movies]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/ifc-news-podcast-71-gambling-o.php Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:59:08 -0500 "21," which is based on the true story of a group of MIT students who used a card-counting system to win millions of dollars in the Vegas casinos, isn't the first film to tackle gambling as a topic... and it's doubtful anyone would call it the best, either. But gambling, whether it be on cards, dice, horses or other people, is tough to capture on screen. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at "21," the plague of the poker fad on screen, and a few gambling films that get it right.

Download: MP3, 29:44 minutes, 27.2 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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9017 2008-03-31 09:59:08 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_71_gambling_o publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1009017 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Gambling on the Movies (photo)]]> Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:59:08 -0500 1009017 2008-03-31 09:59:08 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_71_gambling_o_photo inherit 9017 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/opening-this-week-6.php Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:52:18 -0500 03312008_flightoftheredballoon.jpgBy Neil Pedley

This week is something of a nostalgia trip with a period comedy, Freddie Prinze Jr. and a concert documentary about a group of men who, by all the laws of man and nature, should not still be alive and walking around.

"The Flight of the Red Balloon"
After being nominated for the Palme d'Or an incredible five times at Cannes, it's no wonder that director Hou Hsiao-hsien has become a Francophile. In his first film outside of Asia, the "Three Times" auteur directs the country's first lady of cinema, Juliette Binoche, in a story about an overburdened mother who receives a much-needed lift from her son's Chinese nanny (Song Fang) as they turn the City of Lights into a magical playground for the 7-year-old Simon — a tribute to Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short. In French with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Jack and Jill vs. the World"
"Kiss the Bride" director Vanessa Parise corrals a cast of familiar faces to fill out what's been dubbed by the film's distributor as "a love story for cynics." If penning a relationship manifesto together is the new foreplay, then Freddie Prinze Jr. and Taryn Manning are well on their way as a couple who demand complete honesty from each other, only to have one keep a grievous secret with the potential to destroy what they've built. Ah, wasn't life easier when Prinze Jr. only had Matthew Lillard to contend with?
Opens in Los Angeles.

"Jellyfish"
Nominated for every category imaginable at the Awards of the Israeli Film Academy and the winner of a Golden Camera at Cannes, this poetic and reflective tale of three Tel Aviv women attending a wedding is the directorial debut of Israeli actress Shira Geffen and her husband Etgar Keret. The multi-stranded film about chance intersection and the struggle to find affection in an increasingly transient world recently played at the New Directors/New Films festival.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on April 25

"Leatherheads"
George Clooney takes a vacation from politics and global affairs to produce, direct and star in this screwball comedy about the growing pains of professional football in the 1920s. Clooney plays Dodge Connolly, the rogue captain of the Duluth Bulldogs, who drafts in college-star-turned-war-hero Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) to bolster his team's chances, though his plan backfires when Rutherford steals the spotlight and the affections of Renée Zellweger's impetuous sports reporter, Lexie Littleton. There should be some authenticity here since "Leatherheads" was written by Sports Illustrated scribes Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly.
Opens wide.

"Meet Bill"
Longtime producer Bernie Goldmann makes his directorial debut, along with co-director and writer Melisa Wallack, on this comedy, which stars Aaron Eckhart as a perpetual doormat who signs up to be a high school mentor but finds himself being given a crash course in self-esteem building by a mischievous schoolboy (Logan Lerman). Though casting of Eckhart as a loser goes against type, finding female leads was even harder as Amanda Peet and Lindsey Lohan left the project over "creative differences" before being replaced by the infinitely easier on the eyes Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Alba, respectively.
Opens in limited release.

"My Blueberry Nights"
This bittersweet tale of a group of strangers whose lives intersect and touch another across the length and breadth of the country opened last year's Cannes Film Festival, where some critics found it to be middle of the road. Yet the first English language film from Wong Kar-Wai features an all-star ensemble boasting the likes of Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachael Weisz, David Strathairn and Grammy-winner Norah Jones as a woman who attempts to find herself after a break-up. Ironically, Darius Khondji's dreamlike take on the American landscape has been cited as the film's biggest star, though Kar-Wai originally envisioned shooting "Blueberry" entirely in New York.
Opens in limited release.

"Nim's Island"
Seemingly typecast for years as Hollywood's female answer to the action hero, Jodie Foster takes great delight in lampooning her image as the capable woman who's cool under pressure in this endearing fantasy adventure directed by Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, the husband-and-wife team behind "Little Manhattan." Foster stars as the reclusive and agoraphobic author behind a series of adventure novels who must help her biggest fan (Abigail Breslin) find her missing father (Gerard Butler) in real life.
Opens wide.

"The Ruins"
From the guys behind "Blades of Glory" and "Dodgeball" comes... this bleak adaptation of the acclaimed horror novel by Scott B. Smith, the Oscar nominated writer behind "The Simple Plan"? While this might sound like another cheap spin on the torture porn riff that has all but killed the American horror film, Sundance alum Carter Smith (no relation) directs indie darlings Jonathan Tucker and Jena Malone from their idyllic Mexican vacation to scout out an ancient Mayan temple, unaware of the evil and malevolent spirits that exist there. Yes, Ben Stiller produces, but this still should be scarier than seeing Derek Zoolander in spandex.
Opens wide.

"Sex and Death 101"
The once stable, then crazy, now stable again Winona Ryder reunites with "Heathers" writer Daniel Waters on this dark comedy, which Waters also directed. Simon Baker fills in as Roderick Blank, a man who receives an email detailing every sexual encounter he will ever have. While he weighs the potential fun to be had with the advance knowledge of his conquests, his confusion is compounded when he encounters a mysterious femme fatale (Ryder) who punishes men guilty of crimes against women. Despite this reunion, there remains no official word on the much-touted "Heathers" sequel.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

"Shine a Light"
Two of the biggest icons in film and music combine as Martin Scorsese catalogues an unforgettable performance by The Rolling Stones at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2006. Besides having seven of the world's best cinematographers on hand to capture the riveting musical spectacle by one of the world's greatest rock 'n' roll bands, Scorsese also pulls back the curtain to reveal the logistical difficulties, the clash of egos and the staggering amount of planning and forethought that goes into creating such an event. However, as excited as we are to see the Stones, we might suggest that our pal Matt Singer sit this one out.
Opens wide and in IMAX.

"Tuya's Marriage"
Taking home the Golden Bear at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival, this slow-moving, scrupulously detailed portrait of nomadic Mongolian life is the latest film by Chinese director Wang Quanan. Frequent Quanan collaborator Yu Nan stars as the willful young Tuya, who takes it upon herself to search for a new husband who'll care for her and her current husband, who lost his legs and can no longer support his family. Quanan was so keen on casting his longtime leading lady Nan that even though the film is set in Mongolia, the entire film is in Chinese, Nan's native tongue.
Opens in limited release.

"Water Lilies"
Writer/director Céline Sciamma gently guides us through the hazy fog of female adolescence in the sensuous coming-of-age story of Anne, Marie and Floriane, three girls who endure a summer in the French suburb of Cergy during the 1960s by sticking close to the municipal swimming pool. Floriane is the attractive star of the synchronized swimming team who lures the awkward Marie in as her confidante, much to the chagrin of Marie's friend, Anne. The film first premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival where it was part of the Un Certain Regard section. In French with Subtitles.
Opens in New York.

[Photo: "Flight of the Red Balloon," IFC Films, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Kimberly Peirce on "Stop-Loss"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/kimberly-peirce-on-stoploss.php Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:39:58 -0500 03262008_kimberlypeirce.jpgBy Stephen Saito

In "Stop-Loss," the unaddressed enemies of the conflict in Iraq are the hidden costs of war — the post-traumatic stress disorder, the broken relationships with loved ones, the disconnect with reality at home. While Kimberly Peirce based the film on the experience of her brother's redeployment to Iraq after fulfilling his initial tour of duty, the "Boys Don't Cry" writer-director probably never envisioned making a war movie. Little did she know that it would be a fight on many different fronts.

After a nine-year hiatus in which she was asked to direct everything from an adaptation of Dave Eggers's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" to the grand scale "Memoirs of a Geisha," Peirce is returning to an unforgiving marketplace for complex dramas, never mind films even tangentially related to the war in Iraq. She's also re-entering the cultural conversation at a time when the Internet is a driving force. But Peirce has embraced all of it, first by incorporating YouTube videos of real soldiers into her story of three enlisted men who respond in different ways to returning home to Texas and subsequently discovering that they have been "stop-lossed" — in other words, they must serve another stint on the front. Beyond the production, however, she has engaged in an ongoing exchange of ideas and war stories on the "Stop-Loss" Web site, where she's fielded questions from Tucson to Tikrit in addition to posting video of her 24-city tour to promote the film. ("Stop-Loss" was in fact initiated from instant message conversations Peirce had with her brother while he was stationed overseas.) The battle-tested director explained to me how the Internet inspires storytelling and why "Stop-Loss" is anything but an Iraq War film.

After all the adaptations that you were offered to direct after "Boys Don't Cry," did it make sense that your follow-up turned out to be something personal?

"Boys Don't Cry" was this huge gift to me. I was in grad school, I fell in love with the story, the character — it was personal. I made the movie, was very fortunate, [and] thought, okay, every project I do is going to be this meaningful to me. [I] opened myself up to what was being offered to me in Hollywood and just didn't find it as deeply moving as something that came from me. Or if I did, I would walk in for the interview [and] it would be like "Wow, you're great. Your take is really amazing." And as we'd proceed, [it wasn't] necessary what they were wanting. I want to get to the heart of it and tear it apart and reveal what's underneath it and even though you're offering me millions of dollars and lots of access and I can make a movie, I can't do it unless it makes sense to me. So that was one reason for the delay.

The second one was that I fell deeply in love with another story, the William Desmond Taylor murder, the greatest unsolved murder of Hollywood. Robert Towne and King Vidor also tried to do movies on it. I cast Annette Bening, Evan Rachel Wood, Ben Kingsley, Hugh Jackman, was on the one yard line, ready to go — this was the end of '03, so we weren't too far out. The studio ran the numbers and they said, "Wow, we would love to see the $30 million version of this, but we only want to pay for the $20 million version. And we don't want to see the $20 million version."

03262008_stoploss1.jpgHow did "Stop-Loss" come about then?

The day that happened, I had already been working on this as an idea. I made a decision and said, for the next one, I'm not going to accept any development money. I'm going to use all my own money, I'm going to buy the tapes, I'm going to buy the camera. I just followed my curiosity and my passion, as I'd done on "Boys" and as I'd done on "Silent Star." The difference was that nobody owned the material. I owned it. So I did research all around the country, interviewed real soldiers, interviewed my brother who was fighting in Iraq, interviewed my mother.

I hooked up with Mark Richard, this great novelist from Texas, and we started working. He got a blowup bed, he lived on my floor and we wrote the script for 10 or 11 weeks straight. [Associate producer] Reid Carolin and I cut together footage from interviews with soldiers and the soldier-made videos. We handed a script to Hollywood on a Friday night, and we handed them this trailer, which had the sensibility: it was the YouTube generation — fix up a camera, film themselves, film their friends, and put it up on the internet. [These videos] had great music — rock and roll, Toby Keith, patriotic music. [They] had young people who were good-looking, charismatic and noble and fighting, bands of brothers. By Saturday morning, we had four studios who wanted to make the movie — not just buy the script. I didn't want to sell the script. I wanted to make the movie.

One of the striking things about "Stop-Loss" is how you mix media to tell the story. The film begins with choppy YouTube footage and by the end of the film, the orchestral swelling is reminiscent of old Hollywood melodramas. Did you feel that you were more free to experiment this time around?

In terms of music, like in "Boys," I used "Dead Man" as an inspiration: off-key guitar, rough rock and roll, drums, so all that rock music is going into this score. Every now and then, you've got your country/western. The counterpoint [to that] is the patriotic processional stuff that Brandon [Ryan Phillippe] hears in his head, calling him back to duty — that's going to be your snare drum and your military-type stuff, pulling Brandon back — family, duty and honor versus individualism, striking out, going across the country on a road trip.

The videos do the same thing. Here are boys turning the cameras on themselves, turning the cameras on their friends. That's going to make it rough, it's going to be handheld. I think we do that at four or five points in the movie. Then you have your more classical photography that [cinematographer] Chris Menges is doing in 35MM throughout. Hopefully, you're getting inside and outside their psyche and their experience.

03262008_stoploss2.jpgBesides the YouTube-type footage in the film, the marketing campaign for "Stop-Loss" has really embraced the Internet as a forum for discussion, where many real-life veterans have shared their experiences. Has that been as gratifying for you?

I love it. I think my deepest passion is being a director, but my other passion is telling stories and hearing stories. Did you see the post today, the woman who posted her beautiful husband who looks like Matt Damon and her little daughter? She's like, "He's done three tours, he's about to do his fourth. This has to stop." It's hugely gratifying. The Internet is transformational to our culture and our society, and I love that it puts the power of communication into the hands of the people. It's not just people passively looking at a television. It doesn't have the gimmicks of commercials, it's just story, story, story.

In some circles, the film has already been dismissed as "just another Iraq War" movie. Have you been affected by that personally?

It's not an Iraq War film. And certainly people have asked me is this going to be an issue, and I actually write about it on the [film's web site]. We've screened it in all these cities and so many people love the movie and what they say is "Thank you for making an emotional story. Thank you for making a story that's [about] this generation." We've had vets stand up at nearly every screening, like last night, and say "This is authentic" or "This is the story of my generation." I mean, look [points at the film's poster which features stars Phillippe, Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt sitting on the hood of a truck], it's a band of brothers. You haven't had that yet. Add Victor [Rasuk, who plays the fourth soldier in the squad who is wounded in battle] in there. You have these young people who are cast age appropriately. They're energetic. They're involved in engaging stories. It's not about the Iraq War. It's about coming home, connecting with each other and trying to connect with their families. It's exciting, it's moving, it's American.

[Photo: "Stop-Loss," Paramount Pictures, 2007]

"Stop-Loss" opens in wide release on March 28th.

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<![CDATA[Zak Penn on "The Grand"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/zak-penn-on-the-grand.php Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:32:57 -0500 03252008_thegrand1.jpgBy Michelle Orange

Four years after the release of "Incident at Loch Ness," a wily mockumentary with a big, German question mark at its center, writer-director Zak Penn returns with "The Grand," his friend Werner Herzog once again in tow, this time as a participant in a high stakes poker tournament. More forthright than "Loch Ness," Penn's comedy still balances the outrageous with the heartfelt, tapping the improv skills of a cast that includes Michael McKean, Judy Greer, Richard Kind and Woody Harrelson as the odds-off favorite. Penn found time in between working on "Section 8," a sci-fi series for ABC, and writing the script for a remake of "The Dirty Dozen" to talk about making a movie where he didn't know the ending, the German, and the conundrum of the mockumentary tag.

You said in an interview in 2004 that "Incident at Loch Ness" was more about making movies than searching for monsters, and that "the poker movie" [which became "The Grand"] would be about more than poker, but you weren't sure at the time what those other things would be. What did they turn out to be?

What I discovered is that the movie is actually about dysfunctional families. There are two themes — one is whether you believe in the idea of being lucky and how that dictates your life. Lainie [Cheryl Hines] accepts the fact that you can't control the cards and you can't control your family, whereas her brother [David Cross] believes that he can control everything around him. Jack [Harrelson] has given himself over to luck, he wants to believe he's helpless to do anything about anything. Harold [Chris Parnell] completely controls his environment. But the other thing the movie turned into is an exploration of families. I didn't even realize this until the movie was finished, but if you look at the relationship between Harold and his mother [Estelle Harris], or Gabe Kaplan and his kids, or Jack and his grandfather — most of the characters are struggling with some sense of the pressure of a previous generation. That became the heart of the movie.

So you started with a treatment for the film, and let the actors improvise and drive the details. Did the themes develop over time?

The luck thing is something I knew from the outset, so when we did the interviews with the characters, one of the first things I asked was "How do you feel about luck? Are you lucky? Are you skillful? Do you believe in luck?" I asked them questions hoping that it would make sense somehow to cut in later, which it did. On that level, I very intentionally went after a theme and tried to work it into scenes. But the family stuff, a lot of it came out in the improvs, and my job as writer/director is to say, "That was great, do that again."

The incredible irony of the movie is that, in playing the whole final table for real, and not knowing as a filmmaker what the ending was, we left the entire movie up to chance. The character who won was not who was set up to win. We said, whoever's character wins, wins in the movie and we shot 12 different endings to cover all the iterations of people winning or losing. It was all shot the way you would shoot a televised poker event. We shot with 10 cameras. I told everyone we're playing real tournament rules. If you get eliminated, you leave.

Did anyone have to learn how to play?

I think Chris [Parnell] had to learn how to play, he didn't know how. Dennis Farina knew a little bit, but he had to bone up.

03252008_thegrand3.jpgThe film has been described as being in the mockumentary mold, but you've talked about mapping the structure along the lines of "Spellbound," a pretty sincere documentary. "The Grand" is actually broader and has a bigger heart than what I'd consider a mockumentary. I wasn't sure you were actually mocking anything, except maybe geek-driven competitive documentaries.

Technically, mockumentary refers to a movie that's pretending to be a documentary and yet is making fun of them, like "Spinal Tap." And "Incident at Loch Ness" is a good example. That film is clearly a mockumentary, in that it's literally mocking the form of documentary. Yes, on some level "The Grand" uses mockumentary techniques, but if you actually watch "Best in Show" again, is it a mockumentary? There's no narrator, no person shown making the film. It's not structured like a documentary, it's structured like a story. Sometimes people are talking to the camera, but for the most part, people are acting in scenes and the camera just happens to be there. So, for example, in a scripted documentary like "Spinal Tap," there are no scenes that don't have a documentary crew as an implied part of the film. Would you call "JFK" a mockumentary because people talk to the camera? No, it's just a technique that [Oliver] Stone uses. Not to get too technical, but in "The Grand," the sit-down interviews are all part of the poker show [within the film]. It uses documentary techniques to tell a story, sure, but it's not a mockumentary, there's no implied filmmaker. 80% of the movie is just shot the way a movie would be shot.

What do you think the attraction of the format is to filmmakers, and what is the function (and future) of mockumentary in a culture that — at this point — essentially mocks itself?

Well, if there weren't sit-down interviews in "The Grand," would we be having this discussion? Would we call it a mockumentary? Do you call "The Office" a mockumentary? Ostensibly, there's a filmmaker there, but it doesn't seem like it because they never deal with it. I would argue that only two things in the movie make it feel like a mockumentary, the interviews and the kind of Ken Burns-ish photo montages that tell you about the characters. And the reason for both of those are purely production-oriented. The most efficient, cheapest and easiest thing to shoot when you're doing a low budget film are scenes of people talking directly to the camera. You can shoot for an hour straight with one set-up and get all sorts of usable footage with one camera and you can get around some of the editing problems you can have on a low-budget movie, which is you can't do re-shoots or ten extra set-ups. If I'd had more money, I would have ditched a lot of that. I'd have found a way to turn it into a regular scene. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that. It is an interesting issue — it's an aesthetic issue and there's also a very real production and practical issue behind it all.

In the film, Werner Herzog's character, the German, praises Las Vegas for being "a place without irony, there are only winners and losers." And Herzog is on record as claiming not to have a sense of irony — his character plays heavily into the sort of Herzog persona, did you have to convince him to do that?

Not at all. There was definitely some trepidation on his part before we did "Loch Ness," about what I was going to do — although not really, Werner's not the type, he'll go head first or not at all. But once he saw "Loch Ness" and saw how I was using his persona, how I was allowing him not to take himself seriously — which is something I think he longs to do — he likes being funny, and so it was pretty easy. Seeing Werner in this role, there's an extra bonus level of funny to it because it is who it is. But it really is as far removed from him as you can get, in terms of character. He's a very gentle, sweet guy, he's really friendly. But the idea of him as a frightening Bond villain — and that's the way I pitched it to him — was kind of perfect.

03252008_thegrand2.jpgHis introduction is pretty spectacular. It's like John Wayne in "Stagecoach," it's right up there with the classic entrance scenes.

That's more of a classic performance scene and a lot of Werner's part is like that. You just have to be quick on your feet and stay in character [in improv], and he can do both of those things. Particularly in German, he's really good in German. He didn't have a problem with it, but I'm not going to tell you that he could get up on stage with the Groundlings and be as good as David Cross.

What's your take on Vegas? The film seems ambivalent — you have Jack Faro trying to keep the old downtown alive amidst soulless overdevelopment, but the Vegas that the Dennis Farina character is nostalgic for involves 13-year-old hookers and racial segregation.

You've actually pinpointed another of the themes I had in mind originally, which was that idea of false nostalgia, which I pitched to [co-writer] Matt Bierman, who came up with the story originally. One of the things that always strikes me about Vegas is this sense that no matter when you go there, everyone's always longing for when it was better. It was better when the gangsters were there, it was better when it was classy, it was better when it was seedy...for a while, it was family friendly and people complained. Now, it's seedy again and people long for when it was family friendly. And poker is kind of like that too — that is the part of the film that is actually about poker. You talk to some poker players and they talk about how it used to be so much better, and how all of these internet players have ruined it. But the internet is what made poker so popular; before that, poker was just a game that was played in Vegas and a few other places, and in fact, it's kind of nice that poker has become a much more democratic game. We lived in Vegas at the Golden Nugget, which is something I felt very strongly about, for about seven weeks and shot there for four weeks total.

You've had a 15 year-plus poker game going — what's your attraction to the game? Is there a character who comes closest to you in style or attitude toward luck?

I believe that luck is an example of the human mind transposing order onto something that is inherently chaotic. For many people, luck has come to mean something that rubs off on you or sticks to you, like by sitting in a certain seat you can influence what's happening, whereas I firmly believe that you're perceiving a pattern in retrospect where there is none. I like poker because it's not just a game of luck — there's a lot of skill involved. And you can overcome the cards, unlike blackjack, where you just play against chance. Poker poses as a game of chance but is actually a game of strategy. I actually thought I was a better player before I made this movie. Once I had hung out with a bunch of pros, I learned I was not as good as I thought. But Lainie is the character who is most normal and grounded in her approach and is probably the audience surrogate. She has the healthiest attitude toward the game, so naturally I'd have to put myself in her boat. Either her or Doyle Brunson.

[Photos: Zak Penn on set; Dennis Farina and Hank Azaria; Werner Herzog — "The Grand" Anchor Bay, 2007]

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: René Pinnell & Claire Huie on "The King of Texas"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/sxsw-2008-rene-pinnell-claire.php Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:10:29 -0500 It was an oddly complementary pairing at SXSW when there was a mid-festival premiere of "Lou Reed's Berlin" followed by "The King of Texas," a documentary about indie film pioneer Eagle Pennell. Like Reed, whose sole album fronting The Velvet Underground inspired a host of imitators, Pennell is cited as an influence for not only filmmakers like Richard Linklater, who picked up Pennell's loose-knit aesthetic for "Slacker," but also for the likes of Robert Redford, who was said to have been inspired by the film to commandeer the U.S. Film Festival in Utah in order to make it a forum for regional filmmaking — now known as Sundance. Pennell made two films that suggested far greater things — the laconic, lived-in slices of life "The Whole Shootin' Match" in 1979 and "Last Night at the Alamo" in 1983 — before his struggle with alcoholism and other personal demons left him homeless and ultimately, dead mere days before he was to have turned 50 in 2002.

Although Pennell's work is largely unknown outside of Texas, his friend and restoration expert Mark Rance is hoping to change that with a DVD of "The Whole Shootin' Match," complete with a new documentary on Pennell made by his nephew René Pinnell and Claire Huie. But make no mistake, the resulting film, "The King of Texas" is far more than your typical DVD special feature. Insightful and pulling no punches, the film chronicles Pennell's adventures as a filmmaker who was immensely talented and unprepared for success, with interviews with Linklater, screenwriters Bud Shrake and Kim Henkel, and several other of Pennell's friends and collaborators. Pinnell and Huie spoke about capturing Pennell's larger than life personality shortly after their film's SXSW premiere.

You say in the film you didn't really know about Eagle's films until he died. When did you first discover them?

René Pinnell: I'd known before [Eagle] had passed away that he was a filmmaker, but I had no idea what kind of movies he made or where. When he died, [Austin Chronicle editor and friend of Pennell] Louis Black organized a retrospective screening of his films at the downtown Alamo Drafthouse. I watched his movies and I was blown away because they were really good. It was totally bizarre to me — I think I was 18 then and had already been making movies since when I was really young. I started doing animation when I was eight or nine, claymation and hand-drawn animation, and as soon as mini DV cameras came out I started working with those. [Filmmaking] had already been a huge part of my life by the time I found out that someone in my family actually made a movie that I liked.

03252008_wholeshootinmatch.jpgWas it a huge shock to find out that you were related to such an accomplished filmmaker?

RP: It was a neat connection, and I remember wondering why I never knew the guy. I knew the basic reason was because he was kind of a drunk and a bum for the later part of his life. But I didn't really understand why he was never a part of my life at all until I made the movie, because it was only then that I understood the full extent of how difficult my dad's relationship was with his brother. Before I was born, he and Eagle tried to write a film together. They were trying to write a western and my dad took it really seriously and worked hard and had a lot of hopes riding on it. Eagle would have some good ideas, but he could never sit down and finish it, and never gave the direction that my dad needed. So it fizzled, and I think after that it was just always painful for my dad to do anything with his brother, [for] that and a whole host of other reasons.

Because this is a personal story and you had so many family members involved in the making of the movie, were there things about Eagle that people shied away from talking about?

RP: Claire would probably be the best one to answer that because she was our barometer in terms of making sure that we were honest.

Claire Huie: There were scenes that were difficult, that initially, when Chuck [Pinnell, René's father and Eagle's brother] saw them in the edit, he thought we should take out. The scene where Eagle is at his [own] wedding reception and hitting on the [sister of his newly wedded bride], that was hugely painful for every Pinnell involved. At first, [Chuck] said "You have to take it out," and we decided to leave it in, because you really see just how delusional he is in that moment.

How receptive were people to talk about Eagle?

CH: I think people were very reticent to talk about the bad times, and I think there were a couple of people, like Lin Southerland [who starred in Pennell's "The Whole Shootin' Match"], who resisted for a long time just to do an interview.

RP: She never actually agreed to an interview. We showed up and were like "Can we at least film Chuck getting the [archival] stuff?" And that's why we did the whole interview in front of her little shed/barn.

CH: She started talking about everything, and I think it was definitely 15 minutes into the interview before she realized that she was being interviewed. [laughs]

What do you hope this will ultimately say about Eagle's legacy?

RP: I think the first thing that comes to mind is the myth that he created around himself — the larger-than-life tall tales of Eagle being ridiculous and crazy and drunk, and I think that totally overshadows the fact that he made two good films — "The Whole Shootin' Match" and "Last Night at the Alamo," and even his short, "Hell of a Note." It wasn't just caricature. There was a man behind that who had complexities and depth. He could be a terrible asshole, but he also had a different perspective.

He made some good films, they influenced some people and then the rest of his life is really just a cautionary tale. I think everybody that makes movies can see a little bit of themselves in Eagle, because it takes a lot of those traits. It takes the ability to pull a group of people together and put your film and often yourself ahead of everyone else, because it's such a hungry baby that you have to feed. I think that selfishness goes hand in hand with filmmaking, and knowing more about [him] has shown me pitfalls I think I'll be able to avoid more effectively now that I've seen his whole life play out and I know it's not the road I want to go down.

[Additional photo: Eagle Pennell's "The Whole Shootin' Match," Watchmaker Films, 2006]

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: René Pinnell & Claire Huie on "The King of Texas" (photo)]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:10:29 -0500 1008938 2008-03-25 12:10:29 closed closed sxsw_2008_rene_pinnell_claire_photo inherit 8938 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Anthony Minghella]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/ifc-news-podcast-70-anthony-mi.php Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:23:04 -0500 03242008_anthonyminghella.jpgBy Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

British playwright, screenwriter and Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella passed away last week at the early age of 54. Best known for glossy, classy literary adaptations like "The English Patient" and "Cold Mountain," the director maintained throughout his brief career a focus on class and on pressures that arise from being an outsider struggling to conform. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look through Minghella's six theatrical features and the themes to which he always returned.

Download: MP3, 34:41 minutes, 31.7 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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8970 2008-03-24 11:23:04 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_70_anthony_mi publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008970 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Anthony Minghella (photo)]]> Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:23:04 -0500 1008970 2008-03-24 11:23:04 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_70_anthony_mi_photo inherit 8970 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro on "Body of War"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/sxsw-2008-phil-donahue-ellen-s.php Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:09:11 -0500 03242008_bodyofwar1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

"My gold standard for the length of the movie was 85 minutes, which, by the way, is the length of 'March of the Penguins'...and I missed it by two," muses Phil Donahue, a day before his first film, "Body of War" starts its national theatrical run. "But we have longer credits, I think."

Donahue can't be faulted for thinking big. After a career spent in the homes of millions of Americans on his groundbreaking talk show, he's hoping that just as many will see his first documentary, "Body of War," in theaters — and not because of the box office. It's the former television host's first time working in the medium, his first time working with a partner (in co-director and Austin-based documentarian Ellen Spiro), and his first time on the road raising awareness for the film. But it's all been worth it to Donahue, who was compelled to find a way to tell the story of Tomas Young, a young man who enlisted in the military shortly after 9/11 and came home from Iraq paralyzed. Instead of letting his disability ground him, Young becames an anti-war activist, but as Donahue and Spiro will tell you, this isn't just another anti-Iraq war doc — "Body of War" is an examination of courage, from the average American citizen to within the highest levels of government. While in Austin for SXSW, Donahue and Spiro spoke about the response to the film, getting Eddie Vedder on board to write a song, and how Michael Moore ruined the ending of their movie.

What has the film festival circuit been like?

Phil Donahue: It's been a rush, as you can imagine. This is an odyssey that all of us have embarked on. We had no idea where this film was going to go. I knew that, when I met [Tomas] at Walter Reed, I didn't want to just pat him on the head and say goodbye. I just got very, very lucky with this ridiculous idea that I would make a movie. I got lucky in the choice of Ellen Spiro — she's been fabulous. I got lucky with Eddie Vedder. Eddie jumped out of the cake — "Phil!" "Eddie!" "Eddie, I'm doing an anti-Iraq war documentary." He says, "You want a song?" And I just..."Are you kidding?" And [Tomas's] family was good luck for us. It's a heartland family split in the middle: red and blue [Tomas's parents are of different political persuasions]. The reception that we've been getting has been very encouraging.

Ellen Spiro: You never really know what it is until you share it with an audience, so we never tire of that. I guess we never tire of it because the response has been good. [laughs] We're dealing with this stigma of people thinking they know our story before they see it because there have been so many Iraq docs. They don't get how different it is and that it's really a human story that happens to be an Iraq story too. It's a great feeling to see people be very genuinely moved and touched and want then to do something. That's the experience I had meeting Tomas.

03242008_bodyofwar2.jpgPD: I took the film to Bob Graham of Florida, two-term governor, three-term senator, recently retired. He's a "no" voter [against the war resolution] in our film. And he turned around after it was over and said, "This film should be seen by every college and university in this country." That's when we said, maybe we've got a chance here.

We're all intimidated by the fabulous work that's out there. In a lot of ways, I feel a little green watching some of these films — they're so well done, well cut, compelling. We're not saying we're better, we're saying we're different. Nothing in our film goes boom. There's no archival [footage], no moderator. It's a story. I had said to [Ellen], "Show the pain. Let's not sanitize this war." What you see in our film is a drama that's happening in thousands of homes in this country, and nobody sees it. This administration thought they were going to have a merry little war. And we now have thousands [wounded] — almost 30,000 people — many of them with hideous injuries.

Rage is the obvious emotion when seeing someone come home in the condition that Tomas did, but that doesn't always translate into an effective film. How did you not let the rage take over?

PD: First of all, we had a responsibility to the family to tell their truth. Their truth, not ours. And we're very pleased that we did. There's no pretense in our film. No hotdogging. It is what it is and you see it. And Ellen and I, co-directors? Can you imagine me a co-director? All my life, I've worked alone. But a lot of the disagreements that we had, the creative collisions that we had, resulted in a better film. I knew even before I embarked on this that one person can't make a film. You need the collaborative creative process and we exploited that notion to the fullest because Ellen was firm and I was firm. All the 29 years I was on the air, I was surrounded by producers who often disagreed with me and talked back, and that was always fine with me. Because I knew their motive was a better program and the same thing [was true] here.

ES: [Phil] was very involved in all aspects of it. He watched every second of footage I shot, which was really scary to me at first. [laughs] It's like somebody going through your underwear drawer or something — "Wait! Nobody watches all the raw footage. Especially not Phil Donahue. The assistant editor does that!" But he was entirely hands-on and committed to the process. He spent more time in the editing room than I did. And I would go off to Kansas City alone, usually, and try to capture the real intimacies of Tomas's story because I knew that the film had to be different to stand out, but I also knew that in order to reach people, you have to get intimate, so that's what we did.

PD: It isn't preachy. It isn't a rant. I showed the film to Sy Hersh and he said, "This film makes me angry." And I said, "Well, you flatter us. We hope it does the same to other people."

Ellen, in the Q & A that followed the film's premiere here at SXSW, Tomas had mentioned you were hesitant to "jump on the anti-war documentary bandwagon." What was it about Tomas' story that you found so compelling?

EP: I was so transfixed by Tomas that for a while, I just wanted the focus to be on Tomas' story and not to bring in the congressional debate. I changed my mind on that when we found a creative solution for how to blend the two elements because Tomas was a big fan of Robert Byrd. He was the main spokesperson against the war. He was the main guy in this footage of the congressional debate. So when we found a way for Tomas to actually meet Robert Byrd and Robert Byrd came off of the TV footage of CSPAN and into our story, that's when we all kind of united behind these elements in the film and that's where I realized well, it's going to be a better film for this.

03242008_bodyofwar3.jpgHow did Sen. Byrd get involved in the project?

PD: I asked him. I saw what he was doing. [In the film, Byrd screams on the Senate floor] "The life of your son may depend upon it." I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This guy is begging his colleagues, begging, [to admit] this is not constitutional. So I was on the phone with that office for a long time. I had a hard time getting in. Finally, I got in and I showed him some of the choruses of the congressional stuff we had cut. I said, "I want you to meet Tomas." My idea was to film Tomas and Senator Byrd going across the floor of the atrium of the National Archive building in Washington in which chamber is located the real Constitution, the actual, original document. And the next morning, it was canceled because of the Michael Moore effect. If you're the GS controlling the government facility and you permit the filming of a scene that winds up in a movie that embarrasses the administration, you may be looking for work. People were burned in Washington by "Fahrenheit 9/11," and Michael Moore, to his credit, I think certainly has been the single most hated person in the White House. Not only did he do this film that embarrassed the administration, but people went to see it. So the legacy of Michael Moore lives in Washington and I was burned by it. [Ultimately, the end of the film takes place in Sen. Byrd's office.]

Even before the national release of the film, do you get a sense of where the country is from being on tour?

PD: We're popular now. We're in the majority. The protesters have to get used to this. The majority of people in America now see this [war] as a mistake. I think a drawdown can happen in six months. We're not sure what will happen if we leave, but we do know what will happen if we stay. More Americans will be killed and our movie features a mother and a son who believe that another death in Iraq is morally indefensible. What's it going to take to rattle us here? It takes six minutes to get into a war and 60 years to get out. The aircraft carrier stunt gave them away.

[Photos: Directors Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro; Tomas Young visits Ground Zero; Tomas Young and Robert Byrd; "Body of War," Film Sales Company, 2007]

"Body of War" is now open in limited release.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/opening-this-week-5.php Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:35:57 -0500 03242008_alexandra.jpgBy Neil Pedley

Apparently, less is more this week, as "Flawless" and "Priceless" both head to the big screen and work from minimalist Alexander Sokurov balances out over-the-top offerings like "Superhero Movie" and "21."

"Alexandra"
Russian avant-garde director Alexander Sokurov's melancholic drama landed itself a Palme D'Or nomination last year at Cannes. Set in a nameless, war-torn place that bares more than a passing resemblance to Chechnya, "Alexandra" has for its star veteran opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, who plays an elderly woman who sets off to visit her grandson, a soldier stationed at the edge of a wasteland. In Russian with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Backseat"
Labeled by some a "Sideways" for twenty-somethings, "Backseat" features Rob Bogue and Josh Alexander, who also wrote the film's script, as a pair of directionless friends who take to the open road in a bid to outrun the incoming juggernaut of adult responsibility and maybe meet Donald Sutherland. "Backseat"'s journey to distribution has taken nearly as many turns, considering the film spent two years kicking around the festival circuit. One of its pit stops was at the Austin Film Festival, where it picked up an audience award.
Opens in limited release.

"The Cool School"
Grammy nominated filmmaker Morgan Neville charts the struggle of late '40's Los Angeles to transform itself from a poor man's New York into a city with a thriving and legitimate art scene lead by the likes of Ed Ruscha and Ed Kienholz. Neville lends an artist's eye to the archival footage, kinetic music and talking heads as he explores the creation of a singularly American art scene that was the first to showcase the likes of Andy Warhol and his soup cans at the innovative Ferus Gallery. Jeff Bridges narrates.
Opens in New York.

"Chapter 27"
After premiering at last year's Sundance festival, J. P. Schaefer's debut film about John Lennon's assassin Mark David Chapman began a run of misfortune that makes one wonder how it managed to survive. Aside from the unwanted publicity of co-star Lindsay Lohan's public meltdown and a competing project, "The Killing of John Lennon," negative reactions to the very idea of a film about Chapman led Lennon fans to establish a boycott website that claimed the film was glorifying a killer. On top of this, reviews out of Sundance weren't kind. That Peach Arch Entertainment is giving the film a limited run must be of some cold comfort, but "Chapter 27" star Jared Leto has already had his just desserts for the project — the star reportedly bulked up 62 pounds on pints of microwaved ice cream to play the inimitably creepy Chapman.
Opens in limited release.

"Flawless"
Following years of more serious fare like "Dancing at the Blue Iguana" and "The Merchant of Venice," Michael Radford returns to the lighter touch he brought to the Oscar-nominated "Il Postino" with this playful period heist drama. Demi Moore brings her best scowl to the part of Laura Quinn, a disgruntled banking executive who is approached by Michael Caine's soon-to-retire janitor to trade her glass ceiling in for something a little more valuable. Though her character may protest, Moore herself could be easily swayed — after all, she played Caine's teenage daughter in a pre-Brat Pack role in the underrated 1984 comedy "Blame it on Rio."
Opens in limited release

"Hats Off"
A remarkable account of sheer triumph of will, "Hats Off" chronicles 10 years in the life of the bubbly and vivacious Mimi Wendell, a 93-year-old working actress who regularly puts in 14-hour days in New York. Documentary filmmaker Jyll Johnstone does her best to keep pace with the sprightly Mimi as she darts from ballet class to film shoots, to dance class, to auditions, seemingly carried along by nothing more than her can-do attitude, her free spirit and her love of life.
Opens in New York.

"My Brother is an Only Child"
From the co-writers of "The Best of Youth" comes another sprawling Italian epic of brothers divided by political ideals but united by the love of the same woman. Set at the time of the so-called historical compromise, when the extreme ends of the political spectrum tried unsuccessfully to form a working government, the film stars Riccardo Scarmaccio and Elio Germano as the conflicted brothers struggling to reconcile with one another against the backdrop of a troubled country struggling to reconcile with itself and forge a new national identity. Palme D'Or nominee Daniele Luchetti (for 1991's "The Yes Man") directs. In Italian with subtitles.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on April 4th.

"Priceless"
Writer/director Pierre Salvadori injects a notable dose of French farce into his elegant 2006 re-imagining of the Audrey Hepburn classic "Breakfast at Tiffany's," choosing the Hepburn-esque Audrey Tatou to play a flighty socialite who preys upon the wealthy playboys that populate the fashionable French Riviera. "The Valet"'s Gad Elmaleh is the shy, befuddled waiter who tries to get closer to her heart by beating her at her own game. Just, please, don't import a version of Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi. In French with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Run, Fat Boy, Run"
Originally set for release last November, this directorial effort from David Schwimmer was postponed — rarely a good sign. In the comedy, Pegg plays Dennis, a directionless loser who decides to turn his life around by running a marathon to win back Libby (Thandie Newton), the girl he jilted at the altar. "Hot Fuzz" fans may be disappointed to see Pegg without his usual sidekick Nick Frost, but Pegg and Schwimmer have teamed up before as well, in HBO's "Band of Brothers" and the little-seen 2006 comedy "Big Nothing."
Opens wide.

"Shotgun Stories"
Nominated for a John Cassavetes Award at this year's Spirit Awards, Jeff Nichols's distinctly American debut examines two sets of half-brothers who have nothing to cling to except their pride and each other. Michael Shannon, Barlow Jacobs and Douglas Ligon play the estranged fraternity in the film produced by "Snow Angels" director and Nichols's North Carolina School of the Arts schoolmate David Gordon Green.
Opens in limited release.

"Stop-Loss"
After garnering a wealth of critical acclaim and launching the career of Hilary Swank with her highly provocative debut, "Boys Don't Cry," writer/director Kimberly Pierce shocked us all a second time by performing one of Hollywood's great disappearing acts. Nearly ten years later, she returns with a politically charged drama about families realizing the cost of the Iraq War through the perspective of a young soldier (Ryan Phillippe) who is forcibly recalled to active duty by the army at the end of his tour.
Opens wide.

"Superhero Movie"
Dimension Films, the studio that bought us the admittedly funny original "Scary Movie" and then the countless unfunny sequels that followed, proudly hoists aloft the now putrid and rotten corpse of the dead horse so that it may be beaten one more time. "Scary Movie 3" and "4" scribe Craig Mazin rises to the directing ranks for this send-up of superhero films, featuring shameless cameos from the likes of Robert Hays, Brent Spiner and Leslie Nielsen as well as the usual onslaught of dick jokes and potty humor and, one hopes, a reminder of the days when spoof films were funny.
Opens wide.

"Who's Your Monkey"
Any movie whose IMDb plot keywords are "Dead Body / Vibrator / Monkey" must surely be worth the price of admission. Jason London and "ER"'s Scott Grimes play childhood friends who accidentally murder a drug dealer while attempting to free his homemade zoo of animals, which have been exploited for amateur porn. Apparently, they appreciate that sort of thing in Florida and at CineVegas, where the film won a grand jury award and an audience award, respectively. Early reviews have said "it's heartwarming." "Seinfeld"'s Wayne Knight and David DeLuise also star.
Opens in limited release.

"21"
Inspired by the real life events depicted in the bestselling book "Bringing Down The House," this marriage of "Good Will Hunting" and "Ocean's 11" sees a group of MIT math prodigies teaming up to beat the Vegas blackjack tables under the watchful eye of Kevin Spacey's scheming professor. Australian director Robert Luketic helms this high stakes ride, which may be short on accuracy (since the real story centered around an Asian student played in the film by a very Caucasian Jim Sturgess), but long on the appeal of longshots. Just don't assume that in real life, Sturgess is a risktaker at the table.
Opens wide.

[Photo: "Alexandra," Cinema Guild, 2007]

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<![CDATA["Moolaadé," "Daisy Kenyon"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/moolaade-daisy-kenyon.php Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:43:33 -0500 03252008_moolaade.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

The seminal will behind everything that matters about sub-Saharan African cinema, and at the same time the world's most guileless filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene was virtually a one-man continental film culture for 40 years, establishing the cinematic syntax and priorities for an entire section of mankind, and its relationship with movies. From the first mini-feature, "Borom Sarret" (1964) to the last, vibrant, polemical film "Moolaadé" (2004), Sembene's work aches with sociopolitical austerity — as an artist, he's virtually style-free, almost unprofessional, but possessed of a voice as clear and uncomplicated as sunlight. Primal, unsophisticated experiences, the films are simple but never simplistic, lowbrow but unsensational, fastidiously realistic and yet unconcerned with sustaining illusion. His filmography is more or less divided between cool, undramatic autopsies on post-colonial norms and folly (1966's "Black Girl," 1968's "Mandabi," 1974's "Xala") and demi-epics of colonial horror (1971's Emitai, 1977's "Ceddo," 1987's "Camp de Thiaroye"). The slow burn, burial day battleground essay "Guelwaar" (1992) is a precariously balanced admixture of both, while "Moolaadé" targets the most galling and controversial aspect of an African society straining under independence, Islam and reactionary tribalism: female genital mutilation.

I wouldn't call "Moolaadé" a comedy, but Sembene might've (he died last year), and there's no denying its native exuberance and rebellious élan. Sembene's agenda was didactic — Africans were always his primary audience — and "Moolaadé" takes a satiric machete to traditional African machismo, marriage roles and society. We're in a small, unindustrialized village where Islam is ubiquitous, but the tribal tribunal of elders still rules and ancient curses and superstitions are still respected. When a quartet of prepubescent girls come running for sanctuary from "purification" into the skirts of Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), the headstrong second wife (of three) belonging to a milquetoasty village bigwig, she decides on the spot to summon the "moolaadé" (a protection curse, represented by a silk rope tied across the home's entrance) to protect them. Therein begins a titanic battle of wills between Collé (who did manage to keep her own teenage daughter from being "cut," thereby making her unmarriageable) and the village's traditionalist elders, the Islamists, the priestesses whose sole mission is to remove clitori, her husband, and even her own daughter.

Sembene somehow manages to make "Moolaadé" affirmative and universal, as if female genital mutilation could metaphorically stand in for every kind of systemic oppression of women in every culture. Maybe it can. The film certainly attains a kind of iconic joy, keeping matter-of-fact faith with animistic beliefs to an almost magical-realist degree, and reveling in Senegalese music, rites and Coulibaly, a non-professional performer (as always with Sembene), who nonetheless crafts a brave and exhilarating persona. It's also Sembene's most beautiful film; having avoided prettifying exotica during his whole career, the aging master was able to relax and enjoy the shade-dappled sunniness of his native land, making his most issue-oriented film also his most Renoirian.

03252008_daisykenyon.jpgAlso proto-feminist in its own way, Otto Preminger's "Daisy Kenyon" (1947) arrives amid yet another of Fox's noir archive exhumations, but you've never seen anything quite like it. Wildly overlooked in its day and since then, Preminger's movie isn't noir at all, but a shadowy "woman's film," complete with career woman Joan Crawford stuck between men in a muddled and morally ambiguous postwar America. But that's where its shared DNA with other movies ends and its flabbergasting originality begins. Adapted from a bestseller by Elizabeth Janeway, the film has twice the character dimension, poetic maturity of dialogue and performance richness than almost any film of its decade. Crawford's designer girl Daisy carries on a relaxed and cynical affair with married man Dana Andrews, a big shot lawyer who knows Walter Winchell (walking through, playing himself), who irresistibly calls other men "honeybunch" and "dew drop," who patronizes his brittle wife ("Citizen Kane"'s Ruth Warrick), who spoils his daughters even though he's always on his way to somewhere else, and who never in Preminger's view remains either a selfish louse or a helpless alpha male trying to do the right thing. Fed up, Daisy defects and takes up with returning soldier Henry Fonda, a calm bundle of offhand, secretive, amused, suicidal contradictions himself.

The wonder of "Daisy Kenyon" is in its deep-dish management of character, credit for which should go to everyone concerned, but which is an earmark of Preminger in his most sublime moments. Every character harbors a private self, and Preminger never tips his hand to show them. Crawford has never been as complex and heartfelt, and has never had such strange and inspired dialogue ("Everyone's dead but you," Fonda's misanthropic trauma-man spits; "But how did they come to die?" Crawford's struggling single woman says, but says warmly, smiling, in sympathy for his despair). Fonda is so sheltered in his abrupt nihilism you couldn't blame the other characters for thinking he was kidding — and though Daisy sometimes seems to, we don't ever. Andrews, one of the most resonant and subtext-packed leading men of the '40s, lives out his ambiguous hot dog in four real dimensions, and you never know what he'll do or say next. Even Warrick transfixes your eyeballs as a neglected wife given to battering her children — who would've thought any role of hers would overshadow Emily Monroe Norton Kane?

Perhaps Preminger does deserve the final kudos, because his elaborate mise-en-scène, the unprecedented screenplay (adapted by David Hertz, with a grown-up relationship with the real postwar world), and a cast at the height of its powers is made to cohere into a distinct vision that talks and walks and feels utterly unique. It's a revelation.

[Photos: Ousmane Sembene's "Moolaadé," New Yorker Films, 2004; Joan Crawford in "Daisy Kenyon," Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1947]

"Moolaadé" (New Yorker Video) and "Daisy Kenyon" (Fox) are now available on DVD.

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8967 2008-03-24 09:43:33 closed closed moolaade_daisy_kenyon publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008967
<![CDATA[Oliver Assayas on "Boarding Gate"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/oliver-assayas-on-boarding-gat.php Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:15:36 -0500 03202008_assayas.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Parisian auteur and former Cahiers du Cinéma critic Olivier Assayas ("Clean," "Demonlover" — and perhaps his finest hour, "Irma Vep") had intended his next film to be a portrait of provincial French life, but in the increasingly difficult world of arthouse filmmaking, his funding fell through. Instead, Assayas surprised many by making "Boarding Gate," a psychosexual noir-thriller starring screen vixen Asia Argento as a femme fatale (go figure!) who gallivants with underworld types in various states of undress. Called either sleazy or sexy since its premiere at last year's Cannes (and more on both of those adjectives later), it's an exhilarating, swaggering globetrot filled with debased sex, illegal smuggling, triple-crosses, and an unlikely pimp-cum-lover played by Michael Madsen. I met Assayas to discuss the film, Argento's X-factor, why suburban kids should watch his films, and his music geekiness.

How did your backup project come to be, unapologetically, a B-movie?

It didn't feel like it was an unnatural move, to put it simply. It's something that had been creeping into my films in different ways, and for some reason, I never had the opportunity to go all the way. Sometimes you have fantasies of the kind of movie that one day you would be making, and the fact that the movie I had written was [either] not happening or delayed, I accepted it as an opportunity to try something radical. When you're functioning within the framework of French cinema, it's kind of a radical move. It's something you're not supposed to do when you make French films, but I decided it was okay to make strange choices and go in strange directions.

You say how radical it is, but I feel like it shares a lot of blood with "Demonlover," especially the broad strokes you paint of ambiguous global businesses. Do you see the two films relating to one another?

Oh, yes. I was not conscious of it while I was making "Boarding Gate," but I suppose that [in hindsight] I see "Demonlover," "Clean" and "Boarding Gate" as some sort of strange trilogy — three movies that make sense functioning together, and have a lot of echoes with one another. But "Boarding Gate" is a much less theoretical movie. "Demonlover" was like a manifesto or something. It's the one movie I've made that is very much about ideas. This one takes place in the world that "Demonlover" defined, except these are two flesh-and-blood characters and whatever is happening could be in completely opposite situations. It's much more simple and straightforward in its own way.

As a former critic, why do you think genre movies have such a stigma, as if they shouldn't be taken as seriously?

I know! It's kind of complicated because genre movies are ambiguous in a sense. Somehow, they can appear as part of the logic of Hollywood, of mainstream filmmaking. Genre filmmaking is almost arrogantly triumphant because they're huge budget movies that are supposed to crush everything in their way, and independent filmmaking [is supposed to] stand against that. For a long time, it had been my conviction that, more or less, that's how it worked. I think the problem with arthouse cinema today is that the audience is aging and becoming kind of conservative. It's closing its eyes to how the world is changing, not even in terms of judgment but in terms of fact.

There's a new audience out there who have completely different references. All of a sudden, you now have a whole world of academic writing about cinema, a whole world of very conventional storytelling that ends up being [called] sophisticated, highbrow arthouse cinema. At some point, I didn't want to be part of that because when you make movies, it's about being in touch with the world as it is. You want to have a dialogue with the world as it is, and with a real audience. My dream is that kids in the suburbs will watch the films, but they won't... maybe accidentally, they turn on the TV and watch five minutes of it or something. Ultimately, that's the audience I would dream of reaching because it's the medium they relate to in defining their vision of the world. It's important when you are a filmmaker to be in touch with that audience and with that approach of cinema, and I see arthouse cinema drifting away from it.

03292008_boardinggate2.jpgAre there any films you've admired that specifically appeals to the next generation of media-savvy filmgoers you speak of?

Well, I'm not familiar enough with that generation in the U.S., but I see them in France. One factor I'm really struck with is the interest in horror movies. They are the one genre that teenagers all over the world relate to very strongly. It can be 50-year-old horror movies, or it could be now. And why? It's because they have a physical dialogue with the audience. You react physically to those movies. It's a fascinating element of cinema, and in some ways, I think what is missing today from arthouse cinema is this relationship to physicality. Why can't you make an arthouse film that takes into consideration that you can relate physically with an audience? It's the ultimate way, because if you focus there, it's a big limit. You have to be able to move out of that, but it's certainly one of the aspects that mainstream filmmaking has perfectly understood when arthouse cinema has completely missed the point.

So when can we expect to see an Olivier Assayas horror film?

I suppose when I do "Demonlover" or "Boarding Gate," in some ways, I try to take that [physicality] into consideration. I'm trying to walk the walk. [laughs] You know, I'm trying to make art films that do include my relationship to modern cinema, and even my relationship to modern art. I think you can make very abstract, ambitious films using the language of the broadest audience. They're open. The problem is a lot of movies don't manage to get to that audience, and ultimately, the way Hollywood logic works, it narrows the spectrum of what you can or can't do, what you can or can't watch.

It's a blow to art itself that when you push the envelope too far, you risk alienating the masses.

Yeah, yeah. All of a sudden, you try to make movies that are a tiny bit more ambitious. And I'm talking about movies more mainstream than what I am doing. You have big audiences who watch them and say, "Oh no, it's too slow. It's too boring. It's too this, too that." They end up forgetting what else movies can be; they feel that because the movies don't function on the simplified level they are used to them functioning, which is all about sitting back and just receiving the film, they think it's incompetent. They don't realize that you can voluntarily try different things.

03292008_boardinggate3.jpgCritics have responded quite differently to the "B-movieness" since Cannes. Do you think "Boarding Gate" is a sexy movie, a sleazy movie, or both?

[laughs] Well, I think the sexy aspect has to do with whatever Asia is, not so much the narrative of the film. What's so great about her is that she has a sexy presence, totally, and she's incredibly human. She's someone you care for, and she has this beautiful screen presence, this specific glow. I think she brings this kind of sexiness completely, effortlessly to anything she does.

In terms of sleazy, I did not want to be concerned with making something that was in good taste. I didn't want to have these kinds of limits or barriers. To me, I wanted to make a movie that had a kind of roughness and was not scared of occasionally being over the top. There's a certain degree of brutality in the way it's made. But whatever it has that's sleazy is also kind of playful. It's sleazy in a cartoonish way, that's the way I would put it. Because there is a cartoonish element in the film, and I wanted that. I didn't want to make some kind of parody of genre filmmaking, I didn't want to have fun with the genre. I wanted to be completely straightforward the way Asia or Michael [Madsen] are completely straight-forward. But then, obviously, it's also a game with the audience. There is a certain level of tongue-in-cheekness there, for sure. [laughs]

Beyond her sexiness, you've said that Asia has a rock-and-roll presence. What is that X-factor that you say she instantly evokes?

She has this kind of bad girl thing, it's just part of her. It's the way she grew up. I think she had a pretty rough childhood, and she always had to fight to impose herself. She's a fighter, she's always been like that, and it's pretty difficult just growing up [as] the daughter of someone who's made his fame by being one of the greatest filmmakers in the world, and by murdering women [on film]. I suppose it probably involves pretty complicated issues within her, which creates this response, a kind of macho thing about her. She's someone who has also created some armor around her; she invented this kind of monster, which is a media image. She's not like that. She's crazy, she knows she can be out of control, but ultimately, she's a very sweet, nice person. She's fun, easygoing, but obviously, she has invented something to shield her from whatever she's scared of. She's a scared person, you can sense that, but has this incredible sense of cool, this completely natural thing of just giving herself so generously. At the same time, there's something very vulnerable about her, so you relate to her. This in-your-face thing, you immediately see behind it, this human being. Very few actresses have that.

I honestly couldn't imagine any other actress in this specific role.

Oh, I don't think I would have made the film without her. I had this movie in the back of my mind for ages, but I would not write it. When I met Asia, I said, "Okay. I can make that kind of movie." I could make some kind of weird genre movie because I have the right person here who has the same culture as me, who has the same complex relationship with her own film culture, of having one foot here and one foot there. She also has a strong connection to the music culture, which is the same thing as me. I grew up listening to music, and it's part of my inspiration.

Uh-oh, now you've done it. What's on your iPod right now?

Oh, I have a lot on my iPod. [laughs] I sincerely do. Because of this iPod culture, I've been rediscovering stuff that I haven't been listening to for ages. What's big with me now is the Incredible String Band. I really used to like "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter," and I wondered what it sounds like today, so I started to listen to it again. I couldn't believe it, I think it's genius. And I've been listening to obscure '60s psychedelia that you find on the internet because you don't find it in shops anymore, re-releases of stuff like Farewell Aldebaran and Jerry Yester, some folk-rock [such as] Trees — and Duncan Browne, an incredibly underrated singer-songwriter. That kind of stuff. [laughs]

[Photos: Olivier Assayas on set, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Asia Argento; Magnet Releasing, 2007]

"Boarding Gate" opens in limited release on March 21st.

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8881 2008-03-20 17:15:36 closed closed oliver_assayas_on_boarding_gat publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008881
<![CDATA[Asia Argento: A Life in Film]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/asia-argento-a-life-in-film.php Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:40:36 -0500 03202008_asiaargento.jpgIf last year's Cannes Film Festival had designated a queen in addition to the usual prizes, the crown would without a doubt have gone to Asia Argento, who made one hell of an impression with unforgettable roles in three films. The daughter of influential Italian horror movie filmmaker Dario Argento, Asia has appeared in several of her father's movies, but has carved out a career and a persona all her own. Standing at the intersection between B-movies and the arthouse, Asia — slightly slurry, famously tattooed, somewhat goth and often unclothed — is a fearsome and fearless actress, not to mention a published novelist and the director of two features. Not one to underplay a part, she's made a career out of her willingness to go to sometimes off-putting and strange extremes and her ability to remain hypnotically watchable, if not so safe for work, in the most unusual of roles. One thing's for sure — she's no simpering ingenue. Here's a look at some of our favorite moments from a few of her films so far (along with a few spoilers, so watch your step).


03202008_boardinggate.jpgBoarding Gate (2007)
Directed by Olivier Assayas

"Boarding Gate," which opens tomorrow, is a woozy, jet-lagged thriller that seems to take place in the same ruthless universe as Assayas' 2002 "Demonlover." Complicated corporations, illicit and legitimate, continually require pitiless and sometimes violent acts from those working under them. In the first half of the film, that violence is mostly verbal — Asia plays the shady Sandra, who pays a visit to her former lover Miles (Michael Madsen), a one-time hotshot whose business empire is crumbling, and who's only interested in getting her back into his life. They duel in his office over their past S&M-tinged sex life, a sharp-cornered push-and-pull war of words that's stepped up a notch when Sandra heads over to his house at night. The film's iconic image is of Asia stalking around Miles' expensive pad in spiked heels and black lingerie toting a Luger, but there's a earlier bit that tops all of that. While battling it out with Miles in his office and reminiscing about their old, semi-abusive times, Asia hikes up her dress and caresses her crotch. It's a move she's repeated in at least one other film — as signature gestures go, it's certainly an unexpected alternative to, say, twirling your hair or batting your eyelashes.


03202008_scarletdiva.jpgScarlet Diva (2000)
Directed by Asia Argento

"It's terrible to be an actress in Italy," says Anna Battista (Argento). "I said enough of this, no more sexy Italian film star, I want to become an artist." And so Anna sets out to make a movie of her own called "Scarlet Diva," and since we're actually watching "Scarlet Diva," it's quite safe to assume that Anna is a thinly veiled version of Argento herself (although if Argento was really so sick of her image as a sexpot, she probably should have cut at least a couple of "Diva"'s parade of totally indulgent soft-core porn scenes). As a coherent movie, it's basically a mess; as a fragmented glimpse into a young woman's fucked-up self-image, it's kind of amazing. And if it is all just autobiography then it's fun to consider how crazy off-camera Asia must be. Did she bang a hash dealer for kicks? Has she had multiple abortions? Does she often get into random lesbian trysts with unfamiliar large-breasted women who swear they've met before?

Two scenes belong in the pantheon of Great Moments of Asia Weirdness. In the first, an assholish Hollywood producer convinces Anna to sign onto his movie (a Gus Van Sant script called "Cleopatra's Death!") and then tries, with limited success, to upsell a back massage into some oral sex ("Suck my balls! Is it too much to ask?" he indignantly barks at the reticent starlet). In the second, Anna disrobes in her bathroom mirror, and primps herself in the nude for three fascinatingly bizarre minutes. She shaves her pits while smoking a cigarette as a prelude, then smears makeup all over her face as she breaks down in tears, then licks her armpit, recoils in horror, and licks it again. Is it indulgent hogwash or nakedly honest filmmaking? Like the rest of "Scarlet Diva," it's kind of both.


03202008_xxx.jpgxXx (2002) / Land of the Dead (2005)
Directed by Rob Cohen / George A. Romero

Argento's had two flirtations with the mainstream; ironically, she played just about the same role in both. In "xXx" she's Yelena, a prostitute with a preternatural gift with weapons (turns out, Yelena's only posing as a hooker, she's really an undercover agent for FSB Russian Intelligence). In "Land of the Dead" she's Slack, a prostitute with a preternatural gift with weapons (turns out Slack's a character in a George Romero movie, where everyone is deadly with a sidearm). In both, she serves to satisfy the target teen male audience's appetite for edgy eye candy, but her chemistry with her leading men (Vin Diesel and Simon Baker, respectively) is pedestrian at best. In "xXx" she shares a smooch with Diesel so tentative it looks like she's never kissed anyone before in her life (which makes you wonder how Yelena passes for a hooker) And she puts a lot more passion into her big introductory fight scene with a couple zombies than anything that with Baker, who Slack follows around like a scared puppy. It's easy to see why Romero and Rob Cohen cast Argento in roles that are, on paper, right in line with her hypersexed persona, but neither character affords her the opportunity to take any real chances or do anything truly outlandish. Where're the taboo-busting love scenes? She's mostly a damsel in distress with a penchant for fishnet stockings. It's like casting Michael Winslow and then not having him do any kooky sound effects with his mouth.


03202008_stendahlsyndrome.jpgThe Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
Directed by Dario Argento

Now I'm not a parent, but if I were, I have to believe I wouldn't even want to think about my daughter getting sexually abused. Well, not Asia's dear old daddy Dario; the "Suspiria" director cast his daughter in the lead of his 1996 "The Stendhal Syndrome" and then proceeded to torture the hell out of her for the amusement of audiences everywhere. In one particularly disturbing scene — meaning particularly disturbing even if the star wasn't biologically related to the director — Asia's character, a police officer with a condition that causes her to be physically overcome by hallucinations anytime she sees great works of art, is attacked by the criminal she's assigned to track down. He rapes her and slices her mouth open with a razor blade; Argento, striving for nothing but cinematic clarity, shows it all in close-up. She passes out, but wakes up just in time to watch the guy shoot another victim in the mouth (the shots of the bullet slowly piercing the poor woman's cheek and traveling ever-so-gracefully through her mouth and out the other side are amongst the first uses of computer generated imagery in all of Italian cinema). Allegedly Argento had several other actresses in mind for the role but eventually settled on his daughter, which kind of makes the situation both better and worse (better because, hey, at least his daughter wasn't his first choice for ritualistic torture, worse because when no one else would do it he apparently figured, ah, what the hell, she'll do). Does the fact that Asia's character eventually turns the tables on her abuser, stabs him, shoots him, bludgeons him and tosses him off a cliff make the whole sordid affair any less unsavory? If you're the kinda guy who's comfortable filming your daughter getting raped, I guess the answer is yes!


03202008_phantomoftheopera.jpgPhantom of the Opera (1998)
Directed by Dario Argento

Argento has always had a thing for Gaston Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera. His last great masterpiece, the 1987 film "Opera," was clearly inspired in some way by the tale — dewy understudy lands the lead in a play after the star is injured, only to then be forced to watch her friends be slaughtered by a mysterious killer with connections to her childhood who sticks pins under her eyes so that she can't close them. (Well, that last part is all Argento's.) Unfortunately, he also created a slightly more direct 1998 version of the tale that even hardcore fans of his work shake their heads at. In "Phantom of the Opera," Asia plays Christine Daae as Leroux would never have imagined, catching the attention of the "phantom" — played by Julian Sands, deformity-free and kind of hunky, if in need of a good shampoo and blow-out — right off the bat, either with her voice or her habit of going braless under sheer white dresses. And, with his telepathic powers and ability to talk to rats, he strikes her as quite a catch, too — to the point where she tells her wealthy baronial suitor she'd rather just be friends, and trysts instead with her rodent-defending lover in his candlelit subterranean lair. "Phantom of the Opera" is hopelessly hokey, equal parts cheesy period piece, cheap slasher flick and Skinemax saga, but it does have one memorable moment. The baron, heartbroken by rejection, runs off to a bathhouse orgy to indulge in a lot of opium, and hallucinates that his love is there and willing. Asia dribbles wine down her dress, strokes her own heaving bosom and waggles an impressively long tongue at him. It may be the least erotic supposedly erotic display even filmed, but there's an impressively scary frisson to it, as if Asia were flaunting all conventional ideas of what could be considered a turn-on. [Check it out on YouTube.]


03202008_heartisdeceitful.jpgThe Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004)
Directed by Asia Argento

This adaptation of JT Leroy's first novel came out a few months after the supposed 20-something former male prostitute turned writer was exposed as a fraud. An endless fantasia of white trash child abuse, of trailer parks and seedy strip-clubs, the film finds Asia playing Sarah, a meth-addicted hooker who retrieves her young son Jeremiah from idyllic foster care to drag him around the country while she does drugs, sleeps around, lets her boyfriends beat and rape him and periodically abandons him in cars and other people's houses. Asia, gamely trying to layer a Southern accent on top of her heavy Italian one, channels a very rundown Courtney Love, with bad skin, bleached hair and tops that slide off her shoulders as she and Jeremiah eat out of the trash. Soon she's putting makeup on the boy and curling his hair, putting him in a slip and telling him "We're beautiful girls, aren't we?" All dressed up and no place to go, he shimmies out and seduces her boyfriend while she's at work. It sounds twisted to sell the scene as a highlight, but it's actually "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things"'s one shining display of restraint — Asia only puts herself in, standing in for the underaged actor playing the son supposedly channeling her. And so, what could have been an unwatchably disturbing and legally dicey moment of exploitation becomes merely a fantastically uncomfortable one.

[Photos: "Boarding Gate," Magnet Releasing, 2007; "Scarlet Diva," Media Blasters, 2002; "xXx," Columbia Pictures, 2002; "The Stendhal Syndrome," Troma Entertainment, 1996; "Phantom of the Opera," Allumination, 1998; "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things," Palm Pictures, 2006]

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: Jody and Dennis Lambert on "Of All The Things"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/sxsw-2008-jody-and-dennis-lamb.php Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:02:03 -0500 03192008_ofallthethings.jpgBy Stephen Saito

Dennis Lambert may be the most successful singer/songwriter you've never heard of — unless you live in the Philippines. Although best known as the songwriter and producer behind everything from The Four Tops' "Ain't No Woman Like The One I've Got," Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" and, more infamously, Starship's "We Built This City" (which Lambert calls "an accumulation of all the crap of the '70s and '80s combined"), Lambert made one solo album, "Bags and Things," in 1972 that faded away almost immediately. A few years later, Lambert followed suit, moving to Boca Raton and transitioning into the real estate business. But if that were the end of the story, his son Jody wouldn't have much to work with for "Of All The Things," which follows the elder Lambert tour in the one place his solo album was successful — the Philippines — 35 years after its initial release. From dilapidated dancehalls to the arena that housed Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier's "Thrilla in Manila," Lambert is greeted with packed houses, playing all of the music he penned, in some cases for the first time in public. Since then, the 60-year-old has settled back into being a realtor and family man in Florida, but he and his son Jody, and the film's producer, Taylor Williams, gassed up the tour bus once again to stop by SXSW, where Dennis played a few gigs in addition to talking with me about the rigors of touring and the most unexpected of comebacks.

How did the concert tour in the Philippines come about?

Dennis Lambert: I've been approached by this particular Filipino gentleman going back to when he just became a promoter, which was in the late '70s. He'd been a deejay, a very successful one and he was beginning to promote shows on the side when he first approached me. Every so many years thereafter, I would hear from him — I think he came and approached me at least five times over that 30-some odd years. And the last time was in 2006, when I said yes.

Why was that the right time for you?

DL: I think there were a lot of factors, but firstly it was the urging to do it by my family, particularly my wife, Jody and my daughter. Jody knew my music the longest and was wondering why I wasn't doing more. There were other factors that got in the way in earlier years, like being so busy with commitments to produce and write for people, and it would've created too much chaos and inconvenience for me and for everybody else who had to get it in sooner. In '06, I was living in Florida, I was working in real estate, I was administrating my music and there wasn't really anything I could fit in. My real estate partner said, "Don't worry about it. I'll cover you if you need to leave. Go do this."

How did it all become a movie?

Jody Lambert: When my dad said it might happen, I was thinking I was just going to get a home video camera and follow him around and learn iMovie. I started talking to Taylor, who's my best friend and a big fan of Dennis, and he saw the potential for this to be something larger than a little home video tribute. I mean, we didn't know what was going to happen when we got over [to the Philippines], but the story of a guy who was a really successful and prolific songwriter who now isn't active and who gets pulled into it again is a real narrative and a real arc. Once he committed to it, we got a crew and some money from investors who saw the movie the way we did. We didn't have a lot of time, but we just amped up and got it together and went with him and made the film.

03192008_ofallthethings2.jpgI would think the logistics of this were daunting — you had to shoot concert footage in a stadium, you had to shoot in the Philippines — how do two guys go about doing that in your first film?

JL: A lot of it was flying by the seat of our pants. We had two cameramen, so we shot all those concerts with two cameras. When we finally heard that the final show was at the Araneta Coliseum, when we heard how big it was, Taylor was like, "We've got to get more cameras." So we ended up going for that real formal "Last Waltz," kind of, everything on tripods for that final show. It was crazy because we were on the rock tour schedule, but it was great because it was the best of both worlds. We were making a film, but also on a rock and roll tour.

And you really do keep the concentration on the tour, but in your introduction to the film at the festival you said "There hasn't been much music in my family, literally or metaphorically," Was it your intent to keep the film about Dennis and less about your family as a whole? Did this film bring you and your father closer together?

JL: There wasn't much of an inclination to put myself in the movie more, because I think that when we thought about the film, it wasn't really about me. It's about this decision that my dad made to do this, to go back out on the road, and we didn't feel that the movie was a father-son discovery movie. God bless all the movies that are made by family members, but we didn't want to do that sort of "My Architect" thing where it's like "let me take you on a journey of my father and a journey of discovery." That's just not what we thought the movie was. It's a rock movie, a fish out of water story, a comedy — the father-son element is the last part of it. As far as bringing us closer together, we've been close forever and it didn't...

DL: If anything, this made us less close. [laughs] I'm still pissed.

JL: If I ever have to listen to his songs again... But no, it's been a fun thing for our whole family — it didn't heal any wounds or anything, because there really were no wounds.

So this isn't your typical rock documentary — no family problems, no internal tension, no descent into madness, no drug addiction...

DL: There really wasn't any drug use when there could've been for me. Lots of pot, lots of coke and lots of uppers to be in the studio hours on end. I lived pretty clean. Now, I'm into drugs. I take a diuretic, I take a cholesterol pill, blood pressure medication, Aleve, just for general aches and pains. [laughs]

Dennis, the film ends with you going back to a career in real estate, but are you doing more music now than you were before the film?

DL: Absolutely. This has opened up a lot of opportunities and given me a lot of food for thought. I'm working on a musical for Broadway, I'm now contemplating doing more live performances. I've done three or four in support of the film and they've gone really well. I had a sense that might be true because over the years, whenever people would say "Play a song or two for us" at a party, always you could hear a pin drop. It's an intimate chance to listen to the singer/composer play his own music, especially if he's not known to be the artist as well, and there's something about that that's interesting and intriguing for audiences and on a bigger scale, I see it now. I'm going to produce and write when the right thing comes along. But that would've been true before the movie, if people would reach out to me, to say "We want to have you involved in a new album." If it was the right project, I would do it without hesitating.

[Photos: Dennis Lambert on tour in the Philippines in "Of All The Things," The Shot Clock, 2008]

For more on "Of All The Things," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[Louis Garrel on "Love Songs"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/louis-garrel-on-love-songs-1.php Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:09:34 -0500 If it weren't enough just being a French heartthrob and a fabulous actor, 24-year-old Louis Garrel ("The Dreamers") comes from impressive film-biz stock: he's the son of acclaimed auteur Philippe Garrel (the two worked together on 2005's "Regular Lovers," along with Louis' César-nominated grandfather Maurice) and actress Brigitte Sy. But beyond Garrel's blood family, the young star has already developed a creative bond at such an early stage of his career. "Love Songs" (or if you want to impress your friends, "Les Chansons d'Amour") is his third film with French writer-director Christophe Honoré ("Ma Mère," "Dans Paris"), a romantic if tragic, pansexual, Nouvelle Vague-inspired musical. During his recent trip to New York, I struggled to understand Garrel's thick (and charming) Gallic accent as we discussed being a sex symbol, seducing women with song, and how he almost became a lawyer.

This is your third collaboration with Honoré. Why do you like working with him?

I don't know. I mean, I met him on "Ma Mère," and we were really excited during the shooting, so we wanted to make a film again. He's really tender with actors in general. It's fluid and simple to work with him. I don't know. I like his tenderness, you know? For me, his movies are really sweet, and it helps me to live. I love to work with him.

When you were auditioning your singing voice for him, you had your audience turned their backs to you. How did you get over that fear when you had to sing for the filming?

It wasn't fear -- I just didn't want to sing in a horrible way. I'm not a singer, so I reproduce a little bit what I see on television and what I listen to on the radio. I don't have self-control, really, so I didn't want to sing like Mariah Carey. I don't have her voice, so I was afraid. I tried to sing simply and be self-conscious of my singing. [On the set], 80% is technique because you have to put something in your ear; you have to be good at lip-synching. At the beginning, it's a little boring and feels a bit oppressive. It takes longer to learn how to be free and have fun.

What and where do you sing for fun? Karaoke? Do you sing in the shower?

I sing on the streets with my friends at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. I have a memory of this moment with my friends where I'm singing on a bridge. It was funny. I don't sing too much. When I maybe want to seduce a girl, I sing a little bit because it's love, a love song, you know? Before the theater, people were singing on stage so it's the first art, you know? It's the most direct way to express emotion.

03182008_louisgarrell3.jpgAre there any sure-fire songs for seducing a woman?

I mean, Jacques Demy songs, ["The Umbrellas of Cherbourg"], are really good to seduce. The songs of those movies are really gay. Not "gay," but gay as joy, because in French the same word that means homosexual is like joy.

They can mean the same in English, too.

Yeah? That's funny.

Last year, Elle magazine listed you as one of the 15 sexiest men in France. How do you not let something like that go to your head?

The week after, there was an item. A girl wrote a letter about "this fucking shit, this young man. Me, I want to see 40-year-old men. This guy is too young." I mean, it's a joke. I turned it into a joke with my friends. I was before Jude Law. Something isn't right.

With your family's background, was there any chance that you wouldn't have gotten into the arts?

I wanted to be a lawyer. I love that job, I don't know why. I went to a tribunal. But, I mean, the job of a lawyer is really interesting; the part of the truth, of what you say, it's really strange. Did you see the Barbet Schroeder movie, ["Terror's Advocate"]? That guy Jacques Vergès, he's a strange, amazing man.

Do you have any aspirations to direct, like your father?

I did one -- it's a short, about 25 minutes. I'm editing it right now, and after that, I'd like to make another one. Maybe I would like to film my friends, because I have a group of theater friends.

What's your short about?

It's really strange to pitch it, but it's a guy with problems [concerning] divorce. The mother asks him to write a letter against the father. The story is when you're an adult, men make the girls suffer, you know? When you are a child, the girls make the men suffer. It's about a nightmare between three men, and the father causes a lot of pain to the mother.

I would also like to make a fairy tale in black and white. Maybe I'm going to call it "Little Taylor." Little Taylor who fell in love with an actress the first time he sees her, and he starts to make a little robe -- dress -- for her, but she's going to betray him for her own kind.

Presuming you'll still want to act if you begin directing features, do you have any goals as an actor, or people you'd like to work with?

In France, I would like to worth with Patrice Chéreau, who made "Queen Margot." I would really like to work with Almodóvar and James Gray. I love "We Own the Night."

[Photos: "Love Songs," IFC Films, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Louis Garrel on "Love Songs" (photo)]]> Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:09:34 -0500 1008936 2008-03-18 13:09:34 closed closed louis_garrel_on_love_songs_1_photo inherit 8936 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Georges Méliès, "Khadak"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/georges-melies-first-wizard-of.php Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:30:08 -0500 03182008_triptothemoon.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

Perhaps, with the cataract of DVD'd Méliès mania besetting us — the new comprehensive Flicker Alley box "George Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913)," the new, more modest and affordable Kino sampler "The Magic of Méliès," both piling atop Facets' standard "Méliès the Magician" disc — we can begin to consider the French pioneer as something other than a film history staple and an oddity for scholars. It'd be a brand new tact to take for films that, being over a century old, reach right back to the form's infancy, movies' equivalent of cave painting and hieroglyph carving. But there's something effervescent and seductive there, a spirit of high innocence and ceaseless invention that has made several of Méliès's elaborate images — most obviously, the man in the moon with the ship-bullet in his eye, from "A Trip to the Moon" (1902) — undying cultural icons, familiar to the masses who aren't particularly aware of or even interested in the fact that the movies were being made during the McKinley administration.

Film geeks don't need to be sold; objects like the Flicker Alley box, which bundles (and thoroughly indexes) most of Méliès's surviving films (over 170 out of more than 540), are a cinephile's idea of shipwreck treasure, long thought lost. But it's become clear that Méliès is more than just the stop-motion special effects inventor and fin de siècle fantasist he's normally defined as having been — or, that those definitions are more resonant cultural ideas than we have usually presumed. Certainly, returning to the artesian source for every manifestation of cinematic mystery and sleight-of-hand has its own aesthetic buzz — the essential élan and spectacle of movies can be found in their prenatal form in Méliès's short dreams, whether they be mere trickery or elaborate fairy tales, such as "The Impossible Voyage" (1904), a 20-minute epic that uses up more visual imagination and hectic chaos than most features made in the next 40 years.

There are no Méliès masterpieces — he worked in the era before such a concept was even hatched. And it's true, as per the classic historical argument, that his films occupy a 2-D theatrical space in comparison with the early Edwin S. Porters and D. W. Griffith. (The performances in Méliès are far more expressive, amusing and, ironically, rich in conviction than any contemporaneous film, however.) But that's like dismissing Bosch because he wasn't Rembrandt. It could be said that as a pioneer, Méliès expanded the cinematic vocabulary by skipping over the third dimension and extending towards a fourth — a way of seeing that evoked the unseen and the impossible, a use of recorded light that palpably smacked of the metaphysical. He elaborated on a space familiar to everyone at the time (the theater proscenium) and then, as if by magic, transformed it into the saw-it-with-our-own-eyes unreality of the ghostly and the subconscious. Not for nothing was Freud a youthful contemporary — but Méliès never dared to suggest textual insight, making only comedies and always, always striving towards irreverence, another advantage he had and still has over Porter and Griffith.

But more than that, Méliès's movies are beautiful to look at, the first triumphs of filmic design (and the most thoroughly conceived until German Expressionism.) Watching Méliès is like seeing a secret, a lost and ancient gray universe of pre-technological inventions, nursery rhyme caricature, painted landscapes, cartoon Victorian affluence, trains and ships and cars that are obviously just facades but into which characters climb anyway, moons and stars, many of them with anthropomorphous faces, human butterflies, outrageous cross-section views (Wes Anderson's debt remains unpaid), deceptive perspectives, movies within movies, faeries and imps, classical paintings come to life, relentless disappearances and reappearances, and so, infinitely, on. It's an arena of unfettered childlike wonder, a Seine of blissful unreality, as energetic and joyous as a playground, and comparable, as pop art, to the career work of Maxfield Parrish, Chester Gould, Cole Porter, Bing Crosby, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Kirby, The Beatles and Hayao Miyazaki. Put that in your Cinema 101 DVD deck and smoke it.

(It should be noted that the Kino disc comes with a 1978 American bio-doc about Méliès, while the Flicker Alley set comes supplemented by Georges Franju's 1953 reenacted biopic/whatzit "Le Grand Méliès.")

03182008_khadak.jpgOn another faraway planet, Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth's "Khadak" (2006) shows us a Mongolia we haven't seen before, and does it in the course of a trippy magical realist tale that seems, despite the filmmakers being Belgian and American respectively, authentic to the region. Our hero, Bagi (Batzul Khayankhyarvaa), is the fatherless lad of a small sheep-herding clan living on the "gobi" plains; he suffers occasional seizures, which seem to insert his consciousness into a parallel realm where only the local shamaness can reach him. Their world is upset when a reputed livestock plague forces the Mongolian government to relocate the family to a semi-industrialized mining town, complete with blocks of workers' housing shooting up abruptly like an aging dystopia against the doggedly blue Central Asian sky. Eventually, Bagi is hospitalized for his seizures and must escape from the system — but "Khadak" hangs on its plot frame like a silk sheet blowing in the wind, making spectral connections and conjuring evocative tableaux and visually mourning the tragic, soulless modernization of an ancient world. (A two-minute tracking shot of the family's physical removal from the wilderness, with hazmat-suited soldiers and furniture stranded on the steppes in a Magritte-like dislocation, is typical of the film's virtuoso and expressive yet oblique approach.) Brosens and Woodworth make full use of the Asian dusklight and the steam that rises from everything in the Mongolian cold, and seize on compositions in depth, and try as I might, I saw no evidence of a Western, orientalistic perspective. (In fact, it's a much more elusive and de-Westernized film than, say, indigenous products like "Mongolian Ping Pong" or "Kekexili: Mountain Patrol.") If "Khadak" fragments in its last quarter, abandoning bilateral universes and chronology, that's because that's what's happening to the old life, free and independent and intimate with the ground and sky. All that's left, it would appear, is the magic in our heads.

[Photos: Georges Méliès' "A Trip to the Moon," 1902; "Khadak," Lifesize, 2006]

"Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema" (Flicker Alley), "The Magic of Méliès" (Kino) and "Khadak" (Lifesize Entertainment) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[The Brothers Wilson]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/ifc-news-podcast-68-the-brothe.php Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:20:09 -0500 Luke and Owen Wilson have risen from earlier collaborations with Wes Anderson to mainstream stardom, but have also retained distinct on-screen personas that have informed both their larger and their indie roles. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at the career of the two more famous Wilsons (sorry, Andrew), the roles they've tended to take or be offered, their attempts to break out of those roles and their brightest on-screen moments.

Download: MP3, 26:33 minutes, 24.3 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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8926 2008-03-17 15:20:09 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_68_the_brothe publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008926 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Brothers Wilson (photo)]]> Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:20:09 -0500 1008926 2008-03-17 15:20:09 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_68_the_brothe_photo inherit 8926 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Joel Hodgson on "Cinematic Titanic"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/joel-hodgson-on-cinematic-tita.php Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:47:00 -0500 03172008_joelhodgson.jpgBy Matt Singer

In the not-too-distant past, a disillusioned stand-up comedian named Joel Hodgson created a show for the local Minneapolis UHF channel about a guy stuck in space watching bad movies with a couple of homemade robots (puppets, really). The series was eventually titled "Mystery Science Theater 3000" — even though the show was not set in the year 3000 — and became an improbable cultural touchstone. Even more improbably, it survived numerous cancellation scares, a network switch and an almost complete turnover of its cast all while maintaining the high comedic standards Hodgson established before he left the show halfway through its fifth season. Almost ten years after the series' finale, "MST3K"'s devoted fan base still shows up to purchase old episodes on DVD. "'Mystery Science Theater' still sells," Hodgson told me. "I still get a royalty from it."

The viewers (and their continued financial support) eventually convinced Hodgson that it was time to get back into the movie riffing game. He recently assembled a team of "MST3K" alumni and founded a new troupe: Cinematic Titanic. This time around, there are no puppets ("We didn't want to make it as cute," says Hodgson). And to date, there are no elaborate comedy sketches framing the movie mockery, but the crucial joke-to-schlock ratio remains high. The venture is different for another reason as well; "Cinematic Titanic" is entirely self-financed and distributed, and available only through the group's website, CinematicTitanic.com. Recently, I spoke with Joel over the phone about how the hands of fate led him to his new gig.

What year did you leave "Mystery Science Theater?"

There's a lot of people who'd be able to answer that question better than I. I think it was um... '95? '94?

Either way, it's been a while. Why do something like "Cinematic Titanic" now?

Oh boy. Well, I left "Mystery Science Theater" basically because I was fighting with my partner and I felt like it would wreck the show if we kept going. That's why I decided to leave. I loved working on it. I didn't want to go — I kind of had to say to the press, "Hey, I got a bunch of stuff going, and I'm moving on!" But I really didn't. I just didn't want it to look bad when I left.

Time went by and I started to appraise my life and I kind of regretted that part of it. Then some other situations happened where all of the original guys were available and wanted to do it, and they were willing to go for it this way where it's a self-funded project. We all put money in to do this pilot and get it out there.

One of the biggest differences between "Cinematic Titanic" and "Mystery Science Theater" is the lack of a story that explains why you guys are watching these bad movies. Why did you decide to go that route this time around?

We are getting a lot of people telling us they want more of an explanation, so we intend to build that onto the front [of future episodes]. The overriding concept is we're recording this for future generations. The movie is really the springboard for all these other ideas, and at the end of it, there's this great big mound of data. It reminded me of the stuff they put in time capsules to explain to people in the future what happened at a certain time in history. We're actually going to have a physical "Time Tube" and we're going to put all these DVDs in it and put it down into the earth. It's like the Westinghouse time capsule from the 1964 World's Fair. In fact, it's exactly like it. That's where I got the idea.

As far as our ability to riff on a movie, everybody was satisfied, but [more explanation] is the thing that's emerging that fans want more of. It's very similar to the beginning of "Mystery Science Theater." I didn't have a theme song when we started. That came once we realized people were saying, "What are you doing?"

Back when you started, I imagine you had to justify why anyone in their right mind would watch a bad movie. Now "Mystery Science Theater"'s had such an impact that watching a bad movie seems like a perfectly rational activity.

It's true. We don't have to be quite as formal as back then. When we used to do the show locally on channel 23, people really did call in thinking they were losing their minds. There was nothing they could compare it to.

02272008_cinematictitantic.jpgWhen you guys were working on something like "Manos: The Hands of Fate," did you sense at the time how popular that episode would become?

Not at all. To me, that's one movie I think of when people ask me, "Did you ever encounter a movie that you felt you couldn't do?" I just remember sitting there shaking my head going... I didn't say it out loud, because I didn't want to bring down morale — "This is really awful! I don't know if we can do this!" [laughs]

Another interesting thing about "Manos" is I was reading on Wikipedia about how Torgo had cloven hooves. And I never caught on to that! They showed a picture of it and I realized that the silhouettes [of Joel and the 'bots at the bottom of the screen on "MST3K"] always masked the bottom of his feet. So, in a weird way, "Manos" helped me get to this new "Cinematic Titanic" silhouette array that's like scaffolding that goes up the sides of the screen. You can see much more of the screen, and that allows you to riff on more things.

The disclaimer at the front of the first DVD describes "Cinematic Titanic" as an "artist owned and operated venture." Can you talk a little bit about why you guys decided to go that route?

If you take a deal in Hollywood now, you pretty much have to take notes. If we went to someone for the money to make six or eight or 12 shows, they would go "Okay, but we really have some strong opinions on how you need to do it." And "Mystery Science Theater" was really rare in that the Comedy Channel [which was later redubbed Comedy Central] was so busy getting a network going that they really didn't give us notes. After being in Hollywood for ten years, I said to myself, "This is really screwing me up. Right or wrong, I'm kind of used to doing these autonomous shows. 'Mystery Science Theater' was an autonomous show, so maybe we should just do that again." The only way to do that was to just pay for it ourselves.

How often do you actually go to the movies?

Man, not too much! I have to say I haven't gone to too many movies lately. I just get screeners and stuff like that and watch them at home. It's hard, because in L.A. going to the movies is kind of like going to church. People are a little too into it. I prefer to go to the movies in the Midwest because they have exactly the right attitude — will this entertain me for 90 minutes? Whereas here you feel like people are really invested and it takes the fun out of it.

Okay, last question: If your life depended on it, would you be able to build a Tom Servo or Crow T. Robot off the top of your head?

Oh easily!

How long would it take?

If you wanted one just for show I could do it in about a half hour. If you wanted one that was functioning, that would be about 12 hours.

Wow.

Yeah, I could do it easily. I'd just use a hot glue gun. But it wouldn't really last very long.

That's all right. If your life depended on it, you'd have to act quickly. There's no time to be fancy.

Oh yeah, for sure. I could even do it if you had one of those black ops underwater rooms that was completely dark and was filled with water. If I had snorkel gear, I could do it.

[Photo: Cinematic Titanic's "The Oozing Skull, Joel Hodgson, Cinematic Titanic, 2008[

To purchase Cinematic Titanic's "The Oozing Skull," go to CinematicTitanic.com. CT's next episode is due by the end of April.

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: Caroline Suh on "Frontrunners"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/caroline-suh-on-frontrunners.php Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:31:04 -0500 03172008_frontrunners1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

Kofi Annan once told Alexander Payne that "Election" was the most purely political film he'd ever seen, which makes one wonder where the former U.N. Secretary-General would place the nonfiction "Frontrunners," Caroline Suh's study about the real life political process at New York City's Stuyvesant High School. As the film immediately lets the audience know, Stuyvesant is one of the most prestigious schools in the country and a proving ground for some of the best and brightest — where a term as student union president could equal a ticket to Harvard or Yale. With so much at stake, the race for student government involves primaries, televised debates, newspaper endorsements and, yes, the usual schmoozing with constituents (which in one candidate's case involves serving glasses of Pellegrino in the middle of a hallway "lounge").

For most, this isn't the typical high school experience, but then again, what is? Although the four candidates at the center of "Frontrunners" represent the familiar cliques of high school life — Hannah, the drama queen whose extracurriculars included a role in Todd Solondz's "Palindromes"; George, the Max Fischer-esque go-getter; Mike, a seemingly withdrawn type who cruises by on his looks and charm; and Alex, the ill-prepared basketball player — the resulting election reveals a generation of teens that is at once diverse, but also media savvy and unafraid of resorting to old fashioned stumping for votes. The documentary is the first to be directed by Suh, who had previously been a producer on various PBS documentaries with Erika Frankel. Suh discussed the highs and lows of the campaign trail following "Frontrunners'"s world premiere at SXSW.

Coming from a producing background, did your heart sink when you found out that one of the candidate's strategies involved blasting "Born to Be Wild" and "Teenage Wasteland" (songs with expensive licensing fees) to grab the attention of students walking to class?

Both Erica and I begged George, when we found out that this was part of his campaign strategy, to not play The Beatles or things that we knew we couldn't license and of course, he kind of ignored us and played very expensive music. [laughs] We have a lawyer who's very aggressive in terms of fair use issues and she's been guiding us through the process. But as two people who are used to producing, it was very disturbing, but we had to go with it because it was the story and we couldn't control what was happening.

Had you been wanting to direct for a long time?

I started doing this because I wanted to make films and needed to learn the craft and also, we need to support ourselves, but this was a great opportunity to not produce and do something that was my own, to not have boundaries and not have to make a program to time and not have to take notes that we didn't agree with. It really was a great experience in that way.

03172008_frontrunners2.jpgA high school election also seems like a nice subject to ease into as a first project since it's self-contained. Was that a consideration?

That was definitely a consideration. We wanted to tell a campaign story and we don't really look at the film as a competition film, but more as a campaign film. We knew that there was an arc to the story, so that definitely made it more manageable, and we knew we'd be shooting for a limited amount of time, which actually enabled us to make the film because we could afford to. It wasn't a situation where it would stretch on for months and months and we couldn't afford to have a [D.P.].

Last night in the Q & A, you said you didn't want to work with adults, but usually the maxim is "no kids, no animals" — how did high school politics come up?

CS: [laughs] Well, to be honest, we've worked on a lot of a serious subject matter docs and I wanted to do something where I didn't have to be professional. As a producer, it's also different — you do have to present yourself professionally, and I wanted to do something that was more relaxed, more one-on-one. I also look young and I'm a woman and when you're dealing with "adults," it's a different kind of interaction. So it's nice to work with teenagers where some of that outer stuff falls away.

Because of the Stuyvesant setting, you probably knew the election would be interesting, but in most high schools, elections seem to boil down to pithy popularity contests. Was that a concern of yours going in?

When we started filming, that was definitely a fear that oh, what if there's no story? We didn't have any control over it or the characters — luckily, they ended up being great and all very different from each other. But it was a huge fear. There could've easily been no story. We know there were going to be debates, and that's great and fun, but we started to relax when we met the Spectator people [the Stuyvesant school newspaper, which must endorse a candidate] because they provided a context for the election that gave it some gravity.

Were you surprised by how civil the election was?

I don't know if we had any expectations going in as to what it would be like. We were concerned that bad things would happen, because they're only 16 and 17, and we didn't want this to be something that ruined someone's whole life, so we really were hoping that there wouldn't be real world ugliness. We were lucky that didn't happen.

You also kept the focus on the election, although there seemed like there could've been a natural inclination to learn a bit more about the adults.

That's what we wanted to do. We felt strongly that the film is really about the election and how the kids have decided to be at school. It's really their story, their public persona, and their private persona too, but it really is all about who they are at school. It was important to us that we keep it that way.

[Photos: "Frontrunners," Suh Films, 2008]

For more on "Frontrunners," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/opening-this-week-4.php Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:49:31 -0500 03172008_boardinggate.jpgBy Neil Pedley

SXSW recently concluded a week-long unveiling of some of the best and brightest new talent that indie film has to offer, but that didn't deter established players from forging ahead with the fine traditions that have this week brought us an Owen Wilson kiddie comedy, a poker mockumentary and an imitation of whatever Asian cinema was doing four years ago.

"Boarding Gate"
Three-time Palme D'Or nominee Olivier Assayas delivers a sleek and sexually charged thriller that stars the irresistible Asia Argento as a gal on the run from Europe to Asia as she indulges in affairs with both Michael Madsen's high-flying financier and the hit man sent to target him. If you can take your eyes off of Argento, keep one eye open for a supporting turn by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon.
Opens in limited release.

"Drillbit Taylor"
Judd Apatow tries to appeal to the kiddie crowd with this slapstick comedy co-written by Apatow associate Seth Rogen about a troupe of high school nerds who hire Owen Wilson's bungling bodyguard to protect them from bullies. While Wilson's apparent suicide attempt in August 2007 has made this a hard sell for Paramount, the film is filled with funny faces including Leslie Mann, Danny McBride and Lisa Lampanelli. Indie film fans should take note of the casting of Alex Frost as one of said bullies — he played a bullying victim turned assassin in Gus Van Sant's controversial 2003 film "Elephant."
Opens wide.

"The Grand"
We've been spared a Will Ferrell jai alai satire (so far), but there are few sports that have yet to become the basis of a sports comedy. In this most recent example, "The Grand" lampoons poker's newfound image as the coolest game in town with a variety of numbskulls and deluded wannabes competing for the grand prize in a tournament at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas. In addition to a galaxy of poker's finest players dealing themselves into the action, the film boasts a cast including the likes of Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, Cheryl Hines and (yes!) Werner Herzog.
Opens in limited release.

"The Hammer"
Perhaps it's fitting that the reunion of "Kissing Jessica Stein" writer/actress Heather Juergensen and director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld is for this bizarre but affectionate comedy about second chances. Did we mention it stars "The Man Show"'s Adam Carolla? The radio host reportedly drew from his own life experience to pen the story and to star as Jerry Ferro, an ex-amateur boxer turned construction worker who decides to put the gloves back on and launch a bid for Olympic glory as he approaches 40.
Opens in limited release.

"Love Songs"
Novelist, playwright and children's author Christophe Honoré continues the renaissance of the modern day musical with this tale of young love in Paris starring Louis Garrel and Ludivine Sagnier as a couple who attempt to kick start their stalled romance with a ménage-a-trois that only succeeds in complicating matters further.
Opens in New York.

"Meet the Browns"
Tyler Perry may not be earning cred with the critics, but he has snagged his first Oscar-nominated lead in Angela Bassett, who stars in Perry's latest parable as a woman struggling to hold her family together following the death of her father, who she never knew. Audiences might already know about "the Browns" from its run as a play in 2004, but after a two-film absence, Lionsgate is hoping an appearance by Perry's signature character, Madea, will be cause for celebration.
Opens wide.

"Planet B-Boy"
Filmmaker Benson Lee makes his debut with this colorful documentary looking to shed some light on what he feels is the criminally misunderstood phenomenon of break dancing. Lee takes us around the world, charting the history of the dance, its relationship to martial arts, its courtship by pop culture and its free-flowing, improvisational nature as a form of self-empowerment and free expression. Frankly, we're in favor of anything that makes us feel less ashamed of loving "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo."
Opens in limited release.

"Shelter"
Jonah Markowitz writes and directs this melancholic tale of self-sacrifice and forbidden love that was an acclaimed staple of the gay and lesbian film festival circuit last year. Trevor Wright stars as Zach, a young man forced to put his life on hold to care for his younger brother. When love blossoms between himself and his best friend's brother, Shaun (Brad Rowe), Zach is torn between his obligations to his family and the hopes and dreams he still harbors for himself. If nothing else, the art direction should look great — Markowitz cut his teeth in the art department on films ranging from "Saw" to "House of Sand and Fog."
Opens in limited release.

"Shutter"
Now that Hollywood has exhausted the Japanese horror genre, the producers behind "The Ring" and "The Grudge" have turned their attention to Thailand with this remake of Banjong Pisanthanakun's 2004 thriller of the same name. A young couple (Joshua Jackson & Rachael Taylor) honeymooning in Tokyo discovers ghostly images lingering in their vacation photographs. Incidentally, the U.S. is not the first country to remake "Shutter" — last year, the Tamil film industry adapted a version of their own, entitled "Sivi."
Opens wide.

"Under the Same Moon"
While the immigration debate rages on all around us, filmmaker Patricia Riggen's tender family portrait focuses on the loving bond between mother and child that even thousands of miles of separation cannot break. After his grandmother passes away, a young boy has no choice but to risk the treacherous journey across the U.S. border in the hope that he and his mother can be reunited. This is Riggen's first dramatic feature, following her debut documentary that received a short filmmaking award at Sundance 2005.
Opens in limited release.

[Photo: "Boarding Gate," Magnolia, 2007]

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: Jay Delaney on "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/not-your-typical-bigfoot-movie.php Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:55:42 -0500 03132008_notyourtypicalbigfootmovie1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

I'll start with a spoiler: You won't see Bigfoot in Jay Delaney's documentary, "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie." (Actually, that's a matter of opinion, since there's photographic evidence presented throughout the film that may or may not be Sasquatch.) But there is something much more elusive that Delaney captures as he tracks two Bigfoot hunters through the Appalachian woods of Portsmouth, Ohio — a loving portrait of Dallas and Wayne, two old friends looking for a major accomplishment to be remembered for in a place where there aren't many opportunities to make a mark. While both men believe the discovery of Bigfoot could also bring fame and fortune, they also enjoy the thrill of the hunt, and when the arrival of a high-profile Bigfoot hunter complicates their research, their friendship is tested. I caught up with Delaney after his film premiered at SXSW to talk about the creature they call Yeti in Australia and the pursuit of the American dream.

Could you talk about how you guys met up with Dallas and Wayne?

A friend of mine was working in a bank in Portsmouth, and he told me the story about this guy who'd come inand ended up talking all about Bigfoot the whole time he was in the bank. He left a business card that said, "Dallas Gilbert: Bigfoot Researcher." I was instantly curious, so he passed on the card to me and I figured out a way to get in touch with Dallas. We decided we'd meet [Dallas and Wayne] on the Ohio River at a picnic table, and Dallas came with this briefcase with pictures and he showed all kinds of pictures and pointed to Bigfoots in [them], and it really grew out of that. Ever since then, it's haunted me, the story, and I've always wanted to get back to it. The whole time, they really wanted us to go out into the woods with them to see some of the evidence — broken tree limbs and whatnot — and they have a whole lingo and language for their research. If a tree limb's broken, that's called a snap. Sometimes it's called a snap and a twist, if the Bigfoot twists it. We weren't going to go out into the woods with them, but then I got back and I looked at the footage and I realized this was going to be really boring if we didn't. So I called them up and said, "Hey, are you still up for going out and showing us where you do your research?" And he did.

Had you been actively looking for a project when this came about?

In all honesty, no. I've been interested in filmmaking since I was a teenager. I studied marketing in college, but I had an honors class on the films of Frederick Wiseman and that whole vérité style just really stuck with me. For that class, we were supposed to do a class project on ethnography and doing the story about the Bigfoot researchers was a bit of a stretch, but I really wanted to make a [short] about them, so I thought "let's just tie these two together." That was in 2000, 2001. I lived in New York for six months during 2005, worked on some productions and for those years in between, it was always eating at me that I really need to get back to this. In October '05, I decided to move back to Ohio to start the project.

03132008_notyourtypicalbigfootmovie2.jpgThe guitar score really underlines what's going on in the film, particularly the montage sequence that explains the history of the two men. How did you come up with that?

All of the music in the film, except for the closing song and one that's played briefly in the middle, is by Justin Riley and Ben Colburn, two Ohio musicians. They saw a cut of the film and really connected with the story and wanted to be involved. But to talk just a bit more about that montage sequence: I realized that I had spent all this time with Dallas and Wayne and I wanted an audience to be able to understand them. To me, that's the part of the film in which I probably interjected myself the most. I tried as much as possible to stay out of it, but there were all these little sort of quirks and interesting qualities about them that I wanted people to know, but to let them experience it all in a true vérité style would have taken forever. So I was actually looking to some other films. In "Amélie," of all films, there's this interesting part in the beginning that always stuck with me where her parents are introduced and it lists qualities and personality traits about them, so I just thought "let's try this out" and I thought this really works.

The film is about these two men and their friendship, but it could've just as easily turned into some farce about their obsession with Bigfoot. How did you walk that fine line?

That was definitely one of the challenges, because there was a friendship there that I feel with Dallas and Wayne, and I really wanted to respect that and the trust that they placed in me. They realized that it's funny to some people, but then you see moments like when Dallas wins the award [from his local Bigfoot Society for his contributions to research] and he stands outside and he's talking about, "I don't appreciate when people make fun of me, but what else can you say? What else can you do?" Moments like that just really connected with me and I hope connected with an audience. Growing up in that area [myself], I wanted to respect it, and I hope the film is taken in a way that people who are from there will realize there are some problems with our hometown, but there are [also] really good things about it. And I think there's something really beautiful and inspiring about the fact that [Dallas and Wayne] are still out there still trying for this. They have this hope in Bigfoot, and they have this faith in action, and I think that's really inspiring.

As the film goes on, you also realize that there's an enormous world of Bigfoot hunters as well as the politics that go with it. How early in the process did you discover that?

I had no idea going into it and in fact, initially, I thought that he was a rarity in the sense that, you know, how many Bigfoot researchers are there? As far as realizing that there is a pretty big subculture out there of people who track this, and they're a ton of websites online, that was really fascinating. At one point, I thought it would be interesting to interview some other Bigfoot researchers, but then I realized no, it's really a story about Dallas and Wayne, and I think the real value in it is [how] deep we can get into these two guys' lives. But it was fascinating to see that world out there and to see how there are controversies and disagreements within it — some people feel this bond with Bigfoot and want to just expose Bigfoot to the world, but in a loving way. Other people want to capture Bigfoot and other people want to kill Bigfoot.

It has to be asked — are you a Bigfoot believer now?

I went into it with an open mind and I hope it doesn't sound at all like a weak position, but for me, I was so focused on [Dallas and Wayne] that I don't know that my opinion changed. My opinion changed in other ways and I think I probably went into the film with a lot of questions and thought I'd come out with answers and actually came out with different questions and more questions. I still just keep an open mind.

[Photos: Dallas and Wayne; Director Jay Delaney, "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie," Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, LLC, 2008]

For more on "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: Daryl Wein and Richard Berkowitz on "Sex Positive"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/sex-positive-director-daryl-we.php Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:55:34 -0500 03122008_sexpositive1.jpgBy Stephen Saito

When Richard Berkowitz's mother is asked why she thought her son's book wasn't successful, she replies, "sex sells" and frankly, his book wasn't very sexy — even though it was titled "Stayin' Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex." Berkowitz had heard that before, even if his past as a gay hustler in New York during the 1980s would lead one to believe otherwise. Berkowitz spent his nights as a sex worker and his days as a journalist and AIDS activist at the height of the frenzy that surrounded the disease, attempting to dispel myths about how the disease was transmitted and pioneering the idea of having sex with condoms within the gay community. Yet his efforts mostly fell on deaf ears, and he retreated to write a book in 2003 that quickly went out of print. He also maintained an impressive archive that chronicled not only his own involvement in the early years of AIDS, but created a veritable oral history of the disease and potential prevention through saved television interviews, recorded phone calls and articles from the gay press. Although he may not have realized it, all he needed was 24-year-old filmmaker Daryl Wein to turn the treasure trove of material into something much more. I spoke to Berkowitz and Wein a day after their film, "Sex Positive", made its world premiere at SXSW, only 11 months after the two first met at a Passover Seder.

Considering the subject matter, how did you meet at a Passover Seder of all places?

Richard Berkowitz: When I first came to the city in the late '70s, I was a gay activist, and I made two feminist friends — one turned out to be Ardele [Lister, who appears in the film] and she almost became Daryl's mother-in-law. Every couple of years, Ardele makes a Passover Seder for the outcasts, for the transgendered or for the gay guys that would bring their lovers. It's a Seder for progressive people. So I show up by myself with my AIDS, and two guys who are lovers from Israel can show up, and Daryl was there because he was the boyfriend of her daughter.

When I heard that he was fishing around for a topic for a documentary, I didn't know it was suggested to him to look into my book, but the minute he came and got it, at first, I wasn't sure of his sexuality. I'm like, "Well, he's thin, he's cute, he takes care of himself..." [both laugh] And then as I got to know him and I realized he really was heterosexual, I said to myself, here we were, the women's and the gay movement in the '70s saying straight men aren't emotional, they're too worried...everything we want this generation to be — more sensitive, more empathetic, not homophobic, not afraid of gay men — now that's the way they're becoming, you step back and say, well, he'd make a great movie. So I felt really guilty about ever thinking he was gay because it's actually the more idealistic straight heterosexual guy that [could make this movie.] Also, the fact that he had been so close to a woman that had been my political and even spiritual rabbi and sister for like 30 years.

Daryl Wein: [laughs] I've also got beautiful blue eyes and when Richard and I locked eyes, we just...

RB: I trusted him. I think the problem with gay men when they do something like a documentary or do anything public media-wise is in the back of their mind, they're always thinking "How will this read to straight people?" It may not be true within a generation, but that's been my sense with gay men. They're more worried about how things will read to the straight community and we're just saying the truth as it is.

Daryl, coming from a generation where safe sex is generally accepted, were you surprised by the resistance that Richard faced by promoting safe sex?

DW: Absolutely. It was shocking to see what went on. I couldn't believe that there was an entire generation of gay men that had suffered to such a great degree for our safety — that's not something you learn about in school. I'd always thought that safe sex was a government-initiated program. I just did not know that it was a handful of fervent activists who really stood up and told people they needed to protect themselves, and that nobody wanted to listen to that in the beginning.

RB:In the midst of all this frenzy [over AIDS] and fear over contagion, there were actually some gay people fanning the flames of fear to create this horrible reaction of people not wanting to treat people with AIDS. There was actually some gay people fanning those fears because they thought it would finally wake people up and get the government to release funds. It caused people to die, and people didn't want to walk into their hospital rooms. People committed suicide. People were thrown out of their apartments. It was a terrible time.

03122008_sexpositive2.jpgThere are a few moments in the film where the person on camera actually says "I don't want this on camera." How did those moments ultimately make it into the film?

RB: I think in the gay community there's a tendency when you disagree with someone to use personal details about their private life to attack or silence them. There's a shot in the film from 1983 with this guy standing there saying, "Who is this person telling us what to do with our sex life? Well, I'll tell you who he is. He is a hustler who..." that traumatized me for years. I'll never forget sitting in my apartment seeing details about my sex life being used to silence and shame me by a man who's supposed to be my gay brother, because that's the tactic the straight world was using to silence the gay community. I think the same thing was true with [Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, Berkowitz's doctor and writing partner on a guide for safe sex]. But I think we'd both been burnt so many times about details of our sex life, which are details that actually made us better experts in advancing safe sex and being there at the forefront, that 25 years later, we're still afraid to say things that could be used to hurt us.

DW: I think those moments are the most amazing, because they're so truthful, and I think in Sonnabend's case, the doctor didn't want to offend Richard because they have a very personal relationship and I think for Richard, it's difficult to dig back into his sexual past because I think a lot of that's behind you now...

RB: It is. I feel old. When I was young, in my twenties, I didn't want to listen to some 60-year-old talk about sex. I just didn't. It's like listening to your parents talk about sex.

Isn't it strange that it took a young straight guy to have some perspective on this?

RB: I would never have dreamt that it would be a straight guy that would come along and make use of the archive. No one else came along. The book came out in 2003, was reviewed very well in the gay press, no one had any interest in interviewing me, no one had any interest in doing a documentary, no one had any interest in doing an article.

DW: I think I was coming in at a time when you had pretty much given up.

RB: Yeah.

DW: So it was kind of a lucky coincidence.

[Photos: "Sex Positive," Might and Main, 2008]

For more on "Sex Positive," check out the official site here.

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: The Winners]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/sxsw-2008-the-winners.php Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:55:46 -0500 03122008_theykilledsisterdorothy.jpgScreenings for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival (as well as our coverage here at IFC.com) will carry on as the music contingent rolls into Austin, but last night, the winners of the jury and audience awards were announced.

Daniel Junge's "They Killed Sister Dorothy," about the murder of activist Dorothy Mae Stang, received both the jury and audience prizes for best documentary, while on the narrative side, Jake Mahaffy's "Wellness" and Mark Webber's "Explicit Ills" were given nods by the jury and by the audience. Here's a full list of the winners:

NARRATIVE FEATURE

Grand Jury Award: "Wellness," dir. Jake Mahaffy
Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast: "Up With Me," dir. Greg Takoudes
Special Jury Award for Cinematography: "Explicit Ills," dir. Mark Webber

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Grand Jury Award: "They Killed Sister Dorothy," dir. Daniel Junge
Special Jury Award: "Full Battle Rattle," dirs. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss

REEL SHORTS

Winner (Tie): "Warlord," dir. David Garrett; "Small Apartment," dir. Andrew T. Betzer
Special Jury Award: "The Second Line," dir. John Magary

ANIMATED SHORTS

Winner: "Madame Tutli-Putli," dirs. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski
Special Jury Award: "I hate you don't touch me or Bat and Hat," dir. Becky James

EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS

Winner: "Safari," dir. Catherine Chalmers
Special Jury Award: "Upwards March," dir. Kaveh Nabatian

SXSW WHOLPHIN AWARD

Winner: "Glory at Sea," dir. Benjamin Zeitlin

MUSIC VIDEOS

Winner: TV on the Radio, "Me-I," dirs. Mixtape Club & Daniel Garcia
Special Jury Award - (TIE) Group Sounds, "Temporarily in Love," dirs. Randy Scott Slavin and Cornelius; "Fit Song," dirs. Keigo Oyamada and Koichiro Tsujikawa

TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL COMPETITION

Winner: "Picnic," dir. Wesley Bronez
Special Jury Award: "Inflections," dir. Matthew Campbell

ON NETWORKS GREENLIGHT AWARD

Best Original Production: "The Guild," dir. Jane Selle Morgan
Best Original Series Idea: "Knock Off," written by Brandi-Ann Milbradt

Audience Awards

NARRATIVE FEATURE

Winner: "Explicit Ills," dir. Mark Webber

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Winner: "They Killed Sister Dorothy," dir. Daniel Junge

EMERGING VISIONS

Winner: "In a Dream," dir. Jeremiah Zagar

[Photo: "They Killed Sister Dorothy," Just Media, 2008]

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<![CDATA["Her Name Is Sabine," "Terror's Advocate"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/her-name-is-sabine-terrors-adv.php Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:57:22 -0500 03112008_dvds1.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

It is surely a first — an international movie star (Sandrine Bonnaire) making a patient, respectful, thoroughly unnarcissistic documentary about her own handicapped sister, and stumping for policy change as she considers painful mysteries about family and the passage of time in the process. "Her Name Is Sabine" (2007) is a simple, unpretentious piece of work — Bonnaire spends an enormous amount of time simply observing the managed-care home where Sabine, nearing 40, lives now with a handful of other adults with varying modes and manifestations of autism. Slowly, Sabine's history is dripped in — as a child, teen and young adult, she was different, "off," but lucid, literate, energetic and capable of playing Chopin. She went without diagnosis for decades. As her siblings — ten of them — grew up one by one and left home, Sabine, robbed of stimulus, began to deteriorate; a series of hospital stays and hired nurses followed, and then a five-year long institutional stay in which Sabine grew violent and was tamped down by straitjackets and antipsychotic drugs. The filmmaker glosses over it, but Sabine, perhaps now permanently debilitated, was eventually rescued to a new facility that her famous sister had to raise money for herself, using her fame as an actress and celebrity.

In her deliberately modest way, Bonnaire has a tiger by the tail here, in ways that have nothing to do with the film's obvious and sincere plea for better diagnostics and care for autistics. The film's searing pathos emerge from Bonnaire's use of home videos shot by the family and by Bonnaire herself over the last 25 years or so, which are cut directly into segments of Sabine's present-day existence, and the tragic contrast between them is bludgeoning, and not necessarily the complete result of her bad years of institutional care. When young, Sabine resembled her sister, and was clearly a tempestuous, fascinating, zesty whip of a girl, not at all unlike the reckless, trouble-seeking gamine Bonnaire made her global mark as in Maurice Pialat's "À Nos Amours" (1983). (They even had the same enormous head of ropey hair.) It could be a revelation for serious students of Pialat's depth-sounding movie: Did the 16-year-old Bonnaire use her sister as a model, and was the film's Suzanne intended to be slightly "off," autistically disconnected in some hidden way from her family, helpless in her impulsiveness? It almost seems certain that Bonnaire was channeling her sister in Agnes Varda's ferociously antisocial "Vagabond" (1985) — the existential tension of which could easily be read as an autistic crisis, or vice versa.

In any case, "Her Name Is Sabine" embodies an essential, brutal sadness — whatever the confluence of reasons that caused Sabine to devolve from a hungry, bright-eyed girl to the obese, slack-jawed patient we see today, it's a distillation of the costs of time on all of us. This comes to the surface when Bonnaire, perhaps somewhat brutally, shows Sabine the home videos from 10 or 20 years before, and we watch the torturous grief rise and fall on her sister's face like ocean waves... until it's over, and she asks to see it again, laughing.

03112008_dvds2.jpgIn contrast, Barbet Schroeder's bio-doc "Terror's Advocate" (2007) is as complicated and duplicitous as full-on espionage. Our subject is Jacques Vergès, a French lawyer of French-Vietnamese ancestry who has been a pivotal figure in many of the last half-century's most contentious terrorism-based trials and controversies — pivotal in that he uniformly defends, on principle, the terrorist at hand, including PLO bombers, members of the Bader-Meinhof gang, Carlos the Jackal, Pol Pot, etc. Vergès doesn't disappoint in cutting a provocative figure — confidently waving a cigar around, he answers only the questions that suit him, and is quite obviously in love with the vision of himself as a kind of international man of mystery. Schroeder, whose specialty has been enigmatic subjects skirting the edges of civilization (talking gorillas, primitives, dominatrices, barflies, Idi Amin), obviously loves Vergès for the unpopular, or even inexplicable, position he proudly takes in world politics, preferring to focus on his love affairs, debts and a period in the '70s when he disappeared altogether, rather than on the political reasoning behind his decisions.

But the reasoning is there, and it makes "Terror's Advocate" burn with fury, even if far too few American film critics had the temerity or the education to address Vergès head-on. Simply, Vergès began his adult crusade with the Algerian fight for independence, which established a paradigm that has continued unabated to the present day: Poor colonialized Third Worlders will fight the rich nation that controls them with bombs, often targeted at civilians, because that's all they have. Whether they are "terrorists" or "freedom fighters" is a purely subjective matter, depending on to whom you're listening. But armies dropping bombs on civilian cities, killing innocents with many times the proficiency of handmade explosives, is seen somehow, in the Western media mindset, as a more righteous action, and therefore, uneasy to label as "terrorism." Vergès doesn't live in a world where taking civilian lives a handful at a time is worse than, or even remotely equal to, invading or occupying Algeria or Palestine or Vietnam or Lebanon — in every case, he quite correctly illustrates the French government's guilt in crimes far worse than any his clients have committed (Schroeder glosses over the Pol Pot issue a bit, but the Sétif massacre of 1945, in which the French killed somewhere between 10,000 and 45,000 Algerians beginning on the same day Germany surrendered, more than illustrates his point). The Iraq war is never referred to, but Schroeder is alive to the fact that Vergès might be a point man for the new millennium, when wars will be fought between the little and the big right where we live, and a new and more realistic kind of ethical mathematics are required.

[Photos: "Her Name Is Sabine," Film Movement, "Terror's Advocate" Magnolia, 2007]

"Her Name is Sabine" (Film Movement) and "Terror's Advocate" (Magnolia Pictures) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[From South by Southwest 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/ifc-news-podcast-68-from-south.php Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:31:21 -0500 There's film! There's music! There's barbecue! There's... interactive! This week on the IFC News podcast, we check in from SXSW 2008 to talk about what we've been up to, what we've seen, and why we like this damn festival so much.

Download: MP3, 32:51 minutes, 30.1 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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8880 2008-03-10 22:31:21 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_68_from_south publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008880 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[From South by Southwest 2008 (photo)]]> Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:31:21 -0500 1008880 2008-03-10 22:31:21 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_68_from_south_photo inherit 8880 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[SXSW 2008: Richard Jenkins on "The Visitor"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/richard-jenkins-on-the-visitor.php Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:12:59 -0500 03102008_richardjenkins.jpgBy Stephen Saito

There's an everyman quality to Richard Jenkins, but not every man (or actor) has had the chops that have led Jenkins to become one of cinema's great scene-stealers. Though his career has spanned over 30 years, Jenkins first broke through with a turn as a gay FBI agent on acid in David O. Russell's "Flirting With Disaster," which was followed up by supporting roles ranging from the deceased patriarch of the Fisher family on "Six Feet Under" to being a regular in films for the Coen and Farrelly brothers. He joins a different fraternity in his latest film, "The Visitor" — the all-too exclusive club of leading men. In the film, Jenkins stars as Walter Vale, a widowed college professor whose life is reinvigorated by an unlikely friendship with Tarek and Zainab, a struggling immigrant couple who have unwittingly been illegally subletting his apartment. When an incident occurs that threatens deportation for Tarek, who befriends Walter and teaches him the drum, Walter attempts to save him from being returning to his native country of Syria and, in the process, begins to save himself.

"It's an hour and 45 minutes of life, is kind of what it is," says Jenkins, who came to SXSW Sunday to introduce the festival fave that's full of both laughs and tears. Although director Tom McCarthy couldn't join him, since the actor/writer/director was preparing for his first day of work on Tony Gilroy's thriller "Duplicity," Jenkins obviously relished the opportunity to praise "The Station Agent" helmer, dispel some talk about frequent collaborator David O. Russell and explain how the Coen brothers really lost at this year's Academy Awards.

Had you met Tom before?

I met him, but didn't know him very well. We have the same agent and I loved "The Station Agent," and then one day, I was in L.A. and he was in L.A. We were both doing different movies; we were staying at the same hotel and he called me up and said, "You want to go out and get something to eat? Get some dinner?" So we went out and talked for an hour and a half. He sent me [a script] about a year later, and said "I wrote this movie and I want to know, will you do it?" And I read it and I couldn't believe it. I said, "You wrote this for me?" I said, "But nobody's going to finance this with me in the lead." And he said "That wasn't my question. My question was 'Do you want to do it?' I'll find the money." I said, "Absolutely." And that's how it happened.

Knowing that you were going to anchor the film, did your approach to the performance change from that of a supporting role where you only have to nail a few scenes?

Ten years ago, I may not have been ready to play Walter, because you just have to trust... because he doesn't talk a lot. He watches. And he doesn't really respond to a lot of things. He does, but it's internal. You don't see it. So I really had to trust myself and to say people will follow this and watch it and understand it better if I don't try to show what I'm doing — just live the life, live the guy and see what happens. And Tom was a big help with that too.

Because the film was shot on a budget, were any of the scenes that were exteriors improvised? There's a scene in the film where your character plays with a drum circle in Central Park that seems really authentic.

No, no. But [McCarthy] got the idea from going to Central Park and seeing the drum circle, so he got these guys and brought them in for one day and he had extras, but it's Central Park. You can't close down Central Park. I mean, we can't. "I Am Legend" could, but we couldn't. But they were shooting the same time as we were. (laughs) They had all the equipment. They had everything. You know, it was like we didn't have anything. It was like, "Can we get a truck?" "No, no trucks left." But [the scene] had that feeling, which is what you wanted. You wanted a feeling of spontaneity and what a drum circle is really like in Central Park.

03102008_richardjenkins2.jpgYour character learns how to play the djembe (African drum) in the film, but you have a history of drums yourself, right?

I did. I played the drums when I was a young guy. I took lessons for five, six years. I was never any good. But it did serve me in this movie. I stopped playing because I knew that no matter what, I wasn't going to be any good. My son is a fabulous drummer. He was better in six months than I was in five years. But he saw the movie in Miami and I said, "How was it, Andy, the drum work?" He said [grinning], "Well, you were very good."

Have you ever faced a moment, like Walter does at the beginning of the film, where you became uninterested in your career?

Well, yeah. Everyone has those moments where it's just like nothing seems to make any sense. There's a lot of self-loathing in there, a lot of embarrassment about how he's lived his life the last few years. We've all had that. Being an actor, it's not like a hard job, a lot of work, but it is filled with uncertainty, and you get to the point sometimes where you think this is... I give up. I give up.

It might not be an appropriate comparison, but you've worked on some productions known to be chaotic (David O. Russell's "Flirting With Disaster" and "I Heart Huckabee's," the troubled "Rumor Has It"). Were there any moments where you thought "Maybe I should have been a lawyer instead"?

(laughs) No, actually not. I don't like conflict. Some people love it. I just like to have a nice environment and having said that, I love David O. Russell. I mean, he's so gifted and he was great to me — "Flirting With Disaster" was a huge break for me, and when he called me up to do "I Heart Huckabee's," he goes (in manic tone), 'It's just a day! Just a day!' I said, 'Ok,' so I go in for a day and we're starting rehearsals and he kind of goes, 'How about a beard? Do you want to wear a beard?' I said, "Sure, ok." So the makeup people [said], 'We don't have beards. What are we going to do?' So they finally found one. That's what he's like. He's a real force of nature.

And speaking of crazy filmmakers, who are we going to think is more insane tandem that you've worked with by the end of the year: The Coen brothers ("Burn After Reading") or Will Ferrell and Adam McKay ("Step Brothers")?

Well, you know, it's a different kind of insanity, but both of them. (laughs) It's mayhem in both of them. The Will Ferrell thing was just crazy. It was great. I kept saying, "We shouldn't be having so much fun." And the Coen brothers are the best. And this script was so good. It's going to Cannes, I think. I have not heard one word about it, but I e-mailed Joel [Coen] after they won [at the Academy Awards] and said, "Congratulations on your awards, but by my count, you also lost four. So better luck next year." (laughs) And he wrote back, "Thank you for that perspective."

[Photos: Richard Jenkins in "The Visitor," Overture Films, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/opening-this-week-3.php Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:45:55 -0500 03102008_blindmountain.jpgBy Neil Pedley

This week, our cup runneth over with a "Karate Kid" knockoff, a shot-for-shot remake and more documentaries than Michael Moore can shake an overpriced hot dog at.

"Blind Mountain"
The recipient of plenty of acclaim at last year's Cannes Film Festival, director Li Yang has a casual yet immediate style that's been touted as something of a Chinese answer to Ken Loach. "Blind Mountain" offers an uncomfortable but powerful indictment of China's one child policy and the sex trade that has flourished under it. The film follows the desperate struggle of a young woman who accepts a job in a remote mountain village, only to discover that she has unwittingly been sold into marriage as a slave.
Opens in New York.

"Doomsday"
Before anyone had heard of Angelina Jolie, model-turned-actress Rhona Mitra was the original face of "Tomb Raider"'s Lara Croft. Ten years later, she's traded in pixels for pictures as the lead in director Neil Marshall's post-apocalyptic fusion of "Mad Max" and "Escape From New York," playing the head of an elite commando unit tasked with finding a cure for a deadly virus plaguing Scotland.
Opens wide.

"Flash Point"
Director Wilson Yip teams up with Donnie Yen to retool the tried and tested Hong Kong cop thriller formula with the "Iron Monkey" star playing an undercover cop looking to bring down a deadly Vietnamese crime syndicate headed by three dangerous brothers. In addition to his acting duties, Yen choreographed the film's innovative fight sequences, which combine six different fighting disciplines into what the action veteran hopes is the dawn of a new breed of martial arts film.
Opens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"Dr Seuss's Horton Hears A Who"
After the very adult "The Number 23," Jim Carrey puts his quest to be taken seriously on hold to voice Horton the Elephant, who protects the tiny Who civilization from the predators of the jungle. Steve Carell and Carol Burnett also lent their voices to this playful animated adventure based on the Dr. Seuss book from Blue Sky Animation, the team behind the "Ice Age" series and "Robots."
Opens wide.

"Funny Games"
Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke remakes his own 1997 German-language film of the same name, which tells of a vacationing family at a lake house who become the victims of a home invasion by two malevolent teenagers bent on a series of cruel and torturous games. Tim Roth and Naomi Watts face off against Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt in this darkly comic thriller. Despite being a shot-for-shot remake of the original, the U.S. incarnation earned an R rating while the 1997 "Funny Games" was never granted an MPAA rating. Apparently, everything really does sound that much scarier in German.
Opens in limited release.

"Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise"
An official selection of the Montreal Film Festival, this all-access documentary takes us into the private world of one of rock's most enduring stars as he takes to the road for his 2007 "Seize the Night" world tour. Director Bruce David Klein captures a frank portrait of the musician's frequent battle with depression, exhaustion, personal demons and declining health as he's faced with the prospect of calling time on a 35-year career and countless millions in record sales. In other words, it's your typical rock doc.
Opens in New York.

"Never Back Down"
With the massive explosion in mainstream popularity being enjoyed by the UFC and mixed martial arts, it's amazing this movie took so long to arrive. "Never Back Down" seems a Pat Morita cameo away from being "Karate Kid V: The Octagon": Sean Faris stars as Jake Tyler, the new teen in town who gets his head handed to him by the local badass when he tries to chat up a girl. Tired of the endless beat downs, Jake seeks the sage advice of a retired fighter (Djimon Honsou) who trains Jake to get his revenge at the upcoming local tournament.
Opens wide.

"On Broadway"
Premiering at the Independent Film Festival of Boston to rave reviews before working its way down the New England coastline, "On Broadway" is writer Dave McLaughlin's directorial debut. The film follows Boston carpenter Jack O'Toole (Joey McIntyre) as he attempts to reach out to his estranged father by writing a play inspired by the death of his beloved uncle. "On Broadway" boasts a strong supporting cast that includes the likes of Eliza Dushku, Robert Wahlberg (brother of Mark & Donnie) and "Saturday Night Live"'s Amy Poehler.
Opens in Boston.

"Sleepwalking"
Visual effects wrangler Bill Maher ("Mars Attacks," "Batman & Robin") makes his directorial bow with this drama about a family struggling to reconnect. Nick Stahl stars as James, a man forced to confront his long-buried demons regarding his father (Dennis Hopper) after his older sister, Joleen (Charlize Theron), abandons her 12-year-old daughter (Anna Sophia Robb), leaving her in his care.
Opens in limited release.

"Sputnik Mania"
On the heels of the well-received "In the Shadow of the Moon" comes another doc about the space race, this time about the American reaction to the launch of Sputnik, the former USSR's first Earth orbiting satellite. Liev Schreiber narrates David Hoffman's elegant, detailed story of how new technology inevitably leads to new terror and how that technological innovation impacted our entire way of life, then and for the 50 years that have followed. "Sputnik Mania" was the recipient of an International Documentary Association Award for best use of news footage in a documentary.
Opens in New York.

"Towards Darkness"
A slick and intricate abduction thriller, "Towards Darkness" is a non-linear chronicle of the events of 90 minutes in the life of a kidnap victim from a multitude of different perspectives. Roberto Urbina stars as Jose, the terrified victim who contemplates his life and seemingly imminent death while his father Carlos (Tony Plana) tries to secure his release with the aide of some covert American mercenaries. Director José Antonio Negret draws on the numerous personal tragedies of his own family for his directorial debut, which also stars and was executive produced by "Ugly Betty" herself, America Ferrera.
Opens in New York.

"War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death"
Filmmaker Jeremy Earp joins forces with Loretta Alper to continue his exploration of the media's symbiotic relationship to politics and their complicit role in selling war to the American people. Sean Penn narrates what is Earp's third film on the subject, which employs archival news footage spanning 50 years of American foreign policy, illustrating the parallels between Vietnam and the Iraq war as they argue that the more things change...
Opens in New York.

"Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub"
For over 12 years, the Tribeca-based Wetlands Preserve Rock Club provided a venue for a unique fusion of music, environmentalism and political activism that brought people together in celebration of free spirit and independence. The club helped birth such classic acts as the Dave Mathews Band, Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and many more, all the while funneling their profits into environmental and humanitarian causes all over the world. Filmmaker Dean Budnick makes his debut bringing us the untold inside story of this legendary establishment and the people who helped to make it so.
Opens in New York; Opens in Los Angeles on March 28th.

[Photo: "Blind Mountain," Kino, 2007]

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: Going Cuckoo for Cannabis]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/sxsw-2008-going-koo-koo-for-ca.php Sun, 09 Mar 2008 07:54:00 -0500 03092008_superhighme.jpgBy Stephen Saito

With 4/20 only a little more than a month away, SXSW kicked off an all-encompassing celebration of marijuana on Friday with the regional premiere of the Doug Benson doc "Super High Me" at the Paramount Theatre, shortly before other comedies about the herb made their premieres (officially: "Humboldt County"; unofficially: Jonathan Levine's Sundance hit "The Wackness," which played Saturday night as a secret screening). Part concert film culled from "Best Week Ever" regular Benson's stand-up act and part social documentary about the ongoing battle in California between the feds and the newly created legalized "dispensaries," which have been empowered by state law to sell medical marijuana, "Super High Me" sets its sights on being entertaining and informative and manages to do a little of both.

As Benson proves, it's not difficult to procure a doctor's note, and the film follows him as he detoxifies for 30 days from the substance before getting high for an entire month, inspired by Morgan Spurlock's attack on the Big Mac, "Super Size Me." On the surface, it would seem that the film is merely a vehicle for Benson's aloof brand of comedy, which, only moments into the film, gets him recognized as High Times #2 favorite pot comic. But, like Spurlock's seemingly self-serving doc, Benson's 30-day binge becomes something much larger than the gimmick at its center. The comedian's frequent trips to a doctor (who is merely high on life, providing an engaging dynamic) and director Michael Blieden's capture of the public outcry that results from overzealous drug enforcement officers breaking into the marijuana stores that have cropped up since California passed its medical marijuana law make for an intriguing discourse about the health and social ramifications of legalizing the drug. (Still, the sight of Benson and Sarah Silverman sharing a toke while Dave Navarro strums his guitar in the background is a bit jarring to see on camera.)

At the post-screening Q & A, Benson was pleased that "Super High Me" worked for the audience as a concert film, saying thata lot of times, because the audience on screen laughs, the in-house audience won't, which wasn't a concern in Austin. Likewise, Morgan Spurlock won't be filing suit for infringement, according to Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, whose Red Envelope Entertainment produced "Super High Me." He added that when he told Spurlock of the Benson film at Sundance, "[Spurlock] only wished he had seen it first." Sarandos and Benson were joined on stage by editor Alexis Hanawalt, director Blieden and producer D.J. Paul, who probably inspired a few people in the audience to start making movies of their own when he said all the marijuana for the production was donated for free.

Although the second installment of the adventures of Harold and Kumar has a little more than just pot on its mind, the sequel to the instant stoner classic was the subject of a panel Saturday that featured actors John Cho, Kal Penn and Neil Patrick Harris, as well as writer/directors Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz. While moderator Robert Wilonsky and the panel generally steered talk away from the films' drug element, one Austinite couldn't help himself during the Q & A portion and ask if Cho and Penn did any research before making the first film, to which Cho deadpanned, "We did a lot of blow — and then I was told that was incorrect." However, a beet red Harris was more surprised to learn that Penn actually had to research "Doogie Howser, M.D." for Kumar's obsession with the Steven Bochco series.

Despite the panel's mostly light tone, with Cho going so far as to say, "I don't think the movie has anything to say politically," the social issues that have given weight to the "Harold and Kumar" comedies were also raised. Penn shared an anecdote about the TSA searching him frequently in airports during the first film's press tour and how in one instance, his friend, who was in Penn's words, "pinker," was carrying a hunting knife on him after just getting back from a camping trip. "Racial profiling makes us all less safe," said Penn, who also spoke of his first encounter with Schlossberg and Hurwitz at a mutual friend's birthday party and being offended by Hurwitz when he said, "Wow, you don't have an accent." (Hurwitz countered, "We weren't actor trained yet.") But Penn and Cho reflected positively on what "Harold and Kumar" has done for their careers — Cho said the film was his "calling card at this point" while Penn said he only got an audition for Mira Nair's adaptation of "The Namesake" when Nair's 14-year-old son (a "Harold and Kumar" fan) bugged his mom to audition him. And for those already awaiting a third "Harold and Kumar," Schlossberg jokingly teased, "We've planned a 12-part dodecology. What you find out is ["Guantanamo Bay"] is chapter four and five."

If there was one shortcoming of the panel, it was the lack of input from Harris, who not surprisingly had all the best lines. When asked whether he was reluctant to come back for a second film, Harris cracked, "I was excited to finally cash in on a sequel... and [Schlossberg and Hurwitz] told me Anthony Michael Hall was on the other line." But he saved his best for last when Wilonsky walked right into a gag by cutting off questions by saying, "I see the guy in the back giving me the 'hi' sign," leading Harris to do his best Beavis impersonation, giggling, "high sign."

[Photo: "Super High Me," Screen Media Films, 2008]

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<![CDATA[SXSW 2008: The Zellner brothers on "Goliath"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/sxsw-2008-the-zellner-brothers.php Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:37:51 -0500 03072008_goliath3.jpgBy Alison Willmore

If you know short films — and, given how hard it can be to see them, you'd be in a select crowd — then boy, do you know the Zellner brothers. David and Nathan Zellner are an Austin-based filmmaking team whose distinctively deadpan, frequently funny and unfailingly if oddly affecting shorts have earned them high praise on the festival circuit. This year marked their fourth in a row with a film at Sundance, and their first with a full-length feature, "Goliath," which is both true to and expands upon the off-kilter sensibility that made their shorter work so successful. In simplest terms, "Goliath" is a film about a missing cat and the recently divorced man desperately searching for it. But, as director/writer David Zellner puts it, "I guess more stuff happens." I checked in with the Zellners on the unseasonably cold day before "Goliath" was due to make its hometown premiere at SXSW.

What's it like being bringing "Goliath" back to SXSW and Austin after Sundance? Any major differences?

David Zellner: They're both cold.

Nathan Zellner: Yeah, just as cold here as it was there.

It was your first feature at the festival — that must have been an interesting experience.

DZ: Yeah, it was different from the shorts because you get more attention. And if you get attention, you know it's for your film and not for another one in the block of shorts.

NZ: And in the Q&A, you know that every question's directed to you. When you're at a Q&A with a short [film] program there's always one [film] that gets left out, until someone's like "This question is for everyone." "What was the question? What was the budget for your film? I can get that one."

What's the difference in your process between creating the shorts and developing a feature?

DZ: For "Goliath," actually, very little, because we'd done a bunch of shorts and got all the mileage we could out of those, festival-wise and also in honing our skills and vision. We were ready to tackle a feature, and a couple of larger projects that were getting close to taking off didn't, and we didn't want to sit around for another year and we didn't want to do another short. We had this script on the back burner and it happened very easily. We used the same crew we use with the shorts and it was easy to segue into it, to look at it like a bunch of shorts glommed together.

I'd read in one interview that part of impetus for the film came from your fixation on — is it... a pole saw?

DZ: The pole saw. Oh, yeah.

...and wanting to put that in a movie.

DZ: I'd seen them at Home Depot and I'd seen greenskeepers using them. You know what [a pole saw] is?

NZ: Like a chain saw with a —

DZ: —a spear with a chainsaw on it. It's incredibly fun, and I hadn't seen it in a movie before. I'd fantasized about using it in a movie when appropriate... and also, just for personal reasons, wanted to play with it. You know?

03072008_goliath1.jpgHow do you two divide up work on your films?

DZ: Ultimately everything overlaps. We each have a say, but I come from more of a creative background, Nathan from more of a technical background, so I'll typically tackle more of the writing/directing and Nathan more of the editing and producing. That said, it all overlaps, and we definitely have to have a consensus before we go forward — which we usually do.

NZ: It's a good structure, the checks and balances.

DZ: I have a film degree and he has a computer science degree—

NZ: Together we make...

The ultimate team?

NZ: Well, we need a third sibling with a business degree. And then another one with a PR degree. And one with a doctor degree in case someone gets sick.

DZ: A doctor degree?

Has working together this long ever caused problems? It doesn't dredge up any old sibling grudges?

DZ: Not really. I think just because we've been doing it so long — it's all an extension of what we've been doing from little home movies when we were kids. One thing leads to the next, and hopefully the quality improves over time.

NZ: No more in-camera editing.

DZ: Or movie spoofs. When you're eight that's about all you can do, right? Movie spoofs.

Can you tell me about your decision to both act in the movie?

DZ: That's one thing that, if we had just started to do now, I'd be freaked out about, but since, for better or worse, it's just an extension of what we've always done, it's kind of second nature. Part of it is that we like to act and it's built around our abilities — we're going to try to be smart with our casting because we know that if people feel our performances suck then we deserve all the flack in the world for being vain bastards and putting ourselves in. We're really hard on each other when we're filming — we don't mince words. We really like to do it, and when it's appropriate it's a lot of fun to do.

So who's the cat owner?

DZ: That's—

NZ: —our parents.

DZ: Our parents have had tons of animals, so we grew up around them. They still have way too many animals now.

NZ: We always find them adopting strays. Or strays adopt them.

DZ: It's all our dad. Our mom is tolerant of our dad's obsession with feral cats.

NZ: They appear in the yard and then he gives them a name and you're like, "Oh, don't give it a name because then it's gonna start coming around." "I call that one Two-Boots" or something. "Oh, I won't adopt it. I'm just giving it a name."

DZ: And then you have three male, kind of feral cats in the house that—

NZ: —don't get along—

DZ: —and mark everything. Yeah, it's bad news.

[Photos: David Zellner; David and Nathan Zellner in "Goliath," Zellner Brothers, 2008]

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<![CDATA["Frownland"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/frownland.php Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:43:26 -0500 03072008_frownland.jpg[A variation of this review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2007 SXSW Film Festival]

"Frownland", the first feature of New York-based projectionist-turned-director Ronald Bronstein, is the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. It was also my favorite film at the last year's SXSW Film Festival, one that dares you to walk out until you, perhaps out of spite, find yourself totally drawn in and so in its strange headspace that you harbor concerns for your sanity. When I first reviewed the film, I suggested you shouldn't expect to see it in a theater near you anytime soon — one year later, Mr. Bronstein has secured, while not a run of the nation's cineplexes, a solid one-week NY run for "Frownland" at the IFC Center. If that does happen to be a theater near you, I highly suggest you make your way down there.

Bronstein's main actor, Dore Mann, plays (or is -- one suspects his role in the film is a mixture of performance and unadorned existence) Keith, a man who lives in the kitchen of a shared one-bedroom apartment and works as a door-to-door salesman fund-raising for a multiple sclerosis charity. Everyone in his life, including his roommate Charles (Paul Grimstad), his ostensible friend Sandy (David Sandholm) and his sister? cousin? girlfriend? Laura (Mary Wall) treats him with thinly veiled or open hostility, which sounds unfair, except that Keith is possibly the most irritating human being on earth. A chain-smoking, wet-lipped bundle of incoherence, he quivers under an unending struggle to force what he'd like to say out from under a nervous stutter, crippling hesitation and a hopelessly circuitous style of speaking. His inability to get his point across is matched only by his need to do so; he's constantly, preemptively apologizing while also refusing to acknowledge any social cues. Minor confrontations like his asking his bullying musician roommate to pay the electricity bill escalate almost instantly into open animosity. Keith is like no character I can recalls having seen in a film before -- whatever sympathy he amasses as we follow him through the miserable routine that is his life erodes as soon as he opens his mouth.

The thing is, everyone in "Frownland" seems caught up in their own kind of misery, and Keith is such an easy punching bag. Midway through the film we abandon Keith briefly for Charles, and see that he's not better off, jobless and broke, out-cynical pseudointellectualized by someone he meets testing for the same tutoring job, who declares, in a line for the ages that "I'm nostalgic for a Kafkaesque universe."

When we wander back to Keith, it's only to watch the one person he's so far been able to make sit still and listen to him finally crack and shoves him away. He's left to stagger through a New York that's made up to be the worst kind of urban hell -- one that's malevolent and that offers absolutely no respite or space to call your own.

"Frownland" was shot on film, a rarity on the festival and indie circuit these days, and the sound design recalls the industrial assaults of David Lynch. At a Q&A after the film's SXSW premiere, one audience member informed Bronstein that she had tinnitus and that the last 20 minutes had been agony for her, and then looked to him expectantly, as if he were suppose to promise to make his future films with sufferers of tinnitus foremost in mind. It was one of the stranger Q&A moments I've ever witnessed, but also seemed weirdly appropriate to the film.

[Photo: Dore Mann in "Frownland," Frownland, Inc, 2007]

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<![CDATA["Married Life"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/review-married-life.php Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:41:00 -0500 03072008_marriedlife.jpgBy Matt Singer

By the end of "Married Life," the characters have caused each other a great deal of harm in order to better their own lives, and they know it. Is it wrong, they wonder, to build one's happiness on the unhappiness of others? If it is, that makes going to the movies one of the most immoral acts you can do. What are movies, after all, if not the vicarious enjoyment of the suffering of others?

There's plenty of suffering here, and thus plenty to enjoy. The film focuses on four people living at the turn of the 1950s and the damage they do to one another. Harry (Chris Cooper) is married to Pat (Patricia Clarkson), but their relationship chilled some time ago. Harry confides to his best friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan) that he wants something more out of a woman than just "the sex" by way of introducing him to his mistress, Kay (Rachel McAdams). While Richard -- who initially considers marriage as "a mild illness" -- falls for Kay, an oblivious Harry plots ways to remove an equally oblivious Pat from the picture.

The film is set specifically at the end of 1949. In American cinema terms, that sort of places it at the tail end of film noir, but just prior to the major melodramas of Douglas Sirk. It's funny how we tend to think of these particular styles as so wholly different even though these films were often standing shoulder to shoulder at the box office ("The Big Heat" predated "Magnificent Obsession" by about ten months and it, in turn, predated "Kiss Me Deadly" by about ten months). In a sense, "Married Life" marries the two forms together in a way that honors, and also upends, the traditions of both. If you're looking for one filmmaking mode or the other, you might be disappointed that the film isn't as dark as the former or as serious as the latter. But if you're willing to go along with a movie that plays with convention and ducks expectations, it all works.

Well, maybe not all. Some of the angles of this love rectangle are just a wee bit off. McAdams, in particular, doesn't seem the right match — age-wise, temperament-wise, "the sex"-wise or otherwise — for Cooper. Her character would seem to fit the bill of a femme fatale but, as we've established, "Married Life" isn't necessarily a film noir and so Kay isn't necessarily required to play into any stereotypes. But she doesn't play into much of anything else either; her performance is as flat as that unflattering platinum blonde hairdo she sports. She fares better in her scenes with Brosnan, but that may be thanks to the fact that he seems to be as authentic to the era as she is clearly not. Brosnan got a lot of credit for "updating" Bond back in the '90s, but it's obvious in the way he wears his suits, smokes his cigarettes, and carries his hat that he's very comfortable in a period piece. He just looks like someone from a movie from 1949 and he's got just the right sort of ladies' man persona for a character as lovesick as Richard.

I like the way the film builds to one climax but delivers another even more satisfying one, and I like the way the director, Ira Sachs (previously of the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, "Forty Shades of Blue"), piles on layer after layer of guilt, deceit, and paranoia and still has the guts to go for a happy ending. The characters suffer for our pleasure, and, ultimately, their own.

[Patricia Clarkson in "Married Life," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Christopher Doyle on "Paranoid Park"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/christopher-doyle-on-paranoid.php Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:59:29 -0500 There are cinematographers, there are great cinematographers, and then there's Christopher Doyle. Boasting an eccentric résumé that includes stints as an oil driller in India and a cow herder in Israel, and notorious for his hard-drinking ways, the Australian-born cameraman, who was never formally trained, first made a cinematic name for himself with Edward Yang's "That Day, on the Beach" in 1983. But it's his long-standing collaboration with Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai that's cemented Doyle's reputation as a visionary, his constantly mutating yet highly distinctive style — most often typified by strikingly expressionistic color and lyrical, sharply defined compositions — resulting in numerous awards and a legion of devotees. Having by and large confined himself professionally to Asian shores, Doyle has, during the past decade, gradually branched out into American productions, the latest being Gus Van Sant's aesthetically intoxicating "Paranoid Park." Doyle recently traded e-mails with me about re-teaming with Van Sant, his disdain for artifice and the way that spaces provide inspiration.

You've worked with Gus Van Sant before, on his 1998 remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho." What was it that made you want to collaborate with him again?

I had shunned Hollywood for many years, for all the right reasons. When Gus came along with the ultimate "conceptual film" that our "Psycho" is, I felt there was hope for art and that, in his integrity, I could actually find a space. I just had to get the colors right and get to work on time... I think I got the colors okay. So when the producers of "Paranoid Park" promised to actually get me to work on time, how could I refuse?

How did you and Van Sant develop the visual style for "Paranoid Park"?

Most of the filmmakers I work with (myself included) tend to avoid artifice. We often abhor anything that looks "lit" ("It looks like a movie" is our most negative response). "Paranoid Park" is a diary. It is subjective and episodic. I feel the only valid response to the personal nature of the main character's experience was to allow the "kids" themselves to take us where the film should go.

03052008_chrisdoyle.jpgWhat plays the largest role in your choosing a project? The director? Actors? Script?

The people. Why would you want to spend all your energies and intellect and emotion and trust most of any day for anything from the six weeks to years that some films take to make if you didn't like who you were spending such energy and time with? S&M you can find online.

What informs your approach to a given work, and what specifically informed your approach to the look of "Paranoid Park"?

The space. The location. In this case, the climate (it rains 151 days on average in Portland) and the process itself. Most films actually do make themselves. How well they make themselves depends on our openness to, and global understanding of, all the elements that contribute to a "work." The actors respond to a space. The production designer and the director and cinematographer have chosen or manipulated or created the space. The light defines the space, but if the light is "natural," it may be temperamental... changing in unexpected ways... and what if the actors are new to their craft? And what if someone falls ill? The parameters have to be engaged. Film is life, too... I try to "go with the flow."

There's a powerful, intrinsic interplay between image and sound in "Paranoid Park." Did you know before filming began what type of sonic design would be employed, and did you try to meld the cinematography to it?

I would hope that the cinematography engaged the sound. I would suggest that the rhythms are there... but Gus gave them resonance. I hate the concept that an idea is "unique" or "inviolate." Like a date or a conversation, one thing triggers another, so you either end up in bed or in jail or have the best soundtrack I can remember (because Gus dares).

03052008_paranoidpark2.jpgYour work has always struck me as deeply lyrical, and that can certainly be felt in "Paranoid Park"'s skateboarding sequences. Why differentiate them visually from the rest of the film?

There are a large variety of sources and inspirations and debts and contributors to what is on screen and how it was filmed. In the context of this interview, I feel I should acknowledge that this film wouldn't look and work and feel as "skaterly" as it hopefully does without the input and access and respect that skaters and skater filmmakers gave us. And it wouldn't be as poetic as you suggest, or as coherent as we believe the film is, if the tone wasn't right, if that integrity and respect and exuberance and pride wasn't built into the spirit of the whole film.

How important is it for you to feel a connection with the story you're shooting?

One connects with an idea or two. One sees in space somewhere to go. The ideas initiate the one idea that may center a piece, the one image that is really all a good film needs... or none of the above. Shakespeare writes okay — how many good Shakespeare films can you name? The process is what makes a film... through the people... the people can only be no more or less than they are. So real people make good films and fake people pat each other on the awards back

Given how long you've lived and worked in Hong Kong, is it strange to work on American features? Does it require a process of acclimating yourself to the States, especially with a project like "Paranoid Park," which seems very intent on placing viewers in a particular American time and place?

In my experience, the more specifically and directly and openly one addresses ones own predicament, the more universal the experience is. At heart, we are not too dissimilar, even given what is often superficial cultural disdain. Sure, I feel more at home in Asia. Yes, many American obsessions are not my own. But when our common humanity can be explored and communicated with people of "heart" with real intention to "share," there are no boundaries. I have made many films in many languages and cultures I am not of, but I rarely feel foreign. Watch the faces and the images. The subtitles are only a tool.


[Additional photos: Christopher Doyle and director Gus Van Sant on set; skateboarders, IFC Films, 2007]

"Paranoid Park" opens in limited release March 7th.

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<![CDATA[Christopher Doyle on "Paranoid Park" (photo)]]> Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:59:29 -0500 1008849 2008-03-05 11:59:29 closed closed christopher_doyle_on_paranoid_photo inherit 8849 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[David Gordon Green on "Snow Angels"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/david-gordon-green-on-snow-ang.php Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:15:00 -0500 03042008_davidgordongreen2.jpgBy Aaron Hillis

Writer-producer-director David Gordon Green became an instant indie darling when his debut feature, "George Washington," snagged four Spirit Award nominations and the New York Film Critics Circle's award for Best First Film in 2000. An impressionistic drama set in the South (as are many of Green's films), "George Washington" was primarily crewed by Green's fellow North Carolina School of the Arts classmates and alumni, including "Great World of Sound" director Craig Zobel and others who continue to collaborate on each other's projects. In fact, cinematographer Tim Orr and composer David Wingo followed Green through his next three films — "All the Real Girls," "Undertow" and his latest, the 2007 Sundance entry, "Snow Angels." Adapted by Green from Stewart O'Nan's novel, the film is a poignant small-town drama about relationships young and old, some beginning and others breaking, with a top-notch ensemble that includes Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Griffin Dunne and Amy Sedaris. I spoke with Green about the North Carolina film scene, what attracts him to youthful characters and how he ended up directing a Judd Apatow stoner comedy, the upcoming "Pineapple Express."

I'll get to "Snow Angels" in a moment, but I first want to ask you about the North Carolina School of the Arts, since so many of the scene's filmmakers — especially in the past year — have been making names for themselves, winning awards and popping up at all the major festivals. Why do you think NCSA is breeding so many success stories?

I think it's a real sense of camaraderie. When we were all at school, people weren't so ego-driven. You go to a lot of film schools and there are a lot of really wealthy students that have family contacts and relationships that escort them safely and conveniently into the movie business. But this was just a bunch of hungry people from all over the country who really wanted to get involved in some way, making stuff that we believed in. "Chop Shop" just opened, and that's awesome because [writer-director Ramin Bahrani] worked in the office at our school. Jeff Nichols has "Shotgun Stories" coming out next month, and there's Craig [Zobel], [Aaron Katz's] "Quiet City" and so many more movies that came out in the last little bit. We've got a bunch of knuckleheads with their fingerprints all over the industry in a minor scale, and hopefully taking some ambitious steps over the coming years.

You've certainly taken some of those steps. How have you managed to work with bigger-name casts and larger budgets and still maintain artistic control?

The key is finding responsible budgets that give you the creative freedom to be as productive and prolific as you want to be. It's an industry that seems to like jumping on a moving train. If you illustrate the fact that you don't need them, then people get weirded out because they want to be necessary. If they see you have a good time, and they can help you out, they can take a step with you and be appreciated for that. Perceiving your financial resources as a bank, for instance, gets really frustrating. If you look to the distributors, financiers, producers, sound mixers, art directors, publicists and exhibitors as collaborators in a creative endeavor, then everyone feels the rewards and satisfaction, regardless of their respective professions.

03042008_davidgordongreen1.jpgI hesitate to use the word "departure," but "Snow Angels" feels different from your first three films. You adapted "Snow Angels" as a work-for-hire years ago, so I'm curious if I'm left with this impression because you hadn't originally intended to direct it, or that it's more plot-driven. Maybe it's because there aren't as many impressionistic visual digressions?

To me, you can say "departure." I wanted to do something different, something that wasn't in the South. The book gave me discipline as a writer, and not intending to direct it myself, I was wearing a different hat as I was writing it. I couldn't lean on the kind of vague, impressionistic writing style that I had previously. I had to illustrate with words, conceive in my own head, and flesh out the character and story arcs in a way that I had never fully realized before. For this movie, having that discipline brought a different type of engineering to it. When the opportunity to direct came up, I took one step back to a place where I had more of a personalized ownership of the story. I enjoyed the more conventional storytelling structure, so that I could focus all of my attention and ambition toward the emotional risks of the movie.

I enjoyed your recent piece in MovieMaker Magazine about the film, especially the list of character traits you and Kate Beckinsale fleshed out via back-and-forth emails. How did these bits of trivia help shape her character when they're as esoteric as "she likes to sit Indian style on bar stools," or that "her first kiss was from a summer camp counselor"?

I would like to go over to your house and look through your books and DVD collection, and then make some judgments. I love getting into people's closets, so luckily, a lot of the demands of my job are getting into people's closets, which is location scouting, casting, rehearsals and all that stuff. It's fun to be a collaborative designer of these closets and go through people's dirty laundry. To me, that's interesting and part of the fun, adventure and exploration of the job.

To me, the success of this movie would be dependent on the epic headlines of certain concepts within the movie that could be plucked from the front page of a newspaper, in terms of giving people emotional gravity and epic circumstances from which to launch. Ultimately, you pull out the microscope and look at the intimate details and awkward mannerisms of people who are looking at each other in the eye with either first or last love. To me, that balance of those two very distinctive concepts makes it interesting. I don't think you can get away with the "headlines" until you've discovered those intimate details. Otherwise, you've got a concept-driven movie, and you should just have an asteroid attack the earth.

Some of the richest roles in "Snow Angels" are the youngest, which made me reflect upon all the strong youthful characters in your body of work. What attracts you to younger characters?

I'm stuck in my youth, for sure. I just got braces to retain how I was in my 14-year-old awkward phase. [laughs] There's a lot of movies that deal with young characters, and most of them are pretty condescending or held up to such a sentimental light that it becomes annoying. Being stuck in that time of my life, I try to embrace the naïve, awkward and hilarious qualities of that period when emotions are magnified, frustrations are amplified, and you've got the optimism of the rest of your life ahead. You can look at everything from politics to relationships with such an infinite possibility that it's genuinely inspiring to see stories through those eyes. If I've done my job in the design of this movie, it's to have an audience reflect on the frustrations and disconnections of their own relationships, but with the perspective of those early notes and times when anything was possible and everything was so alive.

How much does this attachment change as you grow older and get farther away from your childhood?

If there's any anxiety I have as a filmmaker that has made a few movies and hopes to make a few more, it is the fear of distance — that distance from when I was broke and working jobs that I hate. It's the fear of the distance from those young and hungry emotions, those heartbreaks I had. So much of the world was unknown and uncertain. And now, you know, you make money, you have a cool girlfriend, you've traveled the world and you have a different perspective. So, I think stories do evolve as your perspective evolves. You hope that you can hang on to a grounded discipline of where you came from, what your life experiences have taught you, and how to bring where you are today into an honest picture of the stories you want to tell. It's scary.

03042008_pineappleexpress.jpgYou've got another film coming out this year, and a huge one at that: the Judd Apatow-produced stoner comedy "Pineapple Express." Will you continue to bring your collaborators with you as you venture into the Hollywood domain?

Part of the great thing about the loyalty our band of crew has is that you trust them. They're going to shoot you straight, call you on your shit and keep your ego in check. They're going to push you in ambitious directions, and then you feel like you've got your own minor army to protect you. Even on "Pineapple Express," a commercial comedy with a substantial budget, big stars and a Hollywood set, there were probably 15 or 20 people who'd also been involved in some way or another on "George Washington," a movie where nobody got paid and everybody sweat their asses off for a summer. So there's something very satisfying about seeing a studio executive down the pipes looking over your shoulder and seeing a posse of fuckin' solid dudes that got your back, and a bunch of new friends that you've met along the way to expand the team.

How in the world did David Gordon Green end up in Team Apatow? Now, there's a departure.

Yeah, that's the easy thing to say, but I hung out on the "Knocked Up" and "Superbad" sets, and we just realized that we have a similar approach. We make low-budget dramas, and they've been making big commercial comedies, so we just decided to join the two teams as an experiment, to see what would happen if we all got drunk and made a movie. It's hard to argue with that. It was seeing their loyalty to their crew base, seeing the freedom they give their actors to fuck around and have a few laughs, and it really translated organically to the style that we've come to embrace through the four movies we'd made at that point. We just slapped on a Huey Lewis and the News theme song the other day and finished it up, so I think we're in good shape.

The other new project of yours that I'm equally excited and totally baffled by is your remake of Italian splatter maestro Dario Argento's giallo classic, "Suspiria."

[laughs] Honestly, it was a straight-up remake, incorporating a lot of the artistic ambition that Argento inspired: from the Technicolor vibrancy to the plot holes and loose ends that the movie has. It is kind of right for a remake with today's technology, and what we have to bring to the table in terms of artistic contribution and technical merit. It's a movie that I love and I certainly have my anticipations and anxieties making it. It's very much in the spirit and vein of what Argento set out to do with the original movie. I'm writing it with my sound designer, so it's great to be approaching the technical elements of the script from more of a logistical ambition as well. It's a different approach, but it's worked out pretty awesome.

Some of your earlier movies were quickly compared to those of Charles Burnett and Terrence Malick. Now that you're branching out into different genres, how do you perceive your own trademarks, and relatedly: How do you feel about being compared to other filmmakers?

I think any time you're trying to communicate through a conversation or an article, you're trying to [convey] a sense of style. Even in a pitch, you throw reference points in there. But slowly, I'm evolving from a reference point of Terrence Malick and Charles Burnett to John Landis and Robert Altman. [laughs] Or Roger Corman, if I have it my way. I try not to be put in a cage and professionally have ambitions lie way beyond an industry's expectations. My hope is that I can dabble in all genres because, let's face it, I'm a freakin' movie geek and like a lot of different kind of movies. It would be fun to be able to blow up a few barns, have a few car chases, a few scares, a few laughs, and, I don't know, make everyone cry now and then.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to pigeonhole you, but in terms of a signature, do you see any throughline that even critics writing about your films haven't picked up on?

Definitely. Every movie I make has to have some dude running around in his tighty-whities because it's funny all the time.

[Photos: Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale in "Snow Angels, David Gordon Green on the set, Warner Independent Pictures, 2007; "Pineapple Express," Columbia Pictures, 2008]

"Snow Angels" opens in New York on March 7th.

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<![CDATA["Kilometre Zero," "Lubitsch Musicals"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/kilometre-zero-lubitsch-musica.php Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:00:00 -0500 03032008_kilometrezero.jpgBy Michael Atkinson

The idea of a "national" cinema, expressive of a particular and coherent cultural esprit, is a standard of most cinematic intercourse — until you confront the real map, in which Kosovar cinema is now primed to forge an identity of its own (as the Serbs and Slovenians have done), the ex-Soviet nations of the Silk Road are struggling to differentiate themselves from Russian film and the nationless movies of the Basque, the Romany and the Palestinians still hunt for footing and voice. Add to this gray zone the films of Kurdistan, a non-country standing nevertheless with its own army, government and debatable borders, and a nascent cinema rising with the ascent of the Iranian new wave and from the crater of the American occupation. Even within this context, Hiner Saleem is filmmaker on the roam — an Iraqi Kurd long expatriated to France, Saleem has made seven features, two in France, two in Armenia and three, since the fall of Saddam Hussein, in Iraqi Kurdistan. But he's a Kurd first and only, and if Saleem and compatriot Bahman Ghobadi are any indication, Kurdish films exude a distinctive sort of mordant comedy, a rueful folky toughness and ardor for luckless absurdity born out of centuries of persecution and only a few years of reasonable hope for legit nationhood.

Saleem's fifth film (the second to be seen here, after 2003's superb and acidic Armenian farce "Vodka Lemon"), "Kilometre Zero" (2005) is his inaugural return to Iraq, and in 86 lean, sand-blasted minutes he takes on the memories of the Saddam regime as experienced by a luckless Kurd during the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s. Ako (Nazmi Kirik) is a Kurdish husband with a luscious wife (Turkish-Kurd cover girl Belcim Bilgin, no hint of Sharia law here) who gets arrested and shanghaied into serving in the war with Iran on the other side of the country. Kirik is a gawky, googly-eyed nebbish, the perfect silent comedy foil for Saleem's threadbare depiction of life at the front, comprised of random explosions, crazy Saddam propaganda, summary executions and disciplinary beatings. Eventually, during a siege, Ako takes to jutting his foot into the air out of his foxhole, hoping to have it shot off. His wish of disengagement comes true when he's assigned to accompany a hired taxi driver back across Iraq with a KIA coffin strapped to the roof. The journey back is Saleem's masterstroke — traversing a barren landscape with corpse, Ako and his irate Arab driver (Eyam Ekrem) are constantly being halted at checkpoints and told to park until nightfall, lest the civilians get upset at the sight of their flag-draped cargo. Along the way, as identically laden taxis proliferate to form a caravan on the highway, the two men face off and confront their ethnic animosities, but settle nothing. Saleem's style is never wishy-washy, exhibiting visual confidence, subtle screwball rhythms and deadpan compositions, making "Kilometre Zero" a discombobulating jaunt for anyone expecting any kind of definitive Kurdish-state-of-mind movie, much less an "Iraqi" film made amidst an ongoing occupation and civil war. But belying expectations seems to be in the Kurdish DNA.

03032008_onehourwithyou.jpgExpatriation suited Hollywood legend Ernst Lubitsch well enough, when he came off a string of fiercely witty silent farces in Expressionism-era Germany and arrived in 1923 Hollywood to direct one lavishly praised and audience beloved hit after another. He even jumped to sound with uncanny ease a few years later, and virtually invented, in his own Teutonic-vaudeville way, the movie musical. Today, the new Criterion Eclipse set of early Lubitsch films for Paramount is not only a four-step lesson in how Hollywood was taught by Lubitsch to make a stiff and unforgiving technological handicap into a feather-light form of audio-visual confection; the four movies — "The Love Parade" (1929), "Monte Carlo" (1930), "The Smiling Lieutenant" (1931), and "One Hour With You" (1932) — are also entrancing gray heavens of impish élan, barely disguised sex talk and the toast-dry comic timing Lubitsch had already made famous back home. The goofy songs are secondary, though adorable for their antique joy, and the performers are front and center: In three out of four, Maurice Chevalier could be unctuously dopey when allowed to stage-leer, but watch him do chagrined and exasperated and you see Lubitsch's fine-tuning at its most essential. (He is substituted rather adroitly by song-and-dance stalwart Jack Buchanan in "Monte Carlo.")

Also in three out of four (Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins are required to replace her in "The Smiling Lieutenant") is Lubitsch discovery Jeanette MacDonald, who's still famous for the enervatingly pious and stuffy musicals she made in the '30s with Nelson Eddy, but who is a discovery here, ridiculously sexy and game and saucer-eyed. Her bratty grin might've been the filthiest in Golden Age Hollywood. The films are variations on the Ruritanian royalty romance template ("One Hour With You" steers clear of fake peerage aristocracy, but it's also, naturally, the most assured of the bunch), and all are, with their silk nighties and vaguely veiled innuendo, absolutely pre-Code. These were movies made not for some mythical dull-minded Depression-era innocents, but for sexually active grown-ups brimming with spunk and irony and attuned to Lubitsch's approach, which could suggest entire unshowable scenarios with a shrug or a smirk or a raised eyebrow.

[Photos: "Kilometre Zero," First Run Features; "One Hour With You," Paramount Pictures, 1932]

"Kilometre Zero" (First Run Features) and "Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals" (Criterion Collection) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Films and "The '50s"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/ifc-news-podcast-67-films-and.php Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:17:35 -0500 Ira Sach's new film "Married Life," opening this week, is set in a stylized late '40s/early '50s that may not resemble what real life was like in that era, but that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has, well, watched TV or seen films. "The '50s," in all of their heightened glory, are a favorite era of filmmakers, shorthand for either the good ol' clean cut days of American mythology or the dark, unacknowledged underbelly of that time. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at how films like "Hollywoodland" and "Far From Heaven" treat the era, and some themes that come up again and again.

Download: MP3, 30:17 minutes, 27.7 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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8833 2008-03-03 11:17:35 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_67_films_and publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008833 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Films and "The '50s" (photo)]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:17:35 -0500 1008833 2008-03-03 11:17:35 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_67_films_and_photo inherit 8833 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/03/opening-this-week-1.php Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:05:00 -0500 03032008_cj7_a.jpgBy Neil Pedley

[Photo: Stephen Chow's "CJ7," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008]

Still nursing a hangover from a week of drunken rage spent stumbling half-naked through the subways of New York, shouting at strangers and ticket machines about how "Michael Clayton" was robbed for best screenplay, I thought I was back in 2007. After all, there's an ancient epic from Warner Bros., a new Martin Lawrence comedy and... well, Jason Statham seems to have a new movie every month. Upon further investigation, however, "300" and "Wild Hogs" haven't been retitled and my life returns to some semblance of order.

"10,000 B.C."
You've overseen the invasion of planet Earth by alien forces, trashed New York City by way of a gigantic lizard and buried the entire northern hemisphere under 300 feet of ice and snow. What's next? Simple, really — you travel back in time 12,000 years and try to find shit to destroy there, instead! Director Roland Emmerich goes medieval on the prehistoric era with an extravagant epic employing 2000 A.D-era computer graphics to breathe life into huge woolly mammoths.
Opens wide.

"The Bank Job"
This Roger Donaldson-helmed cockney crime caper is based on the true story of a 1971 bank robbery of hundreds of security deposit boxes in London and its aftermath. Jason Statham and his crew of likely lads are hired by some shady figures looking to protect the Royal Family after compromising photos are traced to a box in the bank's vault.
Opens wide.

"Blindsight"
After being cast out of Tibetan society under the belief that blindness is caused by demons, six visually impaired teenagers are taken under the wing of German social worker Sabriye Tenberken, who attempts the improbable by leading them 23,000 feet up the north face of Mount Everest. English documentarian Lucy Walker, who previously directed the Spirit Award-nominated Amish doc "The Devil's Playground," captures it all on film. "Blindspot" won audience awards at both the 2006 AFI Film Festival and at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival.
Opens in New York; expands March 14.

"CJ7"
The irrepressible Stephen Chow follows up the hugely successful "Kung Fu Hustle" with this gentle family comedy. Chow writes, directs, produces and stars as a widower indebted to his boss and unable to afford a Christmas present for his son. Skulking around a junkyard, he stumbles across the film's titular character, the impossibly cute CJ7, an alien he mistakes for a toy and brings home to unexpected results.
Opens in limited release.

"College Road Trip"
Once again recycling his "tightly wound authority figure with the short fuse" schtick, Martin Lawrence stars as a police chief and overprotective father who freaks out when he realizes just how far away his daughter's college plans will take her. In a stroke of corporate synergy, Raven-Symoné, star of the Disney Channel's "That's So Raven," plays Lawrence's long-suffering offspring who tries to break out on her own.
Opens wide.

"Fighting For Life"
Terry Sanders, the two-time Oscar winner who last co-directed the Vietnam prisoner of war documentary "Return with Honor," returns to the battlefield with this documentary about the unsung heroes of the U.S. armed forces — the field army medical core deployed on the front lines of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taking politics out of the equation, the film focuses on the humanity and compassion of the people charged with saving lives under some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions on Earth.
Opens in limited release.

"Frownland"
Winner of a Special Jury Prize for "uncompromising singularity of vision" at the 2007 SXSW film festival, "Frownland" is the story of a man trying to make a living selling coupons door to door. In his directorial debut, Ronald Bronstein delivers a darkly sardonic portrait of one man's staggering level of social awkwardness and painful inability to communicate and form meaningful relationships with the people around him.
Opens in New York.

"Girls Rock!"
Arne Johnson and Shane King take us behind the scenes of Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls, a program designed to combat the indoctrination of teenage girls to conform to a preconceived image by the mainstream media. Every year, the camp takes in eight- to 18-year-old girls and schools them in self-empowerment through music, which leads not only to better self-esteem and self-image, but a chance at becoming the next Joan Jett.
Opens in limited release.

"Married Life"
Chris Cooper leads an all-star cast in Ira Sachs's adaptation of John Bingham's cult novel about a man who falls in love with a seductive young woman (Rachel McAdams) but can't bear the thought of breaking the heart of his wife (Patricia Clarkson). He decides it'd be kindest to find a way to kill the missus. Pierce Brosnan costars.
Opens in limited release.

"Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"
This romantic farce tells of Miss Pettigrew (Francis McDormand), a perpetually unemployed London governess who poses as a social secretary out of desperation and gets hired by dizzy socialite, Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). Determined to enjoy herself for a change, Miss Pettigrew decides to make herself right at home and sets a task of navigating Delysia through her precariously overcrowded love life. "Pettigrew" was penned by the tag team of Simon Beaufoy ("The Full Monty") and David Magee ("Finding Neverland").
Opens in limited release.

"Paranoid Park"
Enigmatic, divisive director Gus Van Sant returns with another slice of his singular vision of American pie, complete with the usual flavors of innocence lost and youthful alienation. Based on the Blake Nelson novel of the same name, "Paranoid Park" relates the story of Alex, a young skateboarder who must deal with a crisis of conscience after he accidentally kills a security guard while trying to hitch a train ride. Cannes already issued its verdict -- "Park" took home a special 60th Anniversary Prize at last year's festival.
Opens in limited release.

"Snow Angels"
A highlight of last year's Sundance Film Festival, "Snow Angels" reveals the unfulfilled lives abounding in a declining Pennsylvania town in indie darling David Gordon Green's adaptation of Stewart O'Nan's novel. A high school pair (Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby) fall in love as an estranged grown-up couple (Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale) deal with the bitter end of their relationship. Amy Sedaris, Nicky Katt and Griffin Dunne round out the eclectic cast.
Opens in New York.

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<![CDATA[Reaching the End of the New Line]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/looking-at-the-end-of-the-new.php Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:40:45 -0500 02292008_newline.jpg

By Stephen Saito

Less than five months ago, New Line Cinema co-chairmen Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne were celebrating the 40th anniversary of the company that Shaye founded out of an apartment on East 14th Street in New York at the New York Film Festival. Needless to say, four decades in the movie business deserved a trip uptown, to the Lincoln Center's tony Fredrick P. Rose Hall, where no less than Nicole Kidman glided down the red carpet and a full gospel choir accompanied Ricki Lake and Marissa Jaret Winokur in a rendition of the "Hairspray" number "Come So Far." Days later, the duo would get an hour on Charlie Rose en route to releasing one of the biggest budgeted films in their history, the $200 million-plus fantasy "The Golden Compass." Now those days seem like a different age, after word came down yesterday that Warner Bros. will absorb the studio without the participation of Shaye and Lynne. It looks like the house that Freddy Krueger built and Gandalf retrofitted is about to undergo an extreme makeover.

It's possible the result will look like the Disney subsidiary Miramax, which has thrived in recent years without its famous/infamous co-founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Then again, the Weinsteins might never have come up with the idea for Miramax (and Bob's genre label Dimension) if there hadn't first been a New Line, which Shaye built on college tours of cult films like "Reefer Madness" and Jean-Luc Godard's Rolling Stones doc "Sympathy for the Devil" and theatrical runs of early John Waters films and low-budget horror flicks, including the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Evil Dead." Naturally, Shaye segued from distribution to production, which paid off when "Nightmare on Elm Street" became a studio-defining hit in 1984. Besides the financial rewards reaped by what would become the Freddy franchise, it also introduced the world to Johnny Depp, and, over the course of six more films, future "L.A. Confidential" scribe Brian Helgeland ("Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master"), future "Shawshank Redemption" director Frank Darabont and indie stalwart Bruce Wagner ("Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors") and. most importantly, future New Line production exec Michael De Luca, who penned "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare."

After all, that's what New Line did — exploit new talent, much in the same way that Roger Corman had done before, but on a larger level. When "Nightmare" became a success, New Line moved into the '90s with aspirations of becoming a full-fledged studio and when Shaye sold the company in 1993 to Ted Turner, it paved the way for more films and bigger films. But there always remained room for the smaller ones. New Line was one of the first studios to form a specialty label with Fine Line in 1990, which countered the larger studio's output of easy sells like "House Party 2" with Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho." Fine Line also reintroduced Robert Altman to a larger audience with "The Player" and "Short Cuts" back to back in 1992 and 1993. But New Line remained primarily in the business of introductions and, thanks to the keen eye of writer-turned-exec De Luca, they would shepherd in the director who would be Altman's heir, Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as the breakthroughs of a host of other visionaries including Albert and Allen Hughes ("Menace II Society"), David Fincher ("Se7en"), Alex Proyas ("Dark City"), Tarsem ("The Cell") and the late Ted Demme ("Blow").

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However, talking about New Line as some sort of bastion of artistry would be doing it a disservice. While the studio had a penchant for investing in both edgy indie-minded fare like "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and prestige projects like Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt," New Line's heart was always in pure entertainments like "Final Destination" and "Austin Powers." Maybe that's why Anderson's "Boogie Nights" or more recently, Todd Field's heavily lauded "Little Children" failed to get much award consideration, but why every moment of a New Line programmer like "Snakes on a Plane" feels as though someone at the studio is letting loose a joyous "wheeeeee" in the background. (In fact, after New Line bumped the Samuel L. Jackson starrer to a R rating from a PG-13, production chief Toby Emmerich started suggesting body parts for the snakes to bite.) The studio was also never shy about nepotism, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, considering that the always watchable character actors Lin Shaye (sister of Bob) and Noah Emmerich (brother of Toby) got a leg up in New Line fare.

Now, the fun is over for New Line, at least in its era with Shaye and Lynne at the helm. Some would consider that a good thing, especially since the steely reserve and aggressiveness that led the two men to great success has also been cited as a cause of their professional downfall, with that very public dispute between Shaye and "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson over the bookkeeping of his J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, not to mention the pair's questionable personal behavior, which was detailed in a July 1998 article by John Connolly in Premiere. (As for the "LOTR" suit, Jackson ultimately settled with the studio, but only after New Line's costly "Golden Compass" failed to ignite at the U.S. box office.)

Incidentally, Shaye and Lynne will likely go out on top — New Line's "Semi-Pro" is expected to top this weekend's box office chart. And although making money was always at the forefront of New Line's operation, more than enough truly innovative and quality films made it into the pipeline to call it an accident that it was also a bastion of independence.

[Photo: "The house that Freddy Krueger built and Gandalf retrofitted": New Line's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984) and "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001); "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," Fine Line, 2001]

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<![CDATA[Funny or Die: DIY Comedy Takes a Victory Lap]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/funny-or-die.php Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:01:56 -0500 02282008_funnyordie1.jpg

By R. Emmet Sweeney

While the Oscar telecast was drawing its smallest audience ever on Sunday night, Will Ferrell's Funny Or Die Comedy Tour was finishing up its sold-out eight date run with a raucous show at Radio City Music Hall. It was a carnivalesque take on your basic stand-up comedy gig — with glittery costume changes and group sing-a-longs breaking up (and into) the routines. Farrell (along with his alter egos) was the MC introducing the three young performers (Demetri Martin, Nick Swardson and Zack Galifinakis), all of whom have contributed videos to the the Funny or Die website.

The tour is a victory lap of sorts for the site, a YouTube for comic shorts that exploded into the mainstream when Ferrell and director Adam McKay joined forces with it. (Chris Henchy, the writer/producer of "Entourage," is the third member of the site's creative team.) Their sketch "The Landlord," which turns McKay's toddler daughter Pearl into a foul-mouthed slumlord, has been viewed over 50 million times, and encouraged other established comedians to post their own DIY absurdities — including John C. Reilly, Judd Apatow and Jack Black (my personal favorites are the violent environmentalist satire of "Green Team" and the "Drunk History" series which features Black's randy Ben Franklin).

The charm and lifeblood of the site is the way that it allows amateur videos to brush up against the successes: in the site's "Platinum Club" section, which lists all the videos that have received over one million hits, you'll find not only a bunch of Ferrell videos, but a clever masturbation joke from the scruffy unknown Nick Thune. Funny or Die acts as both an entertainment and networking site — put up a video and Judd Apatow might select it as one of his favorites.

Venture capitalist Mark Kvamme first pitched the concept to the Creative Artists Agency and fronted the $17,000 to start up the site after a conversation with his teenage son. As the Mercury News' Scott Duke Harris has reported, the company has evolved into "Or Die Networks," and is now backed by $20 million. It's started up sister sites "Shred Or Die" (for skateboarders), "My Blue Collar" (featuring Southern comics) and, apparently, "in the works is a culinary site to be called 'Eat, Drink, or Die.'" With its brand fully in place, the Funny Or Die tour acts as its coronation into the big time, replete with movie studio backing.

The tour is promoting Ferrell's (and New Line's) upcoming movie "Semi-Pro," and the site itself is laden with promos, interviews and trailers for the film. Aside from Radio City, every other tour date was set on a college campus, luring in that delectable 18-35 year old age group that studio execs drool over. All of which is good business, but it would be a mite distracting if the show wasn't so inspired and almost entirely clear of cross-promotion itself. All the hucksters were outside the arena, with afro'd "Semi-Pro" hype men handing out swag and timid Funny Or Die interns blanketing folks with t-shirts. There was even a "Harold & Kumar" sighting — two guys in orange jumpsuits tossing out one-sheets for the Guantanamo Bay-set sequel. Variety has said that "Semi-Pro" is receiving "the kind of buzz building push that movie marketers dream of" from the tour, and a similar one might take place in support of the Jeremy Piven starrer "The Goods: The Don Ready Story," the first feature being made under Ferrell and McKay's production company, Gary Sanchez Productions.

Inside the theater, though, there was barely a whiff of money — just the overpowering stench of Ron Burgundy's man musk. After two solid opening sets from Martin and Swardson, Ferrell's most popular character took center stage. With McKay as the announcer, the crowd got a taste of how "Anchorman" was filmed — in a flurry of improvisation, each man trying to top the either with absurdist glee. In a revealing history of the poorly named "Frat Pack" in Sight & Sound, Henry K. Miller quotes director David O. Russell as calling "Anchorman" "a balance between performance art and narrative film."

There wasn't much narrative on this night. When Burgundy called out Tom Brokaw on stage at Radio City, the show turned into pure performative insanity. Brokaw immediately seemed to regret his decision to appear, but gamely soldiered through it, even when Burgundy asked him about the time Diane Sawyer went topless — or if he would smoke a vial of crack if it would save the president's life. Brokaw parried by saying he'd give it to Farrell's staff, who would probably eat it up. The whole interview seemed close to imploding at every turn, and at one point Brokaw turned his hostility to them, wondering whether the system should allow people our age to vote. Graceful as he is, he quickly maneuvered away from it, and they navigated back to safe waters — plugging his books (including Burgundy's own "The Greater Generation: The Story of the '69 Miracle Mets"), joking about hit and runs and saying goodbye.

It was a riveting performance by both men, even if one wonders if Brokaw entirely knew what he was getting into. It's clear Farrell improvised most of the bit — audibly cracking up McKay behind the mic and getting energized by the unexpected combativeness of his foe.

After such a display, Zack Galifinakis could only lip-synch to "Tomorrow" in a Little Orphan Annie outfit and toss glitter in the air. It worked, as did his closing slam against Dane Cook. The evening ended with the whole production on stage, dressed in Capezio dance pants tucked into Uggs, warbling to Alicia Keys' "No One" with reckless abandon. But they couldn't let the night go without a nod to Friday's release. Tight shortsed "Semi-Pro" co-star Woody Harrelson was roped in to stand up from his seat, awkwardly take a kiss from Will, and disappear into the poster-strewn night.

[Photo: Will Ferrell on the Funny Or Die Comedy Tour, © Funny or Die Inc., 2008]

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<![CDATA[The Whitest Kids U'Know on "The Whitest Kids U'Know"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/the-whitest-kids-uknow-on-the.php Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:01:07 -0500 02282008_wkuk.jpg

We've all enjoyed great sketch comedy, suffered through terrible sketch comedy and furrowed our brows at totally inexplicable sketch comedy. But how does sketch comedy, you know, work? I sat down with Sam Brown and Trevor Moore of IFC's own sketch comedy show "The Whitest Kids U'Know" to find out how the magic happens.

What's your writing process like?

Trevor Moore: Everything's written different ways. If someone has an idea for a sketch, they can come in and be like, "I really want to do this," but when we're actually writing for a deadline, we're like, "Okay, everybody take five minutes and write down as many ideas as come to mind." And then we go around the circle, and it's everybody pitching out their ideas. And we'll just kind of be like, "Okay, that one—" depending on what everybody laughs at.

Sam Brown: And a lot of times it'll even get to the point where we'll work on something until we decide, "Eh, maybe it wasn't the best idea."

TM: Yeah, and then some of our sketches are like— you know, Sam's nut popping out in the first episode of season two. That just came about when we were outside of one of our live shows...

SB: ...I think, "What if we had a sketch where the joke was that I had one nut out?" I think it was that simple.

TM: And we're talking about that— "Yeah, and what if you come back later and it's hanging out of your collar?" And then we wrote a sketch for that.

So it's just basically a lot of drunken conversation.

As connoisseurs of a certain type of comedy that... pushes boundaries, where do you figure the line is? Or is there a line?

TM: It's all tone. I don't think there's any issue that you can't talk about. A lot of our sketches deal with race or homophobia and stuff like that. The person that the joke is on tends to be the racist character or the homophobic character. They're the odd man out, not like they're the norm.

SB: You're not gonna be mean to people for no reason.

TM: Well, that can be funny, too. [laughs]

Where did the name of the group come from?

TM: It was like really early in the troupe, and we had a couple of names that weren't very good that we were considering. We used to go out and film stuff with video cameras, just on the street. We were doing some sort of freestyle rapping thing on the subway, and this one guy who was friends with us was like, "You guys are the whitest kids I know." We were in the market for a name, so we were like, "That'll do!"

Who do you guys like out there, in terms of influences or just people you think are doing great things in comedy right now?

TM: Well, everyone in the troupe has different influences. I think one consistent influence for me is Monty Python. There'll never be anyone better. They're the Beatles of comedy. The troupe kind of goes down into two groups -- Sam and I are into Monty Python, Steve Coogan and some comedians that no one's ever heard. And Zack and Timmy and Darren really like Dane Cook and—

SB:—the Blue Collar [Comedy Tour].

Really?

SB: Yeah, they are. They have the DVD. They watched it a lot when we were on tour.

TM: That and "Full House."

SB: Timmy just got that. He ordered it. It comes in a little house, like the actual house—

TM: And it's just full of DVDs. It's a full house of DVDs. That's their influence.

Any plans to work on movies?

TM: Yeah, Zack and I just finished a movie [a Fox comedy called "Playboys"] that we're editing right now. We actually have to turn in our first cut next Friday. The Whitest Kids have a movie written that we're actually about to go out and try to set up somewhere.

A sketch comedy movie?

TM: It's not a sketch comedy movie. It's a linear story — we don't play multiple characters, but it's got the same tone and mentality of the TV show. The hard thing was having an arc for each character — they all have to learn something along the way. I think we took care of that pretty well. It's kind of like a live action "Duck Tales" episode.

[Trevor Moore and Sam Brown of "The Whitest Kids U'Know"; Andre Vippolis, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Ramin Bahrani on "Chop Shop"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/ramin-bahrani-on-chop-shop.php Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:55:52 -0500 02272008_chopshop1.jpg

By Aaron Hillis

Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani's first feature was "Man Push Cart," a poignant immigrant drama about a former Pakistani rock god who now spends his days schlepping a coffee cart through the traffic-clogged streets of midtown Manhattan. It was a solid debut, its finest quality being its uncannily beautiful lensing of an oppressively ugly section of New York City. Similarly, the auto body junkyard stretch of Willet's Point, Queens is the backdrop of Bahrani's even better second feature, "Chop Shop," for which the director won the "Someone to Watch" Spirit Award this past weekend. Starring mostly non-actors (some of whom play variants of their real personas), the film tells of an entrepreneurial Latino orphan (Alejandro Polanco) who lives and works in the titular locale, stealing and hustling to support both himself and his older teenage sister (Isamar Gonzales). I sat down with Bahrani in a Tribeca coffee shop to chat about his truly wonderful slice of social realism, his cultural identity and TV's "Top Chef."

Immigration is such a hot-button political issue today. Based on the ethnic diversity in your first two films, I'm curious to know if you have strong feelings one way or the other?

Coming from Iran, you learn to keep your mouth shut when it comes to politics. [laughs] A lot of people say that I'm interested in marginal, immigrant or socially and economically poor characters... maybe? I don't find them marginal; I find them to be the majority. Most people don't live like Woody Allen characters. Those characters don't resemble most of the three billion people within the world. What I haven't addressed much in these films is, I'm against the people who have and [then] destroy the [have-nots]. Those are the ones who piss me off. A lot of my films come out of an anger towards them.

I'm surprised to hear you say anger. I don't see that in your films.

It's not in the films, no. They're what I hope that I could be, and hope people could be. I wish I was as accepting, nonjudgmental and loving as Alejandro and Isamar. They know so much about each other, hurt each other and, in the end, love each other so unconditionally. I don't see that in the world at the moment.

Is it a personal obligation for you to make films about underrepresented characters?

I'd say I naturally have an interest in it, yeah. I get bored seeing the same characters again and again and again. I find it more engaging to learn about things I don't know a lot about, and I really do learn about them. I spent one and a half years hanging around the chop shop, talking to everyone. I did research into safe homes, a lot of which got cut out of "Chop Shop." The whole idea of [Isamar's] prostitution, a lot of it came out of safe homes. But with each film, I realize I'm not interested in explanation and excessive amounts of backstory to make the viewer say: "Oh, now everything makes sense to me. I can go home and feel good!" There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't interest me.

Film is really 24 frames a second in the present, and I realize when you leave certain gaps, it allows space for the viewer to enter the film. That requires a viewer who wants to be engaged, who wants to have an emotional connection to a film, which should not be confused with films that elicit emotions like weeping and whatnot. You watch a certain movie, and the director puts you in a headlock through ways of dramaturgy, music, camera moves and excessive acting. It hits certain synapses in your brain and makes you cry, then you leave, and the next day you're having a hamburger and you don't really remember what the film was. Despite that those are the kinds of films that get lots of accolades and attention, it doesn't attract me as a person nor as an artist. I'm more interested in the ones — because of your participation — [that] seep into you, and two months later, are still a part of you. I don't know if I've accomplished this, but it's what I'm striving for.

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You also left out any heavy moralizing about the kids' actions, which is one of the film's strengths.

I can show you versions of the script where lots of other things happen, and we just kept eliminating them. We realized they were false, they did not make sense, they weren't truthful. There were people pressuring me to make [Alejandro's boss] Rob a good guy and [Rob's business rival] Ahmad a bad guy, and I kept denying that because it's not how I imagined it to be. Rob wasn't a good guy, but he's doing what he's doing. Ahmad's not really a bad guy, but if he can make money on this kid, he'll do it. But the kid's making his money, too. Who the hell am I to judge what's going on? I thought this was such a twisted compliment: Somebody told me, "I saw a kid steal something the other day, on the street, and now I'm glad I didn't try to stop them." Two other people said, "If I were to witness this, I don't think I would try to stop them." I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but I'm really interested in this comment.

Perhaps getting involved would be strangely condescending. After all, everyone is exploiting something or someone to get what they need. It's just the nature of things.

Your job is to ask me these questions, and my job is to answer them. [gesturing to a waitress] Her job is to serve us this coffee and espresso. The guy on the corner, his job is to be homeless and extend his hand, and your job is to sometimes give him something. This is hard in America for people to accept. In Persian culture, Iranian culture, a lot of other cultures in the East, it's not so hard to accept.

Khayyam as a poet makes complete sense to me. I wish I could understand it on a deeper level, and that's why you re-read great things. I hadn't read "The Rubaiyat" in two years. I was re-reading it in the last couple of weeks, and I understand it a little bit more now. Maybe in two years, I'll understand it even more. I think this kind of philosophy is challenging for some people in America to accept. He's so joyously saying that we come from the dust and we'll go right back to it. I get so excited when people are responding to these films, which accept life for what it is, but with some kind of joy.

You manage to pull seemingly improvised performances out of non-professional actors. Do you have to shoot countless takes, or what?

Usually between 30 to 40 relentless takes. One of the great things about the actors is they "are." If you pick the right non-professionally trained actors, there's certain things that they don't have that you don't need to get rid of. But the first step is casting. With each film, I become more convinced the job of the director is casting. [laughs] I start filming the kids from the beginning, from the audition. The first audition is just a Q&A to figure out who they are, and then months of rehearsals and sometimes manipulation. Carlos [Zapata] and Alejandro played games; I would arrange them in ways that would create the characters and their relationships just the way I wanted them. Alejandro would become the leader. I'd tell one person something and tell the other person something else, and forbid them to talk to each other about what they've been told. Isamar didn't know what the film was about until she saw it. She never knew if Alejandro stole that phone or who stole her money until she saw the film at the cast and crew screening. She blurted out, "So you did steal my money!"

Would you say you're inspired by Robert Bresson?

One hundred percent, but the big difference is that I want my actors to have emotions in the film; he did not. Of course, you can see non-actors, but also his use of sound, and the rigor of what you see and what you don't see. When [Alejandro] tells his sister, "Go to the left to the bathroom," I don't cut. Everyone else would cut. But Bresson told you, "don't cut. Show it. " Rossellini, Kiarostami, none of the people I respect would've shown that girl down there because it cuts off the viewer's imagination.

If you're getting bombarded by [sights and sounds] every day, then I have to be slower so that it seeps into you. In fact, films 40 or 50 years ago could have had a faster pace. I think they wanted to. But today, they cannot. There are certain things I don't do in my life. I don't watch television, I don't see a lot of new films, I don't look at magazines, and I try to hide my eyes from billboards. [laughs] Going to Times Square makes me nauseous. And it's not that I don't watch TV because I think it's good or bad. One of the main reasons is that I don't want to get addicted each Thursday night. If you told me "The Wire" was good and gave me the DVD, I'd watch it.

So you're not an anti-television snob, as long as you can watch how you want to watch?

I went to North Carolina to make [my next feature] "Goodbye Solo," and I lived with my brother. He has TiVo, which I didn't even know about because I hadn't had a TV in six years. The good thing about TiVo is that you can watch it whenever you want, and you can skip the commercials. It became more palatable to me. I will confess I got into one show, "Top Chef." I like that they put so many different pieces together. Some of them look so simple and beautiful on the plate. How do they know what ingredients will make a certain taste? It's kind of like the film: simple elements put together to create a taste and an emotion as you eat it. I want to learn to be a better cook now.

"Chop Shop" opens in New York today.

[Photos: Isamar Gonzalez and Alejandro Polanco in "Chop Shop"; Ramin Bahrani on set, Koch Lorber Films, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Those Damn Dirty Apes: Our Guide to 40 Years of "Planet of the Apes," Part 3]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/those-damn-dirty-apes-our-guid-2.php Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

[Check out Part 1 and Part 2.]

After four movies in five years, the "Planet of the Apes" series was on its last legs. But it hung around for one more unwelcome entry (kind of like this column), and then returned not-so-triumphantly (kind of like this column) for one of the most widely disliked remakes of all time. It is this dark territory that I venture into this week. If I don't return in a thousand years, send James Franciscus in after me.

Please note: Most "Planet of the Apes" films have a "shocking" twist that everyone at this point already knows. However, if you have somehow extricated yourself from forty years of pop culture references, by all means be wary of SPOILERS ahead.

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"Battle for the Planet of the Apes" (1973)
Directed by J. Lee Thompson

Synopsis: In an indeterminate time after the events of 1972's "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" and the ensuing nuclear war (possibly 12 or 27 years, depending on which character's talking), the remnants of ape and human societies maintain an uneasy peace. In the wake of the last film's primate revolution, the slave/master roles have been reversed: The apes, led by Caesar (Roddy McDowell, returning to his second "Apes" role for a second time) are in charge, and men are their servants. After a human named MacDonald (Austin Stoker) tells Caesar of recordings of his parents buried somewhere in the ruins of the Forbidden Zone, they travel there, only to discover the first wisps of the mutated, bomb-worshiping cult that figured prominently in "Beneath the Planet of the Apes." Their incursion into the mutants' territory sparks another battle between the armies of man and beast that threatens to end 12 (or maybe 27) years of interspecies peace.

Until! ...well, nothing really. The titular "Battle" happens, Caesar and MacDonald agree to live together as equals, and John Huston appears as an orangutan named "The Lawgiver" to reinforce the film's message of unity. The closest thing to a twist is the final image; a shot of a statue of Caesar that sheds a single tear as the credits role. But the only thing really shocking about that is the pretension that's on display. The statue, you see -- it's crying! Because... well, to be perfectly frank, we're not entirely sure why it's crying. But it is! And that means beneath the bad makeup, bad acting and the bad special effects, this cash-grabbing fourth installment is important, dammit! Feeeeel the gravity!

Metaphors of the Apes: At this point, the series had basically run out of ideas, and that extends to its subtext as well, which this go around is just a rehash of the same old, same old. Fine sentiments, but they've been fine sentiments for four movies now. I know you're trying your hardest, "Planet of the Apes" movies, but if humanity hasn't realized that warmongering and racism are bad by this point, I'm not sure you're going to sway them now.

People Forget: That John Landis co-stars in "Battle for the Planet of the Apes." You heard right -- "Animal House" director John Landis appears prominently in the credits of "Battle." Not that he appears prominently in the film, mind you -- he plays "Jake's Friend" and having just watched the film for a second time, I still have no idea who that is.

Work Within Your Means: As each "Apes" received a smaller budget, each struggled with its sense of scale. They're called "Planet of the Apes," and with each installment, the percentage of said planet we get to see shrinks significantly. By this, the fifth and final installment, we're limited to an "Ape City" -- basically a third-rate Ewok Village -- and a underground mutant community lit so dimly that it could have realistically been filmed on the set of "All in the Family" during the show's summer hiatus and no one would have noticed. As for the so-called armies of man and beast, they may be the first armies in history that could be comfortably outnumbered by the members of a professional basketball team. Caesar conquered the world, fellas. He's not going to be intimidated by eight guys in a beat-up old school bus. Seriously. They drive on Ape City in a big yellow bus.

The Don Murray Award For Scenery Chewing Goes to: Claude Akins as the evil ape General Aldo. In his acceptance speech, Akins would no doubt thank his screenwriters, John William Corrington and Joyce Hooper Corrington, without whom this recognition would not be possible. After all, it is they who gave his laughably simplistic character dialogue like "We want GUNS! GUNS are POWER!" And I know you're trying to convince us you're a gorilla, Claude, but at least half those grunts are unnecessary.

Continuity Boo-Boos: This fairly unremarkable picture distinguishes itself in just one category: the number of things about it that don't make a lick of sense. As I mentioned earlier, the exact amount of time between "Conquest of" and "Battle for the Planet of the Apes" is incredibly vague. The gruesome Governor Kolp (Severn Darden) mentions an armistice that's lasted 12 years; the guard at Caesar's armory claims to have worked the job in the same ramshackle hut for 27 years. The weird thing is that, either way, every ape in the entire world has learned to talk in the course of a single generation. It's an extraordinary feat when you think about it -- in tens of thousands of years, apes have collectively spoken nothing. In 12 (or 27) years, Caesar has taught all of them while simultaneously razing the earth to the ground. That is some hellacious multitasking.

(On a side note, how come all the dusty, broken electronics on the Planet of the Apes all still work? And where is all the electricity coming from?)

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"Planet of the Apes" (2001)
Directed by Tim Burton

Synopsis: In the year 2029, on a space station full of astronauts and astroapes, Leon Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) trains a chimp named Pericles to pilot a little rocket ship. When a freak electromagnetic storm appears, Pericles is sent against Leo's orders to investigate. When Pericles' pod vanishes, Leo hops in another pod and gets sucked into the storm. He's tossed 1000 years into the future and crashes on a nearby planet where he's shocked to discover a society where apes reign supreme and men are kept as slaves and pets. He's captured, but escapes with the help of a sympathetic chimp named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) and later, they're chased across the planet by the brutal General Thade (Tim Roth). In the middle of a battle between Leo's allies and Thade's army, Pericles lands in his pod. Leo takes it and heads back into an electromagnetic storm, bound for his own time back on Earth...

Until! ...he crash lands once again, this time on a planet that looks like Earth and has a city that looks like Washington D.C., only the Lincoln Memorial is now a monument to General Thade. As Leo tries to figure out what the hell that means, a bunch of ape policemen and ape soldiers pull up in their ape cars and ape tanks and ape arrest him. On his DVD commentary for the film, director Tim Burton says that the notorious "Ape Lincoln" image was intended as a cliffhanger designed to facilitate additional movies, and declines to explain further for fear of undercutting the dramatic impact of future sequels. It's a convenient excuse, anyway; Burton's intense stammering hints at a different truth (Sample commentary: "To me, I wouldn't have taken it further. I wouldn't have explained any more even -- whatever -- if I could of, or -- whatever..."). Still, he remains defiant in his film's defense. "I'm not quite sure what people are responding to," he shrugs, "because for me, I had no problem with the ending." The most likely explanation of the Ape Lincoln statue? Pretty simple, actually; Leo leaves Thade trapped but still alive on the Planet of the Apes. So Thade must have found some working remnant of Leo's technology amongst the wreckage of his ship and used it to go to Earth at some point before 2029 and reshape it in his image. As for those proposed sequels, they seem to have vanished, like an astronaut sent into an electromagnetic storm.

Metaphors of the Apes: The cornerstones of "Apes" iconography -- racial inequality, religious fundamentalism, unchecked militarism -- are all present, but they're significantly tamped down in the interest of making an uninspired chase picture. Much of that has to do with Wahlberg and his (non-) character Leo, who, unlike nearly all the protagonists in the original "Apes" series, has absolutely no opinion about any of the issues the films traditionally explore. Where Taylor left Earth to escape mankind's faults (only to find himself doomed by them once more), Leo wound up on this Planet of the Apes (one that is most certainly not our own) mostly because he cared a little bit too much about a monkey. Once he's there, all he wants to do is go home. He's not a scientist or an explorer or a philosopher. The role calls for Wahlberg to do nothing but look determined in the elegantly tattered remains of the impossibly chic space suit. Evidently at some point before 2029, G-Star purchases the exclusive rights to design all of NASA's uniforms.

People Forget: That this movie's storyline is actually closer to the one in the original novel by French author Pierre Boulle. There, as in Burton's version, a human has an adventure on an alien world with dominant apes, and returns to Earth only to discover that it, too, is now ruled by a bunch of talking gorillas. Burton's sin isn't one of faithfulness to his source; it's one of boring his audience.

The Don Murray Award For Scenery Chewing Goes to: Roth as General Thade. His makeup, designed by Rick Baker, may be far more complex, but the character is just as simplistic as Aldo, another utterly one-dimensional tyrant. And I know you're trying to convince us you're a chimpanzee, Tim, but at least two-thirds of those snarls and seven-eighths of those nostril flares are unnecessary.

After Seven Years It's Easy to Seem Dated: This "Apes" was made at the height of Hollywood's love affair with wirework stunts and boy, does it ever show. Whenever Thade smacks someone upside their heads, they go careening away as if they've been shot out of a cannon. That bad wire-fu effect -- where the action says someone is being pushed, but the body language of the person flying through the air says they're being pulled by digitally erasable cabling -- permeates (and pretty much ruins) every major action sequence.

Continuity Boo-Boos: The humans in this "Planet of the Apes" can still speak, which makes their enslavement tough to swallow. If they've kept their intelligence, what's led to humanity's fall? Kris Kristofferson should have no problem showing these apes who's the boss. Such is the magic of these films: I have no problem accepting talking apes on an alien world, but the fact that the humans are wearing banana leaves bothers me.

[Photos: "Battle for the Planet of the Apes," 20th Century Fox, 1973; Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes," 20th Century Fox, 2001]

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<![CDATA["Walker," "The Draughtsman's Contract"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/walker-the-draughtsmans-contra.php Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:00:00 -0500 02262008_walker.jpg

By Michael Atkinson

British cinema would've been a far more dire prospect in the Reagan-Thatcher years if it hadn't been for Alex Cox and Peter Greenaway, two wildly disparate but brilliantly rebellious and, you could say, slightly insane independents — insofar as you could categorize them as filmmakers working in some kind of English tradition. Mostly, you couldn't — Cox, for his part, always considered himself more of a punk without a country than a British voice; only his second film, the magisterial "Sid & Nancy" (1986), is set in the U.K. His quick arc after the tireless indie success of "Repo Man" (1984) is a study in the punk-artist paradigm — first, drop your pants at the establishment, then get brought into the system, then quickly reveal yourself to be an ungovernable brat, and get dumped like a sizzling isotope. Cox's moment of truth was "Walker" (1987), one of most viciously prankish and politically outrageous fireballs ever to hurl out of Hollywood. It was only Cox's fourth feature and it summarily ended his ascension in even semi-mainstream cinema. (In interviews, Cox remembers being astonished that he didn't receive a single call or offer after the film was released.) Needless to say, it's a movie that demands our respect and reverence.

For all of his snot-nosed impishness and drunken élan, Cox is a die-hard leftist, and "Walker" is his wickedest, angriest rocket launch, a historical "drama" documenting the late career of William Walker, a polymathic doctor, writer, adventurer and filibuster who, in the mid-1850s, was sent to take over Nicaragua by Cornelius Vanderbilt (played like Nero by Peter Boyle). Which he did — Walker ruled the tiny, colonialism-beset country as a dictator for two years until he went completely mad, revoked Nicaragua's progressive abolitionist laws, fought for his throne with a coalition of other Central American armies (and Vanderbilt's forces), and was eventually executed in Honduras in 1860. Tiny as his niche in history is, Walker has always served as a striding, bellowing symbol of American corporate imperialism (Gillo Pontecorvo's "Burn!," with Marlon Brando, was a loose version of the story). At first, Cox and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer treat Walker's saga as merely tongue-in-cheek history, but gradually the film descends into madness itself, crazed with genre movie allusions, boozy slapstick, meticulous period flavor, satiric anachronisms (the film climaxes with a helicopter drop of '80s-era Marines), moments of raw Grand Guignol and a pervasive sense of lysergic mayhem.

A toked-up fusion of Godard, Altman, Peckinpah (remembered here on a gravestone) and Monty Python, "Walker" doesn't in the end have the weight and wisdom we'd like to have in our dreams, but at the same time, it's as close as any major '80s film came to Ionesco. Of course, Cox's sights were actually set on the Reagan administration and its expansive program of destruction in Central America. (The film was shot in Nicaragua during the period when the Iran-Contra Affair was becoming news and just as the Tower Commission Report came out — with the full cooperation of the Sandinistas.) Cox always had an eye for the revelatory iconic, and his movie seethes with mysterious signifiers, from Ed Harris's bright-eyed performance as Walker to Joe Strummer's hilariously satiric score to moments of "Wild Bunch"-ian slo-mo and fascinating prophecy. ("We were welcomed as liberators!" Walker intones, when in fact they weren't welcomed at all.) The Criterion edition comes with a plethora of predictably irreverent video documents, commentaries and interviews, and a beguilingly period-appropriate booklet full of documents and a new essay by Graham Fuller.

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Peter Greenaway, on the other hand, is very British from toe to nose, but there may not be another filmmaker in the U.K. as defiantly untraditional and perversely idiosyncratic. A hyper-structuralist of the old school (on whatever planet that old school might be), Greenaway is a cinema-maker intoxicated by patterns, tableaux, narratives based on theoretical systems, and mythical histories — in other words, he's always wanted to be God. Greenaway's long passage through his own formal obsessions — his amazingly homogenous career began in the '60s — has taken him to some odd and repulsive regions of late, but his first feature, "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982), stills hums with high wit and delirious pleasure in its fusion of pop-baroque music (Michael Nyman's score is a head-shaking triumph), lavishly composed imagery, fecund Brit-speak and the farcical yet accurate reinvention of the 17th century. The bounce of intellectual game-playing never ceases, from the first bon mot-clotted frieze to the active engagement of the story, which has the wife and daughter of a repellent landowner, while he's supposedly away, persuade a draughtsman (Anthony Higgins) to draw the estate in 12 careful sketches, a process that involves sexual intrigue and, in a "Blow-Up"-esque twist, the recorded evidence of a murder plot. Greenaway lent the film a uniquely waxen quality, arranging his ludicrously bewigged, candle-lit cast in flat art history tableaux and filling their mouths with absurdly thick Thackerayan verbiage, all of it so arch and masterfully delivered that the very idea of a British aristocratic tradition begins to feel like a sour joke. It's not a movie likely to be savored by your average miseducated new release-renting trog, but for those with the palates and background, it's a banquet.

"Walker" (Criterion Collection) and "The Draughtsman's Contract" (Zeitgeist Films) are now available on DVD.

[Photos: Bruce Anderson, Richard Zobel, John Diehl in "Walker," Criterion Collection; ]

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<![CDATA[The Outer Boroughs]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/ifc-news-podcast-66-the-outer.php Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:12:40 -0500
Download: MP3, 31:20 minutes, 28.7 MB
Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]]]>
8778 2008-02-25 17:12:40 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_66_the_outer publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008778 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Outer Boroughs (photo)]]> Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:12:40 -0500 1008778 2008-02-25 17:12:40 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_66_the_outer_photo inherit 8778 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/opening-this-week-2.php Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:20:04 -0500 02252008_bonneville.jpg

By Neil Pedley

The Oscars have passed, the Spirits have been lifted, and the end is nigh for the godawful release graveyard that is the month of February -- a cinematic black hole where the discarded and unwanted trudge their way onto a big screen somewhere near you in hopes you might glance at their poster as you make a mad last dash to see that Oscar-saddled show pony before it's pulled on Monday after it fails to win in any of the categories in which it's been nominated. Meanwhile, there are 11 other films opening this week to quench that post-awards season thirst, including some with an Oscar pedigree.

"Bonneville"
Quality roles for aging actresses that accurately reflect the middle-aged female demographic have become the veritable unicorn in Hollywood of late. Director Christopher N. Rowley goes back to the tried and tested formula of the road movie in an attempt to change some of that with the mourning after tale of Arvilla (Jessica Lange), a woman who sets off on a pilgrimage with her two best friends (Kathy Bates and Joan Allen) after she loses her husband of 20 years. Ordinarily, cramming three gal pals in headscarves and sunglasses into a vintage convertible and pointing them west would set off some serious alarm bells, but this decorated veteran cast of Oscar baiters is loaded with enough talent to elevate the premise well above the redundant.
Opens in limited release; expands March 21st.

"Chicago 10"
The opening night film of last year's Sundance Film Festival, "Chicago 10" is an audacious new brand of history lesson from the mind of writer/director Brett Morgen that chronicles the heated controversy surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the subsequent trial of a group of protesters with conspiracy to riot charges. Morgen blends archival footage and interviews with an animated dramatization of the courtroom saga based on the actual transcripts, similar to Morgen's last film, the Robert Evans biopic "The Kid Stays in the Picture." A stellar voice cast, including Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte and the late Roy Scheider, lend their weight to the trial proceedings.
Opens in limited release.

"Chop Shop"
Writer/director Ramin Bahrani looks past the bright lights of the big city to bring us another side of New York via an auto body shop, run off a junkyard in Queens, where a young Latino street orphan named Ale (Alejandro Polanco) lives and works. As in his debut, "Man Push Cart," Bahrani uses non-professional actors in this gritty urban drama about one young boy's ambitious pursuit of a warped American dream, one hustle at a time. Fortunately, it looks like Bahrani won't have to hustle to make his next film, since he won a grant as a result of being anointed as "Someone to Watch" at last weekend's Spirit Awards.
Opens in New York.

"City of Men"
Not so much a sequel to "City of God" as a spin off, "City of Men" was a Brazilian television series that followed childhood friends Acerola and Laranjinha for four years as they struggled to navigate their adolescence in one of Rio de Janeiro's most violent favelas. Directed by Paulo Morelli, this full-length feature picks up where the series left off, with the two boys entering into adulthood and once again dealing with a life of drugs, violence and the grinding poverty faced by a forgotten people trying to survive any way they can.
Opens in limited release.

"Jar City"
Based on the acclaimed crime novel of the same name by Arnaldur Indriðason, "Jar City" is a gristly murder mystery from Icelandic actor turned director Baltasar Kormákur. When an old man is found murdered in his Reykjavik flat, the world-weary Inspector Erlendur follows clues left by the killer that will lead him to the grave of a young girl killed many years ago and into the web of conspiracy that surrounds it. Just don't talk to any Icelandic natives before seeing it - it was the highest grossing film of all time in the country and we wouldn't want them spoiling the mystery. In Icelandic with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"The Other Boleyn Girl"
Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated writer of "The Queen," adapts Philippa Gregory's award-winning novel for the screen with help from an all-star cast in their prime. Set in a time where nothing is too sacred to be sacrificed in pursuit of power and influence, the film stars Eric Bana as England's most famous monarch who takes 14-year-old Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) as his mistress in desperate pursuit of a male heir. Natalie Portman is Mary's scheming older sister Anne, who plots to steal the king away from Mary and anoint herself queen, no matter the cost.
Opens wide.

"Penelope"
When their ancestors manage to piss off the local witch, stuffy British socialites Catherine O'Hara and Richard E. Grant have to bear a curse -- their firstborn daughter will sport the nose of a piggy. Christina Ricci stars as the family's dirty little secret, doomed to look like Babe's little sister until she finds someone to love her the way she is - perhaps in the form of a debt-saddled gambler played by James McAvoy. Also taking a gamble is Reese Witherspoon, who produced the modern day fairy tale in addition to taking a small part in it.
Opens wide.

"Romulus, My Father"
An Eric Bana double bill this week - let joy be unconfined (seriously, I think the guy is terrific). Veteran actor Richard Roxburgh steps behind the camera for the first time to helm this adaptation of Raimond Gaita's critically acclaimed memoir about an immigrant couple's turbulent marriage as witnessed through the eyes of their young and impressionable son in 1960s Australia. "Romulus, My Father" co-stars Franka Potente (of "Run Lola Run" fame) and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the young Gaita, whose indubitable love for his father is put to the test.
Open in Cambridge, MA.

"Semi-Pro"
Like clockwork, the Will Ferrell sports comedy is becoming an annual tradition. This time, the former "SNL"-er works his petulant man-child schtick and dons short shorts and an afro as he leads an ABA basketball team of no hopers who need to pull it together and make a run at the playoffs or miss out on a lucrative league merger with the NBA. Joining Ferrell for the fast break are usual suspects: David Koechner, Will Arnett and Andy Richter as well as Maura Tierney and Woody Harrelson.
Opens wide.

"The Unforeseen"
Fresh off its Truer Than Fiction win at the Spirit Awards, "The Unforeseen" finds environmentalist director Laura Dunn taking an in-depth look at the development surrounding Barton Springs in Texas, and the deeper issues that underlie the struggle between developers looking to shape the future and conservationists who oppose man's meddling in Nature's paradise. Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, who also narrates the doc, are executive producers on the film.
Opens in New York.

"Vivere"
Told in the non-linear style of "Amores Perros," "Vivere" relates the intersecting stories of three women on Christmas day in Rotterdam, beginning with Francesca and her pursuit of runaway sister Antonietta. Along the way she picks up Gerlinde, a melancholic middle-aged woman with a broken heart, and begins a journey entangled in fate and self-realization. German filmmaker Angela Maccarone helms this quietly affecting tale of three women struggling to trust their hearts and live for their dreams. In German and Dutch with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

[Photo: "Bonneville," SenArt Films, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Photo gallery: The 2008 Spirit Awards]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/photo-gallery-the-2008-spirit.php Sun, 24 Feb 2008 09:32:24 -0500 Take a peek at photos from the red carpet of the 2008 Spirit Awards.

FOR MORE PHOTOS, CHECK OUT OUR PAGE AT MYSPACE.COM

Go to SpiritAwards.ifc.com to find out more on the 2008 Spirit Awards

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<![CDATA[The Winners of the 2008 Spirit Awards]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/the-winners-of-the-2008-spirit.php Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:52:07 -0500 02232008_juno.jpg

By Alison Willmore

The 2008 Spirit Awards took place under a cloudy and sometimes rainy Santa Monica sky on February 23rd, airing live on IFC. Here's a complete list of the winners:

Best Feature: "Juno," Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Mason Novick, Russell Smith (producers)

Best First Feature: "The Lookout," Scott Frank (director); Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber, Laurence Mark, Walter F. Parkes (producers)

Best Director: Julian Schnabel, "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly"

John Cassavetes Award: "August Evening," Chris Eska (writer/director); Connie Hill (I) (producer); Jason Wehling (producer)

Best Female: Ellen Page, "Juno"

Best Male: Philip Seymour Hoffman, "The Savages"

Best Supporting Female: Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"

Best Supporting Male: Chiwetel Ejiofor, "Talk to Her"

Best Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins, "The Savages"

Best First Screenplay: Diablo Cody, "Juno"

Best Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

Best Documentary: "Crazy Love," dir: Dan Klores

Best Foreign Film: "Once," dir: John Carney

Robert Altman Award: "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes (director); Laura Rosenthal (casting director); Cate Blanchett; Christian Bale; Richard Gere; Heath Ledger; Ben Whishaw; Marcus Carl Franklin; Charlotte Gainsbourg; Bruce Greenwood

Truer Than Fiction Award: "The Unforeseen," Laura Dunn

Producers Award: Neil Kopp, "Paranoid Park," "Old Joy"

Someone to Watch Award: Ramin Bahrani, "Chop Shop"

[Photo: Honest to blog! "Juno," Fox Searchlight, 2007]

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<![CDATA["The Signal"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/the-signal-1.php Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:23:25 -0500 02222008_thesignal.jpg

By Matt Singer

Three stories, three writer/directors, one movie. That's the premise of the apocalyptic sci-fi triptych "The Signal," a movie full of stuff that should feel like gimmicks but don't. David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush tell three interconnected stories with one shared cast and manage to craft something that feels like a collaboration, but looks like a work of one vision, albeit one shared by three like-minded and very creative artists.

A strange, psychedelic transmission from every television, computer, and radio in the city of Terminus has turned half the population into primordial murderers and has sent the other half running for their lives. Once you stare at this "signal" for too long, it infects your mind and triggers massive hallucinations and homicidal mood swings. One of the survivors is Mya (Anessa Ramsey), who, in the film's first segment, "Crazy in Love," returns from an extramarital affair she's having with a nice guy named Ben (Justin Welborn) shortly before people everywhere start freaking out. In the second piece, "The Jealousy Monster," Mya's jealous husband Lewis (AJ Bowden) follows her trail to an apartment complex where everyone has lost their mind but no one realizes it. And in the final portion, "Escape from Terminus," Ben tries to track down Mya and ward off her murderous husband.

Though they tell a single narrative, each segment has its own tone and purpose. "Crazy in Love" is a very classic kind of world-goes-to-pot piece with gore and scares and people screaming things like, "One out of every two people just decided to kill each other!" while holding homemade weapons they've fashioned out of duct tape and kitchen utensils. "The Jealousy Monster" is a pitch black comedy that takes a different tact: Since those infected by the "signal" can't comprehend that they've lost their minds, it proposes that an isolated group of lunatics wouldn't realize they've all gone cuckoo. In it, a dinner party carries on as if nothing is wrong even as guest after guest gets savagely butchered. (Sample dialogue: "You killed Laura!" "She was coming straight at you with a knife!" "That was a keychain!") "Escape from Terminus" resolves the Ben-Mya-Lewis love triangle, but couches its resolution in a warning about our society's increasing preference for electronic interactivity over actual human interaction. It's certainly a timely message. I'll be honest, I spent the better part of today playing "Rock Band" instead of taking the guitar I own and starting a real one. And I'm strangely okay with that. Clearly, it's already too late for me.

Bruckner, Gentry and Bush's movie is scary and smart, and laden with clever low-fi filmmaking; ironically, a bunch of guys railing against technology are quite adept at using it in service of a story. "The Jealous Monster" in particular deploys all kinds of clever (and cheap) camera tricks in the service of giving the viewer the taste of what it's like to have your perceptions corrupted by the "signal." Even the multiple "gotcha!" endings work. Plus, these guys have a ready-made metaphors for the way their film works -- it gets inside your skull and it takes control.

"The Signal" opens in limited release today.

[Photo: "The Signal," Magnet Releasing, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Those Damn Dirty Apes: Our Guide to 40 Years of "Planet of the Apes," Part 2]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/those-damn-dirty-apes-our-guid-1.php Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:51:17 -0500 By Matt Singer

[Check out Part 1.]

When we last left our intrepid heroes, they were dead. Along with the entire planet Earth. The end!

But not so fast -- Fox wanted more sequels. With no way to pull a mulligan on the whole "You maniacs! You blew it up!" thing, screenwriter Paul Dehn came up with a clever way to have his Armageddon and avert it too.

Please note: Most "Planet of the Apes" films have a "shocking" twist that everyone at this point already knows. However, if you have somehow extricated yourself from forty years of pop culture references, by all means be wary of SPOILERS ahead.

02212008_escapefromtheplanetoftheapes.jpg

"Escape from the Planet of the Apes" (1971)
Directed by Don Taylor

Synopsis: The spaceship formerly piloted by Taylor crash lands on the Pacific coast in the United States circa 1973 (the near future, as far as the film is concerned). Its three passengers are Cornelius (Roddy McDowall, back after a one film break) and Zira (Kim Hunter, in her last "Apes" movie) from the first two "Apes" along with a new character, Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo, of all people, for a paltry 10 minutes before his character is offed by an ornery gorilla). They've bounced back through time by the shockwave left after the earth's destruction in the previous film. Once the apes let it slip that they can speak, they become media darlings; once they let it slip that they're from a future where apes subjugate humans, they become pariahs, particularly after Zira divulges the fact that she's also pregnant. Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden) targets the apes for death, tracks them across Southern California, and eventually kills them and their baby in cold blood on an abandoned oil tanker, eliminating the threat they pose to humanity...

Until! ... we discover that Cornelius and Zira secretly swapped their baby with that of a circus chimp. Their incredibly brilliant offspring lives on in the care of the benevolent Armando (Ricardo Montalban), guaranteeing he will lead the ape race into a bright future full of many sequels. No one but me seems upset that some poor innocent baby chimp died as part of a ruse to further their talking ape bloodline.

Metaphors of the Apes: Cornelius and Zira's rise and fall is a rather prescient take on the chew-you-up-spit-you-out world of modern celebrity culture. Their brief flirtation with fame is filled with hilarious scenes that exist only to make fun of dumb rich people -- at the apex of their popularity, the apes throw a party at their suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where they get bombed on wine (or "grape juice plus," as its described to Zira) and watch as two adults bounce around on an enormous seesaw. Also, Zira's Rodeo Drive outfit makes her resemble Little Red Riding Hood, which suggests the fact that her seemingly friendly exterior masks the danger she poses to the human race.

People Forget: That this movie is actually kind of smart. Even the villain, Dr. Hasslein, doesn't take his actions lightly -- when debating what to do about Cornelius and Zira, he has a series of conversations with the president of the United States (William Windom) about the morality of taking a life not on the basis of what it has done in the past, but what it might do in the future. Most of the "Apes" movies are dominated by dogmatic antagonists, which gives the filmmakers the chance to rail against their fundamentalism and fanaticism. Hasslein, in contrast, is wracked by doubt and his actions, if heinous, are also logical. "How many futures are there?" he asks. "Which future has God, if there is a God, chosen for man's destiny? If I urge the destruction of these two Apes, am I defying God's will or obeying it? Am I his enemy of his instrument?" Pretty heady stuff for a movie about talking chimps that's supposedly aimed at children.

Work Within Your Means: After having to deploy so many cheap looking ape masks in the crowd scenes of "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," the producers wised up. There were hundreds of apes in each of the last two movies, "Escape" contains exactly three, and one of them doesn't even make it out of the first act. Setting the film in the near future had to be a budget-conscious decision, too -- by placing the movie just two years after its release, they explained away the fact that NASA was a ways off from making a spaceship that resembled Taylor's without having to make Los Angeles look futuristic in any way.

The Charles Bronson Memorial "Death Wish" Award Goes To: Montalban's Armando, who shields the two apes and later hides their baby out of what could only be described as a fetishistic love for simians. By way of explaining his actions (which, again, will either directly or indirectly result in millions of deaths, including his own) he says to Zira, "I did it because I like chimpanzees... I did it because I hate those who try to alter destiny, which is the unalterable will of God. And if it is man's destiny to one day be dominated, then oh, please God, let him be dominated by one such as you." Methinks Armando's been dipping into the grape juice plus.

Continuity Boo-Boos: The entire story sets up one of those "Terminator" paradoxes where the future creates itself by venturing into the past and jumpstarting the events that lead to apocalypse. Cornelius and Zira's child, Milo, who becomes the protagonist of the next two movies, eventually frees the apes from their slavery and later leads them in a war against the mutated remains of humanity. In short, he gives birth to the planet of the apes that, in turn, gives birth to him. But if Cornelius and Zira create the talking apes, how did the talking apes appear before Cornelius and Zira traveled back through time to create them? File all of this under "Things You're Really Not Supposed to Think About While Watching 'Escape From the Planet of the Apes.'"




02212008_conquestoftheplanetoftheapes.jpg"Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" (1972)
Directed by J. Lee Thompson

Synopsis: In 1983, a virus brought back from space by astronauts (who are always causing trouble in this series) kills every dog and cat on Earth. Apes become the pets of choice, but they prove themselves so smart and adaptable they're soon turned into slaves instead. Now, 18 years after the events of "Escape," America has turned into a fascist state and apes are trained for their servitude (i.e. tortured) at a facility called "Ape Management." Armando is arrested, so Cornelius and Zira's son Caesar (McDowall) bunks up with the ape slaves. After seeing the cruel conditions for himself, he teaches his brothers the art of guerilla warfare (yo ho!) and leads them in a bloody rebellion that threatens to destroy civilization...

Until! ... Fox ordered a reshoot to provide a happier ending after test audiences were understandably unsettled by an finale that glorifies the violent subjugation of humanity. Suddenly, Caesar takes pity on his former masters and promises (in a speech eerily reminiscent of Armando's ape pickup lines from "Escape") that "if it is man's destiny to be dominated, it is God's will that he be dominated with compassion and understanding!" And here I thought apes were agnostic.

Metaphors of the Apes: After a couple movies pussyfooting around its staple imagery, "Conquest" plays the race card for all its worth. The sequence where the apes are processed evokes shades of the Royal African Company and throughout the film, the emphasis is on reminding audiences that it is never smart to treat others inhumanely because you never know when the shoe will be on the other paw. The ending is made particularly poignant by the presence of a black actor (Hari Rhodes) in the role of MacDonald, the kind human sympathetic to the apes' plight who tries to negotiate a truce. "You, above everyone else, should understand," Caesar tells MacDonald when he explains his plans for a revolution.

Work Within Your Means: With budgets sinking lower than ever before, the filmmakers faced an uphill battle creating the world of 1991. Their solution? Shoot the entire movie on the "futuristic" campus of University of California, Irvine and never venture outside it. So we don't get a look at what a car or an airplane might look like in 1991, but the art department provide a few tantalizing glimpses of the shape of things to come. To wit:

In 1991... telephones have NO cords!

In 1991... cigarettes are green!!

In 1991... people wear white socks with dress shoes!!!

In 1991... all restaurants cook their food hibachi-style!!!!

In 1991... escalators will continue to work much as they do in 1972!!!!!

People Forget: How insane the movie's ending is, even with the studio-mandated softening. It's one thing root for the subjugated apes -- that's easy, since all the humans except MacDonald or Armando are bottomless assholes -- and it's quite another to cheer as Los Angeles burns to the ground. My favorite moment comes when the dean of UC Irvine (also known as Governor Breck), played by Don Murray, gives an overwrought speech designed to give the uprising a sense of scope that the budget cannot provide. As if to justify why he's so freaked out about one group of monkeys with Molotov cocktails, he bellows, "If we lose this battle it'll be the end of the world AS WE KNOW IT! We will have PROVEN ourselves INFERIOR! THIS will be the END of human civiliZATION and the world will belong to a PLANET of APES!" Damn, man. It's just a couple hundred apes with knives. Unclench.

The Charles Bronson Memorial "Death Wish" Award Goes To: MacDonald, who goes way beyond compassion for an oppressed race (or species) into cuckoo territory with his repeated attempts to help destroy society. He goes from fighting for the humane treatment of apes to helping them bash his boss's head in. Then again, maybe he doesn't have a death wish; maybe he just wants a new job.

Continuity Boo-Boos: In "Escape from Planet of the Apes," Cornelius and Zira name their baby Milo. Armando is fully aware of this. He's there when they name the kid; it's right before he tries to get in Zira's housedress. Yet at the start of "Conquest," Milo's no longer Milo; he's Caesar. Did Armando just ignore the ape's decision and name the thing what he preferred? Hardly the way to honor the memory of the ape love of your life, Armie!


Next week, it's the shocking conclusion of: Looking Back at The Planet of the Apes! With special appearances by Tim Burton and John Huston!!!

[Photos: "Escape From the Planet of the Apes," 20th Century Fox, 1971; "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes," 20th Century Fox, 1972]

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8759 2008-02-21 13:51:17 closed closed those_damn_dirty_apes_our_guid_1 publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008759
<![CDATA[Fake Names, Real Oscars: Five Nominees Who Didn't Really Exist]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/fake-names-real-oscars-five-no.php Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:49:02 -0500 02202008_fivefakenominees.jpgBy Stephen Saito

For all the talk of triviality that annually accompanies Oscar season, sometimes there really is much ado about nothing... or rather, no one. With this year's nomination of Roderick Jaynes for best editing of the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men," the Academy added to an exclusive but enduring club of nominees who exist only on the celluloid on which their names. Here's a brief history of the nominees least likely to ever attend the Oscar ceremony (well, besides Marlon Brando):

Robert Rich (Dalton Trumbo)
"The Brave One"

Dalton Trumbo had been nominated for an Oscar in 1941 for his script for "Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman." It'd be the only time Trumbo would be recognized by the Academy under his real name until shortly before his death in 1976. Thanks to the blacklist, Trumbo would win two Oscars by proxy -- the first in 1953, when screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter, who did rewrites only, was the lone recipient of the trophy for "Roman Holiday." In 1957, when Trumbo wrote "The Brave One," the story of a boy and his bull, the King brothers, who produced the film, paid Trumbo a measly $1,500 (out of a promised $10,000) and gave the screenwriting credit to their nephew. However, when the Academy bestowed the best screenplay Oscar to Rich, Writers Guild member Jesse Lasky, Jr. picked up the award and claimed Rich was at the hospital where his wife was giving birth. As for the King brothers, they got their due for taking advantage of Trumbo's blacklisted status -- five people claimed that Robert Rich had plagiarized their story idea for "The Brave One" and sued. With no real Rich to testify, the first suit alone cost the Kings $750,000 two weeks after the Oscars. Meanwhile, Trumbo emerged from the blacklist in 1960 to earn a credit for "Spartacus."

Nathan E. Douglas (Nedrick Young)
"The Defiant Ones," "Inherit the Wind"

Like Roderick Jaynes, Douglas is the only other Oscar alias to be nominated twice, earning a best screenplay nomination for his work on 1960's "Inherit the Wind" following his win for "The Defiant Ones" in 1958. While the Sidney Poitier-Tony Curtis prison escape drama caused its share of controversy when it was released, it paled in comparison to the full blown brouhaha caused by a New York Times article that revealed Douglas to be the pseudonym for blacklisted screenwriter Nedrick Young, which was followed by the Academy reversing their rule that blacklisted scribes could not be allowed to be nominated for Oscars, calling it "impractical to enforce." Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote at the time, "Since our Academy now makes it legal for Commie writers to receive Oscars, some past winners, who are as bitter about this as I, tell me they'll return theirs." They didn't, but Young still was nominated as Douglas and wouldn't receive proper credit until 1993, long after his death in 1968.

02202008_fivefakenominees2.jpgP.H. Vazak (Robert Towne)
"Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan"

Robert Towne had done plenty of uncredited rewrites on Oscar nominated films, including "The Godfather" and "Bonnie and Clyde," but when his own screenplay for "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan" was trimmed and reshaped by Michael Austin after he had been denied the directorial reins, Towne changed his credit to the name of his late Hungarian sheepdog, P.H. Vazak, probably thinking the end result would turn out like the last time he used a nom de plume, Edward Wain, on the Roger Corman production "The Last Woman on Earth." Instead, P.H. Vazak became the first canine to be nominated for an Academy Award, and when Peter Shaffer won the best adapted screenplay for "Amadeus," it's quite possible that Vazak rolled over in his grave.

Donald Kaufman (Charlie Kaufman)
"Adaptation"

The Academy had an easy out if "Adaptation" actually won the award for best original screenplay in 2003. Not only would Charlie Kaufman be on hand to accept the award on behalf of himself and his brother, but, according to the end credits of "Adaptation," Donald had died during preproduction of the film. It was likely because of this that Charlie refused to answer questions about the dearly departed when asked at the Writers Guild Awards that year -- even more distraught were agents who saw Donald's name attached to the hot script before production and couldn't reach him. As far as the Oscars were concerned, none of this mattered when Ronald Harwood won for "The Pianist." If Nicolas Cage's gregarious portrayal of Donald was any indication, Donald could have, like Cage, cashed in on his Oscar nod with some work for Jerry Bruckheimer.

Roderick Jaynes (The Coen brothers)
"No Country for Old Men," "Fargo"

The Coen brothers have always been fond of creating characters not just on screen, but off. For the restoration of their first film "Blood Simple," the Coens went to the trouble of including an introduction from Mortimer Young, a dapper (and completely fake) older gentleman whose company Forever Young Films was credited with the newly struck print of the 1985 thriller. "Blood Simple" also marked the introduction of Jaynes, one of the most respected film editors in the business, if one of the most elusive. In addition to penning introductions to the published versions of the Coens' screenplays for "Barton Fink," "Miller's Crossing" and "The Man Who Wasn't There," Jaynes was celebrated as one of Entertainment Weekly's 50 Smartest People in Hollywood last year and had been previously nominated for an Oscar for "Fargo" in 1997. However, when Variety checked whether Jaynes was a member of the American Cinema Editors organization, they heard crickets. Don't fear the same awkward silence on Oscar night if "No Country for Old Men" wins best editing; when asked in 1997 what would occur if Jaynes won for "Fargo," Academy executive director Bruce Davis responded, "The Oscar will simply be accepted on behalf of the Academy by the presenters."


[Photos: "Roderick Jaynes" on the set of "No Country for Old Men," Miramax, 2007; "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes," Warner Bros. Pictures, 1984]

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<![CDATA[George A. Romero on "Diary of the Dead"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/george-a-romero-on-diary-of-th.php Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:00:00 -0500 02202008_georgeromero.jpg

By Aaron Hillis

Although a strong case could be made for why "Martin" and "The Crazies" are neglected classics, the richest work in horror maven George A. Romero's oeuvre always seems to be populated with wall-to-wall zombies. Romero invented cinema's undead flesh-munchers, at least the modern mythos, but his intelligence and staying power among cinephiles comes from how he uses the genre to reflect and poke holes in real-life societal ills. 1968's "Night of the Living Dead," the granddaddy of them all, famously invoked Vietnam-era paranoia, with an ending that showed how mankind could be just as monstrous as the moaning hordes. 1978's consumer-dependency spoof "Dawn of the Dead" followed, then 1985's macho-fascism rampage "Day of the Dead," and 2005's "Land of the Dead" played like a greatest hits whack at 20 years of corporate greed and political corruption.

It's now a quintet with Romero's "Diary of the Dead," a terrifying, whip-smart, often darkly hilarious critique of new media. Resetting the series' timeline, the film goes back to day one of the zombie infestation, as seen through the eyes of film students making their own horror flick. As the news begins breaking, one student makes it his compulsive duty to record every second of history as it's being made, and in turn, Romero's film is structured entirely as a documentary-within-a-film -- think "Cloverfield" with brains, "The Blair Witch Project" with substance or "Redacted" with zombies instead of disingenuous guilt. I chatted with Romero on February 5th (a day after his 68th birthday), or as the media played up its primaries branding, "Super Tuesday."

There's something fitting about "Diary of the Dead" coming out in an election year. Exactly how deep does your cynicism run when it comes to American politics today?

[laughs] I'm pretty goddamn cynical, but I've been that way forever. I don't know, can you predict what's going to happen? I just worry that there's too much prejudice against a woman or an African-American to beat Romney, god forbid. I have no idea which way it's going to swing. Before we made "Night of the Living Dead," we had a little production company that did beer commercials, industrial films, and so forth. We also did political campaigns, and in fact, we did Lenore Romney's campaign to be governor of Michigan. Harry Treleaven and all the boys who brought you Nixon '68 were there, and it just gave me an inside look at the scene. I've been pretty cynical about it ever sense.

What about in the long view? Are we better or worse off now?

I just can't believe people can get suckered into the same old kind of political game-playing. It's like Oral Roberts: there's a way of talking, a way of winning issues. It's ridiculous, there's no straight talk. Part of what inspired this film is that, like that old show "Crossfire" on CNN, which was just people screaming at each other. You never got any information. Is the planet warming or not? We ought to be able to answer that question. There's too much unmanaged information, and half of it is just opinion. Obviously, there are tremendous advantages to having this incredible access to information. I use the web all the time, and it's fabulous. But it's also wide open for the bad guys: how to build a bomb, how to order a hooker, whatever! It's all on there.

Was the emerging media idea your main reason for rewriting the series' history, or had you always intended to go back to the beginnings of the zombie rising?


No, I had the idea first, that these would be film students with a camera, and they could document it. I couldn't really do that three years in after it had become Thunderdome! They wouldn't be attending classes anymore, so I felt I could go back. It's sort of returning to the roots, and it's a film about people who were very much like what we were like when we made the first film. It was really like coming home.

02202008_diaryofthedead.jpgIt's definitely coming home. "Diary" seemed to me like your angriest film since "Night," a clear-headed evaluation on how we're choking ourselves with so-called information. In a world with both tabloid TV and "Faces of Death," how would you suggest we determine what's worth documenting?

[laughs] Man, I don't know! How do you draw that line? There's a certain belief in journalism that if there's a story, it's worth reporting, no matter what the story is. Now they're saying, "Hey, if you see a car chase or a fire outside your window, shoot it, and we'll put it on the air." It's trivializing it, when there's always been some management figure saying, "This is a big enough story." That's not right either, but the point is now it's every which way but loose: "Look, that cat has a third ear, put it on CNN!"

Most of the stuff that plays solidly for three, four days a week seems pretty trivial to me, compared to some of the real problems we're having in the world. It's hard to define what you think is worthwhile. Ultimately, it comes down to somebody's judgment -- is Arianna Huffington any more of a judge than Joe Schmo in Chicago? I prefer the old days when it was being managed. Maybe I was being manipulated, but I always thought I was able to see through that. It bothers me a lot more having thieves and bad guys shouting at me.

So the next time I see Britney clogging up my television, what am I supposed to do with this these resentments your film exudes?


I know! That's what's so frustrating about it. It's really a new question. With the power people still in control of the mainstream, all we're getting is garbage. I'm sure there are people out there writing blogs, these timid little voices in the wilderness being straight-ahead, honest and trying to point out major issues and big problems, but they get lost in all the other smoke. I thought it was a bit demeaning, some of the questions sent in to the [CNN-YouTube] presidential debates. Some cat with a guitar gets on there and he's entertaining. Somebody dresses up like a snowman, they throw them in. Here you are, running for this important office, and... I don't know. There was something impolite about it.

If there aren't any easy solutions, how destructive do you think media's failings could potentially be?


I don't think it'll ever destroy the world because, in the end, there are enough people that either don't pay attention or aren't going to get suckered in. How bad could it get? It could be Nazi Germany on a grander scale, but somehow we seem to recover from that stuff. It amazes me that people are so willing to follow, that's what scares me the most. People will send their last dime to some television evangelist without asking any questions. Someone who has impressive qualities and claims to be a leader and have some answers is going to get a lot of followers.

It's a scary world. I'm half-Latino and my name is Latino. I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, and I was always getting knocked around by the Italian kids. So I know that the world can turn on you. You just don't want anything that creates this kind of tribalism. Nobody listens to Rush Limbaugh unless they're "with" what he's saying. That's the kind of shit they want to hear. And nobody is going to listen to these bloggers unless it's the kind of shit they want to hear, but it's pretty easy to preach radical ideas that a lot of people think is common sense. The idea of terrorism is having the same kind of effect, so that all over the world, people see this as a viable solution, and it's just happening everywhere. I worry about when people get online and start preaching.

This is officially depressing, so let's end on a lighter note. I loved your self-referential joke about why zombies can't move quickly. What were your thoughts the first time you saw a sprinting zombie in a movie, such as Zack Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead" remake?


Obviously, I was... disappointed? Not a strong enough word. I thought it was ridiculous! First off, there are two sides to this argument. I grew up on "The Mummy," man, the Christopher Lee "Mummy." I like the idea of this big, slow, lumbering dead thing. He's never going to catch you if you run, but you can drill him full of holes and he just keeps coming. There's just something inevitable about this monster, and I think that's scarier than things running at you. The other side of the argument is that I just don't believe it. These things are dead, they're stiff! Like in the "Return of the Living Dead" movies, where they're digging their way out of graves. How does a weak zombie dig his way out of all that mahogany?

"Diary of the Dead" is now in limited release. ]]>
8737 2008-02-19 11:00:00 closed closed george_a_romero_on_diary_of_th publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008737
<![CDATA["Pierrot le Fou," "Hélas pour Moi"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/pierrot-le-fou-helas-pour-moi.php Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:33:14 -0500 02192008_pierrotlefou.jpg

By Michael Atkinson

Let us belt the battle cry of Godard, cinema's own Robespierre and Whitman and Dylan all rolled into one transfiguring powerhouse, reinventing film from Day One and never letting the rest of the world quite catch up. We're lucky to have had him, and to have him still. There should be no question that Godard has been to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot and Picasso were to theirs -- utterly unique, rule-rewriting colossi after whom human expression would never be quite the same. Quentin Tarantino may be the most famous public genuflector before Godard's legacy, but Martin Scorsese, Abbas Kiarostami, Gus Van Sant, Spike Lee, Lars von Trier, Jim Jarmusch, Raul Ruiz, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Richard Linklater and Wong Kar-Wai, among innumerable others, all owe him a debt they could never pay out. Wrestling in any capacity with movies as art means facing his body of work and taking a deep breath. Workaday reviewers still quake in dread at the prospect of having to elucidate the complicated reality of a Godard film to their readers. Somehow, though, the seductive energy of this most elusive filmmaker maintains its grip on each successive generation of moviehead, and now, years after graduating to video-making himself, Godard's oeuvre is finding itself properly feted on DVD.

When I interviewed Anna Karina, swooningly, in 2001 for the re-release of "Band of Outsiders," I asked her what was her favorite of the seven features she'd made with Godard, and, after demurring ("If you had seven children, how would you say which one you prefer? After all, it was a love story, wasn't it?"), she dared to guess mine, and nailed it: "Pierrot le Fou." Of the Godardian '60s, this effervescent, self-mocking, effortlessly iconic masterpiece may be the filmmaker's quintessential work, the ultimate commentary on how life and movies fuck and spawn spectacularly beautiful children. It's not merely a guy-&-girl-on-the-run film, nor a farcical tango with the subgenre, but a catapulting Godardianism, a living tissue, a fabulous and hilarious shared week in the life of Godard, Karina and co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo as they make a movie together on the Cote d'Azur, and make it part of our lives, too. Karina and Belmondo, whatever their screen names, jump magically - that is, cinematically - from being acquaintances meeting at a high-end party (where Sam Fuller appears, pronouncing famously on the essence of cinema) to homicidal lovers escaping to a depopulated, semi-tropical island (in a convertible!), blithely leaving thug corpses in their wake.

Where another filmmaker would focus on the telling of the tale, Godard trains in on the vibe, the aura, the juice, the silly élan of the movie-life experience. His reputation as cold, intellectually forbidding artist is decimated by "Pierrot," which in all of its advertising-haiku clutter and goofy playacting is rampagingly spontaneous, intimate, irreverent and sometimes as messy as a fucked-in bed. The few musical numbers, whispered off-handedly by Karina, alone reveal a filmmaking heart bleeding with joy at the world. "Pierrot" is very much a young man's movie, a spirited lark with tragic modernist undertones and a sense of pretending that plays like new lovers' experimentation with life. But it's not real (when asked why there's "so much blood" in the film by a journalist, Godard famously replied, "That's not blood, that's red."), it's a movie.

But the movie is real, of course, a graceful, rebellious, life-affirming fact of our culture community, just as much as it was real in 1965 for Godard and his young, lovely, ocean-eyed wife, playing at being a genius and a movie star on the beach. The Criterion party thrown for "Pierrot," so supercool and long overdue, comes with an extra disc packed with interviews, docs and video pieces.

02192008_helaspourmoi.jpg

Godard, like us all, has aged, and if his formal voice has remained furiously consistent over the decades, he has been perfectly frank about his maturation from a crazy jukebox meta-movie youth to a pensive, cynical old man finding poetry less in the buoyant fantasy of movieness than in the captured simplicities of earthly life: young girls with translucent skin, meadows in the breeze, European metropoli cooling at dusk, spectators frozen by the beauty of landscapes. Sticking out in a new box set of Godard's later films (including 1982's "Passion," 1983's "First Name: Carmen," and 1985's "Detective"), "Hélas pour Moi" (1993) takes as its structure the Greek myth about Zeus and Alcmene, but as Godard has aged, his movies became even more fragmented and, at the same time, more contemplative. "Hélas pour Moi" is a creative nonfiction essay, built from multi-layered tableaux of random incidents and gestures and dramatic dialogues and arguments with God on love, devotion and memory, which to Godard all translate to regard for The Past, and our pitiful disregard for it. Godard is still attentive to pure cinema: The long composition-in-depth featuring a park, a couple, a voyeur, a trash collector and a canal ship is breathtaking, as is the simple close-up that Godard morphs into a emotional statement by beginning in sub-irradiated overexposure and moving slowly to brooding, portentous underexposure.

But his primary movies-are-life idea still stands. The reality of cinema is all there: the experience we have watching, the experience Godard and his team had filming, the passage of minutes, the affectionate distance between the actors (including Gerard Depardieu) and their "roles," between the camera itself and what it photographs - all of it happily naked to the eye and mind, none of it slickly masked by editing sleight-of-hand or "story." What the work may be "about" at any given moment is never prioritized over the beauty of a morning garden, a woman's watchful eyes, the political injustice currently burning in the filmmaker's conscience, or the fact that he may be eating an apple. For Godard, it's all good.

"Pierrot le Fou" (Criterion Collection) will be available on DVD on February 19th; "Hélas pour Moi" is now available as part of the Jean-Luc Godard Box Set (Lionsgate).

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8736 2008-02-19 09:33:14 closed closed pierrot_le_fou_helas_pour_moi publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008736
<![CDATA[A Simpler, Kinder, More Muscled Time]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/ifc-news-podcast-65-a-simpler.php Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:00:02 -0500 '80s nostalgia is in full force in film and television right now, in a particularly bittersweet way. In these complex political times, the vintage musclebound blockbusters have come to represent an odd common global cultural touchstone as well as a relic of a simpler, more naive time. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at how Rambo became the face of innocent loss in several films on the festival circuit, and what '80s franchises are in the pipeline to be remade.

Download: MP3, 33:06 minutes, 30.4 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28220 2008-02-18 07:00:02 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_65_a_simpler publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028220 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[A Simpler, Kinder, More Muscled Time (photo)]]> Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:00:02 -0500 10028220 2008-02-18 07:00:02 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_65_a_simpler_photo inherit 28220 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Courting Controvery at Berlin]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/courting-controvery-at-berlin.php Mon, 18 Feb 2008 02:36:33 -0500 02182008_tropadeelite.jpg

By Alison Willmore

José Padilha's "Tropa de Elite" ("Elite Squad") was awarded the Golden Bear, the top prize of the Berlin Film Festival, this past Saturday. The film, which looks at how the BOPE special police unit in Rio de Janeiro uses exceptionally violent tactics to subdue crime in the favelas, was a controversial pick. A box office hit in its native Brazil, "Tropa de Elite" drew a mixed reaction from critics at the festival, some of whom felt that it glorified the brute force used by its characters -- Variety's Jay Weissberg wrote that it elevated the BOPE to "Rambo-style heroes," and called the film "a one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs."

Padilha, who last directed the acclaimed documentary "Bus 174," told the AP that this was a misread, and that the film actually "aims to explain how the state turns ... people who join the police either into corrupted people, or people that don't really want to do anything with their jobs -- or, worst of all, violent people." "Trope de Elite" will be released in the U.S. by the Weinstein Company.

Other winners:

Jury Grand Prize - Silver Bear:
"Standard Operating Procedure," dir. Errol Morris

Silver Bear for Best Director
Paul Thomas Anderson -- "There Will Be Blood"

Silver Bear for Best Actress
Sally Hawkins -- "Happy-Go-Lucky," dir: Mike Leigh

Silver Bear for Best Actress
Reza Najie -- "Avaze Gonjeshk-ha" ("The Song of the Sparrows"), dir: Majid Majidi

Silver Bear for an Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Music)
Jonny Greenwood -- "There Will Be Blood," dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Silver Bear for Best Script
Wang Xiaoshuai -- "Zuo You" ("In Love We Trust")

Alfred Bauer Prize for innovation
"Lake Tahoe," dir. Fernando Eimbcke

Best First Feature
"Asyl - Park and Love Hotel," dir. Kumasak Izuru

[Photo: "Trope de Elite" ("Elite Squad"), ©Weinstein Co, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: "Be Kind Rewind," "The Counterfeiters," more.]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/opening-this-week-be-kind-rewi.php Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:01 -0500 02182008_bekindrewind.jpgBy Neil Pedley

If last week's avalanche of Valentine's Day-inspired fare forced you to spend the week alone in your apartment like yours truly -- eating ramen noodles in the dark and crying -- then take heart. This week is a fresh slate of brand new movies with nary a rom-com in sight.

"Be Kind Rewind"

If a million monkeys sat at a million typewriters for a million years, they might out something like the storyline for this film. When Jerry (Jack Black) unwittingly erases every tape in the video store at which his friend Mike (Mos Def) works, the two decide to recreate the movies themselves with a camcorder in hopes the customers won't notice. Given that this is the brainchild of writer/director Michel Gondry, the man behind such mindbenders as "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "The Science of Sleep," you get the feeling that this was little more than an excuse for all involved to have a bit of a giggle.
Opens wide.

"Charlie Bartlett"
Charlie Bartlett is a mischievous schemer who's been kicked out of one private school too many and is banished to - gasp - public high school, where he sets up a bathroom stall counseling service for the school's lost and lonely, handing out sage advice in one hand and pills from his psychiatrist in the other. Anton Yelchin, last seen in "Alpha Dog," stars as the titular character in this comedy aiming to be a Ferris Bueller for the Prozac generation.
Opens wide.

"The Counterfeiters"
Austria's official entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2007 Academy Awards, "The Counterfeiters" is a fictionalized dramatization of Operation Bernhard, a secret Nazi plan to destabilize the allied economy by flooding England and the U.S with thousands of forged banknotes. Told in flashback, the film centers on Salomon Sorowitsch, a master counterfeiter who's arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis, who indoctrinate him into working for their cause. In German with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Cover"
Watching the trailer for "Cover," it's difficult to shake the notion that this was a direct-to-video title that was somehow mislabeled and sent out to a theater. C-list legend Bill Duke, who moonlights as a go-to goon character actor, steps behind the camera to direct this tale of marital infidelity and betrayal starring Aunjanue Ellis as a devoted wife implicated in a murder, only to discover her husband, Dutch (Razaaq Adoti) has been leading a double life. Louis Gossett Jr. kills some time waiting for "Iron Eagle V" as the dogged police detective determined to uncover the truth.
Opens in limited release.

"The Duchess of Langeais"
Set in 19th century Paris at the time of the restoration, this period drama is brought to us courtesy of 80-year-old director Jacques Rivette, the man Truffaut credited with birthing the French New Wave movement. He breathes new life into the Balzac novella about Antoinette, a married noblewoman who schemes her way into the heart of the dashing general Montriveau, whom she ultimately drives to madness. The humiliated general seeks his revenge, only for Antoinette to realize that her best laid plans may have cost her true love and more. In French with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"Passing Poston"
Documentarians Joe Fox and James Nubile present the stories of four former internees of the Poston Relocation Center, the largest of ten Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. The film's focus is Ruth Okimoto, a future artist who was forcibly moved to Poston with her family at the age of six, who journeys back to the now derelict and abandoned camp, searching for answers as to how such a thing could be allowed to come to pass.
Opens in New York.

"The Signal"
Told from three different perspectives by three different directors who apparently had no idea what the others were doing, "The Signal" is essentially three mini-movies loosely strung together: a thriller, a black comedy and a romantic mystery, all detailing the fallout of a mysterious transmission that invades the airwaves and turns ordinary people into crazed killers. Written and directed by David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry, this low-budget indie horror flick made its debut at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and a quick scan of the credits tells you everything you need to know -- there are dozens of people credited with roles like "Screaming Man," "Deranged People" and "Random Bodies."
Opens in limited release

"Vantage Point"
Perhaps the only thing more pervasive than the possible conspiracy in this intricate and elaborate high-concept thriller is the film's trailer, which has seemingly played in front of every movie at the multiplexes for months. The gist: Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox star as a secret service agents charged with protecting the president (William Hurt) during a terrorism summit on Spanish soil. When an assassination attempt occurs, the two must sort through video evidence and piece together the events with, among others, an American tourist (Forest Whitaker) and a TV news producer (Sigourney Weaver). Naturally, nothing is what it appears to be. We're hoping the same is true of the film as a whole, which reminds us of Brian De Palma's distinctly arse "Snake Eyes."
Opens wide.

"Witless Protection"
Suffice to say this looks about as funny as a trip to the dentist for a root canal. (Hey, now there's an idea for Larry the Cable Guy's next movie...) The Blue Collar Comedy alum stars as a Mississippi deputy who mistakes a federal witness for a kidnap victim and must dodge corrupt FBI agents and mob guys to usher her safely to Chicago. This smut-spattered toilet-humor adventure comes complete with support from Eric Roberts, who, it seems, is no longer content with making music video cameos.
Opens wide.

[Photo: "Be Kind Rewind," ©New Line, 2008]

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<![CDATA["Diary of the Dead"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/diary-of-the-dead.php Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:06 -0500 02182008_diaryofthedead.jpg

By Alison Willmore

With "Diary of the Dead," George A. Romero has retconned his zombie apocalypse series back to its beginnings, before the burdens of upping the scale in each installment backed things into tough-to-swallow scenarios like "Land of the Dead"'s fortress for the wealthy. In "Diary," it's present day, the dead have just commenced with the rising and the munching and everyone else is willfully resistant to accept how bad things are becoming. There's a guy, a girl, a few of their more edible friends and the end of the world -- and, oh yes, a camera with which to record it all. The unpolished filmmaking techniques that gave 1968's "Night of the Living Dead" the disconcerting air of a documentary have been traded in for new ones that explicitly signify the same -- shaky camerawork, uncertain lighting and actors repeatedly shrieking at an unseen shooter to just put the damn camera down already. Like "Cloverfield" and chunks of "Redacted," "Diary of the Dead" channels its story through the lens of one of its characters, the mostly unseen Jason Creed (Joshua Close), a Pittsburg film student who's directing a mummy movie out in the woods when everything goes to hell and, on the upside, provides him with some more compelling subject matter. Creed, a handful of fellow students and their hard-drinking British professor head out to find their families in the RV they were using for the production. I probably needn't tell you the trip doesn't go well.

Aside from the richly difficult-to-pin-down parallels of his first film, Romero's never really shown what could be called a light touch with satire or subtext. "Diary" takes on its chosen target of truth and power in media by having its characters talk, sometimes endlessly and at the cost of scares and interest, about truth and power in media. The living are often more dangerous to each other than the sluggish dead in these films, but "Diary"'s characters have such a tendency toward taking ethical stands or speechifying during impractical moments that you start to feel like they deserve their inevitable chomping. The issue of how anyone could keep filming through the devouring of his friends by animated corpses is explained away as an obsession/coping mechanism for Jason, but no excuse is offered for how his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) can keep railing on the fact -- "If it didn't happen on camera, it didn't happen," she snips at him. We know Debra's due for a change of heart, because she also somberly narrates the film, presenting it as something edited together from Jason's footage with music for effect, because, as she says, "I am hoping to scare you, so that maybe you'll wake up."

Even with its serious ham-handedness, "Diary" has resonance: Jason posts what he's shot on the web, where it's a magnet for those wanting to get to the truth through the noise of misinformation from official sources, something that unmistakably recalls amateur coverage of Iraq, and what Brian De Palma did even less elegantly in "Redacted." There's both a virtue and a cost to this documentation, a cause to which Jason, it's not so much a spoiler to write, martyrs himself. "Diary" also martyrs itself to making its point -- as a horror film it has some scares, but also an overabundance of didacticism and listless downtime. The rare and ridiculous moments of humor -- a "don't mess with Texas" bit, a meta-rebuke of the recent rapid-undead trend and a mute Amish farmer -- are more than a relief. They're a gesture to the fact that "Diary" is, after all, a zombie movie, and that the audience is owed a little fun.

+ "Diary of the Dead" (Myspace)

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<![CDATA[Those Damn Dirty Apes: Our Guide to 40 Years of "Planet of the Apes," Part 1]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/those-damn-dirty-apes-our-guid.php Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:05 -0500 02112008_planetoftheapes_310x229.jpg

By Matt Singer

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of one of the most well-remembered, metaphorically rich, penny-pinching, bare-chested, temporally impossible movie series of all time, IFC News looks back at "Planet of the Apes" and all its ape brethren. Stay tuned for installments two and three in the upcoming weeks.

Please note: Most "Planet of the Apes" films have a "shocking" twist that everyone at this point already knows. However, if you have somehow extricated yourself from forty years of pop culture references, by all means be wary of SPOILERS ahead.

02112008_planetoftheapes2.jpg"Planet of the Apes" (1968)
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner

Synopsis: Three Earth astronauts from the 1970s crash land on a mysterious planet in the year 3978 after thousands of years in suspended animation. After days roaming a desert wasteland they stumble on a primitive, non-verbal human civilization and then a society of intelligent apes. Captain Taylor (Charlton Heston) is captured by the apes; within their Ape City, he encounters the kind scientists Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) and the powerful and paranoid Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans). Cornelius and Zira befriend Taylor and help him escape his captivity. Taylor and his chosen mate, Nova (Linda Harrison), ride off into the sunset of the Ape Planet's "Forbidden Zone"...

Until! ...they chance upon one of the most iconic final shots in all of cinema, the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. A crestfallen Taylor realizes he is, in fact, on Earth, one that has apparently been destroyed by an unrevealed cataclysm. Drag.

Metaphors of the Apes: The elaborate ape makeup, by John Chambers -- who was rewarded with an Honorary Academy Award for his impressive efforts -- is all there to quite literally mask a story about racial prejudice in 1960s America. Obviously the apes enslave the humans (who, in an ironic role reversal, are all white-skinned) but even within the simian society there is friction and persecution; Zira, for instance, notes how Dr. Zaius, an orangutan, looks down his nose at the chimpanzees, who are disallowed from taking part in the ape government.

People Forget: that Charlton Heston's Taylor is a total dick. Granted, he's treated poorly by Dr. Zaius and the rest of the apes, but that's no excuse for the poor manners he frequently displays throughout the film. He flies off the handle with alarming speed; any bit of bad news is liable to send Heston into a sweaty, profane frenzy ("You cut up his brain, you BLOODY BABOON!"). The fact that the embittered Taylor is an astronaut, that great symbol of 1960s optimism and heroism, only enhances his status as a surprisingly dislikable protagonist, one we often side with on the basis of species loyalty alone. That said...

Charlton Heston's a Friggin' Badass: You have to love a movie star who isn't afraid to look like a douche. Taylor isn't just brutal to his enemies; he's not even civil to his friends! When his fellow astronaut plants a symbolic flag in the Forbidden Zone, the cynical Taylor -- who took this doomed mission to try to find something in the universe "better than man" after becoming disillusioned with society -- mockingly laughs at the gesture. I'm talking cackling-like-a-madman laughter. Later, when Cornelius tells him to stop holding Dr. Zaius at gunpoint, the grumpy human shoves him aside and yells "Shut up!" (despite the fact that Cornelius has risked his own freedom to give Taylor his). Cornelius, someone should have told you: nobody messes with Chuck Heston when he's got a rifle.

After 40 Years, It's Easy To Seem Dated: Cornelius and Zira's nephew Lucius (Lou Wagner) gets to spout all sorts of hilarious youth movement slogans, as if Ape City had its very own Haight-Ashbury. "How are you feeling?" Taylor asks him after the final battle. "Disillusioned!" he replies, "You can't trust the older generation!" The racial component of the film still works; the hippie ape, not so much.

Continuity Boo-Boos: As author Eric Greene observes in his text commentary track on the "Apes" DVD, Taylor should have been clued in to the fact that he's on Earth well before he spots what's left of Lady Liberty. Why else would the apes speak English?


02112008_planetoftheapes3.jpg

"Beneath the Planet of the Apes" (1970)
Directed by Ted Post

Synopsis: After Taylor disappears into a bad special effect in the Forbidden Zone, another astronaut from his time conveniently crash lands on the Planet of the Apes looking for him. Our new hero, Brent (James Franciscus) hooks up with Nova, then completes a checklist of Taylor's activities from the first movie: he rides horseback with Nova, gets captured and brought to Ape City, receives help from Zira and Cornelius (now played by David Watson), loses his clothes, walks around in a loincloth, receives a bullet wound that requires a bandage, realizes that a)he's on a world full of talking gorillas and b)the world is, in fact, the Earth, and so on. Later, Brent and Nova find the remnants of New York City in the Forbidden Zone, and along with them, a race of telepathic mutants who worship a massive nuclear weapon called the Doomsday Bomb. Our heroes reunite with Taylor and all three escape just as the ape army, led by Dr. Zaius and General Ursus (James Gregory), attack the mutants' lair...

Until! the apes kill Nova and Brent and mortally wound Taylor. After Dr. Zaius refuses to help him, Taylor activates the Doomsday Bomb and destroys the entire world out of spite. Good to see Taylor hasn't mellowed since the last "Apes!" After the screen fades to white, a somber narration informs us that the earth "a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." And you thought "The Empire Strikes Back" was a depressing sequel.

Metaphors of the Apes: "Beneath" largely discards the previous film's racial component and instead depicts a twisted version of religious fanaticism. Though the apes' religion was discussed in the first picture, here it is given more screen time, and paired with the mutants and their intensely creepy bomb-based religion. In a truly disturbing sequence, Brent and Nova are forced to endure a mutant worship service ("May the blessing of the bomb almighty, and the fellowship of the holy fallout descend on us all!"). At the heights of the scene's delirium, five mutants peel off their faces, revealing the fact that they all look like Darth Vader without his mask on, and begin to sing in harmony to their "almighty and everlasting bomb." In a movie that is, to that point, mostly a harmless rehash of its predecessor, this chilling scene portends just how dark the ending will get.

People Forget: how much James Franciscus looks like Charlton Heston. The uncanny resemblance is almost certainly the reason the mediocre actor -- whose convulsions during his mental interrogation by the mutants is downright Shatnerian -- landed the role.

After 40 Years, It's Easy To Seem Dated: "Beneath" marks the series' slow backslide into low-budget hell, and it already shows in the more elaborate sequences, where extras no longer wear the full compliment of John Chambers' makeup and instead try to sneak by with cheap-looking ape masks. If you freeze-frame the scene where Ursus delivers his speech to the ape council, you can have a lot of fun spotting the bad applications. It's sort of like trying to find a guy in a crowd with a bad toupee.

Continuity Boo-Boos: Ooh, boy, there are a lot of them. First, the entire notion that the government would send a rescue mission to find a ship that's been tossed thousands of years into the future is totally preposterous. Even if Brent found Taylor, what would he do with him? Plus, Brent's ship tells him he's landed in the year 3955, 23 years before Taylor! Most amusingly, Brent knows to follow Nova because she's wearing Taylor's dog tags. The only problem is Taylor doesn't wear dog tags in the first movie and in the flashback scene conveniently added to explain their existence he nonchalantly pulls them out of his loincloth. So, what, his loincloth has pockets?

Charlton Heston's a Friggin' Badass: Heston didn't want to return for another "Apes" and he only agreed on the condition that his part was limited to about fifteen minutes of screen time and he got to die so he wouldn't be asked to come back again. But apparently that wasn't assurance enough for Heston that Fox wouldn't drag him back if they developed another sequel. So what does he do? He kills the entire planet along with his character. "It's DOOMSDAY! The END of the WORLD!" he sneers at Zaius in a bat-shit crazed whisper. His final words as Taylor: "Bloody bastard!" You would have thought there could be no further "Apes" movies, but, as we'll see soon, not even Heston could kill this series.

On to Part 2!


[Photos: "Planet of the Apes," and "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," Twentieth Century-Fox, 1968 and 1970]

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<![CDATA[Martin McDonagh on "In Bruges"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/martin-mcdonagh-on-in-bruges.php Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:04 -0500 02112008_inbruges_310x229.jpg

By Aaron Hillis

Martin McDonagh makes creative success look ridiculously easy. Having already racked up Olivier, Obie and Drama Desk awards (not to mention four Tony nominations), the Irish playwright wrote and directed his first short film in 2004, "Six Shooter," and won a freakin' Oscar. The short starred Brendan Gleeson, who has reteamed for McDonagh's feature debut and Sundance 2008 opener, "In Bruges." After an underworld assignment in London goes tragically wrong, hit man Ken (Gleeson) and his snarky, younger partner Ray (Colin Farrell) follow orders to hide out in the titular Belgian town. However, Ray's fidgety boredom and uncanny ease at starting a public commotion put the two in the crosshairs of the police, a hot production intern and her psychotic boyfriend, a dwarf actor and the criminal duo's menacing boss (played by a scene-stealing Ralph Fiennes). McDonagh sat down with me to discuss bigoted characters and why "In Bruges" isn't just another hit man flick.

What do the Belgians think about a film whose protagonist not only hates the city of Bruges, but is quite outspoken as a naysayer?

He is. I was a little bit worried about that because they welcomed us with open arms, and helped us out completely. We showed it to the mayor's office, the tourist board and all of the Belgians who worked on it three weeks ago. They all liked it and were behind it, that was kind of a relief.

Me, personally, I think it's a beautiful, amazing town. What I wanted to capture on film is just how pretty, strange and worth a visit is. For a younger guy, it's probably not the most exciting place in the world. Outside of the museums, churches and the architecture, there's not a tremendous amount to see. When I was walking around the place on a little weekend break about four years ago, that's what popped up in my head. Half of me was loving the culture, and half of me was dying to get a drink, or meet a girl or anything to get away from the boredom. That's sort of how the story popped up, having a guy who hates it and is just bored by the architecture and galleries, and another guy who loves it. So then I thought, why would two people who have these opinions be stuck in a place like Bruges when they didn't want to be? That's when the hit man idea came up... escaping a horrible incident, being sent there and told to chill out for a couple of weeks.

When you decided the characters would be hit men, were you concerned that the "soulful hit man" movie has been done to death in the last decade or longer?

I think part of the idea was to set up that "it's a cool hit man movie" fish-out-of-water story that we've seen before, but then try to subvert that, and take it into territory that's a lot darker, more despairing, or sadder than most "soulful hit man" films ever really go to. Guilt and sin are addressed, but it's more of a lapsed Catholic take on it, you know? It has the balance of the comedy, but I think the sadder place it goes to is what makes this different.

02112008_inbruges_310x229_2.jpgNot to get too writerly about it, but how do you balance those tones?

I honestly don't think about it. Most of my plays have been that way. It's just the way I write naturally, it always tends to come out as black comedy. I guess it's just kind of the way I see the world. I see all the horror, war and pain, and in some ways, I just want to politically take the piss out of it, of all the people who are causing that stuff. If you let it get you down, you're gonna die, you're gonna kill yourself. [laughs] So I'm kind of laughing at this stupidity, which sometimes is the only thing to do. It's partly about redemption and honor and decent things, as well as the darker things.

It seems like theater people who get into filmmaking tend to make flat and stagey work, but "In Bruges" is rather cinematic for a playwright's feature debut.

Well, exactly, that's exactly the kind of film I didn't want to make: Two guys walking around talking for two hours, or sitting on a bench and talking for two hours, or sitting somewhere else. That was my biggest fear. I grew up loving films. I never really had much of an interest in theater as a kid because I wasn't ever brought to it; you know, I didn't really have the money to go to it. Film was always my first love, and is something I wanted to get back to, and all of my influences are cinematic ones. All the De Niro-Scorsese films, Terrence Malick, Kurosawa, Sam Peckinpah, David Lynch... um...

... Nicolas Roeg?

Roeg, yeah. I wouldn't have said an influence necessarily, but "Don't Look Now" is very much a template of this, of trying to capture a town as a character. So yeah, I always wanted to make something that was cinematic instead of wordy. I storyboarded for three straight months before we started shooting just to get the visual side into my head. It's something that doesn't come naturally, so I just broke down every scene and drew pictures. Bruges itself helps -- it's such a cinematic place. I just forced myself to work in angles, two-shots or one-shots or all those things, it's just time, effort and forcing yourself to learn a different skill. At the same time, I know what I like and what I'm good at, which is dialogue and character, so I didn't want to run away from that completely.

There's a casual bigotry to Ray, who has something bad to say about gays, blacks, dwarves and pretty much anyone who's not like him. When you write protagonists like this, how careful should you be in letting audiences know you're not condoning ugly behavior?

I guess the easy, honest answer is not careful at all. I'm pretty P.C. as a person, but sometimes it's more interesting to create a character who is the exact opposite in lots of ways, not a voice box for your beliefs. If your spirit is against bigotry, that's what you hope will come through overall. You hope that an audience member will see that filmmakers don't necessarily subscribe to a character's point of view.

Most everything that comes out of Ray's mouth is, at best, childlike and kind of dumb. I'm sure some would say Ray is homophobic, or whatever else. He's also a killer! I don't subscribe to that point of view either, but with everything Ray says, there's an honor. It doesn't feel like there's any hate or malice to it. That's also countered with things that Ken says about his wife who died, who was black. I hope the picture comes across that these are well-rounded characters that I don't necessarily agree with, but you have to be as free with your writing and characters as possible.

Don't worry, I wasn't about to accuse you of sharing Ray's anti-Americanism, either.

[laughs] A lot of my best friends are American! Creatively, everything has happened for me here, more so than in London or anywhere else in the world. Anti-Americanism is just as dumb as anti-black or anti-gay, but lots of people in the world are kind of subscribing to that point of view. With this film, I'm not doing anything to stamp it out, but I think governments are the bigger issue. I've always been anti-American government, but I'm always "anti" to British government, Irish government...

So maybe you're addressing you own anti-authoritarian ways when Ray insults the fat, Midwestern American tourists, as if they represent the half of the U.S. who voted for the current administration?

Yeah, but was it half? [laughs] Even those people Ray takes the piss out of, he's not right... Okay, he is a little mean-spirited about that. But it's funny!

"In Bruges" is now in limited release.

[Photos: Focus Features, 2008]
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<![CDATA["The Films of Sergei Paradjanov," "El Cid"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/the-films-of-sergei-paradjanov.php Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:03 -0500 02112008_DVDColumn_310x229.jpg

By Michael Atkinson

A summoning of pagan energies if ever there were any in the era of television, the major features of Sergei Paradjanov have maintained a flabbergasting constancy in the Western filmhead cosmos -- these prehistoric, narratively congealed Central Asian mutants have never been out of circulation in this country, as retro-able prints or video editions, and are now all available on DVD from Kino in newly restored versions, including, for the first time, his epochal international debut, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (1964). It's intensely odd, because Paradjanov is one of the most hermetic, arcane and completely original artists in cinema history, and his films do not resemble those made anywhere else, by anyone. Perhaps their sui generis freakiness is their saving grace -- and thus a sign of hope for the survival of adventurous film culture in this country. It's not too much to say that no effort at understanding the outer reaches of filmic sorcery can be complete without a confrontation with Paradjanov's world -- a timeless meta-past of living icons, bristling fairy tale tableaux, stylistic extremities and culture shock.

Paradjanov was Georgian-Armenian by birth, cursed by fate to make films within a Soviet system that condemned him as a decadent and a "surrealist." He spent time in the gulag (released thanks to international outcry in 1978), but the Politburo wasn't wrong; Paradjanov was nothing if not a catapulting folklorist, recreating the primitive pre-Soviet era as it might've been dreamt of in the opium-befogged skull of Omar Khayyám. There could hardly have been a more oppositive reply to Socialist Realism. The films -- "Shadows," "The Color of Pomegranates" (1969), "The Legend of Suram Fortress" (1984) and "Ashik Kerib" (1988) -- are all based on folk tales and ancient history (Ukranian, Armenian and Georgian), but only "Shadows" is centered on narrative. It's also the most visually dynamic; unfolding a tribal tale of star-crossed love and familial vengeance in the Carpathian mountains, the movie is one of the most restless and explosive pieces of camerawork from the so-called Art Film era, shot in authentic outlands with distorting lenses and superhuman capacity, and imbued with a grainy, primal grit.

Utterly convincing as a manifestation of pre-civilized will and superstition, "Shadows" was still only a suggestion of the netherworlds Paradjanov would then call home. The next three films, separated by years of censorship battling and imprisonment, are barely narratives at all, but rather medieval art and life conjured up as a lurid, iconic, wax museum image parade, bursting with native art, doves, peacocks, Byzantine design, brass work, hookahs, ancient ritual, cathedral filigree, symbolic surrealities, ad infinitum. This is not a universe where quantities like acting and pace are issues; Paradjanov's vision can be read as the dynamiting of an entire cultural store closet of things. "Pomegranates" traipses through the life of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, "Fortress" revives an age-old Georgian war legend and "Ashik Kerib" adapts an "Arabian Nights"-style tale retold by Mikhail Lermontov. Together, they represent one of the most unique usages cinema has ever been put to, employing the full range of native textures (scrambling Russian traditionalism with Turkish, Arabic, Indian, Chinese and Rom) and ending up, for all of their stasis and ornate compositions, with a party-hearty-Marty celebration of traditional culture and life in the unruly wilderness of Asian societies rarely if ever visible to American filmgoers. The four DVDs come with an array of background/profile docs, an impressionistic portrait comparing/contrasting Paradjanov with buddy Andrei Tarkovsky, and, best of all, several rare Paradjanov shorts.

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Light years away, medieval historicism in Hollywood gained substantial gravity by 1961, when producer Samuel Bronston and director Anthony Mann relocated what must've been a majority of Italian film laborers to Spain to make "El Cid," and struggled to give the monster a sense of Old World veracity while so many Cinemascope epics of the day settled for studio lot interiors. Appearing finally on DVD in a nostalgic gift box equipped with lobby card and comic book reprints, Mann's film has long been the quixotic favorite of David Thomson and Martin Scorsese, who provides an introductory essay. True enough -- despite its genre-monolithic stiffness and starchy period dialogue, "El Cid" is a muscular, sometimes strangely disturbing historical launch, fashioned by Hollywood's greatest landscape painter into a menacing examination of class struggle and honor-bound tragedy. The portrayal of invading Muslim Moors and the ostensibly Christian Spanish royalty are both equally venal, Charlton Heston does the axiomatic job only certain movie stars can do (riding out, dead but strapped to his horse, along a beach that foretells the climax of "Planet of the Apes," seven years later), Sophia Loren looks so impossibly beautiful that her face seems on the verge of orchid blooming, and the crowds -- all real, all occupying Mann's ancient Iberian horizons in a tangible way that digital hordes cannot -- march and rampage. But mostly the movie is an essay on landscape's colossal indifference to man, as are so many of Mann's films, an eloquent and impressive perspective with which heroic sagas are rarely blessed.

"The Films of Sergei Paradjanov" (Kino Video) and "El Cid" (Miriam Collection) are both now available on DVD.

[Photo: "The Color of Pomegranates," Kino Video; "El Cid," Miriam Collection]

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<![CDATA[The Science of Chemistry]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/ifc-news-podcast-64-the-scienc.php Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:02 -0500 Last week in the New York Times, A.O. Scott mused that the romantic comedy has become the victim of "a dispiriting, uninspired sameness." Well, given that it's the week of Valentine's Day, we thought we take a look at his argument, give our thoughts on whether we agree, and discuss some of the on-screen pairings in the past few years that have actually worked thanks to chemistry and which iconic stars seem incapable of generating romantic chemistry with their fellow actors.

[Correction: In this podcast, we state that Kate Hudson is also the female lead in "Failure to Launch." This is incorrect -- it was in fact Sarah Jessica Parker. We apologize for the error.]

Download: MP3, 30:03 minutes, 27.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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<![CDATA[The Science of Chemistry (photo)]]> Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:02 -0500 10028221 2008-02-11 00:00:02 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_64_the_scienc_photo inherit 28221 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: Children, romance]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/opening-this-week-february-15t.php Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:01 -0500

By Neil Pedley

It's Valentine's Day week, so there's a preponderance of three kinds of films coming out: romantic dramas, date movies and flicks for the kids (so the adults can sneak into the first two while their children text message each other and throw chocolate raisins around in the theater next door).

"Definitely, Maybe"
It must be Valentine's Day if there's a romantic comedy to reaffirm theaters full of late thirtysomethings that even if they're divorced, it's not too late for second chances. This year's entry from "Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason" scribe Adam Brooks sees Ryan Reynolds starring as Will Hayes, a fast-talking political consultant with an answer for everything, until he's stumped as to how to explain his impending divorce to his 10-year-old daughter, Maya (played by pint-sized Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin). As Will recounts his romantic history to Maya, she attempts to piece together the mystery and guess which woman eventually became her mother. Along the way, she realizes that matters of the heart are much more complicated than she first thought -- if it sounds familiar, we're pretty sure this at least has more laughs than "Atonement."
Opens wide (official site).

"Dolphins and Whales: Tribes of The Ocean 3D"
Director Jean-Michel Cousteau takes a stunning journey beneath the waves, from the Bahamas to the Kingdom of Tonga, showcasing the ocean's most enigmatic creatures in crystal clear 3D imagery. If it does well, expect a DreamWorks animated version by the end of the year. Daryl Hannah narrates.
Opens in IMAX in limited release (official site).

"Ezra"
Loosely based on "A Long Way Gone," a memoir of a child soldier in Sierra Leone, this Nigerian film highlights the plight of Africa's forgotten children through Ezra, one of the countless children rounded up and recruited by anti-government militias that rampage across the war-torn continent. Once captured, the children are politically indoctrinated, brainwashed and schooled in the ways of violence and hatred. "Ezra" won the grand prize at the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou and made its U.S. debut at Sundance last year. In many ways, this is the film "Blood Diamond" aspired to be — an unflinching and uncompromising story about one of the most urgent and least talked about problems facing a very troubled region.
Opens in New York (official site).

"George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead"
The godfather of the zombie film, a subgenre that just refuses to stay dead, is back in a big way with this flick that centers on a group of students making a horror film in the woods of Pennsylvania when the dead rise once more from the grave to wreak havoc. On the upside, the reboot of the zombie franchise is being helmed by Romero, so we know it couldn't be in safer hands. On the downside, many of the film's core ideas — an ensemble of lost and unprepared twentysomethings, handheld camera work, etc. — are so three weeks ago as a result of the hype-riding juggernaut that was "Cloverfield."
Opens in limited release (official site).

"Jodhaa Akbar"
From the director of the Oscar-nominated Bollywood spectacle "Lagaan," "Jodhaa Akbar" is part historical drama and part complex political thriller, set in the 16th century and telling of the Mughal empire and its leader, Akbar, whose empire stretched from the southern tip of India to the northern border of Afghanistan. In an attempt to solidify his latest political alliance, Akbar marries Jodhaa, a rebellious Rajput princess. Little did he know that this marriage of convenience would lead to a battle of a very different kind — one to win her love. In Hindi with subtitles.
Opens in limited release (official site).

"Jumper"
Director Doug Liman, the man behind the camera for "The Bourne Identity" and "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," brings us another well-polished, highly stylized fantasy action number. Hayden Christensen stars as David Rice, a man who can teleport anywhere on the planet instantly thanks to a genetic anomaly. Hot on his trail is Jamie Bell's Griffin, another teleporter looking to warn David that he and others like them are fighting a war. "Batman Begins" writer David S. Goyer has the pedigree to make this potentially something quite special, and the film looks to be a visceral assault on the senses that's slick, dark and very, very pretty.
Opens wide (official site).

"The Spiderwick Chronicles"
With "Harry Potter" fever winding down, the race is on to launch that next multi-million dollar children's fantasy franchise. This story is based on a series of children's books set in New England, where a family of four move to the decrepit former home of Arthur Spiderwick, the now-institutionalized author of a field guide that explains how to enter the realm of the Faeries. Twins Simon and Jared (Freddie Highmore of "Finding Neverland" fame) are charged with revealing this effects-laden world to us, as they try desperately to keep the book safe from an evil brownie who seeks to destroy it.
Opens wide (official site).

"Step Up 2 the Streets"
Instead of a sequel to the 2006 sleeper hit, think of this as a distant cousin of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," where instead of Jim Carrey, we journey into the mind of an MTV marketing executive who keeps costs down by not bringing back any of the original cast or crew (save for a Channing Tatum cameo) and populates a film about urban dance with Gap models who also seem to be the most expensively attired poor people in existence and live in the most immaculate ghetto neighborhoods where disputes between rival crews are settled by dance competitions. Thus, "Step Up 2 the Streets," which finds Briana Evigan playing a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who must join forces with Robert Hoffman's elite dancer from the Maryland School of the Arts to compete in a Baltimore underground dance contest called "The Streets."
Opens wide (official site).

"Watching The Detectives"
Writer/director Paul Soter, co-author of the underrated "Super Troopers" and… er…"Beerfest," brings every film student's wet dream to life — a spectacularly hot and charming girl who wants nothing more than to hear you talk about all those great old movies that you love. Lucy Liu is that girl, Violet, who strolls into an indie video store run by Neil (Cillian Murphy) and strolls out with his heart. Joining the meta-cinema mini-revival of mind-bending flicks such as "Adaptation," "Stranger Than Fiction" and "Be Kind Rewind," "Detectives" sees Neil's life begin to resemble those great film noirs he has always loved as Violet's real-life femme fatale starts to turn it upside down.
Opens in limited release (official site).

"The Year My Parents Went on Vacation"
Set in Brazil over the course of a few weeks in June 1970, this quietly disarming drama focuses on Mauro, a 12-year-old boy left in the care of his grandfather whilst his political activist parents are forced to flee from government forces. When his grandfather dies on the day he arrives, Mauro is placed within the collective care of the neighborhood and its colorful characters. Despite the politically charged big picture, this film is an intimate portrait of a working class community that lives and works together in understanding and harmony, a microcosm that transcends ethnic and political differences, helped along by the nation's spectacular domination of that summer's World Cup.
Opens in New York (official site).


[Photo: "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation," City Lights Pictures, 2007]

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<![CDATA["The Band's Visit"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/the-bands-visit.php Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:11 -0500

By Matt Singer

"The Band's Visit" is an antidote to the more common treatment of racial and ethnic difference on screen, which is typically characterized by tragic miscommunication and huge conflicts of monumental importance. (Think "Babel.") Instead, the focus of Eran Kolirin's feature debut is squarely on humanity's potential to overcome those sorts of roadblocks and find a common ground. The result is intentionally light, maybe even a little slight, but also unquestionably warm and charming.

An Egyptian police band, led by stern conductor Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), arrives in Israel to play a special concert at the opening of an Arab Culture Center in Beit Hatikva. Problem is, there is no Arab Culture Center in Beit Hatikva — where the band hears Beit Hatikva, they should have heard Petah Tikva — and there's no chance of transportation out of the desolate little desert town until the next morning. The proprietor of a local café, named Diana (Ronit Elkabetz), takes a few of the members in and encourages her friends to do the same. The film follows the events of the night with amusement, sympathy and hope.

A lot has been made of "The Band's Visit"'s disqualification from contention for the Oscar for best foreign language film on a technicality; because the Egyptians and the Israelis do not understand each other, they communicate by speaking English (which is spoken far too often in the Academy's purview to merit Oscar consideration). But even if the Academy had permitted director Kolirin's film to compete in the category, it would have made a bad fit for the award, where specific nations each submit a single film for consideration, a notion that encourages divisiveness and international competition. Though "The Band's Visit" is an Israeli film, it suggests a community built beyond that country — or any country's — borders, and it's pretty hard to imagine this charming little film or its creators engaging in a cutthroat campaign all for the sake of a little golden statue.

One seemingly superficial aspect of the film bears a great deal of importance. Though most of the dialogue is in English, the entire film is subtitled, allowing English speaking audiences to understand not only the dialogue between the Egyptians and the Israelis, but the words exchanged within each group as well. But the entire plot is centered around the idea that neither faction can fully express themselves to one another; and several crucial moments play upon the fact that when one side needs to share privileged information with others, they revert from English to their first language. Hypothetically, Kolirin could have printed the film unsubtitled; the dialogue, particularly in Arabic and Hebrew, is sparse enough that everything would have been clear without them. Or he could have subtitled one group or the other. Instead, he gave the audience more information than any character onscreen, allowing viewers to stand outside the automatic distrust that a language barrier breeds and feel as if they are one of the Egyptians and the Israelis.

A pre-credits crawl informs us that the film is loosely based on a real life incident. "Not many remember this," it says, "it was not that important." It sounds like a pretty soft sell for a movie, but "The Band's Visit" boils down to that very fact. It wasn't a very eventful visit. To Kolirin, that, in and of itself, made it something of an event.

[Photo: "The Band's Visit," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]

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<![CDATA["Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/vince-vaughns-wild-west-comedy.php Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:10 -0500

By Matt Singer

It is very hard to care about something and then laugh about it. This is why so few movies or TV specials featuring stand-up comedians even attempt to explore the world beyond the stage, the spotlight and the microphone. If you're lucky, you get an opening sketch, maybe a few shots of the comedian arriving at the venue, and then right into the material. So much of the stand-up's persona is their casual, conversational tone; we know it's rehearsed, but we like to pretend it's not. Showing us that it's a job — and a hard one at that — can easily shatter that illusion.

And so it is something of a minor triumph (a very minor triumph) that "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show" pulls off the dual feat of giving you an honest this-is-what-it-takes portrait of the tough life of a stand-up alongside the actual material. The film takes us on the road with Vaughn and four of his comedian buddies, and while it showcases plenty of jokes from their acts, the film actually spends more time with the guys in between sets. It lets them discuss their backgrounds, express their frustrations and failures, and even introduces us to their sometimes disapproving parents.

The film, directed by Ari Sandel, doesn't shy away from the tough side of the business. All the talent and the timing in the world doesn't guarantee success in stand-up. Luck and some fortunate breaks are crucial, and Vaughn, who largely takes a backseat to the four comics in the film, much as he does onstage during the tour, clearly enjoys the fact that he can play benefactor to some needy up-and-comers. Ironically, the funniest guy in the movie is the least successful — when the documentary was shot back in the summer of 2005, Sebastian Maniscalco, who has the strongest on stage persona and clearest comedic perspective, was still waiting tables to pay his rent, and had to take an extended vacation from his day job just to accept Vaughn's invitation. Happily, his fortunes have improved a bit since then, but it took offers like Vaughn's to get him there (after the tour's final performance, a visibly moved Maniscalco thanks Vaughn while apologizing for "acting like a pussy").

The other three comedians and their frat house humor are largely interchangeable, a bit of the reason why "VVWWCS" (which, as if the title wasn't already long enough, has an interminable subtitle: "30 Days & 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland") consistently gives off a pleasant vibe, but rarely a memorable or hilarious one. There's not much conflict beyond Maniscalco's struggles either; even when Hurricane Katrina lumbers onto the scene, it does little more than change the tour's itinerary and give the group a chance to do some goodhearted charity work. By Vaughn's own admission, rough as things got, the guys never had a bad night, nor did they ever really fight. Which is great for the audiences who are enjoying the live show in theaters across the heartland, but pose kind of a problem for the audiences watching the audiences on the screen, since so much of the movie we see is based on the comedians' hassle-free travails on the road. That's a totally different reason not to look behind the curtain. Forget sentimentality — sometimes, banality can be just as dangerous to a comedian.

[Photo: "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show," Picturehouse Entertainment, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Paul Andrew Williams on "London to Brighton"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/paul-andrew-williams-on-london.php Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:06 -0500 Born in Portsmouth on England's southern coast, 34-year-old Paul Andrew Williams began his career as a TV actor (appearing in such British series as "No Bananas" and the long-running soap "Eastenders") before trying his hand at writing and directing in 2000. Short films, viral ads and music videos followed, but it's Williams's BAFTA-nominated feature debut that might finally raise his profile stateside. Set in a social circle of cockney criminals, "London to Brighton" might appear at first glance like it belongs in Guy Ritchie's oeuvre, but if anything, it shares more in common with the kitchen sink dramas of Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke. Unfolding largely in flashbacks, the gritty tale follows a badly beaten prostitute named Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) and 11-year-old runaway Joanne (Georgia Groome) from a bathroom in London to you-know-where, all the while pursued by their pissed-off pimp Derek (Johnny Harris) and a vengeful gangster who wants to know why his father has been found bleeding to death in his mansion. I chatted with Williams about British cinema today and the responsibilities of filming violence. [WARNING: Minor spoilers follow.]

Instead of developing all-new characters, what made you decide to revisit Kelly and Derek from your 2001 short, "Royalty"?

It wasn't anything in particular, to be honest. I had the idea just walking down the road. I pictured these two girls walking into the house, into a really grand room, and that piece of music [Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata"]. It was only a few days later that I actually knew those girls, what they would be doing, and maybe one of them could be Kelly. The story of the feature has nothing to do with the short; it just features two of the characters. I always wanted to work with [Lorraine Stanley] again.

Making short films on the side is one thing, but how does one take the plunge from full-time actor to career filmmaker?

It wasn't anything sort of pre-planned. I've always had ideas, and one day I was out with a friend, we were in the lounge, and I said, "I've got this idea for this short film." He said, "Sure, let's make it then." And that was that. We raised a bit of money, made it on film, and set up the production company. I was still acting, and then we made another one, I was still acting, and then afterwards I was like, "Actually, I'd like to be a director." The thing is, when you're an actor, there's only so much you can do. It's much easier to create something as a director because you can start with nothing. It's in your control, whereas as an actor, you're so much more reliant on outside influences to work and create.

It seems like the bulk of British dramas that make their way across the pond are of the crowd-pleasing variety: "The Full Monty," "Billy Elliott," "Kinky Boots," et al. As someone closer to the scene, what do you think about the state of British cinema today?

Well, it's not as big as America. In order for a British film to travel, especially to the States, you have to be a little easy to get. Anything too challenging might be difficult. And I don't mean that American audiences are stupid, but our sort of independent and low class life is much different than the States. So any independent film that focuses on that — I don't know, it's not something that's already at the attention of an American audience. Does that make sense?

I suppose, but I'm not even talking about what gets widely distributed by the mini-majors. I feel like I don't see the British represented very often at film festivals and on the arthouse circuit.

For an independent film, it's still really difficult. In America, it's not looked at with a stigma. The independent side of making films is much more open, and people, especially nowadays, are more interested in seeing it. It has a much bigger following. Over here, so few British independent films ever see the light of day. Without a big distributor's push, it's hard to get into festivals around the world. I would also say a fair selection of British independent films aren't very good. In America, there could be ten times as many independent films being made, so you have ten times more films coming out. Whereas in England, it's probably the same kind of ratio of what makes it to what doesn't, only we don't have as big of an industry.

I'll buy the smaller industry argument, but you mentioned a "stigma" and that some British indies may just be lackluster. You think both of those come directly from a lack of industry resources?

There are definitely less facilities to call on. In L.A. especially, you know, it's a way of life rather than an industry, from [what I've witnessed] there. In England, I think most people would have to be proved wrong that British independent film is any good. For films of all genres, there will always be a preconception, but especially in Britain. We don't call them independent films so much over here, but low-budget films. The stigma is that it's going to be [amateurish]. Maybe that's changing because of "Once" and maybe "London to Brighton" as well. Sometimes they classify films like "The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland" as independent films, and those are like $15 million.

With underage prostitutes comes a much harsher word: pedophilia. Were you ever worried that a drama with the "p-word" might be difficult to sell to both distributors and audiences?

Yeah, there were those concerns, but the fact is we made this film for about $150,000. We didn't show it to any funding body or anything like that. We purely raised the money privately, and made the film without any preconceptions of what would happen to it. I mean, it was the best reviewed British film in 2006. Five stars pretty much across the board, it was crazy. We had no idea this was going to happen. We were just a group of people who wanted to make a movie, and that's what happened. I knew some would be offended, but those people may well have been offended by however I would've tackled the subject. The idea was always to make something not gratuitous, and I stand by that; there are no gratuitous scenes in there. You don't really see that much violence, a lot of it is suggested. I mean, look at "Saw IV" and shit like that, which is made to shock and disturb. Our film is not that.

However, there is one particularly distressing knifing. We see tons of blood, the image is repeated in more than one flashback segment, but I didn't feel the morality of the act is addressed. Do you feel you have a responsibility to make violence matter, not just to the characters but to the audience?

We shot the whole scene of that, and nobody had a problem with it — you know, distributors and funding bodies — when we were showing the film council and other people. Although you have a young girl stabbing someone, there's no naked flesh. I mean, there's legs, but only what you would wear on a beach. [Georgia Groome] was one of the most mature people on the whole set. She just finished a film for Paramount, she's just remarkable. And her mum was just five feet away during the whole filming. The idea of seeing the blood was just to show that that was an injury that could kill him. It wasn't necessarily, "Look at all this blood." It was to say that if you get stabbed in this area, this is what happens. There was no rape, no molestation, none of that. It was purely the violence of trying to escape, not violence for violence's sake. She was trying to save Kelly's life, that's why the young girl did it.

You mentioned how kind most of the UK press has been, and I agree, having The Guardian call your debut "the best British film of the year" must feel amazing. But then I stumbled upon two negative reviews, both American. Do you think there's anything in the film that might not translate culturally?

I don't know, and in a sense, when you make a little film for that sort of money, the last thing you think about is wherever it's going to travel and get a release in the States. It's a story, that's all it is. It's make-believe. I would say I attempted to do something that felt real, but that's going to be up to an audience to agree with. You know, they call it… is it "middle America" where they're very conservative? What can I do about that, man? It's a big country. But the fact is, 99-point-whatever percent of Americans are not going to see this film. I think it's the sort of film you would have to want to go see rather than, you know, go with your girlfriend on a date and say, "Actually, let's go see this tiny little British film about pedophilia and gangsters and killing." I don't know if it's going to be that sort of movie, so I imagine that most people going into the film will be prepared for what might be in it.

"London to Brighton" opens in limited release February 8th.

[Photos: "London to Brighton," Outsider Pictures, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Rotterdam Dispatch #3: The Prizewinners]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/rotterdam-dispatch-3-the-prize.php Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:04 -0500

By R. Emmet Sweeney

The 37th edition of the Rotterdam Film Festival is kaput after a low-key closing ceremony this past Friday night. The big prize was for the VPRO Tiger awards, which hands three first or second time filmmakers $15,000 towards future projects. The jury, headed by ace Iranian director Jafar Panahi ("Offside"), handed the prizes to the Malaysian underage comedy "Flower in the Pocket," the Thai post-tsunami drama "Wonderful Town" and the Danish Sunni-Shiite thriller "Go with Peace Jamil." "Wonderful Town" looks to be the breakout title of the three, with almost universal acclaim from critics (including myself in the previous dispatch), an award in hand from the Pusan Film Festival, and a slot in the upcoming Berlin Fest's Forum section. With its subtle romance wedded to an undercurrent of post-disaster violence, it's a haunting piece of work and a deserving winner.

The others had a more tempered reception. "Flower" director Liew Seng Tat belongs to a much-heralded, but little seen group of Malaysian directors who formed their own production company, Da Huang Pictures. A straight-up comedy effectively using the intimacy of DV, "Flower" gets strong performances from its child actors (latchkey kids with a mannequin factory workaholic father) and has an eye for the bizarre detail. Liew concocted the funniest scene I saw in the festival, involving an overly jolly doctor, a misplaced lock and key and a wayward X-ray. It's this eye that keeps his story about outcast kids from descending into cliché, and turns it into an aggressively likeable piece of entertainment. It also nabbed a spot in Berlin.

"Jamil"'s selection was a surprise, to put it mildly. A rather reductive tale of Sunni-Shiite violence in Denmark, director Omar Shargawi's handheld opus stirred little support, and its selection suggests a compromise vote between two opposing titles. I hope one of them was Jose Luis Torres Leiva's "The Sky, The Earth, and the Rain," which ended up winning the FIPRESCI prize, selected from the Tiger competition films (I was a member of the FIPRESCI jury as part of a program for young film critics — six of us whippersnappers were given one combined vote). To wrap up the festivities, the Dutch Film Critics gave their award to Alexei Balabanov's incendiary "Cargo 200," and NETPAC, an institution promoting Asian film, awarded veteran Taiwanese actor Niu Chen-zer's debut "What On Earth Have I Done Wrong?".

If there were any trends to emerge out of this eclectic festival, it was simply to confirm that Asia is still the undisputed artistic center of the film world, with new talents emerging ("Wonderful Town"'s Aditya Assarat) and the old masters still going strong, with Hou Hsiao-hsien ("Flight of the Red Balloon"), Jia Zhangke ("Useless") and Tsai Ming-liang (with his excellent installation "Is it a dream?") all in town. There's one Japanese filmmaker questioning his own importance, however, and that's Takeshi Kitano, in the midst of the mid-career crisis that began with his self-flagellating portrait in "Takeshis'" (2005). The same tendency continues in "Glory to the Filmmaker!" (2007), an often uproarious sketch comedy collection about what film Kitano should make next. Structured like a madcap clip reel, "Glory" makes use of a sarcastic narrator to lead us through a variety of failed projects, including an absurd parody of Kitano's gangster films, a spot-on Ozu imitation, the self-explanatory treacle of "The Chauffeur's Romance," and, of course, "Blue Raven Ninja Part 2." A sarcastic deconstruction of every plaudit tossed his way, the film reveals that Takeshi just wants to play the clown. It has the feel of a transitional work — but it's one to revel in.

The last bits of celluloid I took in were of Abdellatif Kechiche's epic about the North African community in southern France, "La Graine et le Mulet" (The Secret of the Grain). Kechiche uses streams of overlapping dialogue to track the lives of the Arab community in the southern French port of Sete. Kechiche has a wonderful ear for the textures of speech — his characters talk in the associative, digressive manner of families with decades old in-jokes and feuds. Arguments build and crescendo with operatic power — and Kechiche gives his actors plenty of room to perform, in every meaning of the word. You'll know what I mean when you see the final scene — a tour de force which contrasts sex and death with startling equanimity.

[Additional photo: "Glory to the Filmmaker!", Office Kitano Inc., 2008]


Previous dispatches:

#2: A Luminous Masterpiece From Chile — Chilean director José Luis Torres Leiva's "The Sky, The Earth, and The Rain" is the title that keeps popping out of the mouths of inebriated critics.


#1: Enigmas and Insanity From Japan and Thailand — Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Ploy" is dreamlike reverie of marital breakdown, while Matsumoto Hitoshi's faux-documentary "Dai-Nipponjin" is brilliantly eccentric.

[Photo: Liew Seng Tat's "Flower in the Pocket," Da Huang Pictures, 2008]

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<![CDATA["Rocket Science," "Right At Your Door"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/rocket-science-right-at-your-d.php Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:02 -0500

By Michael Atkinson

Though it's never been acknowledged, the teen comedy has evolved substantially from the odiously primitive ape it used to be, and today stands as a fiercely intelligent, unpredictable, insightful higher class of creature. The chasm is huge between the idiotic froth and exploitation crudities we saw in the 1950s through to the 1980s, and the eccentric, inspired, brave and crazy films we've seen come out of the indie scene ever since "Heathers" broke the mold for good in 1989: "Dazed and Confused," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Rushmore," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Loser," "Can't Hardly Wait," "10 Things I Hate About You," "Ghost World," "Juno" and even lowbrow hooey like "American Pie" and "Road Trip." Jeffrey Blitz's "Rocket Science" takes its seat comfortably on the dais. Seethingly articulate yet lyrically at a loss, the film chronicles a very particular high school tribulation, and yet it's so finely and generously observed that it feels universal. The milieu isn't many football fields away from the subculture Blitz explored in his breakout documentary "Spellbound" — swapping out spelling bees for high school debate competitions, Blitz unceremoniously allows his characters their own hyper-learned way of speaking as his hero, a beleaguered nebbish with a disastrous stutter.

His father abandons the family, and he fails to choose pizza for cafeteria lunch because he can't get the word out, but Hal (Reece Daniel Thompson, in a masterfully constipated performance) sees a way up out of the mud after being "recruited" for his high school's debate team by a go-getter Type A-student (Anna Kendrick). Hal naturally falls for the girl, ramrod or not, just as he becomes seduced into thinking he can win at tournament debating. That could be the plot for a dumb feel-good Hollywood movie, but Blitz's film (which features absolutely no slumming guest stars) always sidesteps and dodges the clichés; rarely, if ever, do the characters — from Hal's problematic mom to a voyeur neighborhood kid to a deposed debate king — behave in a predictable fashion or speak as if they only have one thing on their minds. (Hal's cultured-simian big brother, played by Vincent Piazza, seems perpetually on the verge of exploding from unexplained teenage fury.) This approach sometimes forces things to fizzle — many scenes that seem to be leading up to an easy joke end with none at all — but most often, the movie feels spontaneous, thoughtful and hard to pin down. There is also, not very incidentally, the best use ever of the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun." But having spent so much time already observing the lives of smart kids, Blitz brings no preformulated thematic ideas to the table about teenagers and high school. It's just life, lived by people too young to understand it.

A few inches farther down on the indie-budget docket, Chris Gorak's "Right at Your Door" is an active demonstration of what can be accomplished with little more than a potent idea. We're in the childless home of an economically static L.A. couple, office worker Lexi (Mary McCormack) and unemployed musician Brad (Rory Cochrane), and not long after she disappears to work, the all-too-imaginable happens: the city is hit by multiple dirty bombs, and suddenly one's location — out and working downtown, or safely ensconced at home? — becomes a matter of life and death. Ash falls on everything, fallout could be anywhere, transportation becomes impossible, panic runs riot around the film's edges and Brad and Lexi undergo the ultimate test of a modern relationship: who would you die for? Masculine guilt and post-feminist resentment lurk at the film's dramatic heart, when it isn't otherwise limning the sense of your neighborhood becoming irretrievably terrified and bestial in a matter of minutes. Gorak, a busy art director who's worked with design mavens David Fincher, Terry Gilliam and the Coen brothers, optimizes his low-budget options, capturing the scrubby L.A. suburbs better than any other film I've seen, getting sweaty, vein-popping performances from his cast, and focusing on the minutiae — which here boils down to an ever-shifting barrier of duct tape and plastic sheeting. Less is more — Gorak's film out-hyperventilates every atomic attack movie since Peter Watkins's "The War Game."

"Rocket Science" (HBO Home Video) and "Right At Your Door" (Lionsgate) are both now available on DVD.

[Photo: "Rocket Science," Picturehouse Entertainment, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 8th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/opening-this-week-february-8th.php Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

By Christopher Bonet

A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend next week.

"A Walk to Beautiful"
Documentarians Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher's first collaborative feature documentary tells the story of five Ethiopian women exiled from their communities after complications during childbirth. As each of these women search out a special hospital in Addis Ababa in order to find a home where they won't be persecuted for the first time in years, Smith and Bucher's camera captures their attempts to rebuild their lives. The film premiered at the 2007 San Francisco Film Festival.
Opens in New York (official site).

"The Band's Visit"
Israeli director Erin Kolirin's debut feature finds a few of Egypt's finest traveling to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab Culture Center... except they head to the wrong town. The comedy/drama premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Un Certain Regard Jury award.
Opens in limited release (official site).

"Fool's Gold"
Matthew McConaughey may have fallen a little out of favor in the leading man department after the colossal failure that was 2005's "Sahara" (and "Two for the Money" and "Failure to Launch" and… well, you get the idea). But the actor's latest marks first reunion opposite Kate Hudson since their wildly successful rom-com "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" in 2003. McConaughey plays a treasure hunter whose relationship with his estranged wife (Hudson) is reignited after he discovers the real key to her heart: Spanish gold. Romance!
Opens wide (official site).

"The Hottie & the Nottie"
We're surprised this indie comedy has neither a National Lampoon's or direct-to-DVD stamp attached to it. Paris Hilton is the "Hottie" in this comedy that finds the infamous socialite the object of affection of Nate (Joel David Moore), a loser who hopes to woo his childhood love once he figures out what to do with her less-than-attractive best friend. "The Hottie and the Nottie" may have the worst poster of the year to date, questionably pitting Hilton against her deformed best friend. Now that's just bad taste.
Opens in limited release (official site).

"How to Rob a Bank"
Newbie director Andrew Jenkins' debut feature visits the worn genre of the "heist film," though the helmer gets a bit creative with this exhausted concept by posing questions of who is robbing the bank and what are they after. A couple (Nick Stahl and Erika Christensen) find themselves trapped in a vault, with the bank robber (Gavin Rossdale, of Bush fame) stuck on the other side of the door. The film sounds a bit like "Panic Room" meets "The Nine"... in other words, possibly promising. The film premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival.
Opens in New York (official site).

"In Bruges"
While this Sundance opening night film may sound like familiar ground (heist-gone-wrong film with rapid-fire dialogue… just see one item above), we're still excited about noted playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh's debut feature. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star as a pair of hit men hiding out in Bruges, Belgium, awaiting word from their boss (Ralph Fiennes) after a botched job in London.
Opens in limited release (official site).

"London to Brighton"
Paul Andrew Williams' inner -ity drama explores underground London culture, tracking a pair of beaten-up prostitutes, a pimp in trouble, and a man left bleeding to death on a bathroom floor. The film won a slew of festival awards in 2006, including the prize for Best Film at the British Independent Film Awards.
Opens in limited release (official site).

"Spiral"
For those yearning for a Joel David Moore double feature this week, the lead of "The Hottie and the Nottie" also co-directed and stars as a lonely telemarketer who is brought out of his shell by a new co-worker (Amber Tamblyn) in this indie thriller. Be on the lookout for a brief appearance by Tricia Helfer, also known as our favorite Cylon Number Six from "Battlestar Galactica."
Opens in limited release (official site).

"Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show"
"Swingers" star Vince Vaughn selects four comedians to perform 30 dates in 30 nights across the United States. Sounds a bit like Dane Cook's "Tourgasm," except without the suck of Dane Cook. The comedians featured in this documentary include Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco.
Opens wide (official site).

"Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins"
Martin Lawrence further tarnishes his comic credibility in this family comedy that finds the formerly edgy comedian playing it safe once again. Lawrence stars as a popular talk show host who leaves Los Angeles for a raucous family reunion in the Deep South. We deeply miss the Lawrence of yesteryear (even "Blue Streak".... anyone?) and hope that maybe, someday, he'll return to the risky material that we all grew to love in the early '90s.
Opens wide (official site).

[Photo: "In Bruges," Focus Features, 2008]

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<![CDATA[The World of Superbowl Advertising]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/02/ifc-news-podcast-63-the-world.php Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The average Superbowl ad cost $2.7 million for 30-second slot this year. For that much scratch, you can afford to hire a decent director. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at the talent behind the most impressive ads that aired during the game, and revisit the illustrious ad careers of some of our favorite filmmakers.

Download: MP3, 30:16 minutes, 27.7 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28222 2008-02-04 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_63_the_world publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028222 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The World of Superbowl Advertising (photo)]]> Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500 10028222 2008-02-04 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_63_the_world_photo inherit 28222 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Rotterdam Dispatch #2: A Luminous Masterpiece From Chile]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/rotterdam-dispatch-2-a-luminou.php Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: "The Sky, The Earth, and The Rain," Jirafa Films/Charivari/Peter Rommel Productions, 2008]


It's a week into the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the one title that keeps popping out of the mouths of inebriated critics is "The Sky, The Earth, and The Rain," a world premiere Chilean film directed by José Luis Torres Leiva. Part of the main Tiger competition for first and second time filmmakers, and by far the best of the bunch, Leiva's contemplative debut captures the misty beauty of Valdivia, an isolated island town 1,000 miles south of Santiago. Blanketed in fog and constantly beset by rain, it's a fetid landscape of soggy stumps, weighted down apple trees and placid swamps — you can almost smell the decay. Shot luminously on 35mm, the location is the star, but Ana is the solitary young woman who navigates these dense, dripping spaces. She takes care of her ailing mother and pays the bills by working as a maid for a local recluse, Toro. Her fraught relationship with him provides the main action, as they quietly circle each other in their own pockets of alienation. Their words are blunted and opaque, their emotions flashing in quick bursts before they return to the day's chores.


Leiva and his DP, Inti Briones, told me the film was five years in the making, with most of the actors involved during that entire process, forging a tight bond. After discovering the area around Valdivia, Leiva re-wrote the script to fit its scenery, emphasizing its importance as a character. They selected locations surrounding Valdivia and into Bolivia to create a composite town that only exists in the hazy netherworld of the film. Ana does the ambulating through this fictional space, and Leiva captures these movements with long, elegant tracking shots, often holding the take even after Ana leaves the frame. This emphasizes the impassive grandeur of her environment, and sets up a secondary character's impulse to annihilate herself in nature. Her death-drive haunts the rest of the small cast — the hypnotic nothingness of the landscape preferable to the daily grinds of civilization. Impeccably composed and edited, with oft-overwhelming sound design, "The Sky" is the major discovery of the festival.


Another Tiger entry with a strong sense of place is the lovely "Wonderful Town," from Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat. Set in the tsunami-ravaged Takua Pa area on the southern coast of Thailand, the film adapts Western genre tropes to examine the psyche of a small village recovering from tragedy, while also managing to be a convincingly tender romance. A Bangkok architect, the civilized outsider, comes to town to work on rebuilding a beachside hotel. He stays at an out-of-the-way motel where he is soon besotted with Na, the local virginal beauty. Her brother is the heavy, suspicious of the outsider and resentful of his incursion into this makeshift frontier. Beginning and ending with placid shots of the ocean that belie its monstrous force, the tender love story slowly shifts into a tale of class resentment that escalates into an act of shocking violence. The tonal shift is rather jarring, but it carries an ambiguous force and acts as an effective allegory about the psychic scars still remaining from the tsunami of 2004.


Another work concerned with a city's spirit following disaster is Garin Nugroho's "Teak Leaves at the Temples." His producer, a jazz aficionado, persuaded Nugroho to throw a Nordic free jazz trio together with Indonesian folk groups, and had them perform improvisations in front of ancient Hindu temples at Borubudur and Prambanan, as well as at a Yogyakarta arts center after an earthquake hit the city. These concerts, experiments in controlled chaos shot in one take, are intercut with profiles of local artists and their communities, making this playful documentary more than just a multi-cultural gimmick. A follow-up to Nugroho's epic Javanese musical "Opera Jawa," "Teak Leaves" shows him examining similar themes in a lighter mood. Both films delve into issues of national mourning and Indonesia's cultural history, using local art forms to investigate modern problems. "Jawa" used gamelan music and shadow puppetry, while this film utilizes stone sculpture, contrapuntal drumming, and ancient architecture. And at a sprightly 70 minutes, it gave me plenty of time to sprint to the next theater.


For those still harboring romantic thoughts of the Soviet Russian regime, Alexei Balabanov has some vitriol to send your way in the form of "Cargo 200." The title refers to the caskets being sent back from the 1980s war in Afghanistan, but Balabanov is concerned with the horrors at home. Set in 1983, it's a pitch black comedy featuring the most sadistic commie in film history. Moscow is filmed as an apocalyptic pigsty in washed-out greys and browns, presaging the moral degradation to come. Filmed with barely repressed rage, "Cargo 200" is often revolting in the depths of its violence, but it is also unforgettable, seared by authentic outrage at nostalgia for the old USSR.


To cleanse my palate, I took in Serge Bozon's "La France," an utterly unique WW1 film that contains four musical numbers. A group of French deserters are wandering through an endless no man's land when Sylvie Testud, dressed as a boy, joins up with them to search for her husband. Shot in soft blues and highly diffused light, the image is ethereal and delicate, appropriate for the ghostlike visages of the male group. In the midst of their epic wanderings, they pause and sing a few songs, whipping out handmade instruments and crooning '60s style psych-pop. Honoring the tunes that used to flood American genre pictures like "Rio Bravo," Bozon's bold and deeply romantic film risks looking foolish in order to reach for the sublime, and it succeeds beautifully.



Previous dispatches:


#1: Enigmas and Insanity From Japan and Thailand — Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Ploy" is dreamlike reverie of marital breakdown, while Matsumoto Hitoshi's faux-documentary "Dai-Nipponjin" is brilliantly eccentric.




[Additional photos: "Wonderful Town," Pop Pictures Co. Ltd., 2008; "Cargo 200," CTB Film Company, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Two From Sundance 2008: "August," "Sleepwalking"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/two-from-sundance-2008-august.php Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Josh Hartnett in "August," 57th & Irving Prod., Periscope Entertainment, 2008]


"August"

Directed by Austin Chick


We never learn how Land Shark, the dot-com at the heart of "August," is supposed to make money. Characters tell us that the brand "speaks for itself. Nobody does what [they] do," but what exactly that might be is left to the imagination. Given the fact that the company is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, it's possible we don't know what Land Shark does because its employees remain foggy on the matter as well.


The Land Shark name is a reference to an old sketch on "Saturday Night Live," in which Chevy Chase, dressed in cheap shark costume, would get women to let him into their apartment by mumbling a bunch of innocent gibberish ("Plumber, ma'am…," Candygram…") until they'd peek their head out to see who it was. The scenario mirrors the way that Land Shark goes about its business under the stewardship of Tom Sterling (Josh Hartnett), who can talk his way into any deal, assuming the other party is stupid enough to open the door and let him in.


"August" opens with a well-edited montage that establishes those heady days of the early aughts when our biggest concern was whether Tom and Nicole would tough things out together. Cut to five months later, and things don't look as bright as they once did at Land Shark. While he lavishly spends money his company doesn't have to keep up appearances, Tom and his tech-savvy brother Joshua (Adam Scott) must figure out how to keep the company afloat long enough for their business model to work. The brothers figure that might take three years. At the rate they're burning through capital, they won't last another three months.


Austin Chick's drama is about the lengths people will go to cling to illusions they love: Tom, in a surprisingly strong performance from Hartnett, fully understands the depths of his problems, but he's too intent on projecting the image of success he's hyped to a nation of investors to let on. Tom's public persona is contrasted with the one seen in scenes with his family, with a mostly wasted Rip Torn playing Hartnett's dad, and his ex-girlfriend, played by Naomie Harris. Though these sequences would seem crucial to fully understand Hartnett's character, the script by Howard A. Rodman is shakiest here. Where the world of power lunches and high finance is a mysterious and alluring one, the world of Tom's home life is a clichéd one of uncomfortable family dinners and old loves lost.


Still, Hartnett skillfully anchors this mostly impressive drama, which captures its pre-9/11 New York City milieu with wit and nuance. Chick makes subtly pointed references to the horror that looms just on the horizon with blink-and-you'll-miss-them background shots of the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers, and deploys a number of clever visual metaphors, the best of which may be the game of pinball Tom and Joshua often play in their local bar. They initially think they're like the flippers, keeping this ball up in the air while everything around them keeps trying to knock it down. By the close of "August," they've begun to realize they're more like the ball — buffeted about by forces they can't control.



"Sleepwalking"

Directed by William Maher


What an appropriate title for a movie that seems to be working solely from a checklist of Sundance movie tropes. There's a precocious child, wise beyond her years, yearning for escape from her crummy small town life, and a dysfunctional family road trip, and a serially depressed young man who is confronting his past and coming of age, and bad parents galore. It's not too late to make an inventive movie using all of these ideas, but it is too late for "Sleepwalking," whose sole creative contribution to the Sundance movie canon is to deploy this motley crew of motifs as a means of justifying and even celebrating murder and a host of other crimes.


Nick Stahl stars as James, a quiet young man who is sleepwalking through life. We know this because he tells us straight out near the finale that "I feel like I was in a dream. Sleepwalking. But you helped me. You woke me up." It's an uncharacteristically blunt statement from a character who has spent the previous 95 minutes completely shielding us from his feelings until we eventually stop wondering or caring whether he has any at all.


Currently, James' biggest problem stems from his sister Jolene (Charlize Theron, in another of her "dirty and disheveled equals important" roles), who's run off and left him in charge of her 11-year-old daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb). Tara is another character we are supposed to care about and don't; mostly because Maher and screenwriter Zac Stanford seem to think her crummy mother excuses her whiny attitude, poor behavior, and her willingness to turn her poor uncle James into a fugitive from the law. In short order, Tara gets James fired from his job, then convinces him to free her from a foster home and set out on an ill-advised road trip that could get James in a mess of hot water. James insists to anyone who'll listen that Tara's "a good kid," totally oblivious to the fact that this sour apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.


For the first two-thirds of the movie James seems shy, depressed and quiet without any good reason. In the final third, we discover the source of his problems: his overbearing ranch hand father, played by Dennis Hopper as if Frank Booth had given up the city life and the huffing to decamp for Wyoming to start a horse farm. At first, it's kind of a gas to see Hopper let loose on such a primordially malevolent character — he, at least, is willing to call Tara on her poor behavior — but then he quickly becomes a cartoonishly overbearing tyrant, bellowing in his terrified grandaughter's face about how his mares are going to get colic.


Let's give credit where credit's due: The final act, which finally breaks free of the Sundance stereotype shackles, is so gosh-darn wonky you'll never see it coming. But it's also so gosh-darn wonky that it's more than a little ridiculous, and maybe even a bit unintentionally funny (even the capital crimes involved in the climax are handled so poorly they're worth a chuckle or two). By the time James wakes from his stupor, it's too late to roust us from ours, or the movie from its own, for that matter.



[Additional photo: "Sleepwalking," Overture Films, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Rotterdam Dispatch #1: Enigmas and Insanity From Japan and Thailand]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/rotterdam-dispatch-1-enigmas-a.php Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Ploy," Fortissimo Films/Five Star Entertainment, 2007]


As I sit in the crowded hall of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's main building, I'm drowning in an atmosphere of harried conviviality. At the table next to me, three ladies promoting "Lucky 7," an omnibus Thai film, are exchanging information with a charming Texan whose short film is premiering at the fest. This is the scene all over this wet and windy city, as independent filmmakers the world over are making contacts and crossing their fingers for that one good Variety review that could lead to financing for their next project (or at least a future festival life for their film).


In its 37th year, this festival defines itself by its independence — specifically its focus on young filmmakers, many of whom are from developing nations. (As a result, Rotterdam devotes the Tiger Awards Competition to a group of 15 first or second time filmmakers lucky enough to make the main selection.) This maverick spirit was instilled by Hubert Bals, the festival's founder, who encouraged an idiosyncratic mix of ambitious unknowns and experimental pioneers, and programs of high-wire genre freakouts and rare retrospectives. His legacy lives on through the Hubert Bals Fund, which gives money to young filmmakers in the developing world, helping to produce such films as Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Climates" and Carlos Reygadas's "Japón."


This year, the festival has a new director in Rutger Wolfson, but according to veterans of the fest, it seems little has changed. The Tiger Awards Competition is still the centerpiece of Rotterdam, but there's an embarrassment of cinematic riches behind every program, including the auteur-driven Kings & Aces section, the midnight movie shenanigans of Rotterdammerung, and a raft of options I haven't delved into yet, including the retrospective of fourth-generation Chinese filmmakers and the avant-garde Exploding Cinema sidebar (complete with a theater designed to ape Tsai Ming-liang's Taipei cine-palace from "Goodbye, Dragon Inn").


So far, I've seen five of the Tiger contenders, and the most impressive is "Waltz in Starlight," directed by noted Japanese still photographer Shingo Wakagi. A shambling reminiscence about his witty grandfather and the lazy tempo of their beachside town, "Starlight" nimbly mixes documentary techniques with fiction to create the impression of a fine-tuned home movie. Koishi Kim, a veteran manzai performer (a stand-up comic in his native Japan), plays the acerbic gramps with studied cantankerousness and glimpses of grace beneath. The others competing for Tigers are less accomplished, including "Go with Peace Jamil," a head-scratcher that reduces the Sunni-Shiite conflict to shopworn action film clichés.


Curiously placed in the Sturm und Drang section for up-and-coming filmmakers, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's latest work, "Ploy," was another early highlight. Known stateside for his 2004 release "Last Life in the Universe," Ratanaruang has been making the festival rounds for a decade and would certainly seem more at home with the more established folks in Kings & Aces section. Regardless, his dreamlike reverie of marital breakdown (which premiered at Cannes in 2007) deserves to be seen. A couple who emigrated to the U.S. return to Thailand for a funeral and check into a modernist Bangkok hotel, where their somnambulistic mind games begin and banal jealousies erupt into violent revenge fantasies. With puzzle-like complexity, Ratanaruang infuses everyday objects, including a necklace, a cigarette lighter and an expensive suit, with the paranoias and euphorias of erotic couplings, creating an impressionistic, demanding, and entirely enigmatic ode to the mysteries of love.


After catching up with some New York Film Festival titles I'd missed (Ken Jacobs' rapturous investigation into pre-cinema, "RAZZLE DAZZLE the Lost World," and José Luis Guerin's superb "In the City of Sylvia"), I sat down to the most purely entertaining title of the fest so far in Matsumoto Hitoshi's brilliantly eccentric "Dai-Nipponjin" (or, "Big Man Japan"). A popular comedian on Japanese TV, Hitoshi's persona is fully honed — he speaks with a halting delivery so deadpan it reaches beyond comedy into the realm of psychosis. He plays Dai Sato, the last remaining employee of Japan's Department of Monster Defense. Employing a faux-documentary style, Hitoshi is questioned about his adoration of folding umbrellas (they get big only when they're needed) and his distrust of America, giving plenty of room for long pauses. He leaves you hanging for the punchline, the humor arising from the lack of one.


The true insanity begins when Hitoshi begins fighting the monsters, with such evocative names as "The Strangling Monster" and "The Stink Monster." Jacked up with electricity and standing inside of a giant pair of drawers, Hitoshi is super-sized and battles the beasts with a steel rod and a mightily hairy back. With surprisingly effective computer effects, Hitoshi dispatches the freaks with aplomb, but the TV ratings for his show are in the pits — so much so it airs at the prime slot of 2:40 in the morning and his agent splashes ads across his chest. The story takes a number of wild turns, eventually ending on a note of surreal televisual bliss — Hitoshi finding the answer to his depressive state in the rubber suits of old.



[Additional photos: "Waltz in Starlight," Youngtree films, Tohokushinsha Film Corporation, 2007; "Dai-nipponjin," Yoshimoto Kogyo Co., Ltd., Realproducts, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Oscar snubs, surprises]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/ifc-news-podcast-62-oscar-snub.php Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Four out of the five Best Picture nominees in this year's Oscars are, technically, indie films. While it remains to be seen if anyone will watch, it's certainly the strongest batch of nominees we've seen at the Academy Awards in a long time. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look over the Indiewood Oscars, pointing out surprises and snubs in select categories. And don't forget to catch Matt Singer double-dating on the Oscar topic over at NPR's Talk of the Nation, here.

Download: MP3, 33:54 minutes, 31 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28223 2008-01-28 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_62_oscar_snub publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028223 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Oscar snubs, surprises (photo)]]> Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 10028223 2008-01-28 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_62_oscar_snub_photo inherit 28223 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Nadine Labaki on "Caramel"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/nadine-labaki-on-caramel.php Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photos: Nadine Labaki in "Caramel," Roadside Attractions, 2007]


When the world looks at Beirut, what's visible most often is a war zone. When Lebanese native Nadine Labaki looks at the city, she sees women dealing with a universal set of pleasures and difficulties, leavened with the unique religious and social complexities of her country. Set in a beauty parlor where the fractured front sign speaks volumes about the daily challenges faced by its customers, the gentle comedy/drama "Caramel" (the title refers to the use of melted sugar as a depilatory) focuses on four women: owner Layale (Labaki), who's carrying on an affair with a married man; Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), an employee nursing an infatuation with a beautiful client; Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri), a Muslim bride-to-be fearing the ramifications of revealing that she's no longer a virgin; and Rose (Siham Haddad), a seamstress who has put her life on hold to care after her senile older sister (Aziza Semaan).


So this is your first feature film, with you in the lead and a non-professional cast.


All except the policeman.


Why take that on?


Because there's so much beauty in ordinary people, in ordinary life. It took me, like, a year, searching for these people — I saw hundreds and hundreds of them. They were the people you see everywhere — on the streets, in our families, friends, people with no experience.


Any thought of, "Maybe I'm crazy doing this?"


Yes, all the time, but at the same time, I had a gut feeling that this is the way to do it. I wanted the film to be as realistic as possible. I wanted to give the audience the impression that they are observing other people's lives, and not watching a fiction where you have an actor being someone for that film and then becoming somebody else for another film. I wanted to audience to feel the closeness, and so it is told by people who look like [my actors]. It's also about getting out of this vicious circle where a film does not get funding or does not work unless it has a name in it. I think we should get out of this vicious circle and start thinking differently about moviemaking.


In the press notes, you mention Lebanese girls being instilled with the concept of aayib, literally, "that's shameful." Did you have to face that attitude as a woman director working in Lebanon?


There are a lot of contradictions. As a director, I am someone working in a field that's not easy for a woman, I'm traveling a lot. On the other hand, I am someone who lived with my [family] until I got married. I grew up with this word [aayib] all the time: "You shouldn't do that…" But you grow up, and you can be free and be applying this freedom, and still you have a lot of self-censorship and self-control because you don't want to hurt the people around you, your family, your education, your religion. You are confused: Are you this free woman who's doing what she wants, or are you a more conservative woman? You are searching for your identity.


I have to admit, watching this film, I realized I know squat about Lebanon. Yet I got the sense, for all the turmoil, that there's an aspect about Beirut that matches up with other cities, in that there's a willingness to embrace a more open social structure.


Of course, it's much more open. But we still have lots of issues to deal with. The whole of Lebanon is like a huge village: Everybody knows everybody, and the problems come from the fact that we live in a community, we don't live on our own. We live in a family, in a society, in a neighborhood, in a community where everybody knows everybody, whether you're in the village or the city. And it's this proximity with other people that creates this pressure. Even though you're in the city, it's not like it is here.


You live in a community, you don't live on your own. It's very hard to see someone eating alone in a restaurant. It's very rare. And if you see someone eating alone in a restaurant, you think he has a problem. At the same time, this proximity has its advantages and its disadvantages. It creates a lot of pressure.


Is this a universal story or more specific to your country?


When I was writing the script, I thought it was going to be specific. Now, I'm discovering what's happening with this film. Everywhere we go, I make it a point of staying and watching the screening, because I like to see how people react in different places. It's surprising to see how people react the same way: They laugh at the same places with the same intensity at the same sentences. So now, I'm discovering it's not specific, it's more universal. I've discovered that human nature, human reactions, human emotions are the same everywhere in the world.


"Caramel" opens in limited release February 1st.

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<![CDATA[Forgotten, But Not Gone: 10 Directors Overshadowed By Their Collaborators]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/forgotten-but-not-gone-10-dire.php Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Stephen Saito

IFC News


[Photo: Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams on the set of "Cloverfield," Paramount Pictures, 2008]


The next film Matt Reeves is planning to direct is called "The Invisible Woman," but if he wanted to make it autobiographical, it could be called "The Invisible Director." Following years of anonymity as a director despite one big screen helming credit ("The Pallbearer") and a co-creator credit on the TV series "Felicity," Reeves remains an enigma, even after his latest film, "Cloverfield," broke box office records. That's because his longtime friend and "Cloverfield" producer J.J. Abrams is getting most of the attention for the monster movie (though some tenacious bloggers like Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells have been valiantly trying to get Reeves his due). And Reeves isn't alone in his unknown status. Rightly or wrongly, here are a few other directors whose work on beloved films has been forgotten in favor of the involvement of others.



"The Empire Strikes Back"

Directed by: Irvin Kershner

But everyone remembers: George Lucas


It may be one of the top grossing movies of all time, but can you name the director? It wasn't George Lucas, who was so frustrated after directing "Star Wars" that he told The New York Times he would never direct again back in 1982. That opened the door to Lucas' old USC professor Irvin Kershner to take the reins of the second Skywalker installment, though Kershner, who had previously directed smaller dramas like "The Eyes of Laura Mars," turned the film down at first. Some speculate that it was Kershner's experience with more intimate films that resulted in what is arguably the most beloved entry in the "Star Wars" saga, but casual fans still probably credit the film to Lucas. As for the director of "Return of the Jedi"? That was Richard Marquand, who told the Times that directing "Jedi" with Lucas was "like having George Bernard Shaw standing behind you while you direct one of his plays.''



"Clash of the Titans"

Directed by Desmond Davis

But everyone remembers: Ray Harryhausen


Ray Harryhausen should be known for many things, but directing the Grecian special effects extravaganza isn't one of them. Of course, he did the stop-motion effects for the film, but in his capacity as producer, he hired journeyman director Desmond Davis to handle the helming duties. Even though a sun-soaked Harry Hamlin and Laurence Olivier were the names at the top of the marquee, it was Harryhausen who went on a month-long tour of colleges and museums to drum up audiences for the 1981 flick, leaving Davis a nice paycheck and not much else in terms of recognition.



"Poltergeist"

Directed by: Tobe Hooper

But everyone remembers: Steven Spielberg


The term "creative force" in filmmaking may have been around well before the 1980s, but it was popularized when Steven Spielberg produced but didn't become the full-time director of "Poltergeist." Instead, he gave that responsibility to "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" director Tobe Hooper. When "Poltergeist" was released, Spielberg insisted that he was the primary "creative force" behind the film since he had written and produced it, and Hooper didn't seem to mind until the Directors Guild of America actually launched an investigation into who directed the 1982 supernatural thriller. Hooper's directing credit was upheld, though actors such as Zelda Rubenstein later claimed that Spielberg did most of the directing on set.



"Pretty in Pink," "Some Kind of Wonderful"

Directed by: Howard Deutch

But everyone remembers: John Hughes


Howard Deutch edited trailers for "The Breakfast Club" and "Sixteen Candles" before John Hughes handed him the script for "Pretty in Pink." Soon after, Hughes fired Martha Coolidge as the director of the next film he'd write and produce, "Some Kind of Wonderful" and replace her with Deutch. Yet, as Janet Maslin succinctly wrote in her 1987 New York Times review of the duo's second collaboration, "That Mr. Hughes did not actually direct 'Some Kind of Wonderful' is almost beside the point." IMDb is quick to point out that Deutch holds the rare distinction of directing three sequels to films he didn't direct, which is the definition of a hired gun, but at least he wasn't firing blanks while working with Hughes.



"To Be or Not To Be" (1983)

Directed by Alan Johnson

But everyone remembers: Mel Brooks


If you look in your Mel Brooks DVD Collection, there's anomaly amongst the eight films included in the boxed set — that would be "To Be Or Not to Be," the remake of the Ernst Lubitsch classic that he produced and starred in, but did not direct. It would be the only time Brooks starred in someone else's film, but at least it was a trusted somebody, since Brooks gave the opportunity to his longtime choreographer Alan Johnson, famous for staging the "Springtime for Hitler" number in "The Producers." Most critics noted that the shot selection of the film was identical to the original, and Johnson went on to helm only one more film, the sci-fi "Solarbabies," which was also produced by Brooks, before going back to choreography. Brooks, of course, was accused of being a svengali once again when the musical version of "The Producers" was directed by Susan Stroman.



"The Nightmare Before Christmas"

Directed by: Henry Selick

But everyone remembers: Tim Burton


Tim Burton considers himself a patron of stop-motion animation, but the macabre maquettes that have been so identified with the director in fact are a product of another — Henry Selick, who helmed both "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach" under the auspices of Burton's production banner. A reported falling out between Burton and Selick led to Selick striking out on his own and then simply striking out with the live action/animation hybrid "Monkeybone" before finding other patrons for his unique sensibilities, including Wes Anderson, who employed him on "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou," and Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, who has rebuilt the Vinton animation studio around the historically underappreciated Selick.



"V for Vendetta"

Directed by: James McTeigue

But everyone remembers: The Wachowski brothers


The theory wasn't that farfetched. Rather than face the massive expectations that would come with following up "The Matrix," the notoriously reclusive Wachowski brothers would hire their protégé James McTeigue to serve as a front so the duo could work in peace out of the spotlight. The Wachowskis even took the unusual step of taking on the second unit directing duties. But similar to the torture suffered by the graphic novel's lead heroine Evey, McTeigue survived the queries of hundreds of suspicious journalists to remain the bonafide director of "V for Vendetta." Heck, in an interview with Cinema Confidential, it was revealed that the former assistant director to the Wachowskis and George Lucas even wrote a draft of the screenplay before the brothers did a final polish.



"The Last Kiss"

Directed by: Tony Goldwyn

But everyone remembers: Zach Braff


Can a mere soundtrack producer overshadow the film's director? Apparently one can when the soundtrack producer in question is Zach Braff, who lent his music tastemaking and acting abilities to this 2006 romantic dramedy, but not his recently discovered skills as a director. After tapping into the zeitgeist of the under-30 crowd with his Shins-heavy directorial debut "Garden State," Braff once again cobbled together a collection of Snow Patrol, Joshua Radin and Coldplay tracks to accompany his performance. Audiences weren't completely fooled, since they gave the kiss off to "The Last Kiss," but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who knew Tony Goldwyn, the villain from "Ghost," directed it.



"What Would Jesus Buy?"

Directed by: Rob VanAlkemade

But everyone remembers: Morgan Spurlock


When "What Would Jesus Buy?" made the rounds of the festival circuit last year, audiences could be forgiven for mistaking the documentary, with its snappy title and its ripe for humor subject matter, as Morgan Spurlock's follow-up to "Super Size Me." After all, Spurlock, who was the film's producer, managed to do the lion's share of interviews about Christmastime consumption as director Rob VanAlkemade sat on the sidelines. The film was an expansion of VanAlkemade's award winning short "Preacher with an Unknown God," but, despite the fact that the director did the heavy lifting, Spurlock proved he was bigger than "Jesus," at least to those who cover the documentary world.



"Superbad"

Directed by: Greg Mottola

But everyone remembers: Judd Apatow


While audiences can expect to see the header "From the guy who brought you 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin' and 'Knocked Up'" on advertisements for a long time to come, Judd Apatow can't possibly have time to direct every single film set to bear his name as a producer. Fortunately, he had a stable of directors from his short-lived TV series "Undeclared" to call on — an impressive group that includes Jon Favreau, future "Along Came Polly" director John Hamburg, "Super Troopers" director Jay Chandrasekhar and Jake Kasdan, who would go onto direct "Walk Hard" for Apatow. But for "Superbad," Apatow chose Greg Mottola, who'd been helming television ever since "The Daytrippers" came and went in 1997. Granted, Mottola recently got the greenlight for his semi-autobiographical dramedy "Adventureland" on the strength of "Superbad," but only indie fans probably recognize his name from "The Daytrippers." "Pineapple Express" director David Gordon Green should prepare himself.



[Additional photos: "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back," Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1980; "Clash of the Titans," MGM, 1981; "Pltergeist," MGM/UA Entertainment Company, 1982; "Pretty in Pink," Paramount Pictures, 1986; "To Be or Not to Be," Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1983; "The Nightmare Before Christmas," Buena Vista Pictures, 1993; "V for Vendetta," Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005; "The Last Kiss," DreamWorks SKG, 2006; "What Would Jesus Buy?", Warrior Poets Releasing, 2007; "Superbad," Columbia Pictures, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 1st, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/opening-this-week-february-1st.php Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Shrooms," Magnolia Pictures, 2008]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Caramel"

Actress Nadine Labaki's first feature film sounds like an Lebanese version of "Beauty Shop" mixed with a contemporary "Chocolat." This Beirut-set romantic comedy tells the trials and tribulations of the personal lives of five women who meet regularly in a beauty salon run by the hardworking Layale (Labaki). Not only was Labaki's debut film well-received during its run on the festival circuit, it also served as Lebanon's official entry for the 2008 Academy Awards. Not bad for a first time director.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Eye"

Based on the 2002 Hong Kong film of the same name from horror maestros the Pang brothers, this remake is notable for being one of the first films left up in the air after the Tom Cruise/Sumner Redstone split at Paramount Pictures in late 2006. Lionsgate picked up the project and traded in original star Renée Zellweger and director Hideo Nakata for Jessica Alba and co-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud. The film tells the story of a young woman (Alba) who begins seeing supernatural beings (we call them ghosts) after an eye transplant. In the wake of a rough 2007 that had her starring in two of the year's worst movies ("Good Luck Chuck" and "Awake"… ewww), Alba starts the new year strong with her first lead role since 2003's "Honey," even if it is in a genre we stopped caring about four years ago. Indie darling alert: Parker Posey in credited supporting role!

Opens wide (official site).


"Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour"

Unable to afford those $1000+ tickets for your tween son/daughter? Might as well take them to your closest Cineplex, as Disney is offering a limited edition 3-D concert film of the 2007 Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus tour. Just to be sure, this is the one where those high school kids break out into song, right? No? Man, we're old.

Opens wide (official site).


"Over Her Dead Body"

The spirit of a deceased bride-to-be (Eva Longoria Parker) attempts to sabotage her former boyfriend's (Paul Rudd) current relationship with a psychic (Lake Bell) from beyond the grave, making her the bitchiest ghost we've seen in quite some time. The film comes courtesy of "John Tucker Must Die" screenwriter Jeff Lowell, who makes a directorial debut that looks to be lacking the romanticism of "Ghost" and the comedy of … well, anything else. We're calling it right now: "Over Her Dead Body" is 2008's "Because I Said So."

Opens wide (official site).


"Praying with Lior"

Ilana Trachtman's directorial debut finds the documentarian investigating the case of Lior Liebling, a young boy with Down syndrome who many around him believe to be close to God. The film explores Lior's relationship with his family, his community and his faith as the boy prepares for his bar mitzvah.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Shrooms"

Harvesting nearly every cliché in the horror film handbook, director Paddy Breathnach (2001's "Blow Dry") goes the low-budget horror route in this film about five American travelers on a quest for psychedelic mushrooms in the Irish backwoods who are stalked by a serial killer. The film premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Silence Before Bach"

Pere Portabella, the 78-year-old Spanish surrealist, delivers another experimental film blending drama and documentary, as well as past and present, with this take on the work of composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The film will be playing at the Film Forum in New York City through February 12th.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Strange Wilderness"

The latest from Adam Sander's Happy Madison Productions finds actor-turned-director Fred Wolf helming this nature comedy that Sandler probably would've starred in himself a decade ago. With the ratings of their wildlife TV show in the toilet, two animal enthusiasts (Steve Zahn and Allen Covert) head to the Andes mountains in pursuit of Bigfoot. Leading an ensemble cast of comedic supporting actors (Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Ernest Borgnine!?), Wolf's debut feature may be the perfect distraction for the cinemagoers sick of serious Oscar fare and heavy drama. Or it could be crap. Who can tell?

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA["Los Muertos," "Quiet City"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/los-muertos-quiet-city.php Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Los Muertos," Facets Multimedia Distribution, 2007]


Art film minimalism has self-modulated a sweet amount since the days of Antonioni's wanderings and Ozu's autumnal fixations — in America, it remained a Jarmuschian joke until Gus Van Sant took to camera-roaming without a story. But internationally, things were only lushly Tarkosvkyian after Tarkovsky died (minimalist-maximalist that he was), leaving a handful of ravishing, observant shot architects (Angelopoulos, Sokurov, Tarr, Hou) in his wake. No, it took Kiarostami, in the '90s, to reset the cinema-as-art experience default to near zero before modern minimalism took hold; after that, Tsai, Bartas, Weerasethakul, Reygadas, Jia and Ceylan established new standards for time and emptiness, and films came from Sri Lanka, Spain, sub-Saharan Africa, Morocco, Portugal (Pedro Costa, oy gevalt), Tajikistan and nearly everywhere else exploring how little a movie could tell us.


Of course, the irony and wonder of minimalism, however dire it might sound in any synopsis, is that usually the less plot an attentively made film has, the more that movie ends up showing us about landscape, the characters' sensual rhythms, the knowledge of time and seeing, and the nature of patiently experiencing life, not simply being told about it via dialogue or narrative contrivance. Lisandro Alonso's "Los Muertos" (2004), which took three full years to find an American release, is the effortlessly expressive example of the moment, a trip through the Argentine jungle that measures out to be about 10 percent action, dialogue and motivation, and 90 percent raw vision. Less is absolutely more — those stingy dollops of context have a seismic punch, and what we don't know makes the ellipses all the more troubling and resonant.


First, we get a single shot preamble: a woozy, fixed-focus perspective walking through the jungle, glimpsing first a few bloodied corpses in the brush and then a passing machete — evoking an abrupt but dreamy memory of Argentina's late-'70s-early-'80s "Dirty War" and oppression by the military juntas. Indeed, 15 years pass (or so it is obliquely suggested) in a cut, and suddenly a laconic middle-aged man named Vargas (Argentino Vargas, a non-professional and, perhaps, ex-con) whiles away his last hours in a relaxed, low-rent jungle penitentiary. Soon, he is free to nearly wordlessly venture back into the jungle to return to his now-adult daughter. We get hints of what his crime had been, but not much more than that — what is happening right now in the new minimalism is the priority, not backstory or what comes next. "Los Muertos" transforms this threadbare outline into a magical mystery tour, in which Vargas feeds himself on honeycombs and the occasional stray goat (watch out, it's a one-take takedown, slaughter and skinning), and responds undramatically to nature. Alonso's camera responds as well, with patience and exaltation — we witness the forest, the river, the sky, the swamps, the trees buffeted by wind, all as experiences eloquent and moving on their own, which, of course, they are. But what's unsaid about this man and his journey — indeed, the "deaths" referred to in the title — is backlit by the chaotic richness of nature, and the tingly upshot is haunting in ways that conventional dramatic setups and payoffs cannot approach.


Recently, American indie minimalism, because it's inherently narcissistic, has morphed into something called mumblecore (a criminally idiotic coinage that one hopes is already being forgotten), deftly represented by Aaron Katz's "Quiet City" (2007). Katz's aesthetic is, on one hand, Ozu by way of high-def (lots of lovely haiku cutaways to New York City skylines and textures), and on the other, decelerated realism (twentysomethings chatting aimlessly and guardedly). It's easy to mock in the overview, but Katz has an eye for the in-between moments, and a satisfyingly subtle agenda for his films' overall arcs. "Quiet City" is so delicate and spare it could crumble in a stiff breeze: Jamie (Erin Fisher) is an out-of-town girl visiting a scatterbrained friend in Manhattan, and finds herself stranded on a subway platform. She asks for directions from a passerby named Charlie (Cris Lankenau), who eventually, and rather gallantly, decides to stick with her until she can find her way in off the street. They end up at his apartment, chastely, and spend what amounts to a long weekend together, before and after finding Jamie's deadbeat buddy. Nothing cataclysmic happens between them, and their talk is almost entirely banal and insignificant, but of course Katz is after what's not being expressed between them, until we finally see a single, simple expressive gesture that was, in its gentle way, worth all the waiting.


Katz has been praised for his naturalism, but "Quiet City" has its fair share of tenderly contrived dialogue; at various points, it's difficult to buy that these two kind-hearted kids would have so little, or at other times so much, to say to each other. (Fisher and Lankenau share screenplay credit for the heavily improvised film.) It is, in any case, a difficult balance to strike if you're working this close to mundane realities. Katz gets props just for keeping his focus and staving off the impulse toward broad narrative gestures, and casting his film with such surprisingly ordinary yet compulsively watchable actors. That said, "Quiet City" is filthy with intimate images of the kind that epitomize cinema's infectious glow, whether it be of Fisher's unsure smile or the Brooklyn Bridge. The DVD set, out from new video startup Benten Films, also features Katz's first feature, "Dance Party, USA" (2006), which makes up for its weightier degree of awkwardness with sharp-edged sexual frisson.


"Los Muertos" (Facets Video) and "Quiet City & Dance Party, USA" (Benten Films) will be available on DVD on January 29th.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: January 25th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/opening-this-week-january-25th.php Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News



[Photo: "Alice's House," FiGa Films, 2008]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you’ll spend this week.


"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"

Writer/director Cristian Mungiu burst onto the international film scene with this abortion drama set in Communist-era Romania that was the surprise Palme d'Or winner at last year's Cannes Film Festival. The film was recently nominated for the Best Foreign Language Golden Globe yet was suspiciously left off (along with "Persepolis") the Oscar shortlist — a great injustice to two of the best foreign films of last year.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Air I Breathe"

Though newbie director Jieho Lee recruited a somewhat awesome cast (Julie Delpy AND Forrest Whitaker!?) for his debut feature, the film's Chinese proverb-as-metaphor premise gets a little too melodramatic for us. The film, which premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, breaks life down into the four emotional cornerstones of life based on a traditional Chinese adage, with each vignette built around a character who embodies one of these emotions.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Alice's House"

Brazilian actress Carla Ribas stars as a married mother of three, living in a working class Sao Paolo neighborhood, who discovers a series of familial betrayals after partaking in a betrayal of her own. The film comes courtesy of documentary filmmaker Chico Teixeira and won the International Film Plaque at the 2007 Chicago International Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"How She Move"

While we realize that we've seen this same movie over and over again the past few years (see: "Stomp the Yard, " "Step Up, " "Save the Last Dance"), there's something charming about this low-budget Canadian film about a young student who must move back to her old neighborhood from private school and rediscovers her love for step dancing. Newcomer Rufina Wesley shines as the young woman who fights to join an all-male dance troupe, drawing comparisons to Michelle Rodriguez way back when "Girlfight" came out.

Opens wide (official site).


"Lost in Beijing"

Director Yu Li's latest drama focuses on class differences and the aftermath of a rape involving a young woman, her boss, her husband, and her husband's wife in contemporary Beijing. The film premiered early last year at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Meet the Spartans"

...ugh. Seriously, this might as well just be titled "2007: The Movie. " Spoofing pretty much every pop cultural event from the past year, from Britney Spears' latest meltdowns to the hit summer movies you already forgot about, co-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (whose movies, by the way, boast an impressive 2.5 rating average on IMDB) drop their latest comedic abomination spoofing "300" with some Paris Hilton thrown in for good measure. Yeah, we really can't wait until the next "Genre Movie."

Opens wide (official site).


"Rambo"

Oh Sly, we missed you so. After scoring critical and some moderate commercial success with 2006's "Rocky Balboa, " Stallone returns to the cinema refreshed and renewed at the ripe age of 60. "Rambo" finds our much beleaguered Vietnam vet antihero leading a group of mercenaries in Thailand to help rescue a group of aid workers that have gone missing. An original cut of the trailer hit the interwebz last year promising the kind of massive explosions and ultra-violence we normally expect from the "Rambo" franchise.

Opens wide (official site).


"Trailer Park Boys: The Movie"

Criminal dimwits Ricky, Julian and Bubbles plot to steal massive amounts of pocket change in this comedy based on the Canadian cult favorite TV series "Trailer Park Boys."

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad)"

From "Bus 174" director José Padilha, "Tropa de Elite" is the story of two childhood friends who join the military police in Rio de Janeiro, only to discover widespread corruption and inefficient bureaucracy within the department until a retiring captain seeks the duo out to clean things up. Shortly after its release in Brazil in October 2007, it became one of the country's most popular films ever.

Opens in limited release (IMDB Page).


"Untraceable"

We're not sure what to make of director Gregory Hoblit's latest thriller, which finds Diane Lane as a detective fighting the war against cyber crimes (much like "Dateline"'s Chris Hanson, we suppose). Lane investigates a new internet predator who broadcasts a series of grisly murders on his website, with the fate of each of his tormentors left in the hands of the public. Comparisons to both "The Net" and "feardotcom" don't really inspire to much confidence either, but Hoblit surprised us with last year's "Fracture" and with Lane attached, we're willing to give this one a chance, though we're not expecting much.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Air I Breathe"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/the-air-i-breathe.php Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The Air I Breathe," ThinkFilm, 2008]


Why do so many "independent" movies look and sound exactly alike? Isn't that kind of a contradiction with the whole independent thing? Nothing in "The Air I Breathe" feels particularly indie; most everything in it is familiar. For any audience member who spends a significant portion of their free time in the arthouse, "Deja Vu" would make a fine alternate title.


The plot is one of those contraptions where four seemingly unrelated stories are all inherently intertwined. Such films try to imbue the minutia of the everyday with a kind of spiritual importance — everything means something, they insist, even if we don't realize it at first. And perhaps it does. But at this point, it is also one of the most tiresome of indie movie clichés. Eventually, there will so many of these movies that some young director will come full circle and rebel against the indie establishment by creating a work about how one person's horrible existence has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the horrible existence of the person they meet at a bus stop.


But that day has not come yet. Instead, we still live in a world where the fates of Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Kevin Bacon all rest on one another, though they are completely unaware of that fact. Whitaker is a man in desperate need of cash; Fraser is a debt collector for a gangster (Andy Garcia) to whom Whitaker owes money, and he can also see the future. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a less ironic version of Krysta Now from "Southland Tales" and falls for Fraser, but finds herself also in debt to Garcia. And Bacon needs to save his wife's life by acquiring blood of a very rare type (bonus points to you, dear reader, if you can guess which other character has said very rare blood type).


Each section has its own title: they are, in order, "Happiness," "Pleasure," "Sorrow" and "Love." Characters appear briefly in one story and then get fleshed out in others. To my shock, the only portion that works at all was Fraser's; he gives an admirable performance amongst truly adverse circumstances. Grappling with his leaden dialogue ("Sometimes things you can't change end up changing you") and a character that is, yes, both a mob heavy and a clairvoyant, Fraser manages to deliver a certain amount of gravitas and makes you believe, despite all other visual and verbal evidence to the contrary, that he's appearing in a genuinely hard-boiled crime story. In a perfect world, it'd be something that would earn "The Mummy" star some new, more interesting work and pull him from the depths of the kiddie film ghetto that dominates his résumé. Rarely have I been more impressed by an actor and less impressed by a film as a whole.


Beyond the hackneyed premise, "The Air I Breathe" also contains numerous uses of a trick so tired that its mere presence can ruin an entire movie. It's the gag, so prevalent in recent years, where a character blithely walks in the street when, out of nowhere, they are run over by a speeding car. You can always tell it's going to happen because the person is standing in the middle of the street, looking extremely happy when all of the sound drops out of the soundtrack; the better to give the impact extra shock value. It's supposed to give viewers a jolt, but the ploy is so played out that only the most naïve audience members (and of course, these doofy, careless pedestrians) don't see it coming. Please, I beg you moviemakers. No more.


"The Air I Breathe" is occasionally amusing; particularly when Kevin Bacon's wife refuses to wear her protective suit while working with deadly snakes. "I'll be fine!" she insists, whereupon she is promptly bitten. And we're supposed to care about this future Darwin Award winner? Connecting four mediocre stories together does not necessarily make them more interesting. Longer, sure. But interesting? Not so much.

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<![CDATA["Saved from the Flames," "The Kingdom — Series Two"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/saved-from-the-flames-the-king.php Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Chuck Jones' "Hell-Bent For Election," from "Saved from the Flames," Flicker Alley, 2008]


There are movie lovers, and then there are cinephiles — the latter tribe can be discerned from the population by an ardor for cinema that runs beyond the requirements of mere entertainment. The average moviehead needs to be enthralled in a conventional, narrative way while cinephiles find the celluloid moving image itself, and its historical legacy, epiphany enough. If you know the names Mary Ellen Bute or Slavko Vorkapich, then you're one of the anointed obsessives, and something such as the new three-disc set from Flicker Alley, "Saved from the Flames," could be your idea of a gold mine. A scattershot collection of "orphans" — scatterings of film that, by definition, profit nobody, and so are therefore only salvaged and restored by cinephilic charities and archives — the set is distinguished from the magnificent "Treasures" series of DVDs put out by the National Film Preservation Foundation in that most of the films have not been "restored" via a laboratory, but are simply digitally spiffed-up prints of films residing in two collections: U.S. distributor Blackhawk Films (which used to be a public domain VHS factory) and France's Lobster Films.


In the viewing, it hardly matters. Here in a case is the melancholy luster of cinema — the entering into a past at once captured as if in amber, and simultaneously forever lost to time. The substantial helping of French silents offers one surprise after another — the shocking chutzpah of Segundo de Chomón's "An Excursion to the Moon" (1908), which steals every one of its images, sets and compositions from the Méliès film made six years earlier; the Bizarro World alternate versions of key Lumière films, including a reworking of "Card Party" that features working class chums sipping wine instead of stuffed shirts swilling beer; footage of serpentine dancer Mme. Ondine performing inside a cage full of angry lions from 1900; sound films from 1900 and 1907, a filmed 1939 performance by Django Reinhardt, and so on.


The American-made films also have plenty of historical juice — we get the Fox Movietone newsreel of Charles Lindbergh's 1927 take-off; Ub Iwerks' immortal "Balloonland" (1935); the infamous MGM-produced fake newsreel story "California Election News #2," anonymously aimed at scotching Upton Sinclair's 1934 bid for the governorship; a sampling of WWII-propaganda "soundies"; D.W. Griffith's outlandish 1912 anti-cocaine melodrama "For His Son"; and a richly colored copy of Chuck Jones' fiery, luridly surreal FDR campaign cartoon "Hell-Bent for Election," which hit theaters in 1944 and makes contemporary campaigning seem mild-mannered, at least in terms of iconography.


But two preeminent eye-poppers are generally European. In 1938, stop-motion animator George Pal went to Holland to make a Philips Radio "broadcast" party film, which was intended to advertise the hardware, but instead packed more Spanish-flavored, rainbow-colored, cranked-puppet song & dance fun into five minutes than Disney did in a decade. Still, the climactic set piece of the program is a montage of censored silent film clips, kisses and hugs and amorous glances separated from their films à la "Cinema Paradiso" by an unknown projectionist in Brussels, the remnants of an old school habit of squeamish prudery that, just as in Tornatore's film, is transformed by time into a bewitching suite of movie love.


For story, coming at you like a stampede of wildebeest, Lars von Trier's "The Kingdom — Series Two" (1997) continues his 1994 saga with this nearly five-hour sequel (total of "Kingdom"-ness: almost 10 hours, for those sick days when already feeling sick is not quite enough), in which the titular Copenhagen hospital, still haunted by ghosts and omened by Downs syndrome dishwashers, is beset by (or still beset by) Satanic cults, suicide-sport interns, voodoo, homicidal medical experiments, badger obsessions, drugs, and, most nuttily, a giant mutant baby (the son of Udo Kier from the first "Kingdom") played by… Udo Kier. One could only wish that American television shows would, or could, replicate Von Trier's agenda here — to just keep ratcheting up the devilish invention and horrifically consequential story ideas — and do so with von Trier's exhaustive measure of satirical intelligence. The squirrelly, dingy video look of the show may not seem as sui generis as it did in the '90s, but here's to being grateful for such a ridiculously generous helping of malevolent narrative nonsense, and to hoping someday for a "Kingdom — Series Three," in which the cliffhangers can finally fall and the world can finally end.


"Saved from the Flames" (Flicker Alley) and "The Kingdom — Series Two" (Koch Lorber Films) will be available on DVD on January 22nd.

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<![CDATA[Sundance Midpoint]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/ifc-news-podcast-61-sundance-m.php Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcasts, we report from midway through the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, discussing what's been good, what's been bad and what people are talking about. Special guest Adam Kempenaar of the Filmspotting podcasts joins us.

Download: MP3, 23:47 minutes, 21.8 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28224 2008-01-21 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_61_sundance_m publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028224 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Sundance Midpoint (photo)]]> Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 10028224 2008-01-21 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_61_sundance_m_photo inherit 28224 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Woody Allen on "Cassandra's Dream"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/woody-allen-on-cassandras-drea.php Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

By Aaron Hillis

The word "nebbish" has been permanently forged into Woody Allen's iconic identity (or at least, his weak-willed onscreen persona), but it's probably a flippant misnomer for an auteur who, after working tirelessly now into his septuagenarian years, appears to be in no danger of abandoning his movie-a-year prolificacy. Originally premiering at festivals like Avilés, Venice and Toronto in 2007, the Woodster's latest is "Cassandra's Dream," a familial cautionary tale and his third consecutive film set in London. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell star as two desperate brothers who may have found a solution to all their financial woes, that is, if both the law and their consciences will allow them to get away with murder. Before speaking with New York's hometown hero by phone, I prepared myself for either cranky or jokey responses, but instead found Allen to be both surprisingly upbeat yet wholly serious.

"Cassandra's Dream" focuses on nearly the same questioning of morality and fate that you explored in your last drama, "Match Point," and even 1989's "Crimes and Misdemeanors." What keeps bringing you back to these themes?

Well, it turns out, my first attempt is to make a movie that will be entertaining to people. Over the years, I've made many comedies, but every now and then, I'll get an idea like "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Match Point" or "Cassandra's Dream" — something that's more tense and suspenseful. Out of crime ideas, invariably, one is led to moral decisions. And those give the films more substance than just murder mysteries and whodunits. As you explore those issues, the films become richer and more detailed, and if they remain exciting, the moral dilemmas are fleshed out and give it another dimension that makes it interesting.

Your next feature, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," is set in Spain, but are the rumors true that you're done with Europe and plan to return to New York?

Yes, I'm going to do a film in New York in about two months, [but] I'm not done with overseas. I did several pictures in London, and I did ["Vicky Cristina Barcelona"] last summer with Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson, but I had a good New York idea and I'm going to do it. After that, it's anybody's guess. I could do 10 movies in New York, or go right to Paris and do one, because foreign investors come forward and keep asking me if I'll make a movie in Rome, or Paris, and they'll back them. These are often offers that I can't refuse because they finance the films with no questions asked.

What if you were offered funding from someplace out of your comfort zone, like a distant island?

I don't think I could go away and live for the four or five months it takes in some place that's non-metropolitan. I don't mind making a film in Barcelona, London, Paris or Madrid, but I think I'd have a tough time in Bora Bora.

In a recent interview, you said you've been framing scenes mainly in "master shots" out of laziness. How lazy could you possibly be if you're still making a picture a year?

It's laziness in the sense that I don't have the incentive, and this left me many, many years ago. You know, to shoot a scene… her close-up, his close-up, her over-shoulder, his over-shoulder, and another angle; I don't have the patience to do that. I like to shoot it and be done with it. Another filmmaker making a perfectly wonderful film can shoot a page and it'll take him all day or two days to shoot with all these angles and changes. I'll do five pages in a day because I'm shooting a master, and I can shoot quicker, get through it faster, and it holds my interest more. As far as making a film a year being a sign of not being lazy, it's not as much work as you'd think. It really isn't. You know, I make small films in a controlled situation, and they're low budget. They don't take more than a certain amount of months to do, and I have plenty of time to make one a year without really rushing myself.

Then, not to be morbid, but do you think you'll ever slow down or retire, or will you continue to film a feature a year right up until the very end?

I think I'll work like this until either something happens to me and I can't, or someone says, "We won't back your films." If tomorrow, I couldn't raise money for movies, I would certainly stop making them and maybe write a book or something. Or, if I felt exhausted, but I feel the same way as I did 50 years ago. I don't feel any diminution at this point. That could set in all at once. You know, I'm 72. I could suddenly, at 73 or 78, say "God, I don't want to do this anymore." But right now, I feel just as energetic doing it as when I first started.

My hat's off to you, sir. Has it become more difficult these days to get your projects financed?

It had gotten harder a while ago. I found it difficult when the film business changed and these mega-hit blockbusters became the thing to go for. They don't care about investing $15 million so they can make five or six million dollars. Modest profits are of no interest to them. They're interested in investing $70 million and making $200 million on a film. It's a big-stakes game. In a situation like mine, I've always been puzzled. It's almost a no-lose situation for them because my film is going to be made for, say, $15 million, so it's [recouped] between foreign sales, domestic sales and auxiliary markets. You almost can't lose money, and if you did, if the film was catastrophic, you might only lose a million or two. But their reasoning is: it's a high risk business, they want a big reward, and in their way of thinking, they found a better business.

I was thinking about your heartfelt eulogy to Ingmar Bergman in the New York Times last year. As someone who has seen firsthand how much the industry has changed over the decades, how do you feel about film culture today? Does anything or anybody give you hope for its future?

Oh, sure. I think the filmmaker who made "There Will Be Blood" has made some wonderful stuff. I enjoyed "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights." I've certainly liked some films by Alexander Payne. The problem with the business is not that there aren't talented people. It's just that it's so hard for them to get stuff done. It's such a fight all the time. There are a lot of young, talented filmmakers out there who could be doing wonderful work, but it takes forever for them to get a film done, if they ever get it done. The companies are so reluctant to take chances, put up money, and not be hands-on. It's such a sweat.

Do you ever read reviews of your films, or rather, do critics mean anything to you today?

They don't, but not out of any contempt. They don't because they never have. I've never had any interest in what they had to say because there's nothing I can do about it. By the time critics get a hold of your film, it's finished, it's out, and there's nothing you can do. You can't change your style. There's no help in reading them. They either tell you you're brilliant and a genius, and you know that's not true, or they think you've screwed up somehow. Maybe you have, maybe you haven't, maybe it's their personal taste, maybe not everybody will feel that way, or maybe everybody will. The best thing to do is make your films, keep your eyes closed, put your nose to the grindstone and just work. Over the years, that which you do which is good will last and people enjoy it, and stuff that's junk drifts away.

Of course, you might just be your own worst critic. I've heard you don't even like "Manhattan."

I was disappointed in it when I finished, and I was surprised… You know, there's no correlation between what I like and what gets accepted of mine. Sometimes I'll finish a film, think it's terrific, and then people don't like it. Or I'll finish the film and think, "I really made a fool of myself here," and it gets embraced tremendously. That's happened frequently over the years, where I'm at a loss as to why people embrace or reject something. I haven't seen ["Manhattan"] in 30 years, but I remember having a very negative feeling: "My God, if this is the best I can do, at this point I should stop making films."

"Cassandra's Dream" is now in theaters.


[Photos: Left, Woody Allen on set; below, Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor in "Cassandra's Dream," Weinstein Company, 2008]


Related: Check out Chazz Palminteri discussing Woody Allen's directorial technique at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival on AMC's Shootout blog.

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<![CDATA["Teeth"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/teeth.php Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Jess Weixler in "Teeth," Roadside Attractions, 2008]


"Vagina dentata" is Latin for "toothed vagina" and it's a longstanding myth borne of the eternal fear of men everywhere about what lurks within the holiest of holies. This man had never heard of it before seeing the new film "Teeth," which deposits the idea into a horror comedy about a teenage girl who discovers that her newfound sexuality has a, ahem, biting sense of humor. Maybe I'm too psychosexually well-adjusted. Maybe I'm just not that well versed in classical myths.


So I wasn't too familiar, but all the guys in "Teeth" are. These men — rapists, molesters, abusers, perverts or amoral scumbags all — live in a perpetual state of feminine fear. At one point, a man learns not to screw with Dawn (Jess Weixler) the hard way and he shrieks "IT'S TRUE! VAGINA DENTATA!" Quite an astute observation for a man who just had the tips of his fingers forcibly circumcised, no?


As a child, Dawn accidentally does the same to her stepbrother Brad (John Hensley), and when we rejoin them as teenagers, the incident has wreaked havoc on each other's subconscious. As Dawn has become a major player in a local church group devoted to abstinence, when it's time for Brad to have sex, he refuses any option but anal. Dawn — whose unique anatomy is probably the result of a genetic mutation sparked by the pollution from the ominous nuclear power plant that looms over her family's house — falls for Tobey (Hale Appleman), another boy in her chastity circle, and finds herself questioning her beliefs about premarital sex for the first time. Tobey initially appears wholesome, but he turns out to be a predator instead, and an encounter between the two at an idyllic swimming hole turns from consensual making out to nonconsensual rape. That's when the metaphorical claws come out.


Most of the movie continues on like that. All the men in Dawn's life, except her stepfather, who's actually kind, and her obvious jerk of a stepbrother, seem innocent until she lets them get close and they subsequently turn into slobbering, ravenous sex beasts. There is no complexity to any of these antagonists, nor to the choices Dawn has to make. The jokes aren't particularly funny and the scares aren't particularly scary. Maybe there's no other way to make a movie about a woman with a toothed vagina, though I'd like to think there is.


"Teeth" is directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of famed pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and interestingly, the film's best gag is a piece of clever graphic design. The local school board has forbidden Dawn's school from teaching female anatomy and covered up the "offending" parts of her textbook with a larger gold sticker with a scalloped edge (the corresponding male passages have been deemed acceptable and left visible). When Dawn and her classmates attempt to peel off the sticker it rips and tears the page to the point of illegibility. It's an appropriate emblem of women's second-class status in society, but the rest of the movie lacks that scene's ingenuity. "Teeth" has a good premise, a talented cast of young actors, a lot of obvious jokes and tiresomely "shocking" gore shots. It feels like a missed opportunity. I'd like to call a mulligan on the whole movie. Can we just throw the whole thing out and start again from the beginning?

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<![CDATA["Cassandra's Dream"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/cassandras-dream.php Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Colin Farrell in "Cassandra's Dream," Weinstein Company, 2007]


Each new Woody Allen movie should be looked at as if it were a cinematic Venn diagram. His latest film always lies at the intersection of two or three of his older ones. In the case of "Cassandra's Dream," it's a mix of "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and the first picture from Allen's English excursion, "Match Point." From the former, Allen reexamines the morality of murder, as well as the nature of God and punishment; from the latter, Allen returns (just two years later) to the debate over luck versus fate and the violent pursuit of upward mobility. In standup comedy terms, he's not really writing new material, he's just reshuffling how he delivers his old stuff, and his delivery, in this case, is agreeable, if fairly predictable.


The title derives from the name of a boat, owned by two lower class English brothers Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell), which was itself coined from a 60-to-1 longshot that came in for Terry at the horse track. Ian's a gambler too — though he works at their father's restaurant, he's constantly meeting with investors about high-risk, high-reward ventures. As the film begins, Terry's on a wild streak of luck, but it ends along with the first act and suddenly, he's deep in debt and goes to Ian for help. But Ian needs money too — to finance a move out to California with his new actress girlfriend Angela (Hayley Atwell) — so both look to their rich Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson) to bail them out of trouble.


The true nature of Uncle Howard and the details of his offer are too crucial to the plot to spoil here; suffice it to say, they don't involve a low interest loan. What Terry and Ian actually do is probably less important, anyway, than what they are willing to do and why they're willing to do it. Money is the quick, obvious answer, but Allen's themes go deeper than that. In "Cassandra's Dream," characters repeatedly refer to having a life here, but wanting to do something in a non-specific there. Terry and Ian's day-to-day are full of obligation to marker holders or loved ones. "Cassandra's Dream" represents a sort of symbolic release from that world, but Uncle Howard's proposal, distasteful as it might be, gives them the chance for real freedom.


It's possible to read that sort of desire into Allen's own move to England in 2005 after almost 30 years of shooting exclusively in New York City. Maybe he was truly stuck in Manhattan — certainly, the transatlantic change has done his reputation and commercial reputation well. Still, I'm not entirely sure why he's stayed this long. Is it callous to assume that he's still working in Europe only because that's where people still go see his movies in large numbers? Who knows? Regardless, McGregor and Farrell's working class accents sound totally flimsy (though that could just as easily be a product of Allen's flimsy working class dialogue). Given that, and Allen's occasionally contentious relationship with the critical community, it's difficult not to see something in one character's line about how looking closely at something will always "reveal all its nasty imperfections."


The imperfections are there whether Allen wants us to see them or not. So are the obvious parallels to Allen's earlier work. Whether that's a good or bad thing will depend upon your viewpoint — young viewers who are just learning about Allen and haven't seen his 1980s work might find "Cassandra's Dream" refreshing; devoid of a larger comparative context, it works pretty well. Auteurists looking for overarching themes will find plenty to work with here as well; to them, the obvious repetitions of theme and subject matter will be a plus rather than a minus.


But a less macro-minded Woody Allen fan — one wise enough to accept the director whether he's working blue or blue blood — might want a little more originality, particularly because prior knowledge of the director's filmography spell out some of the story's twists well before they're revealed onscreen, which takes some of the wind out of "Cassandra's Dream"'s sails. Some level of repetition is probably inevitable for any director working as long as Allen, but some level of freshness is desirable regardless of a filmmaker's decades of experience. You could make a Venn diagram out of this as well — authorial voice in one circle, innovation in another, and in the middle, the ideal movie.

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<![CDATA[Everybody Loves Jason: Why Even Contrarians Like The Bourne Trilogy]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/everybody-loves-jason-why-even.php Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: "The Bourne Ultimatum," Universal Pictures, 2007]


Matt Damon's furrowed brow is saving Hollywood. Gracing each of the three insanely popular "Bourne" films, Damon's agitated wrinkles have implacably faced down an army of psychotic CIA stooges without so much as a sweat, and brought in nearly a billion dollars in box office globally. But the most surprising part of the trilogy's world domination is its critical reception. "The Bourne Identity," the first in the franchise, received grudging respect, but the recent "Ultimatum" is being said to "advance[s] the art of action filmmaking and will change it forever" — a quote not from an overheated fanboy after a press screening, but rather from Anne Thompson, the reliably insightful columnist for Variety.


And it's not only Thompson who's contracted "Bourne" fever. It's also the hardcore cinephiles who vote on the Village Voice year-end film poll. "Ultimatum" placed 25th on the list, beating out critical darlings like "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and "Sweeney Todd." No other Hollywood blockbuster was even close — "The Bourne Ultimatum" probably outgrossed the rest of the list single-handedly. It's also achieved a mainstream cult — enough so that the IFC Center is showing the complete trilogy during its January Midnight series. How has "Bourne" become the only gargantuan Hollywood franchise that's impressed both mainstream and alternative presses (along with contrarian, smug bastards like myself)?


Most of the recent chatter about the series has focused on director Paul Greengrass's controversial rapid fire editing techniques, but I think much of the film's success has to do with Doug Liman's original conception of the series (along with that aforementioned brow of Damon's). Liman, director of the first "Bourne" and executive producer of all three, had just come off the successes of helming "Swingers" and "Go" and was given free reign on his next project. He chose "Bourne," wanting to make a different kind of action film, one with a relatively modest budget of $60 million and a different conception of screen combat. In talking to the BBC about the martial arts used in the film, Liman said, "It is ridiculously efficient. You don't break a sweat or expend any energy, you use your opponents energy against him. And we thought — that's Jason Bourne, that's how he'll do everything in this movie. He'll figure out the simplest, least energetic, most efficient way to get something done."


All three "Bournes" have this emphasis on process, on Damon solving a series of puzzles as quickly and effortlessly as possible. It drops heroism in favor of a robotic rationality and a feel for the traumas of real physical violence. Jason Bourne, an amnesiac, cannot express himself through speech, so he does so through action — you can almost read his mind's calculations through every blunt force gesture. Such attention to physical detail was a breath of fresh air in the action genre, which had veered closer to the self-parodic cartoonishness of the "Mission: Impossible" films. And since most critics came of cinematic age in the '70s, the throwback grittiness of the series gave them ample space for the William Friedkin comparisons they love so well. Toss in some vague political commentary about civil liberties, which became groaningly obvious in "Ultimatum," and there was more than enough to fill up a generous word count.


When Greengrass took over the series with the second entry, "The Bourne Supremacy," he retained the general concept of action as puzzle solving, but elided much more visual information by cutting shots to shreds. While Liman's "Identity" moved fast, it's nothing in comparison to the latter two. David Bordwell, the prominent Wisconsin film professor, has measured the seconds per shot of the trilogy, and "Identity"'s seems downright slow at three, while "Ultimatum" runs at a faster clip of two seconds per shot. But as Bordwell argues on his blog, it's not the relative quickness of the shots that has bothered people — it's the shots' "spasmodic" quality. Greengrass' editing style cut gestures and camera movements short, keeping viewers constantly on edge, always wondering what lies behind the next cut — but what it sacrifices is a coherent articulation of the geography of Bourne's world. This isn't to deny the thrills to be had at "The Bourne Ultimatum" (the parking garage smashup is a technical marvel), but it pushes this editing strategy to an extreme that drains the film of the power of its original conception. Bourne was a character who expressed himself through the economy of his actions. Now, what we see are abstracted shards of movement that are more interested in forward motion than character.


If, as Anne Thompson says, that this is the future of action films, it'll be an exhausting ride with diminishing returns. But what marks the "Bourne" franchise out is its ability to garner this kind of controversy — one actually about a film's style, a conversation that is so rare in modern film criticism but so necessary. While I think Liman's "The Bourne Identity" was the more rewarding, there's no denying that all three are films worth grappling with — and their influence will be felt for years to come, especially in the next cycle of "Bourne"-ian Bond flicks.

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8698 2008-01-14 00:00:00 closed closed everybody_loves_jason_why_even publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008698
<![CDATA[The "Sundance Film"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/ifc-news-podcast-60-the-sundan.php Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 SXSW has laid claim to the mumblecore movement, Cannes is home to the old school auteurist art film, and Sundance has... the Sundance film. The 2008 Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week, and this week on the IFC News podcast, we attempt to define what, exactly, makes a "Sundance film," pick out some of the genre's favorite themes and elements, and test how notable Sundance films of the past few years stack up.

Download: MP3, 29:00 minutes, 26.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28225 2008-01-14 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_60_the_sundan publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028225 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The "Sundance Film" (photo)]]> Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 10028225 2008-01-14 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_60_the_sundan_photo inherit 28225 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Mitchell Lichtenstein on "Teeth"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/mitchell-lichtenstein-on-teeth.php Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, John Hensley and Jess Weixler in "Teeth"; below, Mitchell Lichtenstein on set, Roadside Attractions, 2008]


Indie film journalists can be just as lazy as mainstream consumer reporters, as evidenced by some of the reductive shorthand overheard at festivals in recent years to describe more provocative fare: "Have you seen the Ellen Page torture movie yet?" "How awful was that Dakota Fanning rape movie?" "That Romanian abortion movie just won Cannes." If anyone's particularly tired of this, it has to be Mitchell Lichtenstein — a Spirit Award-nominated actor who's worked with Robert Altman, Louis Malle and Ang Lee (and who is the son of Pop Art icon Roy!) — whose disturbing directorial debut "Teeth" has been simply known as "the vagina dentata movie" since its Sundance '07 premiere. Up-and-comer Jess Weixler stars as prudish high school student Dawn, whose advocacy in a local abstinence group makes psychological sense as she comes to fully realize that, unlike herself, not all girls are born with vicious teeth under their chastity belts. It's a comic-horror coming-of-age riff on a mythic story that's been passed down from several ancient cultures, but it's most decidedly not for the squeamish; while pretty much every male character deserves their onscreen punishment for their misogynistic misdeeds, what winds up in the mouth of a snarling dog alone will turn faces as white as a new set of veneers. I spoke with Lichtenstein about the film and his intentions in addressing real world issues, as some of the best genre films do.


During the writing process, did you set any goals for yourself in how best to craft a story around the idea of vaginal chompers?


I wanted to both use and expose this myth. I knew about it from years ago, but when I began to research it, I saw how, in many ancient cultures, it was pretty pervasive. Then I thought the best horror movies deal with a deep-seated primal fear, and this is pretty primal. [laughs] I also knew that in the end, I didn't want to perpetuate the gynophobia, so I'd turn it on its [ear]. The myth always has the hero conquering the woman, and destroying the teeth. I knew the woman would always be the hero and should never be conquered. I see her as a superhero with this power in the same way that Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound.


To me, the film seems thematically bifurcated by Dawn's sexual awakening, when she realizes she can control her abnormality as a weapon against predators. Up until that point, I had been expecting a social satire on sexual politics, but everything suddenly shifts into a straight revenge fantasy. Were you concerned that this might be too tonally jarring for audiences or distributors?


Well, that's the thing. I luckily wasn't obligated to channel it into one particular genre. I think most movies are obligated at some point or another to do that, and I was really just trying to tell the story in the way that made the most sense. There is a time when it clicks into this other genre, because that's what her character arc really calls for there. I knew that the concept alone might be a hard sell, but beyond that, taking from different genres would be another hurdle. If it works, then hopefully audiences will appreciate that it doesn't follow exactly the same course as other movies.


Expectations should be subverted, I agree. But I'm thinking about the film's early statements on modern puritanical behavior, such as the state-enforced sticker covering up a diagram of female genitalia in Dawn's sex ed textbook. These fall away when she comes to terms with her "gift," after which she abandons her sexual ideals entirely. She's suddenly the empowered vigilante in Abel Ferrara's "Ms. 45," but with a killer libido instead of a gun. Isn't that almost a bait and switch?


I don't know. None of that came up for me, so it wasn't really an issue. I see the sticker — which did happen in at least one school, where the female anatomy was covered but not the male — in a way, that attitude created the vagina dentata, that attitude of whether it's maintaining mystery about women or subjugation. That's the same kind of fear that would come up with such a myth. So I think they are very connected that then results in what you see in the end. I just never really looked at the script from the outside and said "There should be more of this or that." I think it's clear that my intentions are not misogynistic.


So any real-life correlations were more for passing reference than anything you wanted to proactively address about sexual politics or the culture wars?


Well, only to reference them to the degree that they are addressed. It's not a treatise or anything. I think since you notice that [the textbook censorship] has happened, a lot of people wonder, "Well, is that a real thing?" Then you find out, yeah, at least for a time it was a real thing, and what does that mean? It's just something in passing, but there is a connection between that and this ridiculous invention that presumably men invented about women's anatomy.


In all the talk of abstinence in the film, it felt to me that you were tiptoeing around religion. Was this intentional?


Abstinence is usually God or Jesus-related, but I didn't want to [come off] like I was Christian-bashing. I thought it was enough without, and you don't really need God in there to discuss this whole abstinence thing — I didn't want to add that to the pile; it's not my current concern. I have nothing against people choosing abstinence, and my only gripe with the abstinence groups is that often information is withheld. It leads to limiting sex education and pretending condoms don't work. I think kids need to be completely informed about everything, make their decision about it, and have support groups if that's what they're doing, [as long as no one] twists scientific evidence. I think all the studies done in those groups show that they don't delay sexual activity except maybe for a few months, and then when kids do ultimately fall off the wagon, they're less informed, less likely to use birth control, and more likely to get pregnant. It doesn't actually appear to work.


Has the film had different reactions from men and women?


There are often guys who storm out at some point in the movie, which I usually find satisfying. We were at a film festival recently, and I came back for the last 15 minutes. After the dog incident, these two guys stood up and walked out, saying, "Thanks for that." It was really funny that they would last that long, and then five minutes before the end, that was the last straw and they couldn't take it anymore. Men react differently to certain parts of the movie more viscerally than women do, and I've heard about men who were disturbed about just how into the movie their girlfriends were. [laughs]


"Teeth" opens in limited release January 18th.

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8696 2008-01-14 00:00:00 closed closed mitchell_lichtenstein_on_teeth publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008696
<![CDATA["Kz," "Klimt"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/kz-klimt.php Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "KZ," Image Entertainment, 2005]


No matter how long you live and how many Holocaust documentaries you've endured, you should never be seduced by the impression that you've seen it all; the Nazi phenomenon was apparently almost cosmic in its limitless and deathless ability to re-manifest itself as jaw-dropping news, even 60 years later. One of the most original and philosophically fluent documentaries on the subject ever made, Rex Bloomstein's "Kz" (2005) casts a gimlet eye on not only the mass exterminations but the ways they are considered today — not in films, but on the ground. We begin on an opulent cruise trip up the Danube, from which we board a tour bus to Mauthausen, Austria, where a guide plainly tells us that industrialization in Austria at large only began around 1938 and was a product of concentration camp slave labor. Then the well-dressed, well-fed, middle class new-millennium tourists disembark for a guided tour of the most notorious death camp in Austria.


Bloomstein keeps quiet for most of the film, simply filming the calm, saturnine, hypnotic lecturers (many of them young men with SS grandfathers) as they matter-of-factly regale crowd after crowd of international vacationers with the grueling minutiae of what one calls the "stations of life" of a Mauthausen inmate. We also spy openly at the observers, mostly American high schoolers in their push-up bras, eyeliner and designer wear, who mostly go pale and sometimes grow faint from what they hear. "It's an attack on your mind," one German adult mumbles over the crematoriums (after we see a serious but kitschy young couple take snapshots of each other by the open ovens), and this is Bloomstein's real subject — the legacy of unempathizable, emaciated humanity the Nazis left behind, impossible to fathom but, as time goes by, more and more appallingly folded in with the other elements of our everyday culture. One might visit Mauthausen to learn about the functioning of evil, but our quotidian comfort and complacency remain unaffected — even the showerheads have been stolen as souvenirs.


Bloomstein doesn't stop there — while his favorite interview is an Austrian guide whose life is slowly falling apart because of his Mauthausen obsession, he also interviews a plethora of elderly locals, all of them horrified by what they'd seen so long ago but none very bothered by their inaction or even their fond memories of Hitler Youth solidarity and, in one case, a happy marriage to an SS officer who worked at the camp. Mauthausen thrives now as a happy suburb with its own McDonald's and touristy beer garden (enjoyed today much as it was during the war by the SS). Virtually every image of "Kz" is a chilling, ironic mini-movie worthy of an encyclopedic Umberto Eco unpacking, down to the Holocaust-culture insistence by the filmed tourists to mourn Jews ("Anyone know Kaddish?" one German woman asks of the crowd), even though the guides explicitly say that Mauthausen's hundreds of thousands of victims were overwhelmingly Poles, Catholics, Russians, homosexuals, criminals and "asocials" (a label which, the quietest and cruelest guide intones, could be affixed to anyone). But of course Mauthausen, for the visitors, as well as the film's audience, represents "the camps" as well as merely itself, and what we know about the Holocaust is nothing today if not representations: numbers, photographs, movies, testimony.


Raúl Ruiz, with his 75th or so feature, "Klimt" (2006), offers a much more conventional — or conventionally unconventional — portrait of Austrian history, plunging into the Art Nouveau era and his titular hero's biography as if into a love pit full of nymphomaniacs. Klimt, by most accounts, was a prickly artiste who painted a lot, bickered a bit with the Viennese art world institutions, had a few relationships and then died of pneumonia. But in Ruiz's version, he was a rabid, anti-social progressive constantly being seduced in two-way mirrored rooms by naked women and getting into spats with stuffy society types in crowded dining rooms. (Little mention is made of the Vienna Secession, an organizing effort that would've required a measure of social diplomacy, tact and camaraderie on the artist's part.) Ruiz also implies, rather surrealistically, that Klimt (played with shrugging distraction by John Malkovich in a sea of European accents) went insane, or at least delusional, toward the end of his life. As a film, it's a lush, ridiculous fantasy of an artsy, clichéd Mitteleuropa that never quite existed (brothels full of mustachioed women, a bulging-eyed Egon Schiele, played by Kinski scion Nikolai) peopled by symbolic personages (dream muse Saffron Burrows, nameless bureaucrat Stephen Dillane), all revolving around Klimt as if he were a walking martyr for misunderstood geniuses everywhere. Like many of Ruiz's films (not, it should be said, his magisterial version of Proust, "Time Regained"), it's a ripe lark, thick with dream interpolations and Euro-opulence of the old school.


"KZ" (Image Entertainment) will be available on January 15th; "Klimt" (Koch Lorber) is now available on DVD.

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8695 2008-01-14 00:00:00 closed closed kz_klimt publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008695
<![CDATA[Feature: Bush Movies in Obama's America]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/bush-movies-in-obamas-america.php Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:12:05 -0500 01122009_quantumofsolace.jpgBy Matt Singer

President-elect Barack Obama doesn't take office until January 20th. His effect on foreign policy, the economy, and the environment won't be known for months, even years after that. But before he's even set foot in the Oval Office, Obama's election has already had an impact on the world of film.

Movies, at least the ones made by the major Hollywood studios, are enormous undertakings. They take hundreds of millions of dollars and several years to envision, produce and distribute. The world they're released into is often a very different one from the world in which they were conceived. A movie made for an America run by President George W. Bush could look very different in one that's just voted for Barack Obama.

Take, for instance, the latest James Bond adventure, "Quantum of Solace." The 21st century 007, played by Daniel Craig, bears little resemblance to the one played by Sean Connery, Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan. He doesn't sleep with a lot of women; he falls in love with one, then obsesses over her when she's murdered. He doesn't quip, he questions; and particularly in "Quantum of Solace," he's beset by all sorts of moral quandaries that the Bonds of the past were too busy shagging and shooting to ponder: Should he seek revenge against the people who killed his lover? How far should he go to find them and hurt them?

As President Bush's foreign policy decisions came under greater and greater scrutiny, even the typically escapist world of action films began to address, however obliquely, the feelings of a country growing ambivalent about its involvement in wars around the world. Heroes like Craig's James Bond, Matt Damon's Jason Bourne and Christian Bale's Batman/Bruce Wayne struggle with finding the appropriate response to loss. To varying degrees, they all have to decide whether punishing the guilty is enough to alleviate their own guilt. But the "Bourne" trilogy ended last year while the President was still firmly ensconced in Washington; "The Dark Knight" was released this summer and the film served, in some ways, as a final summation of various Bush-era attitudes on terrorism. "Quantum of Solace" came to U.S. theaters on November 14th, just 10 days after Election Day and its accompanying vote for change. Even though he would have felt right at home a few months earlier, with the nation's mood turning more upbeat, a dour, moody Bond suddenly felt out of place. Intended to be completely of the moment, he wound up hopelessly out of date.

01122009_w.jpgA similar problem was faced by Oliver Stone's "W.," which sped through the production process during the summer to ensure its release less than a month before the election. But regardless of the circumstances behind the scenes, no sense of urgency actually made it into the finished product, a surprisingly toothless apologia for the Bush presidency. A superb lead performance from Josh Brolin notwithstanding, Stone's intentions and ambitions remain unclear: if you're going to have the audacity to make a movie about the flaws and mistakes of a sitting president disapproved of by three-fourths of the country, why do it to take pity on him? Audiences weren't too sure either; the movie made less than $30 million at the box office.

Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon" took pity on its presidential subject, too. Howard's Nixon, like Stone's Bush, is flawed but not without redeeming qualities. Though he suffers from a martyr complex, and still refuses to acknowledge his hand in the Watergate scandal, Nixon, as played by Frank Langella, is witty, charming and fiercely intelligent. The image of a deeply unpopular president belatedly fessing up to his mistakes after years of stonewall denials in "Frost/Nixon" calls to mind President Bush and his repeated insistence of a justification for the war in Iraq. But if Howard intended the film to serve as wish fulfillment for a frustrated country, the current president himself provided his own shocking anticlimax when, on December 1st, during the very week "Frost/Nixon" went into limited release, President Bush told ABC News' Charles Gibson that the intelligence failure in Iraq was his "biggest regret of all the presidency."

Some activists expressed their own regret that Gus Van Sant's biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office, didn't arrive in theaters before voters got to cast their ballot on California's Proposition 8, the initiative that restricted the state constitution's definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and which passed on the same day of Obama's election. But "Milk," which would be a touching and powerful story in any political climate, seemed bioengineered to serve as the first movie of the Obama presidency. Milk, like Obama, got his start in politics as a community organizer. When he campaigned for his seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, he articulated a message that would be echoed on the popular Shepard Fairey "Hope" poster that became the unofficial image of the Obama campaign. "We've gotta give 'em hope," Milk says. "Without hope, life isn't worth living."

01122009_milk.jpgAs we see in "Milk," some of the man's best work was done in reaction to the efforts of his enemies, as when he led the demonstrations through the Castro district in reaction to Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign, the guiding force behind Proposition 6, a California ballot initiative that would've made it legal to deny housing and jobs to openly gay people in 1978. While the parallels between the political climates of the two eras are striking, "Milk" is ultimately not about what happens on Election Day, but about the positive change that can happen as a result of adversity. Instead of looking back over what has been lost in the past, like the James Bond of "Quantum of Solace," "Milk" teaches us to look to the future. What changes will come over the next four years under President Obama remains to be seen, as will the nature of the films that are produced during them. The best we can hope for are heroes as relevant to tomorrow as Harvey Milk is to today.


[Photos: "Quantum of Solace," Columbia Pictures, 2008; "W.," Lionsgate, 2008; "Milk," Focus Features, 2008]

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<![CDATA[Rhymes With What? Five Films in Which Women Actually Go Through With Abortions]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/rhymes-with-what-five-films-in.php Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:51:48 -0500 As many an entertainment writer casting his or her weary eye over the past 12 months' releases in search of a trend piece pointed out, 2007 was a great year for the unintended pregnancy (that generally lead to unexpected happiness). The parade of scrappy swollen-bellied successes included "Knocked Up," "Waitress," "Bella" and "Juno" — the last of which cleared the $70 million mark at the box office this past weekend, and has been racking up award nominations left and right. "Juno" has also, thanks to its lucky (or not) confluence with the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy scandal, been the subject of columns and editorials using it as a launching point for talk of the effectiveness of abstinence in sex ed, of whether these films have been whitewashing pregnancy and motherhood, of the best time to talk to your children about contraception, of whether these are indications that we're in a new age of conservatism... While the furor continues, here's a look at a five selections from that less-discussed genre of films — ones in which women actually go through with, as "Knocked Up" put it, a "rhymes with 'shmashmortion'" — and how they're come off on screen.


Cabaret (1972)

Liza Minnelli's bohemian nightclub entertainer Sally Bowles romances the mostly gay Brian (Michael York) and the ambiguous baron Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) in Weimar-era Berlin. When she discovers she's pregnant, she's unsure which of the two is the father. Though Brian is willing to marry her and take her back to England with him, she decides to go through with an abortion and stay in Berlin ("How soon would it be before we started hating each other?").

Portrayal: Tragic. While Sally's point is fair — outside of the bubble of Berlin, their relationship likely wouldn't last — her act comes across as the selfish one in the face of what amounts to Brian's sacrifice, and her choice to stay in Germany as WWII approaches essentially means she'll be punished for it.


Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Impatient with her boyfriend Mark's (Brian Backer) reluctance to make a move, freshman Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) ends up spontaneously sleeping with his more aggressive friend Mike (Robert Romanus), and, yes, getting pregnant. Mike fails to either come up with cash to help her pay for the abortion (he buys REO Speedwagon tickets instead) or show up to drive her to the clinic, leaving her to call on her older brother Brad (Judge Reinhold), who turns out to be gently supportive.

Portrayal: Astonishingly matter-of-fact, particularly for a mainstream film. Stacy doesn't die, drop out of school or embark on a downward spiral — instead, she goes on with her life without dire consequences, and comes to respect Mark's decision to take it slow. Even the excised scene on the operating table (which usually makes it in to cable airings of the film) neither soft-peddles nor demonizes the procedure.


Wild at Heart (1990)

Knocked up by her unstable cousin Dell (Crispin Glover) at age 16, Lula (Laura Dern) is forcefully taken to have the world's scariest abortion by her mother Marietta (Diane Ladd), who wants her to be appreciative of their having gone to see "the best damn abortionist in the South," though Lula mostly remembers his hairy nostrils.

Portrayal: Lynchian. There's screaming, bloody instruments and a fetus in a trashcan, though it's all just a fittingly terrifying counterpart to the nightmare of actual parenthood portrayed in "Eraserhead."


The Cider House Rules (1999)

Dr. Larch (Michael Caine), who runs the St. Cloud's orphanage, also performs abortions when requested though they're illegal — knowledge he insists on passing along to his hoped-for successor Homer (Tobey Maguire), who disapproves. Homer meets his life's love Candy (Charlize Theron) when she comes to St. Cloud's for an abortion, but it's the later act that sums up the film's attempt at moral complexity — Homer performs an abortion on a migrant worker (Erykah Badu) impregnated by her own father (Delroy Lindo), only to have her stab the man to death when he makes another advance on her.

Portrayal: Murky. Homer comes around to the point of view of his mentor — sort of. The fact that he does so because of an act of incest makes the decision less difficult, and, regardless, the melodrama detracts from what, one assumes, is an attempt to portray a morally complex situation.


Lake of Fire (2007)

Tony Kaye worked on this remarkable documentary about the many sides of the abortion issue in the U.S. for 17 years, interviewing fundamentalists, activists, journalists, pundits, academics and people on the street. The thread holding the film together, however, is the process through which Stacy, a woman in her late 20s with an abusive relationship in her past, makes her way to a clinic with the man who impregnated her to obtain an abortion. The camera follows her through the procedure and finds her afterward.

Portrayal: Unflinching. Compared to early scenes of a "partial birth" abortion, the segments with Stacy are not the film's most graphic, though they may be the most emotionally wrenching, particularly as she weeps afterward "I know I made the right decision, but it's still not easy."

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<![CDATA[Rhymes With What? Five Films in Which Women Actually Go Through With Abortions (photo)]]> Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:51:48 -0500 10025384 2008-01-08 11:51:48 closed closed rhymes_with_what_five_films_in_photo inherit 25384 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Disappearing Acts: 15 Big Screen Characters Who Didn't Make Final Cut]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/disappearing-acts-15-big-scree.php Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 After beating out throngs of big name actors for the part and filming for four months in Queensland, Australia with 6am call times every day, Adrien Brody thought he was sitting pretty when he attended a press screening for Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line" in 1998. But 170 minutes later, Brody felt more like a soldier than ever as he saw his performance as Corporal Fife winnowed down to a supporting and largely silent role. As he recalled to The New York Press' Matt Zoller Seitz, "You spend all this time in an unfamiliar place, you experience incredible things, and then you come home, you're wounded psychologically, and you have nothing to show for it."

At least Brody made the cut. Here are a few from recent years who weren't as lucky:

Jon Stewart: "The First Wives Club"

Imagine, if you will, the future host of "The Daily Show" sitting by his TV watching "Laugh-In" and wishing for the day he could play boy toy to Goldie Hawn in a big motion picture. You can't? Neither could Hawn, who told USA Today in 1996 that "As much as I love Jon, before it was even cast I said to Scott (Rudin, the film's producer), 'Let's get rid of this. It's not pertinent to the plot. You are going to cut this.' And sure enough it was the first to go." So much for the vote of confidence, but the film was supposed to be Stewart's big break into movies after his first talk show on MTV came to an end in 1995.


Kevin Costner: "The Big Chill"

Perhaps the most famous character to be left on the cutting room floor, Costner's Alex commits suicide before "The Big Chill" begins, but appeared in a series of flashbacks throughout the film after his friends from college reunite for his funeral. Audiences had their best chance at seeing the performance in 1998 when Columbia wanted to re-release the film with the Costner scenes as a selling point, but director Lawrence Kasdan was "very adamant" about keeping the film the way it was, according to the studio's Michael Schlesinger, who spoke to USA Today at the time. Still, there was no harm done between Costner and Kasdan, who made amends by casting Costner in his next film, "Silverado."


01072008_cutcharacters1.jpgChris Cooper: "The Ring"

Considering "The Ring" became a sleeper hit largely thanks to teenagers, DreamWorks execs probably made the right call when they decided to open the film with a perky Amber Tamblyn than a dour Chris Cooper. Cooper, who would earn an Oscar nomination for "Adaptation" the same year, found his portrayal of an imprisoned serial killer of children left on the cutting room floor, including an opening sequence where the character attempts to persuade Naomi Watts' journalist that's he's rehabilitated in his bid for parole. The kicker was that Watts would deliver the killer videotape to his cell at the end of the film as a bookend.


Janeane Garofalo: "Southland Tales"

And to think Mandy Moore was worried she might not make the final cut -- after the disastrous premiere of Richard Kelly's sophomore film at Cannes in 2006, no one was safe from the chopping block as Kelly tried to appease potential distributors with a shorter running time. Eventually, Garofalo's militant General Teena MacArthur who operated out of a Venice Beach storefront was excised. All that remains of Garofalo's performance is a shot of the General celebrating the end of the world at the film's conclusion.


Michelle Monaghan: "Unfaithful," "Syriana," "Constantine"

Three strikes usually means you're out, but Monaghan appears to have beat the odds. Before landing leads in "Gone Baby Gone" and the upcoming indie "Trucker," the actress was trimmed from a bit part as Richard Gere's secretary in "Unfaithful" before being poised for a banner year in 2005 with roles as a demon-human hybrid in "Constantine" and a beauty pageant queen who travels to the Middle East in "Syriana." The only problem was that her subplots in both films were dropped from the final product. Fortunately for Monaghan, she still appeared in meaty roles in "North Country" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," and even her turn in "Constantine" wasn't for naught -- J.J. Abrams brought the actress on "Mission: Impossible III" after seeing her audition tape from the Keanu Reeves thriller.

01072008_cutcharacters2.jpg
Orlando Jones: "Magnolia"

Obsessive fans of Paul Thomas Anderson already know they can find the ill-fated storyline of The Worm in the published shooting script of "Magnolia," but oddly The Worm's alter ego Jones logs more time on the making of documentary than he does in the film. As part of the "Magnolia" production diaries, there's a tantalizing scene in a diner featuring The Worm, the desperate-for-cash father of Dixon, the young boy John C. Reilly's cop meets in the first act, but Jones is nowhere to be found in the final cut. As Jones told the Sunday Express in 2001, "Paul called me and said: "You're great in the movie but we're four hours." Apparently, Tom Cruise wasn't as expendable.


Andy Garcia: "Dangerous Minds"

If 2007's Hilary Swank drama "Freedom Writers" was an update of the Michelle Pfeiffer inner city school drama "Dangerous Minds," then Patrick Dempsey was the modern version of the crusading teacher's nag of a love interest as Garcia was in the 1995 film. Except Garcia's turn was even more thankless than Dempsey's, since it never saw the light of day - and it couldn't have come at a worse time for Garcia, whose days as a leading man were numbered with the release of his next film, "Steal Big Steal Little." Pfeiffer claimed to have fought for the actor in a 1995 interview with the Sunday Mail... to a point. "I argued against cutting him out," said Pfeiffer. "In the end, I can't really say whether or not it was the right choice. People seem to like (the movie)."


James Van Der Beek: "Storytelling"

Itching to break away from the clean-cut image he cultivated on "Dawson's Creek," Van Der Beek didn't blink when he signed on to star in the "Fiction" segment of Todd Solondz's fourth film as a sexually confused high school jock in the 1980s who, according to those who saw the original NC-17 cut, was a little less confused after an explicit "Brown Bunny"-esque scene with another man. Heather Matarazzo and Emmanuelle Chriqui were also casualties of the editing down of the two-and-a-half-hour film to the 87 minute, R-rated affair it became. When Van Der Beek made the rounds with "The Rules of Attraction," which finally did earn him some indie cred, he ended his self-imposed gag order about "Storytelling" on Moviehole, saying, "I remember saying to Todd [Solondz] the director, when I was doing ADR, that 'even if I get cut from this movie, I just want to say what a fabulous time I've had on this.' I will never say that to a director again!"


01072008_cutcharacters3.jpg
Terrence Stamp & Jacqueline Bisset and Keith David & Angela Bassett: "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"

Jennifer Aniston wasn't the only collateral damage from the chemistry between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. As a positively flummoxed Doug Liman explains on the "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" special edition DVD, test screening audiences were so caught up with the future halves of Brangelina as dueling assassins that the film's main villains, the bosses behind the Smiths known only as Mother and Father, simply weren't necessary. Still, Liman went through two quarreling killer couples in Stamp and Bisset and David and Bassett before eliminating their performances from the film completely... well, David and Bassett's voices made it in, as did that of William Fichtner, who's never seen as the Smiths' marriage therapist.


Tobey Maguire: "Empire Records"

Like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Dazed and Confused," "Empire Records" seemed to have one of those casts - this low-budget comedy about the closure of an indie record store had a quirky quorum of young actors who were destined to become movie stars. Some, including Liv Tyler and Renee Zellweger, did, while some, including Brendan Sexton III and Rory Cochrane, found steady work as character actors. But Maguire said that he felt like an "extreme outsider" on the North Carolina set of the film and suffered what he called a "kind of semi-breakdown" before asking director Allan Moyle if he could fly home to Los Angeles. Moyle agreed to cut Maguire and his character loose, though not before the actor reportedly went skinny dipping with the cast one night and wound up throwing up in the ocean in close proximity of Tyler.


Liv Tyler: "Everyone Says I Love You"

Speaking of Tyler, she spent a few days on the set of Woody Allen's musical, "Everyone Says I Love You," with nothing on celluloid to show for it. Even though the role didn't call for Tyler to use her genetically sound set of pipes, the actress was to have played what Allen called "a sexy, sensuous, hot right-wing Republican" to woo Lukas Haas' lone conservative in a family of liberals. Tyler later told The Times of London, "He wrote me a letter, which I keep on my desk and look at occasionally, saying that he was really sorry and it was nice to work with me and we would work again. But he's never asked me again. And he wouldn't even hear me sing, and I love to sing. So I guess maybe he doesn't like me so much."

01072008_cutcharacters4.jpg
Katherine Towne: "Sweet Home Alabama"

The daughter of "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne probably knew the Hollywood maxim that a film gets written three times: first on the page, then on the set and finally in the editing room -- Katherine probably just assumed that her role as Erin, the personal assistant to Reese Witherspoon's fashion designer, would make it after the second draft. Unfortunately, test screening audiences were troubled by her crush on Witherspoon's fiancé, played by Patrick Dempsey, and director Andy Tennant 86'ed the character without hesitation, though not completely without regret. As Tennant cops to on the DVD, Erin provided a happy ending to the film and a punchline when Dempsey's onscreen mother discovers that her jilted son's ex-fiancé's personal assistant is a Vanderbilt.


Ronee Blakely: "Hammett"

Actors marry their directors all the time, but Blakely is a cautionary tale for any thespian who wants to untie the knot too soon. After close to 90 percent of the revisionist detective tale "Hammett" was in the can, the "Nashville" star filed for divorce from director Wim Wenders, a fact that, when coupled with studio dissatisfaction with the movie in general, prompted Wenders to change up the role and cast Marilu Henner instead as the detective's confidante.


Harold Ramis: "High Fidelity"

Seth Rogen may have been a handful in "Knocked Up," but Ramis perfected his fatherly advice as the sweatsuit-clad old man to John Cusack's introspective record clerk in the 2000 adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel. In an exchange between the two Chicago natives, Cusack's Rob asks for advice about sex from his dad, who bluntly explains how his experience is limited to one woman and to "just go out and do it." The scene didn't make the final cut, nor did a cameo by Beverly D'Angelo as an angry wife who is eager to sell her husband's record collection, but both can be found in the deleted scenes on the film's DVD. And thanks to Ramis' quality time with Cusack on the set, the two worked together again with Ramis as director on the 2006 crime caper "The Ice Harvest."


Harrison Ford: "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial"

Since Ford's pal Steven Spielberg was directing the alien tale from a script by Melissa Mathison, Ford's wife at the time, it only made sense that the actor would show his face during the production. Actually, it was only his back, which was turned to the camera, for his cameo as the principal at Elliot's school who gives a stern talk to the boy. Spielberg ultimately decided to scrap the scene in favor of an ending that didn't leave audiences wondering whether or not Indiana Jones had taken an acting gig in between "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Temple of Doom," but through the magic of the internet, you can watch the scene on YouTube.

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<![CDATA[Disappearing Acts: 15 Big Screen Characters Who Didn't Make Final Cut (photo)]]> Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 1008693 2008-01-07 00:00:00 closed closed disappearing_acts_15_big_scree_photo inherit 8693 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Woman on the Beach"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/woman-on-the-beach.php Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Joong-rae, an established (though not very well-off) director, corrals his weak-willed friend Chang-wook into taking him to the seaside for a few days so that he can work on his overdue script. Chang-wook agrees on the condition that he be allowed to bring his girlfriend along. The three set off in the morning in the friend's car, listening to music written and performed by the girl, Moon-sook, who's a composer and clearly a big fan of Joong-rae's work. They have stilted getting-to-know-you conversations. They find a place to stay. And then, as they dawdle outside, Joong-rae tells Chang-wook that he likes him because he's so trusting: "It's hard for a married man to bring his girlfriend out with him so openly." "I'm not his girlfriend," retorts Moon-sook. "You have to have sex for that."

"This is fun," says Joong-rae.

And so begins "Woman on the Beach," another of Hong Sang-soo's adept, acid-laced explorations of relationships, the gender divide and Korean masculinity. The audience is only given a vague sense of what Joong-rae's films are like, arty and sensitive enough that most of the women in the film are googly eyed upon meeting him. Moon-sook herself is harboring a crush, though after the three have spent an evening together drinking she observes that he's not like his films: "Sorry, but you're actually just another Korean man." This doesn't stop her from opening up to him as the night goes on, as they run and leave Chang-wook behind, walking the beach at night and ultimately trysting in an unlocked, empty hotel room. The next morning he's distant, and she's ready to let him off the hook, if also a little hurt. She and Chang-wook return to Seoul, and Joong-rae stays, calls her to apologize, and in passing picks up another woman staying at a nearby hotel.

Hong's characterizations are hard to take — they would be cruel if they weren't so fully realized, and if he weren't such a connoisseur of the acts of social sadism that can pepper our interactions with others. Joong-rae is a grand disaster of a man, the full extent of which the audience realizes alongside Moon-sook. He's insecure and needy, defensive and manipulative, prone to strident rages and, in the most cutting detail of all, to using the ensuing emotional chaos as fodder for his film. Process is never pretty. Moon-sook is charming and charmingly direct, though at one point she reveals that she's older than she appears; she acts and looks like a winsome girl. In fact, all of the characters seem in different degrees to be blustering children, until they suddenly reveal inscrutable back-stories littered with the wreckage of past relationships, romantic and otherwise.

"Woman on the Beach" is, if it's not clear from the above, a comedy, and it is very funny, though threaded through with a sense of despair at the apparent futility of human connection. Shot almost entirely on the beach and in the buildings facing it, the film has a chilly air to it that's partially the director's world view, and partially just inherent to the setting: There are few things sadder than an empty, windswept resort town once the season has ended.

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<![CDATA["Woman on the Beach" (photo)]]> Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 10025383 2008-01-07 00:00:00 closed closed woman_on_the_beach_photo inherit 25383 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Running With Arnold"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/running-with-arnold.php Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Running With Arnold," Red Envelope Entertainment, 2008]


It's one thing to make a one-sided documentary and it's quite another to make a one-sided documentary and claim impartiality. Though in the film's press notes, director Dan Cox claims he was "determined to maintain an objective stance," his documentary "Running With Arnold" is chock full of the sort of techniques that he claims in the same statement are "anathema to journalism."


Cox, a former Variety editor, says that Michael Moore "manipulates images and facts to create over-the-top points that ultimately ring hollow." Perhaps, but one could easily level the same critique on "Running With Arnold." Consider a scene late in the film, after Schwarzenegger has won the California recall and become the world's first Governator. As part of a larger sequence about how Schwarzenegger reneged on populist campaign promises to fall in line with the national Republican agenda, Alec Baldwin's narration describes Arnold's plan to privatize the state pension plans. "It made sense," Baldwin says, "Certainly, corporations knew how to manage the futures of their employees." Cut to a shot of Kenneth Lay being dragged away in handcuffs and then one of Anderson Cooper talking about Enron's collapse.


Most of "Running With Arnold" is laced with that sort of derisive tone. There're as many sound bytes from comics like as Bill Maher, Rob Schneider and the members of a comedy troupe called Laughing Liberally as there are from journalists, historians or cultural critics. The film is only 70 minutes long to begin with, but with that many jokes, superficial digs and guys impersonating President Bush, there's not much time for more weighty material.


Some of the comedians' material is clever, but I'm of the opinion that Schwarzenegger's legacy in both the political and cinematic arenas is worthy of far more serious discussion. When Cox does dial down the snark and focuses more on the issues, his investigative findings are mild at best and pretty one-sided. In discussing Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial record, he observes, with loads of outrage, that he consistently promised one thing during his campaign and then did something different when he got into office. This is shocking how, exactly? Isn't that what most politicians do?


He tends to assume the worst of Schwarzenegger — for instance, during his discussion of Schwarzenegger's father's history with the Nazi party, Cox suggests that the Governator's donations and work with the Jewish human rights organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center were part of a "careful manipulation of the media" to smooth over potentially damaging public relations, without even acknowledging the awards Schwarzenegger has won for his work with the Center or the possibility that his actions could have been well-intentioned. Cox's attempt to tie Schwarzenegger to the Nazis was the source of Baldwin's widely reported complaints with the film and the reason for his attempt to remove his name and voiceover from the picture over a year ago, calling the images "unfair," "ultimately offensive" and "over the line" in a piece he wrote on The Huffington Post.


I would never vote for Schwarzenegger for public office and I'd agree with Cox that he was underqualified for his new career path in public service. But that doesn't mean Arnold is or was stupid. If he was, he'd own a gym somewhere in Venice Beach and spend all day telling his employees about the glory days of making "Hercules in New York." Instead of treating him like an opportunistic dummy, Schwarzenegger deserves a documentary (evenhanded or not) that treats his legacy seriously and confronts it critically.

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<![CDATA["The District!", "Chameleon Street"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/the-district-chameleon-street.php Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 A filthy, confrontational, sophomoric animated feature from Hungary, Áron Gauder's "The District!" (I prefer the less prosaic, more punctuative Hungarian title, "Nyócker!") has a surplus of borrowed hip-hop attitude and proudly lowbrow ghetto texture. But it's Gauder's absolutely distinctive visual docket that is ceaselessly arresting. Call it a smash-up between faux 3-D digital fluidity and cutout cartooning and rotoscoped realism and Ralph Steadman-esque satiric caricature -- the upshot is hypnotizing, even when the film's wigger material tends toward the idiotic. Gauder captures his actors in a broad variety of facial poses and then animates the characters using these images (much as each character found expression via the interchange of dozens of different heads in the stop-motion "The Nightmare Before Christmas"). But he also embellishes them graphically, distorts them digitally, and then folds them into hectic, multilayered urban tableaux, all of it seething and brawling and swarming like a real city neighborhood as seen through the scrim of very strong microdots.

Which would all make only a scintillating short, not a feature, if Gauder's timing and deftness with multiple action weren't precise and hilarious; watching the background characters' expressions change on the offbeat, from deadpan to rageful to joyous, is often more fascinating than the foreground business, which often devolves into Magyar hip-hop music videos (and accomplished farces of the form, at that). Seeing these 2-D digi-puppets meet gazes is alone funnier than the last five CGI penguin movies. The plot, which moves like a driverless car, involves a gang of Budapest street kids, many of them Rom, deciding to get rich by traveling back to the Stone Age, killing and burying mammoths where their city block will later be, returning and digging for oil. Which they do (they're even inadvertently responsible for continental drift), and the consequences naturally spiral out into an international debacle that ropes in Osama bin Laden, the Pope and Bush II, all of them given a rightful satiric flogging in the process. "The District!" began as an Adult Swim-style series-within-a-series and might represent the most inventive use of digital animation anywhere, and certainly rules the hard drive work being done elsewhere in Europe.

One of the key films of the indie "new wave" that roiled through the 1980s and resulted in, among a great many other things, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith and IFC itself, Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s "Chameleon Street" (1989) fetched a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance before Sundance was Sundance (the soirée's maiden name was the Utah/US Film Festival). It remains a troubling and pioneering piece of work, if somewhat less forgivable today for its grandstanding, its clumsy amateurish filmmaking and its fuzzy thematic hustle. Harris did all but hold his own boom for this micro-budgeted interrogation of American race relations, which in a desultory way biopics the story of one William Douglas Street Jr., a Detroit-born inveterate con man whose compulsion it was to pass himself off in professional identities he wasn't qualified for: a surgeon, a corporate lawyer, a French-speaking exchange student at Yale (without actually knowing how to speak French), etc. (In fact, several players in Street's real life play themselves, including Detroit mayor Coleman Young.) In Harris' purview, Street was a hopeless self-aggrandizer as well as a low-rent autodidact, and his purple, rhyming, R & B narration belittles everyone he meets as relentlessly as it puffs up his own plumage as the smartest man for miles.

But taking the Harris/Street persona at face value -- as an empathetic protagonist -- is a mistake. Harris turns Street's odyssey into a kind of arch, bohemian vaudeville as the rich-talking dude foolishly begins to consider himself a pretentious "artist" of identity and manipulation. Of course, the real subject is the black man's need and desire, in late-century America, to adopt and swap out identities so he might fit within the white hierarchy; the sense of genuine self is a casualty of latent racism, while at the same time, Street can "pass" for anything as long as he occupies largely white environments where he is essentially as "invisible" as Ralph Ellison. The film's crude, cheap visuals also wield a sharp double edge -- take them either as botch work or as the opportunistic parody of blaxploitation filmmaking and those films' disturbed sense of empowerment and social dynamics. Burdened by tons of Street's seriously witless summary judgments and smooth romantic seduction-chat, "Chameleon Street" remains probing and singular, and perhaps, an opportunity for a less indulgent, more thoroughly conceived remake.


"The District!" (Atopia) will be available on January 15th; "Chameleon Street" (Home Vision) is now available on DVD.

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8690 2008-01-07 00:00:00 closed closed the_district_chameleon_street publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008690
<![CDATA["The District!", "Chameleon Street" (photo)]]> Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 1008690 2008-01-07 00:00:00 closed closed the_district_chameleon_street_photo inherit 8690 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: January 18th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/opening-this-week-january-18th.php Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "The Business of Being Born," Red Envelope Entertainment, 2008]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"The Business of Being Born"

Ricki Lake narrates this Abby Epstein-directed documentary about the birthing process and current medical techniques as the film follows a group of soon-to-be parents exploring their options both within the medical community and outside of it.

Opens in New York (official site).


"First Sunday"

While we miss the old Ice Cube of the N.W.A. and "Friday" days, it's about time for us to accept he's on the path of Steve Martin — a formerly brilliant Renaissance man now stuck doing Stone Age-level family-friendly fare for a big paycheck. But at least "First Sunday," the debut theatrical feature from underground playwright David E. Talbert, has a surprising lead role for our favorite "30 Rock"-er Tracy Morgan as both he and Cube star as petty criminals who attempt to rip off a local church, only to learn the error of their ways from the parishioners they're holding hostage. It may be Tyler Perry-lite, but at least no one's in drag. That we know of.

Opens wide (official site).


"In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale"

2008 might be the Year of the Boll, as Uwe Boll, the universally panned director, is set to offer at least a double dose of what past efforts indicate are likely to be awful movies. First up is "In the Name of the King," Boll's highest budgeted film to date (an astounding $60 million) and, as usual for Boll, an adaptation of a semi-popular video game. Reading the plot summary makes us scratch our heads, so, in short, Jason Statham stars as a man named Farmer who attempts to rescue his wife from and avenge the death of his son on the Krugs, a race of animal warriors controlled by an evil Ray Liotta. Look forward to "Seed," another Boll effort, later this month.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie"

The popular 2002 animated film "Jonah" gets a sequel as favorite VeggieTales characters Larry the Cucumber, Mr. Lunt and Pa Grape are whisked away from their jobs at the Pirate Times Dinner Theater and dropped in with real 17th century pirates. We may be outside the film's faith-based kiddie demographic, but we're still expecting this spoof film to be smarter than "Epic Movie." We're just sayin'.

Opens wide (official site).


"Running With Arnold"

Journalist Dan Cox's documentary, which premiered at SXSW last year, examines Arnold Schwarzenegger's life and gubernatorial campaign.

Opens in Los Angeles and San Francisco (official site).


"Woman on the Beach"

Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo releases another semi-autobiographical drama about an out of work filmmaker who convinces his friend to join him on a weekend beach getaway, only to be stricken with envy when that friend's girlfriend joins them for the trip. Equal parts Francois Truffaut and Woody Allen, Hong's latest is a gem worth catching if you have the opportunity.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[On Selling Out]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/ifc-news-podcast-59-on-selling.php Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Comedian David Cross was sensitive enough about taking a role in "Alvin and the Chipmunks" that he felt the need to defend himself on his blog. But he's hardly the first to take a less than Oscar-winning part for a payout -- this week on the IFC News podcast, we list out a few of our favorite respected actors who have shown themselves to be unafraid to star opposite, say, a talking baby.

Download: MP3, 30:53 minutes, 28.2 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28226 2008-01-07 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_59_on_selling publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028226 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[On Selling Out (photo)]]> Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 10028226 2008-01-07 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_59_on_selling_photo inherit 28226 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[List: 2008's Comeback Kids (For Better or Worse)]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2008/01/2008s-comeback-kids-for-better.php Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:09:32 -0500 01062008_mickeyrourke.jpgBy Nick Schager

Americans love comebacks, meaning that for all the domestic and international turmoil of the past 12 months, the country must have dug 2008's cinematic offerings. Sure, typical sequelitis plagued summer cineplexes for better and, more often than not, worse. Yet familiar franchises weren't the only ones to return to the big screen spotlight -- some of the year's most critically and commercially triumphant films and performances were the handiwork of once-beloved artists attempting to rebound from prior misfires or, in the case of one gifted-actor-gone-to-seed, coming off of decades' worth of obscurity. So, as we put 2008 to bed, we salute and decry, respectively, the year's best and worst in return engagements.


THE BEST

Mickey Rourke, "The Wrestler"
The once electrifying Rourke's slow climb out of obsolescence began with 2005's "Sin City," and finished with this, director Darren Aronofsky's saga about a washed-up wrestler's last shot at marquee stardom. It's the performance of a lifetime, in large part because it's one that piercingly resonates as a self-portrait, though Rourke's magnificence isn't simply the byproduct of fiction-mirroring-reality. With a flick of his long blonde locks or the slow, methodical way his battered body grinds into motion, Rourke nails wrestling realities, while also capturing something universal about pain, about sacrifice and about the dignity of knowing, and embracing, one's inherent self.

01062008_dannyboyle.jpgDanny Boyle, "Slumdog Millionaire"
Having, with "28 Days Later..." and "Millions," recovered from a string of flops following 1996's "Trainspotting," Danny Boyle again somewhat lost his way in 2007 with the part-Kubrick, part-"Event Horizon" sci-fi saga "Sunshine." The British director found himself back on terra firma, however, with "Slumdog Millionaire," a boisterous Dickensian tale of childhood, friendship, love and game shows infused with both aesthetic electricity and heart. It's not as fantastic as its growing collection of year-end awards might suggest, but Boyle's distinctive, rowdy crowd-pleaser is nonetheless his finest effort in years.

David Wain, "Role Models"
No amount of goodwill wrought from his time on MTV's '90s sketch comedy show "The State" or his awesomely funny 2001 film "Wet Hot American Summer" could excuse actor/director David Wain for his 2007 flop, "The Ten," a slapdash collection of bible-themed skits tied together by a running adultery gag featuring Paul Rudd's most middling work since his stint on "Friends." Both Wain and Rudd came back nicely, however, with "Role Models," an adults-cursing-at-kids comedy that accomplished something that few of its brethren managed this year: generating profane laughter undiluted by Judd Apatow-style sentimentality.


01062008_indianajones.jpgTHE WORST

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Virtually no one wanted a fourth Indy adventure starring 66-year-old Harrison Ford, yet in their infinite wisdom, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg pressed forward anyway. The result was a misbegotten summer blockbuster along the lines of "The Phantom Menace," whose box office success was predicated not on quality but on affection for the series' preceding classics. With lame extraterrestrial artifacts, lamer Russian villains, and, lamest of all, a tree vine-swinging sequence featuring a pompadoured monkey (seriously) -- "Crystal Skull" was so disappointingly "meh" that one wishes the script had remained buried at the bottom of Lucas' desk drawer.

"Star Wars: Clone Wars"
Speaking of Mr. Lucas, his latest "Star Wars" miscarriage is one that discerning moviegoers should remain far, far away from. An animated adventure that fills in the unimportant gaps between "Episode II" and "Episode III" and serves as little more than a launching pad for a Cartoon Network TV series, this kids' film featured stilted CGI, a story with no dramatic import and a new, feisty female character whose main positive attribute was not being quite as intolerable as Jar Jar. "Clone Wars" feels like a trivial, creatively uninspired cash grab, making it no different than Lucas' recent live-action prequels.

01062008_righteouskill.jpgRobert De Niro and Al Pacino, "Righteous Kill"
Michael Mann's superlative direction, and specifically his key decision to grant the legendary actors only one face-off, allowed "Heat" to live up to its billing as De Niro and Pacino's titanic maiden showdown. "Righteous Kill" reteams the two as cop partners, though with director Jon Avnet -- he of the equally wretched Pacino vehicle "88 Minutes" -- indulging in spastically flashy visual devices and both stars having long since reduced themselves to caricatures of their respective personas (De Niro the raging bull, Pacino the loudmouthed smooth talker), the once-great thespians' reunion was as painfully embarrassing as any drunken high school anniversary get-together.


[Photos: "The Wrestler," Fox Searchlight, 2008; "Slumdog Millionaire," Fox Searchlight, 2008; "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," Paramount Pictures, 2008; "Righteous Kill," Overture Films, 2008

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<![CDATA["Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/sweeney-todd-the-demon-barber.php Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Johnny Depp in "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," Paramount Pictures, 2007]


Just in time for Christmas, director Tim Burton is painting theaters across the country red and green: red with gallons of movie blood, green with the faces of queasy moviegoers when they discover just what kind of gorefest they've wandered into. Burton's turned Steven Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's musical "Sweeney Todd" into a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie for the Schubert Alley set. Squeamish theater fans take note: it's "A Bucket of Blood and Barbasol."


The story remains largely unchanged from the stage version, but the blood-and-guts factor has risen exponentially. Sweeney Todd is equally phlegmatic whether he's giving someone a haircut, a shave or a straight razor to the jugular, and Burton's camera records the action in much the same way. There are numerous instances where Burton could have cut away from the action to leave some of the carnage to the imagination. He never does. His technique is as coldly unwavering as Sweeney's.


Once, Sweeney (Johnny Depp) lived a happy life as Benjamin Barker, a successful barber with a wife and child. Then a jealous judge named Turpin (Alan Rickman) wrongfully imprisoned him, stole his young daughter (whom he now intends to wed) and drove his wife to suicide. After a long exile, Barker returns with a different name and Susan Sontag hair, vowing revenge. "The years no doubt have changed me," he sinisterly informs Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the crazy widow who runs the meat pie bakery below his shop. For a while Sweeney's modus operandi is limited only to killing Turpin; at a certain point, madness and hatred expands his vision and he decrees that there will be blood for anyone dumb enough to pay him to lower their ears.


Thus, as the open credits suggest, blood and witty musical numbers pour down like rain. But even as the body count enters slasher film territory, Burton keeps the tone wickedly funny. If Sondheim and Wheeler's original text was always smirky-creepy, Burton pushes the tone farther into the theater of the absurd. He turns Mrs. Lovett's number about her hopes of a happy home life ("By the Sea") into a candy-colored dream sequence with Sweeney, dressed in convict black and whites, desperately looking for an exit. He treats the romantic lead Anthony (a bug-eyed Jamie Campbell Bower) as a laughably desperate stalker (and doesn't scrimp on Turpin's pedophilic tendencies). He even cast Sacha Baron Cohen as an outlandish street performer (with an even more outlandish Italian accent) who becomes Sweeney's first victim.


The staged "Sweeney Todd" was almost entirely sung, but even if Burton (with Sondheim's blessing and assistance) cut several numbers entirely — including the famous "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" opener — and trimmed many others, the movie is still jammed with music from sprocket hole to sprocket hole. Though Depp has no formal musical training, he did spend many of his pre-acting days in various rock bands, and that influence comes through strongly in his vocal performance, which ranges from a David Bowie croon to a Billy Idol howl. Even if the songs have been performed by more talented singers in the past, there's something seductive about Depp's approach. Against any of the numerous theatrical renditions viewable on YouTube, the movie Sweeney holds his own. I'd take Depp and Rickman's "Pretty Women," for instance, over any of the half-dozen variations available online.


So musically it works, comedically it works, but man is this thing just soaked to the bone with blood. You can't really argue that the thicker-than-waterworks ruin "Sweeney Todd"'s message because they don't. The orgy of Karo syrup (the only strong color presence onscreen in what is otherwise almost a black and white film) only enhances the story's idea of revenge as a doomed, poisonous pursuit. Sweeney's quest for vengeance touches, if not outright destroys, the lives of everyone around him even the innocent. His infective taint on his neighborhood is symbolized by the sooty smoke that pours out of his bakehouse chimney and clogs the air with an inescapable stench. However poetic the Judge's ultimate fate may be, there's no denying that Sweeney, not Turpin, has more blood on his hands — both literally and figuratively.

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8687 2007-12-24 00:00:00 closed closed sweeney_todd_the_demon_barber publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008687
<![CDATA[John Sayles on "Honeydripper"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/john-sayles-on-honeydripper.php Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Stephen Saito

IFC News


[Photos: Left, John Sayles on the set; below, Gary Clark Jr., Danny Glover in "Honeydripper," Emerging Pictures, 2007]


Two notable introductions to American culture in 1950: in the South, the solid-body electric guitar found a following, and the North witnessed the birth of John Sayles. 57 years later, the two have bridged the geographical divide in "Honeydripper," the writer/director's slow burn of a juke joint tale about a crafty club owner (Danny Glover) who tries to revive his sagging business by wooing the legendary Guitar Sam and his Stratocaster to the tiny town of Harmony, AL. When the Delta blues musician doesn't show, the club owner cajoles a young rock 'n' rolling drifter (Gary Clark Jr.) to take his place.


It's material that comes naturally to Sayles — after all, he electrified the independent film movement when he began directing in 1980 with "The Return of the Secaucus 7." But "Honeydripper" sees the Hoboken native retuning his chords. For the first time since "Secaucus 7," Sayles and his partner Maggie Renzi are self-distributing their film, a move that has brought the duo plenty of attention in recent weeks, as well as a renewed energy that seems to have trickled down to "Honeydripper" itself. Even though Sayles may claim to have lost some of his ambition as a filmmaker when he recently spoke to IFC News, he has not lost his touch as a humanist storyteller.


You've said that you came up with the title "Honeydripper" when you were making "Sunshine State" in 2002. How long has the process been to make this film?


It's kind of inspired by a short story that I wrote several years ago called "Keeping Time," about a 40-year-old drummer in a 20-year-old band who into this janitor in his 80s who says, "you know, I used to be Guitar Sam," and tells a few of the stories that are in the movie. So it's something I've thought about a long time. Guitar Sam is based on Guitar Slim, who was the guy who had a big hit with "The Things I Used to Do," and he was known for, among other things, missing his gigs. [laughs] So there are a bunch of guys who later became R & B icons, who at some point in their young lives were told, "Tonight, you are Guitar Slim," because nobody knows what this guy looks like because it was before album covers and MTV. And he was also the guy who came up with the thing of the long extension cord and he used to go out from his club in New Orleans and go to the doorway of the other clubs and just play people back into his set. I'm fascinated with that period, just that moment in the world of music when I think the first time [the guitar players] heard that solid body electric guitar, [they] realized, wait a minute, something's going to change really fast and we might get left behind if we don't jump on it. And I'm always interested in those transitions.


How did you discover your lead, Gary Clark Jr.?


That was really nice serendipity because when I finished [the script], I said, oh my God, we're going to have to find an African-American kid very young who plays this kind of guitar really well. There's just not that many kids playing that guitar any more. And when our friend Louis Black, who's one of the editors of the Austin Chronicle, heard we were making this movie and said, "Well, he might be a little too young, but there's this kid named Gary Clark who I've been seeing since he was 14 years old and he's just phenomenal." So we went down to SXSW a couple years ago and saw Gary at the Continental Club, I think the night that he turned 21, and we read him the next day and it was, "Oh my God, I think he can act too." We thought it was going to take a year and it was the first person we found. Then it was almost two years before we made the movie because we just couldn't raise the money for it. But all I left Gary with was, "you're going to be playing live and I know it's not part of your act now, but you might want to practice playing while you're climbing on chairs or tables."


I also noticed this was your first onscreen role in a while. Did it come back quickly?


Yeah, I've been doing little cameos in other people's movies. I actually just did a movie down in Louisiana that's based on the James Lee Burke book "The Confederate Dead and the Mists of Time." Bertrand Tavernier is directing that and I did a little cameo playing an idiot filmmaker, so I've done those things over the years, I just haven't been in one of my own for a while. It's not that difficult, but it's like what Danny Glover's character says at the beginning of the movie — "Being able to do it is one thing. Whether anybody wants to come and look at you is another one." [laughs] And quite honestly, a lot of the reason I cast myself in the part is Danny's 6'3" and I'm 6'4" and it's a very short scene and just the fact that we were going to stand next to each other for a couple seconds during the scene, I felt like, well, the guy's just a liquor delivery man [who confronts Glover] and he's white and it's 1950, but it'll actually help if I'm a little bigger than he is.


This film and "Sunshine State" seem to share the same prevailing issues of racial inequality, even though they take place in different eras. Were there similarities to you between the two communities?


They're somewhat different, but I think the thing that's the same is that they are parallel worlds that bump into each other every once in a while. "Sunshine State" is more modern and so the apartheid isn't as heavy as it was, but culturally, the whole thing in "Sunshine State" was that our leads were Edie Falco and Angela Bassett and they're on screen for 12 seconds together, but everybody they know have scenes together because those worlds do cross more than they used to. In the case of "Honeydripper," the thing about the Deep South — there's this phrase that black people there used to say, which is "in the South, you can't get too high and in the North, you can't get too close." And what that means is that yeah, there is a ceiling on how high they're going to let you get in the South, but it's intimate. People know each other. There's black people and white people walking around who have the same last name and they know why, even though it's never mentioned in polite society.


So much has been said about the self-distribution of the film, which also has a lot to do with appealing to particular demographics. Has putting the film out there yourself felt different?


Yeah, it actually has. We feel like we can live with the poster. The trailer's pretty good. And all the things that we often say, "can you do this?" and they say, "oh yeah, we'll try to do that" and they never quite get to do, we're actually doing. So much of film distribution is knowing "OK, we know there's an audience who is going to like the picture. How do we get it to that particular audience?" That's the kind of specificity that we just haven't gotten from our experience with a regular distributor.


What interests you now as a filmmaker and how has that changed?


I still get one idea at a time. [laughs] And I don't have anything I'm working on now. I'm on strike, as a matter of fact, so I'm working on a novel that's set in 1898 that I've been working on for a while, but "Eight Men Out" took 11 years from when I wrote the first draft until I got to make it. 11 years from now, I'll be 68 years old, so although there are a lot of things that interest me, I'm trying to steer myself away from historical epics. I've got a couple of those on the shelf that I don't think I'll ever raise the money to make, which is too bad because they're good. Now when I have ideas, if it's something that's just way too expensive, I say, "Well, don't you have another idea?" And that's changed. When I was younger, I was probably more ambitious.


"Honeydripper" opens in limited release on December 28th.

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #58: Looking Forward to 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/ifc-news-podcast-58-looking-fo.php Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: David Gordon Green's "Pineapple Express," Columbia Pictures, 2008]


2007 is so 2007 — we're all about the new year. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look ahead to 2008 and list some of the things we're looking forward to, from the bad movie month of January (hello, two films from Uwe Boll!) to upcoming work from our favorite directors to fabulous films we caught at festival in the past year that are finally making their way to theaters.


Download now (MP3: 31:07 minutes, 28.5 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["There Will Be Blood"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/there-will-be-blood.php Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood," Paramount Vantage, 2007]


"There Will Be Blood," the title promises. But it never really comes, at least not in the sort of quantities we've seen in other movies this fall, like "No Country For Old Men" or "Sweeney Todd." In the film's climax, its protagonist, oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) tells his antagonist, preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), that he drinks "the blood of the land" every day. There's something to that symbolism, I think. Most of this man's transgressions are subterranean, lurking out of view of the public he needs and secretly despises.


There's a bit of Charles Foster Kane to this Plainview man, and maybe a bit of C. Montgomery Burns as well. We meet him in his youth during an extended sequence that shows his early mining ventures and his transition from silver prospecting to oil. The scenes are noteworthy for sketching out most of Plainview's character without the benefit of dialogue, but given the precise choices director and screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson makes, it's obvious the actions speak more clearly than words would. We know what kind of man he is when the ladder of the silver mine he's working on collapses while he's climbing it, and he falls to the base, breaking a leg and maybe a few ribs. Plainview claws his way out of the pit and then crawls his way back to civilization.


The action picks up again in 1911 after Plainview has begun to make his fortune in earnest. When one of his workers dies on the job, he adopts his orphan son not out of the goodness of his heart, but rather a sense that having his own son would lend his huckster sales pitches an air of familial respectability. He totes this child around everywhere, telling anyone who cares to listen that he's his "business partner." But notice how many words Plainview and his son actually share — almost none. Later, an accident befalls Plainview's son and the boy switches from an asset to a liability. Notice what happens then, as well.


Anderson's counterpoint to Plainview's character is Sunday, who is as skeptical of Plainview's hucksterisms as he is certain of his own role as a divine instrument. Plainview needs Sunday's land, Sunday wants Plainview's money for his church. So the two are pitted in direct conflict, giving Anderson the chance to ask the movie's crucial question: Does salvation come from God or from money?


Much of the middle of the movie is devoted to imagery that suggests the intermingling of these two pursuits. After Plainview ignores Sunday's request to dedicate their new oil derrick with a prayer, a series of accidents befall the venture. Then a serious setback occurs when an explosion at the well shoots out a geyser of oil. When the inky spew turns into a giant tower of fire, it's as if hell itself is pouring out of the Earth. When Sunday later confronts Plainview, the scene is established with a breathtaking shot of the heavens reflected in a murky puddle of crude. When Plainview finally talks about the "blood of the land," and you see where their respective philosophies have led both men, you have to conclude that Anderson's decided that both choices are dead ends; in the end, there will only be blood, and nothing more after that.


Day-Lewis is phenomenal, but at this point, that's to be expected. The real discovery is Dano, who matches his highly pedigreed costar in scene after scene. His performance is both shocking in its fervor and terrifying in its believability; when he "heals" a member of his church by casting Satan out of his congregation while screaming and shoving and shaking, it seems like he's the one possessed by a supernatural force, not the woman with the achy hands. (Ever the skeptic, Plainview is ready with a dynamite response: "Well, that was one goddamn hell of a show!") Sunday's Church of the Third Revelation is the setting for many of the best scenes, including Plainview's reluctant baptism, where Sunday confronts him about his mistreatment of his son.


Still, I wish "There Will Be Blood" had a bit more blood — not literally, but figuratively. As terrific as both stars are, there is something a bit inevitable about their conflict, and as convincing as Dano is, he's never really a true equal or rival for the power that Plainview craves and eventually wields. Their battle is a little one-sided and so the ending, however appropriate, is also bit of a foregone conclusion.


Regardless, the film has a powerful impact. Particularly impressive is Anderson's use of Jonny Greenwood's eerie electronic score to create a mood of underlying menace when none would seem to exist onscreen, and his remarkable recreation of turn of the century oil rush country. Technically, he's as sharp as any director working. One could even say he drinks the blood of the cinema every day.

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<![CDATA[Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud on "Persepolis"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/marjane-satrapi-and-vincent-pa.php Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi; below, "Persepolis," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


When the first of Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" graphic novels debuted in 2003, it was perhaps the biggest and most acclaimed crossover success of the medium since Art Spiegelman's Holocaust allegory "Maus" in 1992. Yet it's the film adaptation of Satrapi's memoir of her formative years during the Islamic revolution in Iran that may be without precedent. Already vetted by the film festivals in Toronto, New York and Cannes (where it won a special jury prize), "Persepolis" is coming to theaters this month riding a wave of best animated film honors from around the world, though France's decision to select the film as its national entry into the foreign-language film category at this year's Oscars proves it's no mere toon.


However, when I spoke with Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, a fellow member of the French art comics scene who shares an art studio and a co-writing and co-directing credit on the film with Satrapi, they were less proud of the accolades than of the work itself. Instead, the duo were particularly happy with the fact that they had stuck to their independent roots, especially considering that before Satrapi set out to make the film herself, she had fielded offers from producers pitching a live-action version starring Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez. "Coming from the underground, we never wanted to make compromises," Satrapi said. "We got into comics to have the freedom to do exactly what we wanted." Anyone who has seen the film knows the pair made the right decision.


As cartoonists, you're both used to working alone, so what was it like collaborating with another artist?


Vincent Paronnaud: It went very well for many reasons. From a technical point of view, we wrote this script together from the beginning and talked about any potential problems in advance. While working, we weren't always watching over each other. But we didn't have to; the decisions had all been made beforehand.


Marjane Satrapi: Before we dealt with anyone else on our staff, we had already had the discussion between the two of us. That's why it's extremely difficult to say who did what [on the movie] because we did everything together. Vincent would say something, then I would add something. At the end, you have this thing, but it was made by both of us so it's difficult to draw a line between our contributions. Everything we did, we did together.


How did the fact that you two are old friends affect your collaboration?


MS: The trust you have in people, that really helps. We knew each other for many years before this project. I knew who he was and he knew who I was. For instance, Vincent is someone who hates to read contracts. I hate to read contracts too. So my husband read the contracts, I signed the contract and I told him, "You have to sign," and then he signs.


VP: [laughs] You get the best results in a climate like this — of trust and affection and friendship.


MS: Basically, most of the problems start there. One person wants to get more credit. We were always a "we." And as I always say to people, "You know the Coen brothers?" "We're the Satrapi/Paronnaud brother and sister."


How much of the finished film did you two actually draw yourselves?


MS: We had a budget of $8 million, which is not a big budget for an animated movie. When you have to pay the salary of 100 people for two years, that's not a lot of money. So since both of us knew how to draw, whatever we couldn't afford to pay for, we did ourselves. The storyboards we made entirely ourselves. The characters — more than 650 characters in the movie — we drew ourselves. Both of us come from underground comics, so we're used to working a lot for no money.


Would you have liked a larger budget?


MS: The movie business is not about the money. Of course, you need money to make the movie. If you have a small budget, adapt yourself. Having $200 million dollars doesn't ensure that you're definitely going to make a good movie. There's so many examples that prove that.


VP: Coming from the underground, we knew how to improvise. You have one idea and then you realize that technically it's not possible. So you always have a plan B. But having to use your plan B is a good thing, because it forces you to explore ideas you wouldn't normally try. At the end, [the smaller budget] was a good thing.


The film is very faithful to the graphic novel, but was there anything omitted from the film because you found it worked in the book but didn't work in the movie?


MS: Absolutely! The first script that we wrote was about twice as big as the final version. There were things that seemed extremely important when we storyboarded it, and we might have even put it into the animatic. But then you watch it and you say, "I'm just repeating the same thing twice and it's destroying the rhythm of the story." I wasn't sitting there going, "Oh, this is my great idea, it goes in!" If it doesn't work, we'd just cut it and throw it out.


VP: The marvelous thing about this work is we have two completely different things that come from this same story. They're very similar, but at the same time, they are so different. It's not a transposition; it really is more like an adaptation. That's why I felt like I had so much freedom in this project, because Marjane was smart enough to know when to put the book down.


MS: But I have to tell you something. At the beginning, because he's very delicate — I know he doesn't look like it, but he's a very delicate gentleman…


[Paronnaud laughs]


MS: …he was so much more attached to the book than I was! He would constantly say, "Can we do that?" Because he didn't want to upset me.


Have your friends or family ever disagreed with your version of an event in the graphic novel or movie?


MS: This is my personal point of view. Whenever I've written something nasty about someone, I've never used their real names or real faces for that reason. Take Marcus, my boyfriend. Now, from my point of view, he's an asshole. But if you ask [him], of course, he'd disagree, and he's right to do that because he was a 19-year-old boy and I wanted him to be everything in my life. And it was too much for him; he couldn't do it. But he doesn't have any way to express himself and I do. It's like having a duel with someone who doesn't have a gun. I won't shoot somebody who can't defend himself. So out of respect for these other points of view — which I know are also true — I never do it. So I've never had problems like that.


VP: There's this confusion nowadays between reality and the truth. We're not looking for the reality. We have a story we want to tell. So the details, like what the dog looked like or where this event really happened, are not important.


MS: This is not a documentary of my life. From the second that you take any story, no matter how true it is, and turn it into a script, you create fiction. You have to cheat — otherwise, you don't have a story.


When I was at the Cannes Film Festival, I went into a bookstore and found all these gorgeous French graphic novels that I'd never seen before and couldn't read because I don't know French. How do we get more French underground artists published here?


MS: It'll happen little by little. When "Persepolis" was first published in the United States, I was the only book my publisher had that was a translated comic because people think Americans don't like comics that come from other countries. So I was the first one. But others have started to get translated now. In France, we have this great tradition of comics and graphic novels, but you have all the best cartoonists. You have Art Spiegelman and you have Chris Ware and you have…


VP: Joe Sacco!


MS: You have Joe Sacco and you have Daniel Clowes and you have Robert Crumb. They come from your country, so you have the best of them. Why do you want us?


When I see stuff I'm unfamiliar with, I get curious.


VP: There definitely is a lot of good stuff in France.


Any recommendations?


MS: [points to Paronnaud] His stuff!


"Persepolis" opens in limited release December 25th.

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<![CDATA[Straight Outta Digi: The Best Non-Theatrical Debuts of '07]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/straight-outta-digi-the-best-n.php Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Nao Omori and Shinobu Terajima in "Vibrator," Kino Video, 2007]


So, here's the return of the Revenge of the Straight-to-Video Best-of muster roll because, as we should all know by now, fewer films can be (or at least are) affordably shown theatrically than ever before, and as a result, scores of worthwhile movies see their first "release" in the U.S. on DVD every year. But where are the kudos? A film that premieres on disc can't qualify for inclusion in critics' polls and award systems, despite the fact that the receipts are often higher than a specialty theatrical run would garner since the rentable/buyable indie or import in question is far more accessible (Amazonable, Netflixable, etc.) and can be seen by more people. Of course, some of this year's standouts are decades old, so blame and shame cannot be laid solely upon contemporary distributors; perhaps, instead of kvetching, we should declare a toast to the digital video formats we have and ones to come, which as they keep people home and from tossing a ten-spot at the newest tripe, also democratize and egalitarianize the history of cinema. Skol!


1. "Vibrator" (Dir. Ryuichi Hiroki, 2003; Kino) [Amazon link]


Japanese ultra-naturalism-cum-subjective plunge, tracing the ersatz romance between an unstable bulimic girl (the amazing Shinobu Terajima) and a slack but sweet-natured truck driver (Nao Omori). Urban cool, until it sneaks up to your soft side with a sledgehammer.



2. "Pitfall" (Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962; Criterion Collection) [Amazon link]


Teshigahara's feature debut: A miner and his son, escaping from slave-like employment, wander into the remains of a deunionized coal mining town, followed by a company assassin and faced with the town's population of company-murdered ghosts soon after. "Pitfall" was the most impressive film debut of 1962, beating out, I dare say, even Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood."



3. "Wooden Crosses" (Dir. Raymond Bernard, 1932; Eclipse) [Amazon link]


Arguably the greatest of the early talkie WWI antiwar sagas, beating out Milestone's revered "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Gance's "J'Accuse" (partly because the film is peerlessly cynical about military life and its purpose), this lost and found resonator follows a ramshackle regiment of French trench soldiers in a seemingly pointless undulation between irreverent downtime camaraderie and combat experiences that are tantamount to running into a plane propeller.



4. "FIVE dedicated to Ozu" (Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2003; Kino) [Amazon link]


On one hand, AK's mega-minimalist experiment is the antithesis of everything we take movies to be — momentum, speed, energy, character, story, glamour, visual saturation. On the other, it's so winnowed down, so pure in its affect that it comes close to being distilled cinema — nothing but the ping-pong between images, your eyeballs, time, and your cerebral cortex acting and reacting, observing the film and itself in the process.



5. "Green Chair" (Dir. Park Chul-soo, 2005; ImaginAsian/Genius Products) [Amazon link]


A tempestuous, achingly lovely, slightly batty and overwhelmingly horny Korean romance that begins with a familiar news item: A thirty-something woman caught and persecuted for having a sexual relationship with an underage teen. But the upshot is much more complex — the two vrooming lovers fit together like ragged puzzle pieces; they have fun as they gamble everything that society holds dear to be together, and have more spirited, moving and realistic sex than I think I've ever seen in a mainstream movie.



6. "On the Silver Globe" (Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1987; Polart) [Amazon link]


Torrential, notorious, incomplete, scary crazy Polish sci-fi — canceled in mid-shoot and reassembled after the fall of communism — by Europe's reigning hyperbolist.



7. "Radio On" (Dir. Christopher Petit, 1979; Plexifilm) [Amazon link]


Rich in zeitgeisty goodness, Petit's debut freeze-dries England on the dusk of the punk era in the backseat of a sullen roadtrip, during which the landscape does most of the talking.



8. "The Way I Spent the End of the World" (Dir. Catalin Mitulescu, 2006; Film Movement) [Amazon link]


The Romanian New Wave's generational anthem film, returning yet again to the Ceauşescu regime and its downfall, but with a tempestuous high school heroine (Doroteea Petre, a trophy winner at Cannes) lost in the burgs who defies categorization. Might hit theaters in '08.



9. "The Castle" (Dir. Michael Haneke, 1997; Kino) [Amazon link]


Haneke's Austrian TV version of Kafka's novel is so lean and wintry and moldy and claustrophobic, it may be a definitive adaptation.



10. "And Quiet Flows the Don" (Dir. Sergei Gerasimov, 1957; Kino) [Amazon link]


This five-and-a-half-hour epic is famously regarded as the "Gone With The Wind" of Soviet cinema — a rambling, episodic, and muscular peasant melodrama based on a novel by Nobelist Mikhail Sholokhov that follows two extremely unlucky lovers as they face untold tragedy before, during and after the October Revolution. But actually, it's all about sex and the struggle between traditional agrarian-social values and the messy reality of sex desired, refused, consummated, forcibly taken and child-productive.



11. "Moscow Elegy" (Dir. Alexander Sokurov, 1987; Ideale Audience) [Amazon link]


Sokurov's salute to his mentor Andrei Tarkovsky one year after the master's death is personal without getting personal. Spare on biography, the film is an unaccented eulogy, a melancholy portrait of the man at work (on "Nostalghia" and "The Sacrifice") and at repose. Typically, Sokurov finds reason to eulogize Russia as well in the mix of footage (some rough and small gauge, some old and found); being quintessentially Russian, he rarely abandons an opportunity to examine the mournfulness of the landscape that surrounds his subject.



12. "The Freethinker" (Dir. Peter Watkins, 1994; New Yorker Video) [Amazon link]


Watkins' four-and-a-half-hour essay on the life and legacy of the famed Swedish playwright August Strindberg, the controversial misanthrope, notoriously disastrous family man and self-destructive genius, is no mere mock doc, but a collage of formal ideas that mixes faux-documentary elements with cohesive dramatization, archival footage, photos, huge chunks of Strindbergian text, direct camera address, group discussions, documentary footage of the making of the film itself, texts by Watkins about Strindberg, the film and Watkins' outrageous, but indisputable, summary evaluation of modern media, and so on.



13. "Black Test Car" (Dir. Yasuzo Masumura, 1962; Fantoma) [Amazon link]


Running neck and neck with notorious auteur maudit Seijun Suzuki as the most outrageous and breakneck Japanese pulp force of the '60s, Masumura is only now being revealed to us, one DVD at a time. This ridiculously feverish and visually elegant thriller about industrial espionage is another brick in a distinctive wall.



14. "The Doll" (Dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1919; Kino) [Amazon link]


Midway through his German period, Lubitsch knocked out this cardboard fairy tale answer to "Lars and the Real Girl," a year before "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." Still witty as hell.



15. "The Call of Cthulhu" (Dir. Andrew Leman, 2005; Microcinema DVD) [Amazon link]


An "all-new silent" film, scrupulously faithful to H.P. Lovecraft's seminal 1928 tale, that runs only 47 minutes but packs enough storytelling and energetic incident to fill out a mini-series. Leman et al. cut every corner and freely employ obvious miniatures to tell the tale within a tale within a tale, from the Providence streets all the way to the mid-Pacific night and the stop-motion appearance of the Old God himself. Manages to be creepy in a cheap, unstable, kids-pretending-in-the-woods kind of way.



Runners-up: "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (Dir. David Lee Fisher, 2005; Image Entertainment), "Able Edwards" (Dir. Graham Robertson, 2004; Heretic Films), "Isolation" (Dir. Billy O'Brien, 2005; First Look Pictures), "Horrors of Malformed Men" (Dir. Teruo Ishii, 1969; Synapse Films), "Casshern" (Dir. Kasuaki Kiriya, 2004; Paramount Home Video), "The District" (Dir. Aron Gauder, 2004; Atopia). Special mention goes to the long-unseen and largely intolerable anti-film Jean Isidore Isou's "Venom and Eternity" (1951), presented in Kino's "Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema from 1928-1954" set, and a historical freak you need experience only once.



[Additional photo: "The Way I Spent The End of the World," Film Movement, 2006]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 27th, 2007 and January 4th, 2008]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/opening-this-week-december-27t.php Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Denzel Washington in "The Great Debaters," MGM, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week (and next!).


"Alien vs. Predator: Requiem"

The eternal question of "who would win in a fight, an alien or a predator" wasn't quite answered the first time around, clearing the way for this second chance to watch our favorite '80s sci-fi creatures (sorry, gremlins) duke it out at the expense of the human race. We don't expect gold from a movie about warring franchises, here's hoping this sequel might be better, since original director Paul W.S. Anderson had no hand in its making.

Opens wide December 25th (official site).


"A Bloody Aria"

This South Korean thriller from director Shin-yeon Won tracks a womanizing college professor who suspects a group of dangerous youths of killing a student he attempted to seduce.

Opens in limited release on January 4th (official site).


"The Bucket List"

Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson team up in this geriatric buddy comedy about two terminally ill cancer patients who head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die. We're a little miffed to learn that this film, directed by Rob Reiner (really?), has been receiving a number of strong reviews, even earning a spot on the National Board of Review's best films of 2007. (Again, really?)

Opens in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto on December 25th (official site).


"Chuck Close"

The late filmmaker Marion Cajori's final film chronicles the career of painter Chuck Close, popularly known as the re-inventor of portraiture. Close's subjects — family, friends, artists — offer insight into his work and Close's influence on their own. Cajori passed away shortly after completion of the film in 2006.

Opens in New York on December 26th (official site).


"The Great Debaters"

Denzel Washington directs and stars in this inspirational teacher movie about a professor at an all-African-American college in Texas who leads his underdog debate team into a competition with Harvard in 1935. With a strong supporting turn by Forest Whitaker, plus Oprah Winfrey as one of the film's producers, we're pretty sure this film will make a whole bunch of noise come Oscar season. Sure, we've seen Washington play similar roles recently (we certainly remember the "Titans"), we've no problem watching him do it again.

Opens wide on December 25th (official site).


"Honeydripper"

John Sayles' latest Southern-set drama is about a club owner (Danny Glover) who attempts to pass off a vagrant as a famous guitar player one night in his club in hopes of saving himself from bankruptcy. The film went on to win the best screenplay award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival earlier this year.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles on December 28th (official site).


"The Killing of John Lennon"

It appears that 2008 will feature competing Mark David Chapman projects, as the man who killed John Lennon is the subject of dueling biopics in the new year. First up is this one, an indie from television director Andrew Piddington that features relative newcomer Jonas Bell in the role of the assassin. Much of the film's dialogue is lifted directly from Chapman's real-life journal, allowing the viewer to get into the mind of a murderer who killed for fame.

Opens in New York on January 2nd (official site).


"One Missed Call"

2008 starts off slowly with this J-horror remake of the Takashi Miike film "Chakushin ari" featuring Shannyn Sossamon and Edward Burns doing battle against dark forces responsible for victims getting voice mail messages from their future selves detailing the time of their deaths. Our favorite line of 2008 so far? "That's not my ring tone." Sounds like a horror masterpiece in the making.

Opens wide on January 4th (official site).


"The Orphanage"

These days we get excited about anything Guillermo del Toro is involved in. The "Pan's Labyrinth" director had a strong hand in bringing to life this Spanish horror import about a woman who starts to get concerned about her son's new imaginary friends. Borrowing elements from other "creepy children" horror films such as "The Others" and del Toro's own "The Devil's Backbone" certainly should bolster the suspense.

Opens in limited release on December 28th (official site).


"Persepolis"

Comic book artist Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novels detail life in Iran during the Islamic revolution from the perspective of a young and precocious girl. After winning the Grand Jury Prize earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, her directorial debut made numerous headlines after being banned from both the Bangkok International Film Festival and Satrapi's homeland of Iran despite being one of the best received movies of the year.

Opens in limited release on December 25th (official site).


"There Will Be Blood"

Daniel Day-Lewis alone has us bubbling with anticipation. But the teaming of our favorite method actor with the not-prolific-enough director Paul Thomas Anderson for a film inspired by Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil!" leaves us positively verklempt. The film already has won a slew of awards, been on a number of top ten lists and topped this year's indieWIRE critics' poll, and while we can't predict whether Day-Lewis will add a second Oscar to his mantle, we're sure he'll at least get a nomination. Kudos to Anderson for stepping out of his comfort zone with what originated as a writing experiment for the director after coming across Sinclair's novel.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles on December 26th (official site).

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<![CDATA[2007: The Five Best Retreads]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-the-five-best-retreads.php Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in "3:10 to Yuma," Lionsgate, 2007]


Every year a slew of newspapers run trend pieces about the lack of originality in Hollywood, citing the flood of remakes and sequels. This year, the blathering reached a numbing level of regularity — as if recycling material hasn't been the backbone of Hollywood and every other mixture of art and commerce from time immemorial. From the silent period when film serials were the rage, whether it be "The Perils of Pauline" to "Les Vampires," to the "Charlie Chan" and "Mr. Moto" cycles of the 1930s, the "Thin Man" films of the 1940s, and all the way up to the James Bonds and Jason Bournes of today — the film business is built on regurgitation — and the key is in how it is presented rather than what. There were plenty of imaginative retreads this year. Here's a list of my five favorites.



Two Wrenching Departures

Directed by Ken Jacobs


A devastating memorial to the physical presences of dearly departed friends (and former collaborators), Ken Jacobs' "Two Wrenching Departures" was first presented as a live performance at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1990. After the deaths of Jack Smith ("Flaming Creatures") and Bob Fleischner in the October of 1989, he prepared one of his Nervous System pieces, a series of improvised works featuring dual 16mm projectors that deconstruct images into writhing shards. In 2007, he rejiggered it for DV, and it's a masterpiece. He slows down and loops individual movements to create a throbbing, elegiac ode to the expressive power of gesture and of cinema itself.



I Think I Love My Wife

Directed by Chris Rock


One of the most intelligent Hollywood films of the year was, sadly, one of the worst reviewed. No matter, as this remake of Eric Rohmer's "Chloe in the Afternoon" (1973) will last longer than any number of pithy pans. In updating Rohmer's elegant classic, Rock artfully honors the spirit of the original while infusing it with his own acidic wit and an especially insightful examination of black middle-class life. Rock's dilemma of whether to enter into an affair with an ex-flame or stay true to his wife is pure cliché, yet his treatment of it drips with ambiguity — as his faithfulness is borne almost as much out of maintaining his social status as it is out of love. Filled with pungent vulgarities and an ending of shocking sublimity, it's a viciously underrated work of art.



3:10 to Yuma

Directed by James Mangold


James Mangold's crisp western is a textbook example of how to successfully update a Hollywood classic by expanding the original without cheapening it. Delmar Daves' 1957 original is a taut psychological duel fought with words in a cramped hotel room. The remake enlarges the scope to include a few more chases and gunfights to fulfill the whiz-bang needs of modern audiences, but all of it emerges organically from the original film's plot and much of it deepens the theme of masculine pride. Anchored by nuanced, gritty performances from Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, this is top shelf entertainment — an oater that doesn't feel out of place alongside the Manns, Boettichers, and Fords.



Belle Toujours

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira


A slender sequel to Luis Bunuel's "Belle du Jour" (1967), "Belle Toujours" focuses on aging cad Henri Husson, a role reprised by Michel Piccoli. Piccoli, whose bird-like intensity has turned jowly and ruminative, takes a leisurely tour around Paris, searching town for Severine, the blond trophy wife and occasional prostitute he knew those many years ago. It's an offhandedly graceful essay on aging, as Husson remembers the sexual escapades of his youth and wistfully glances at an oil painted nude. When he finally catches up with Severine (now played by Bulle Ogier, replacing Catherine Deneuve), he finds he still has the energy left for one more act of deviltry — and de Oliveira doffs his cap to Bunuel with a final, surreal visual flourish.



Live Free or Die Hard

Directed by Len Wiseman


A welcome blast of muscular irrationality, this immensely entertaining fourth entry in the "Die Hard" franchise finds John McClane once again caught in the path of a wily psycho about to wreak havoc during a national holiday — only this time, it's Independence Day. Fully aware of McClane's superfluity in an age of remote-controlled missiles, Wiseman and screenwriter Mark Bomback have created a self-reflexive spectacle that cracks so wise even the big action blowups seem to be shot with a giant smirk. This frees them to think up the most outrageous stunts possible, including a taxicab missile and a duel between a big rig and a fighter plane. Reality is of no concern, and with Willis willing to play along, the narrative percolates even when things don't go boom.



[Additional photos: "Two Wrenching Departures," Ken Burns; "I Think I Love My Wife," Fox Searchlight; "3:10 to Yuma," Lionsgate; "Belle Toujours," New Yorker; "Live Free or Die Hard," 20th Century Fox]

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<![CDATA[2007: The Five Best Directorial Debuts]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-the-five-best-directorial.php Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Nick Schager

IFC News


[Photo: "Persepolis," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


Amidst all the new features from established auteurs, it would be easy to overlook the fact that 2007 was a banner year for debuts. In an effort to counteract any potential disregard, here are five films from six first-time helmers who, on the evidence of these maiden productions, will likely be heard from again very soon.



Persepolis

Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi


Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel series "Persepolis" has been rightly acclaimed for its blend of humor, pathos, and social commentary, yet its stark black-and-white visual style hardly seemed a natural fit for the big-screen. Any concerns about lost-in-translation problems, however, disappeared from the opening frames of Satrapi's animated gem (co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud), which bursts with vibrant, prickly, poignant life. Satrapi's film isn't just a faithful adaptation but an energized improvement of its source material, lending the author's personal saga of oppression and exile an aesthetic fluidity and vitality that few animated efforts, of this year or any other, can match.



Away From Her

Directed by Sarah Polley


An adaptation of an Alice Munro short story about a long-married couple torn apart by Alzheimer's, "Away From Her" would be a remarkable feature from a filmmaker of any age. The fact that it was authored by 28-year-old actress-turned-director Sarah Polley, though, makes its success that much more stunning. It's a tale marked by a gentle touch and a humanistic interest in the frustration, pain, loneliness and resilient optimism that accompanies growing old. And its deeply felt sensitivity extends to the treatment of its magnificent leads Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie, whose performances are given room to breathe and blossom by Polley's composed camerawork.



The Band's Visit

Directed by Eran Kolirin


On its face, Eran Kolirin's wry dramedy appears poised for typical culture-clash mushiness. What it ultimately delivers, however, is an affecting dose of subtle, heartfelt sweetness. An Egyptian police band's accidental arrival in an isolated Israeli village is the premise for this sly investigation of communication barriers, with the unexpected meeting between Egyptians and Israelis standing as an obvious allegory for current Middle East relations. Yet the beauty of "The Band's Visit" is that it never feels the need to overtly remark upon its larger concerns, or allow them to interfere with its moving portrait of lonely souls in desperate need of reciprocated kindness.



12:08 East of Bucharest

Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu


Corneliu Porumboiu's "12:08 East of Bucharest" is more overtly comedic than last year's heralded Romanian import "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," but that's not to say it's any less profound a work. Revolving around a TV talk show host's attempt to produce a program about whether the 1989 revolution that expelled Ceausescu from power occurred in his rural town, the film commences with dry joviality and slowly develops into a piercing — and piercingly funny — meditation on the impossibility of establishing concrete truths. Its elegant bookending shots of streetlights going on and off (visual representations of spreading politicization) are textbook examples of understated symbolism done right.



King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Directed by Seth Gordon


This rollicking cinematic depiction of videogame culture came courtesy of documentarian Seth Gordon, who considers his chosen social environment with sincere thoughtfulness free of patronizing mockery. Gordon's non-fiction crowd-pleaser thrives partly because of its thrilling underdog narrative involving the quest by family man Steve Wiebe to topple arcade game legend Billy Mitchell's record Donkey Kong score. Brimming with good guys, bad guys and colorful peripheral figures, it's a true-life tale fit for a Hollywood film. Ultimately, though, its resonance comes less from its twists and turns than from the director's focus on the emotional and psychological forces compelling his subjects to compete.



[Additional photos: "Persepolis," Sony Pictures Classics; "Away From Her," Lionsgate; "The Band's Visit," Sony Pictures Classics; "12:08 East of Bucharest," Tartan; "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," Picturehouse]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 21st, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/opening-this-week-december-21s.php Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Aaron Stanford and Zooey Deschanel in "Flakes," IFC First Take, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Charlie Wilson's War"

Honestly, we wish we were a bit more excited about this project than we actually are. Mike Nichols returns to lighter fare after the solid "Closer," while writer Aaron Sorkin attempts to recover from the debacle that was "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman playing politics? No National Board of Review lovin' will make this look any better to us.

Opens wide (official site).


"Flakes"

Clothing designer Zooey Deschanel teams up with aspiring rock musician and cereal bar manager Aaron Stanford after discovering that an entrepreneur has stolen their million dollar idea in this indie comedy from director Michael Lehmann. Forget that Lehmann directed the lame Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore rom-com "Because I Said So" earlier this year and remember his first full-length directorial effort "Heathers," and you'll see why we'll always will give Lehmann another shot. Wait, he also made "Hudson Hawk"? Hoooh boy…

Opens in limited release (official site).


"National Treasure: Book of Secrets"

Nicolas Cage returns as treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates in this action adventure pic that asks you to check your brain at the door. We still don't know what the appeal of this genre is, but after the original 2004 film made over $150 million domestically without a plot (like Gates, we looked hard for one), it's no surprise Walt Disney Pictures greenlit another adventure that finds Cage in search of the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary that may unlock a worldwide conspiracy. Oooh, tension!

Opens wide (official site).


"P.S. I Love You"

Hilary Swank plays a recent widow who discovers love letters written by her recently deceased husband (Gerard Butler, minus the massive muscles) in order to help her move on with her life. We're suspect this film may qualify as the creepiest romantic drama of the season, but we're willing to put our trust in this directorial effort from "Fisher King" screenwriter Richard LaGravenese in his second teaming with Swank this year.

Opens wide (official site).


"Steep"

Documentarian Mark Obenhaus traces the legacy of extreme skiing from its early pioneers to the daredevils of today. The film premiered earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"

The classic Stephen Sondheim musical gets the Tim Burton treatment, which means lots of gothic makeup, a flamboyant Johnny Depp and some voluptuous… acting from Helena Bonham Carter. In 19th century London, Benjamin Barker (Depp) opens a barbershop upstairs from the piemaker Mrs. Lovett (Carter) before the two team up for some sinister dealings. Not to give anything away, but expect some macabre humor that can only be directed from the man who brought us "Beetlejuice." After a decade of hits and misses for the director ("Big Fish" — okay, "Planet of the Apes" — not okay), Burton is getting his strongest reviews yet, and so far he's nabbed both the National Board of Review award for best director and his first Golden Globe nomination. It's about time.

Opens wide (official site).


"Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"

The Apatow gang tackles the über-serious awards genre of the music biopic, as John C. Reilly inhabits the fictional role of music legend Dewey Cox that recently earned the actor a long-deserved and very real Golden Globe nomination. Reilly fits right in alongside the Apatow regulars in this country fried spoof that looks more akin to "Airplane!" than "Scary Movie." While the film's first trailer seriously lacked the funny, we still have faith in our boy Judd, who we're hoping finishes 2007 three for three. Not bad for the smartest man in entertainment.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #57: Looking Back at 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/ifc-news-podcast-57-looking-ba.php Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Richard Gere as Billy the Kid Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There," Weinstein Company, 2007]


The western returned in full force, the musical biopic was reinvented and the musical reemerged in scruffier form while the serious war film took a beating at the box office. This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look back at the trends and themes of 2007.


Download now (MP3: 27:20 minutes, 25 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[2007: Five Shamefully Overlooked Performances]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-five-shamefully-overlooke.php Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Carice van Houten in "Black Book," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


If we don't award Oscars to stand-up comedians for their celebrity impersonations, why is Cate Blanchett's fun but one-dimensional, gender-bending Dylan gag considered by some to be a lock? What is it about a thick Boston accent and coked-up trashiness that have critics' circles going gaga for "Gone Baby Gone" costar Amy Ryan? And whether he's a neurotic brother ("The Savages") or the desperate kind ("Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"), hasn't Philip Seymour Hoffman been praised enough, and for juicier roles? Awards politics be damned, here are some outstanding performances that deserve a second look.



Carice van Houten ("Black Book"), Best Actress


As the keystone of Paul Verhoeven's sensationalist Dutch Resistance epic, the Dutch beauty won a Rembrandt and was nominated for a European Film Award, yet on American soil, her war-weary poker face and plucky physicality have been quickly dismissed by those who cheekily reduced the film to "Schindler's Showgirls." Baring her body and soul to the head of the Gestapo, van Houten is "a regular Mata Hari, Greta Garbo in the flesh," as she dives into icy waters while bullets whizz by, gets groped by the drunken naked slob who ordered said shooting, bleaches her pubes to hide her Jewish identity and dramatically eats a chocolate bar to counteract a fatal poisoning before leaping off a balcony while drugged — all in the name of survival. Yet it's not about selling pity. We may cringe when a cauldron of shit is poured on her head (which reportedly caused the poor actress to vomit between takes), but she finds empowerment not only by outsmarting the enemy but in seizing hedonistic pleasure for herself in an existence of constant strife. Now that's liberation!



Thomas Turgoose ("This is England"), Best Actor


Another anchoring lead getting more kudos overseas is Britain's now-teenaged Turgoose, whose turn as a fatherless 12-year-old in Shane Meadows' semi-autobiographical drama earned him the British Independent Film Award for Best Newcomer. Though "Tommo" lacks prior acting experience, he's eerily instinctual and drips charisma as Shaun, a boy who is folded into a surrogate family of ska-loving skinheads during the Thatcher years. Far from your garden variety precocious kid star who can overenunciate grown-up dialogue on cue, Turgoose expresses his developmental curiosity through his eyes as if he weren't performing at all — he's sensitive yet skeptically hardened, and in ways far more so than others his age. When Turgoose's young Shaun is eased into shaving his head onscreen, he blurts "Just freakin' do it" and instantly, we long for Doc Martens and initiation, too. As he makes out with a girl much older than him, it's only creepy for a beat before we stop second-guessing his maturity. After falling out with the non-racist skins and falling into a hornet's nest of National Front hatemongers, his self-actualization about growing up too quickly is almost palpable. When was the last time a child actor could make you feel your own innocence lost?



Kate Winslet ("Romance & Cigarettes"), Best Supporting Actress


Fine, fine, Mrs. Mendes is no slouch in her field with five Oscar noms and counting, but that's no reason to disavow each time she's worthy of some gold shine on her mantle. Instead of the usual playing down of her loveliness as the smart alterna-frump, Winslet's redheaded Scottish lass in Queens is the living embodiment of carnal fantasy in John Turturro's ambitious, flamboyantly depressing musical. "God, you are one crude broad," observes Winslet's lover, a married fireman played by James Gandolfini, upon hearing her bedroom request to take it up her, uh… "stovepipe." Unlike her hilariously callous meta-cameo on HBO's "Extras," there's more depth here than just potty-mouthed shock. Maybe her knockdown catfight with Susan Sarandon in a lingerie store will only seem silly in the context of Christopher Walken's hammy emergence from a dressing room, but other musical numbers offer telling moments: Winslet's poorly supported breasts undulating not-so-erotically while she croons along with Connie Francis in a hotel bed and hallway convey a symbolic vulnerability, and a break-up sequence proves unexpectedly bruising given that the actress sings of her heartbreak from underwater.



Paul Dano ("There Will Be Blood"), Best Supporting Actor


Paul Thomas Anderson's honest-to-god masterpiece (this writer's favorite of the year) has so much meat on its bones — Daniel Day-Lewis' byzantine antihero-cum-villain, Robert Elswit's cinematography, Jack Fisk's production design, Jonny Greenwood's mesmerizing score, et al.) — that Paul Dano's single voice in the collaboration is sure to be overshadowed. Paradoxically unassuming and shifty when he first tells Day-Lewis' self-made oil baron about the bubblin' crude below his family's ranch, Dano soon resurfaces as his own twin brother (or are they the same person? Debates continue!), who is a young fanatical prophet whose fire-and-brimstone sermonizing belies his boyish frame. Whether he is the object of a megalomaniac's humiliation or subtly relishing in the role of humiliator himself, Dano can fiercely hold his own family hostage at dinner time, then stand his onscreen ground against a language-chewing monster of depthless intensity — not Day-Lewis's character Plainview, but the method actor himself, who is let off his leash by Anderson in a final scene that might leave a less secure thesp permanently scarred. With just this role, Dano shakes the quirky "Little Miss Sunshine" tweeness off his persona, guaranteeing we won't ever lump him together with lightweight indie twerps like Zach Braff.



Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy ("L'Iceberg"), Best Ensemble


Make that six overlooked performances both in front of and behind the camera, since there's no way to separate this Belgian filmmaking and co-starring trio who bring their respective circus backgrounds to this sweet, vibrant and inventive gem of a comedy. Gordon plays a suburban fast food manager who, after accidentally locking herself in the walk-in fridge overnight, leaves her unattentive husband (Abel) and kids behind in a life-resetting quest to find a real iceberg. Although Romy plays a smaller and insignificant role in the film, his co-directors Abel and Gordon anchor the unmistakably Tati-esque "L'Iceberg" with their highly theatrical and often wordless performances. Awkwardly accentuating her Olive Oyl stature as gracefully as the best Silent Era comedians, Gordon dances, runs, crawls, pulls, stretches, pivots, stumbles and otherwise contorts with a deadpan precision incomparable to anyone off the top of my head. That isn't to discredit Abel, who butters his bread or yawns for what seems like half an eternity, or dresses himself while half-asleep so that his penis flops out of his shirt sleeve; here's a skilled technician in the art of comic repetition and long drawn-out gags.



[Additional photos: "Black Book," Sony Pictures Classics; "This Is England," IFC First Take; "Romance & Cigarettes," Boroturro; "There Will Be Blood," Paramount Vantage; "L'Iceberg," First Run Features]

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<![CDATA["Once," "Feed"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/once-feed.php Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Once," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


Even before I'd seen "Once," the tiny Irish musical that could, it was apparent that those who had seen it and loved it — which was all of them — constituted a kind of epiphanic tribe, attempting unconfidently to communicate to the rest of us their magical experience. Once I saw it, I helplessly joined their frustrated company and word of mouth, handicapped by "just go" inexpressiveness, has kept the film in theaters for seven lovely months (so far, amounting to a roughly 100-to-one profit-to-budget ratio). Of course, John Carney's modest movie can suffer as any movie could from the toxicity of hype surplus, which may be one of the reasons why articulation of "Once"'s pleasures has been so difficult. The other reasons, I suspect, have something to do with "Once"'s essential sincerity, unvarnished simplicity and basic movieness — why else have people been drawn to cinema since 1890, if not for the empathic connection for fellow humans and bearing witness to their expressive dramas?


"Once" is nothing more than a romance-that-never-happened idyll, set in Dublin and taking place entirely between an itinerant busker (full-time folk rocker Glen Hansard) and a Czech immigrant (real-life folkie Markéta Irglová) as they meet and, simply, begin to make music. Of course, Hansard's keening, aching songs (several of which were culled from his years as front man to The Frames, of which Carney was also a member) work their peculiar magic, and Hansard sings them with selfless passion. But what makes this aspect of "Once" so powerful is the songs' context: Hansard's earnest, nameless street musician is, under his friendly surface, virtually boiling with grief over the betrayal and loss of his girlfriend, now in London. He only expresses himself in the songs, and once they begin to explode into such naked wailing, it's hard to imagine any viewer remaining untrammeled by their visceral thrust.


In conjunction with that, there's Irglová playing a completely disingenuous single mom with an errant husband, and her rapport with Hansard comes so easily that while neither can embrace the other, the film plays much like the "In the Mood for Love" of folkie indies. Its grown-up assumptions about adult behavior and history are bracing. (No one in the film resembles a stock dramatic character — even Hansard's gruff vacuum shop "da" is revealed to be matter-of-factly gracious and generous, introvertedly bowled over by his son's first effort at recording). It may be a film that's impossible to dislike, despite the fact that it's formally and visually the cruddiest movie released to American screens since "Chuck & Buck." But like Miguel Arteta's film, it hardly mattered — the honest glimpse of lost humanity did the work. It's also, for what it's worth, a perfect answer to the question of what happened to the musical. Instead of attempting to reconstitute the naïve tropes of the '30s-'60s musicals, tropes which were themselves leftover constructions from vaudeville or fall into the camp abyss, "Once" integrates the songs into the action realistically with not only the timeworn but sensible let's-put-on-a-show numbers, but also otherwise — as with the exquisite long traveling shot of Irglová walking home at night listening to one of Hansard's lyricless tunes on earphones and singing her own words to it as she goes. Everyone will have a personal reaction to the film, and everyone will respond from their stomachs to different moments, but I'll say this: the first impromptu of Hansard's "Falling Slowly," pieced together by the two musicians in a piano store, convulsed me and may be the most transportive moment I've had at the movies since I can't remember when. There, I've overhyped it.


Hype is as hype does: We're well into election season these days, although it's not even the election year yet, and for this, political documentaries are an essential antidote. Indeed, what could deflate the rhetoric and posturing quicker than film visions of past campaigns, successful or failed, and the sight of long forgotten pasty-faced aging white men in white shorts and ties struggling to convince everyone they meet that they're not weaselly goldbrickers? No film does this as concisely as Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway's "Feed" (1992), a found footage portrait of the 1991 campaign circus, in and around the New Hampshire primaries, that eventually led to Bill Clinton's party nomination and presidency.


The primary visual tool at work here is the satellite feed, the video footage sent out to the networks (and therefore out into space, only to be captured by satellite geeks) during the unbroadcast moments of the candidates — Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, George H.W. Bush, Bob Kerrey — combing their hair, making lame jokes, picking their noses, chatting inanely with makeup people, and often sitting and doing nothing at all. The upshot is access to precious visions of our ostensible leaders, whose political machines work so hard to exalt them as leaders, as little more than opportunists, showbiz canards and empty-headed buffoons. The film goes a certain way towards demonstrating that, in many ways, Bush II is something of a culmination of tendencies in American politics — one could only dream about what his stray satellite footage looked like, and the measures taken somewhere to prevent it from reaching public eyes. Rafferty and Ridgeway fill out the movie with public appearance footage of all kinds, much of which, 15 years later, has its own lessons to tell about the catastrophic distance between why we elect certain types of men to office (and what types of men want to be), and exactly what the job might require. A few years from now, when it's not profitable news but appalling history, the Obama-Clinton-Guiliani-Romney-Huckabee-etc. carnival will offer the same sort of spectacle.


"Once" (Fox Searchlight) will be available on December 18th; "Feed" (First Run Features) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[2007: The Year's Best Films]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-the-years-best-films.php Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "No Country For Old Men," Miramax, 2007]


49 movies.


When I sat down to deliberate on the best of 2007, my shortlist of worthy titles came in at an enormous 49 movies. Though I'm satisfied with my final selections, there were far more than just ten "best" movies this year. Anyone who claims 2007 was hard up for quality film just wasn't looking hard enough, if at all. Sure, theaters around the country were consistently filled with clunkers, as they most always are. But there were great pictures to see too; so many, in fact, that some got trampled underfoot by an enormous stampede of releases.


As I look over my favorite films of the past twelve months (along with the lists by my colleagues Alison Willmore, who runs the IFC Blog, and Michael Atkinson, our weekly DVD columnist), I see far too many examples of fine pictures that nobody saw. Where was the love, for example, for "Rescue Dawn"? Werner Herzog's spirited fictionalization of his documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" was almost universally beloved by those who saw it — problem was, that group turned out to be a viewing minority, and the film made just under $5.5 million at the box office.


A lot of critics and commentators would say its box office failure (and the failures of many other pictures) had less to do with an excess of product than its tie to the war. In a year that saw the western return to prominence in the most meaningful way in decades (with pictures like "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" and "3:10 To Yuma"), that other old venerable genre, the war picture, became absolute box office poison. In years past, something like "Rescue Dawn" might have stood a better chance in the marketplace. With very few exceptions, audiences in 2007 voted in favor of less topical fare.


And so, apparently, did I. Though I admired some of these button-pushers (including Tony Kaye's powerful documentary about the abortion debate "Lake of Fire"), my own selections tend to focus on bold directors who made bold films instead of bold points. There are some things about the list I'm not proud of — it's a dreadfully masculine lot and shamefully light on young directors — but it's an honest assessment at the very least. Anyone who assembles one of these lists with an eye toward pleasing others instead of themselves is wasting their time.


This year, I solidified my own personal criterion for what qualifies a movie for the very top of a best-of list. The films that transcend simple excellence to move to that higher stratum of true greatness all left me with the same feeling: the desire to see the entire movie again immediately, without even so much as a bathroom break. This year, four films met that qualification, and they are the top four films on my list.


So here are those four exemplary films, plus six more outstanding titles, plus ten more honorable mentions. And I could go on and list twenty-nine more, and who knows how many more after that. Bad year for movies? If anything, it was too good.


1. No Country For Old Men


At this point, what more needs to be said? The movie is so universally beloved, it almost makes me want to distrust my own equally positive reaction and just hate it on basic contrarian principles. But I can't deny how it made me feel when I saw the movie nine months ago, or how it's stuck with me all the time, or how I expect it to remain lodged in my cranium for the rest of my life.


2. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly


Somehow the film about the most restrictive subject — a man locked into his own body by a sudden and total paralysis — became one of the year's most unrestrained movies. Jean-Dominique Bauby's triumph was in psychologically defeating the ailment that enslaved his body; director Julian Schnabel's triumph is in conveying that battle in a movie that soars with visual invention from start to finish, even as its subject sinks to the bottom of an abyss inside his metaphorical scuba gear.


3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters


This totally compelling documentary provided more entertainment value — and a better story — than most fiction films this year, along with a level of ethnographic insight few other docs could match. Director Seth Gordon must have thanked his lucky stars when he discovered the weird world of competitive arcade gaming, which has enough outlandish characters (i.e. the dude who likes to be called "Mr. Awesome"), human drama, and sheer giddy thrills for five movies.


4. Zodiac


This is a movie about how men lose themselves to their obsessions, and director David Fincher conveyed that idea so effectively, eventually I did too — I got so lost in the film, its 158-minute runtime felt like half that. This mesmerizing chronicle of one of America's scariest serial killers is the shortest three-hour movie in history.


5. The Host


With yet another home run, my favorite Asian filmmaker, Bong Joon-ho, conquers a new genre: the monster movie. The creature causing an international ruckus swallows its victims whole and then regurgitates them to enjoy the next time he's feeling snacky. Bong does much the same, ingesting all the best elements of a slew of horror and science-fiction films and spitting them back out on the screen in gruesomely beautiful fashion.


6. Hot Fuzz


Too many comedies — even some of the funny ones — spray jokes at the audience like buckshot, hoping to throw enough gags at you so that at least a few hit you as funny. Writer/director Edgar Wright and writer/star Simon Pegg's film, in contrast, is an exercise in precision: every shot, every line, every reference to dumb action movies past is crafted with scrupulous care. Plusm Wright knows how to use his camera for more than a sight gag; his arsenal of whips and zooms are a welcome relief from the stuffy cinematography of most of his comedic contemporaries.


7. Syndromes and a Century


Screened at festivals throughout 2006, but released in theaters in 2007, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's follow-up to "Tropical Malady" featured a similarly bifurcated story, about two nearly identical sets of doctors whose stories nevertheless travel different paths to different endings. Like all of Weerasethakul's work, this gorgeously shot film is endearingly odd and oddly endearing.


8. There Will Be Blood


It's barely been released but the film already has a few critical talking points; how it's another remarkably immersive performance from star Daniel Day Lewis and a dramatic (and effective) departure for writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson. Both are true, but the one thing I felt most strongly about this brooding ficto-biopic is in danger of being overlooked; that being, supporting actor Paul Dano, playing two different roles, is so good in this film he absolutely steals every moment he's in. And he's stealing from Daniel Day Lewis.


9. Into the Wild


This is a movie that I flat-out should have hated: the call of the wild goes right to my voicemail every time. But there is something poetic and even spiritual to be found here. Sean Penn's film perfectly elucidates the reason someone might find the natural world so appealing that they would explore and pursue it well past the point that any rational person would turn back.


10. Black Book


Paul Verhoeven's best film since 1990's "Total Recall" (and his most entertaining since 1995's "Showgirls") proves that time away from the spotlight hasn't dimmed the Dutch master's flair for arty depravity. Even as he stuffed the film with well-executed suspense sequences and thoughtful moral arguments about fascists and revolutionaries, Verhoeven still found time to throw in some hot sex scenes and slather his leading lady in human fecal matter. Bravo, sir.


Honorable Mentions (In Alphabetical Order)


4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, The Bourne Ultimatum, Gone Baby Gone, Lake of Fire, The Namesake, Offside, Once, Rescue Dawn, Superbad, We Own the Night.



Top 10: Alison Willmore


1. No Country For Old Men


Among its endless cinematic joys, the Coens' film is one of the few I can think of to fully shoulder the weight of deliberation. Who knew that so much suspense could be wrung out of acts of patience, from men of few words sitting back and fooling themselves into believing they can see all of the angles before acting? Yeah.


2. Rescue Dawn


Werner Herzog wills American jingoism into yet another route to his treasured ecstatic truth in this narrative remake of his own doc "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" that towers above the year's slew of somber war films like a wild-eyed hallucination.


3. There Will Be Blood


Jagged and brilliant, Paul Thomas Anderson's film isn't much like the Upton Sinclair novel that inspired it, or like anything else I've ever seen on screen in any movie theater. Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano fall into place as unlikely adversaries in a battle for control of a small Texas town, but the film itself leaps and stutters forward in drips of dread like the most indescribable of horror movies.


4. Killer of Sheep


Given that it was made in 1977, it seems like a cheat to include "Killer of Sheep" on this list, but just as much one to leave it off — Charles Burnett's exquisite, unhappy chronicle of life in Watts is a landmark of American independent film.


5. Southland Tales


Ridiculous, overstuffed, incoherent and awesome, Richard Kelly's follow-up to "Donnie Darko" is an apocalyptic storyline splattered with L.A. satire, liberal mourning and a shimmer of pop mythology. Imperfect, sure, but impossibly moving and more than memorable.


6. Syndromes and a Century


Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes movies like he's never seen one before, and so has never had to concern himself with the narrative constrictions and formal obligations that weigh every other director down. Supposedly inspired by his parents in their youth, this two-pronged film wanders through a country and a city hospital, with echoing moments seeming to gather meaning while defying any easy read.


7. Paprika


Another incandescent reverie of a film, Satoshi Kon's "Paprika" swirls through fabulous dreamscapes with a delirious freedom that can only be found in animation. A doctor discovers thing have gone terribly wrong with a device that allows people to explore the dreams of others, but that sci-fi surface is only a launching pad for the brightly colored, disturbing envisionings of a thousand buried memories and subconscious doubts and desires.


8. Control


While Todd Haynes' "suppositions on a film concerning Dylan" were fanciful, uneven and ultimately better in theory than in practice, Anton Corbijn's debut feature managed to shake off the stiltedness of the form of the musical biopic merely by being grounded and vividly alive. Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis becomes a compelling, thrilling and fully realized figure, no rock martyr, just painfully young, talented and terrified of being trapped.


9. Romance & Cigarettes


Few moments in movies this year, musical or otherwise, were as thrilling and flat-out enjoyable as the one in "Romance & Cigarettes" in which James Gandolfini walks out of his Queen house and launches into Engelbert Humperdinck's "Lonely is a Man Without Love," accompanied by swirling garbage men, singing schoolchildren and Bobby Cannavale belting the chorus with a garden hose as a mic.


10. The Host


A monster movie for a new millennium — it's hard to determine which is scarier, Bong Joon-ho's galloping, waterlogged mutant or the portrait he paints of the inefficient, uncaring bureaucratic society that's meant to protect its citizens from it. The film's central family may be a dysfunctional disaster, but its members, at least, are still capable of caring for each other and those they come across who are in need, something rare enough in the world of "The Host" to approach a state of grace.



Michael Atkinson


1. Syndromes and a Century


Thailand's great, mysterious, life-affirming, diptych-entranced, meta-meta-man Apichatpong Weerasethakul does it again, twice, or maybe more, while seeming to do nearly nothing at all. A dream had by us all, and just as maddening and gorgeous.


2. Once


Who knows how long the heart-kneaded buzz from this beloved greatest-musical-since-Demy may last, but in my seat it was an all-viscera epiphany, and it's made moviegoing since a little bloodless.


3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days


The greatest of the Romanians so far, Christian Mungiu's patient knuckle-biter is at least 50% off-screen space and trauma; the mercilessly suspense birthday dinner scene alone is more concisely conceived and effective than any ten American films this year.


4. Half Moon


Northern Iran has supplanted the American West and the Australian Outback as the globe's most expressive road-movie topos, and Bahman Ghobadi's mythic Kurdish bus trip is simultaneously hilarious, magical-realist and tragic.


5. There Will Be Blood


Didn't see it coming — P.T. Anderson sheds his pretentious snark-generation-ism for Upton Sinclair's period saga of catapulting capitalism, scene for prickly, crazy scene the most fascinating new American film of the year.


6. Regular Lovers


May '68 awaited its definitive film portrait until the arrival of Philippe Garrel's impressionistic personal meditation, which manifests the cataclysmic, liberating, and finally tragically disillusioned emotional thrust of résistance, coupled with the electric sense of being 19, sexually alive, responsibility-free and ready to dope up and drop out, all of it seeping out of this neglected three-hour epic like fragrance from a valley of lilacs.


7. Killer of Sheep


Charles Burnett's legended, much-hailed, rarely seen 1977 classic about being black and poor and spiritually unmoored in '70s L.A. finally saw theaters, a full 17 years after it'd been an early choice for national Film Registry canonization. It's a ghost movie, returned to haunt us.


8. 12:08 East of Bucharest


Another Romanian, Corneliu Porumboiu's deadpan comedy picks at the scab of the 1989 revolution, revolving around what must be the eloquent and entertaining three-shot in recent cinema.


9. Los Muertos


Lisandro Alonso's lovely, remarkably eloquent naturalist odyssey tracks an aging convict as he is released in rural Argentina and heads upriver to find his daughter and grandson. Exposition is all but absent; the focus is on the moment, the soothing re-establishment of intimacy with nature, performed and captured in astonishing single takes.


10. Michael Clayton


Semi-hack screenwriter Tony Gilroy steps definitively into the men's club with this ethical torture device, thought-through and written and acted with a startling concern for the sickening quotidian of power culture.


Runners-Up (In Order):


The Host, No Country for Old Men, Lars and the Real Girl, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Brand Upon the Brain!, Czech Dream, 3:10 to Yuma, The Boss of It All, Zodiac, Lust, Caution, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Into Great Silence, The Lives of Others, Tears of the Black Tiger, We Own the Night, Dans Paris, Broken English



[Additional photos: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Miramax; "Rescue Dawn," MGM; "Syndromes and a Century," Strand Releasing]

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<![CDATA[2007: The Awesomest Action Scenes]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-the-awesomest-action-scen.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: "Eastern Promises," Focus Features, 2007]


With as many mindless explosions and shootouts that the film industry churns out every year, there are almost more mindless condemnations of them. So we'd like to take a moment to celebrate the technical expertise and genuine imagination that are needed to create these so-called empty-headed exercises in bloodsport.



"Eastern Promises," directed by David Cronenberg

Scene: Bathhouse Knife Fight


Courtesy of Viggo Mortensen (clad only in his tattoos) and the visual imagination of David Cronenberg comes this animalistic brawl in a steam room. Mortensen is Nikolai, a stoic bodyguard just inducted into the higher ranks of the Russian mob, whose boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) doubts his loyalty and sets him up to be disposed of. Once Nikolai is isolated in a bathhouse, two machete-wielding men corner him in the steam. As Paul Newman learned in "Torn Curtain," it's difficult to kill a man, even a naked one. Almost the exact opposite of the "Bourne" trilogy's fleet-footed edits, this scene is deliberately slow — paced so every chest heave, blood spurt and eye poke is documented — squeezing every last breath out of its thugs and asking us to enjoy it.



"Exiled," directed by Johnnie To

Scene: Apartment Complex Shootout


Led by the stone-faced Blaze (Anthony Wong), the hunted exiles recuperate at the local backdoor doctor's place, only to find that their mobster foes have come to get sewn up at the same joint. Blaze and his pals hide behind the makeshift hospital curtains as foe Boss Fay (Simon Yam) gets a bullet plucked out of his groin. Then, in a feast of slow motion operatics, the fabric is tossed aside, the lead flies, the shooters pirouette and the good guys rush outside in time to see their colleague Wo sacrificed mid-courtyard on a blood stained tarp, which the group tears down in a brilliant piece of tragic choreography.



"Live Free or Die Hard," directed by Len Wiseman

Scene: F-35 Fighter Jet vs. 18-Wheeler


Plot doesn't matter! In a spectacularly insane scene that could only be conceived during a sugar-fueled childhood argument, tough guy John McClane (Bruce Willis) battles an F-35 fighter jet with his own beat-up 18-wheeler. Grunting as if he's passing a stone, McClane maneuvers his steel chariot up an elevated freeway as the F-35 turns the big rig into a convertible with an army's worth of ammunition. McClane's bald head shimmers with the top down until the freeway collapses … and he leaps on the plane which is headed for destruction! Werner Herzog is fond of using the term "ecstatic truth" when describing his films — this scene embodies what could be called ecstatic untruth.



"The Bourne Ultimatum," directed by Paul Greengrass

Scene: Rooftop Chase


It's a balmy day in Tangiers, and Mr. Bourne (Matt Damon) has to save the life of Nicky (Julia Stiles), who's in the path of one of those robotic psychopathic killers the CIA likes to churn out. Instead of a starter's gun, the race starts with a car bomb and follows the two agents' sprint through twisting city streets, brittle apartment windows and closely packed rooftops with bristling intensity until they meet in a cramped bathroom, utilizing whatever household appliances can inflict the most damage. Greengrass' controversial editing style, which cuts shots to impressionistic shreds, works wonderfully here to create a sequence of nigh unbearable tension.



"Hot Fuzz," directed by Edgar Wright

Scene: Village Shootout


Combining every action movie cliché into one epic shootout, Capt. Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) trots into the town of Sandford to dole out bloody justice to its quaintly evil inhabitants. Both parody and homage, director Edgar Wright utilizes pointless whip pans, lens flares and quick cutting to ape every blockbuster in recent memory, with "Bad Boys 2" being the major touchstone. A gun totin' spinster is taken down by a car door, the venom-spitting priest screams "Jesus Christ!" upon taking a slug in the shoulder and after shooting his dad in the foot (scored to a slo-mo groan), doughy deputy Butterman (Nick Frost) enacts his action flick-fueled fantasies with a tart "yeah, motherfucker!"

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<![CDATA[2007: Five Directors Who Shifted Gears for the Better]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-five-directors-who-shifte.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Nick Schager

IFC News


[Photo: Frank Darabont's "The Mist," MGM, 2007]


Tilling the same ground over and over again is easy. Just ask Eli Roth. Or Michael Bay. Or Wes Anderson. Or the countless others who delivered new movies in 2007 that strongly evoked — if not outright replicated — their prior works. But taking a gamble, both narratively and aesthetically, is a feat worth celebrating, even if the end results aren't wholly successful. These following five filmmakers all embraced projects that challenged them in new and exciting ways.



Paul Thomas Anderson — "There Will Be Blood"


2004's "Punch-Drunk Love" seems to have been the liberating experiment Anderson needed since "There Will Be Blood" finds the director thrillingly marrying his formidable technical skills to a legitimately epic saga devoid of his trademark (and now played out) pop culture riffing and favorite auteur homages. "Blood" is an astoundingly controlled period-piece-cum-horror-show whose form is awe-inspiringly in harmony with its content. From its elegant tracking shots to its employment of Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's magnificent and otherworldly Kubrickian score, the film stands as the most vital turning point in Anderson's career to date, an impressive shift from agreeably showy stylistics to exceptional, imposing artistry.



Frank Darabont — "The Mist"


Setting aside the feel-good, Capra-esque schmaltz that had characterized his post-"Shawshank Redemption" output, Frank Darabont went fast, loose and nasty with this adaptation of Stephen King's classic novella about a group of small-town Maine residents trapped in a grocery store by a mysterious fog. Shooting all his action with two roving cameras, Darabont's latest has an intense in-your-face claustrophobia that balances out his script's more preachy tendencies with a swift ferocity that culminates in a decidedly bleak finale. A less "important" genre film than his prior efforts, to be sure, but "The Mist" is more excitingly visceral than those heralded predecessors as well.



David Fincher — "Zodiac"


Like Anderson, David Fincher's storytelling gifts have often been overshadowed by his dexterous craftsmanship. And as with "There Will Be Blood," "Zodiac" stands as a defining moment in the filmmaker's career, exhibiting none of the self-conscious cinematographic frippery that infected his prior "Panic Room." Stunningly synthesizing narrative and technique, Fincher's "Zodiac" takes a wholly different approach to the serial killer genre that made him famous with 1995's "Se7en," concentrating less on traditional suspense tropes and jazzy visuals than on the rigorous process of journalistic and police investigation, as well as the immense personal toll wrought from obsession. It's his masterpiece, for the time being.



Francis Ford Coppola — "Youth Without Youth"


Having spent the last decade working on his dream project "Megalopolis," Francis Ford Coppola finally returned to actual filmmaking — and delivered this bonkers philosophical head trip, which involves an old Romanian man (Tim Roth) in the 1930s who is struck by lightning and, consequently, becomes young again with supernatural powers. Oh, and then he rediscovers his long-dead lover reincarnated in a beautiful stranger who winds up being possessed by an ancient Indian woman who's traveling backwards in time. Make sense? No. But with a new collaborator in cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. (not to mention composer Osvaldo Golijov's beautiful score), Coppola's luscious widescreen photography has a grandeur that's nonetheless entrancing. The director's adventurousness is commendable, even if the end result is not.



Lasse Hallström — "The Hoax"


Lasse Hallström's preference for high-toned sentimentality can be insufferable, which is why it was such a pleasant surprise to find those directorial impulses largely absent from "The Hoax," a mostly factual tale that, at least during its opening half, has a gleeful, rollicking vivacity. Things eventually fall apart once the story transforms into a flaccid pseudo-thriller that aspires to cast its protagonist Clifford Irving (Richard Gere), who tried to sell Houghton Mifflin a counterfeit memoir of Howard Hughes, into a big, fat symbol of Nixon's dishonest America of the '70s. But the film's initial verve and vibrancy is so compelling that it almost absolves Hallström for making "Chocolat."

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<![CDATA[2007: The Year's Best Soundtracks]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-the-years-best-soundtrack.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Lily Oei

IFC News


[Photo: "Once," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


From biopics (real and imagined) to film adaptations of Broadway musicals, 2007 was a good year for breaking out into song and dance. For the less expressive among us, there was a bumper crop of quality soundtracks available to enjoy. With thanks to the hard-working folks responsible for clearance and licensing, here are some titles that inspired us to replenish and revisit our collections:


"Southland Tales" [Amazon link]


Richard Kelly raised the bar for himself by including Gary Jules' version of "Mad World" on the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack. Not all the songs featured in "Southland Tales" made it on to the album, but The Pixies, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Moby (who also provided the film's score) avoided the cutting room floor. And for "Buffy" fans wondering when Sarah Michelle Gellar would sing once more with feeling, the former slayer does Britney proud with the parody tune "Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime."



"Once" [Amazon link]


You'd have to be stone cold not to have been bewitched by this boy musician-meets-girl musician tale that's charming in every way that "August Rush" — this year's other boy musician-meets-girl musician love story — is maudlin and misguided. Songs from "Once"'s key scenes are on this album, including the twangy and aptly titled "Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy" and Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's plaintive music store duet "Falling Slowly." Aficionados of Hansard's band The Frames will recognize tracks already in their collections; new fans will swoon all over again.



"The Darjeeling Limited" [Amazon link]


Beyond resurrecting Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?" in both the feature and the complementary short "Hotel Chevalier," Wes Anderson and music supervisor Randall Poster have curated a collection of music from around the world and across time. Juxtaposing Debussy's oh-so-poignant "Clair de Lune" (which you'll also find on the soundtrack for "Atonement") with the energetic "Typewriter Tip, Tip, Tip" from Merchant-Ivory's 1970 film "Bombay Talkie" is whimsy bordering on brilliance. Perhaps it should be no surprise that Poster also supervised…



"I'm Not There" [Amazon link]


As in the film, everyone gets a chance to play Bob Dylan on this two-disc compilation, including Cat Power, Iron & Wine, the movie's Marcus Carl Franklin and, hey, even Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. With a collection this large, and such big shoes to fill, there's sure to be dissent over which covers work and which don't. So to play it safe, we'll recommend the final track — Dylan himself performing "I'm Not There," officially released at long last.



"Control" [Amazon link]


Much of what's available on this album will already be familiar to Joy Division devotees, as well as anyone who's seen Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People." Still, for diehard fans, there's the cast version of "Transmission" and an original score by New Order to get behind. Everyone else should just cue up "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Atmosphere" and appreciate how the genius that was Ian Curtis still resonates today.



"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" [Not yet available for purchase]


Although there's no official word on a soundtrack as yet, few movie moments this year stand out as much as this film's flashback to a ride in Jean-Dominique Bauby's convertible to Lourdes. By setting the stunning visual effect of hair whipping in the wind to U2's "Ultra Violet," Schnabel, who also served as the film's music supervisor, makes us feel as carefree and immortal as his characters. Other standout cuts include the mournful "Ramshackle Day Parade" by Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros and the twinkly French classic "La Mer."



"Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten" [Amazon link]


This documentary gets bogged down with its celebrity eulogies of Strummer, but the soundtrack picks up the slack. There's still chatter, yet rather than limit itself to cherry picking songs from the former Clash frontman's illustrious past, the album includes songs Strummer aired on his BBC radio show — from Elvis Presley to Nina Simone. For purists, there's also a strong selection of Strummer's own output such as "Trash City," which debuted nearly 20 years ago on the soundtrack to the Keanu Reeves flick "Permanent Record."



"Hot Fuzz" [Amazon link]


Be sure to seek out the U.K. edition of this album, which includes more songs than the domestic version. From the glammy opening track, "Blockbuster," to the multiple renditions of "Solid Gold Easy Action" by T. Rex and the Fratellis, this soundtrack is as goofy and big-hearted as its source. The inclusion of snippets of movie dialogue often takes you right out of music, but happily with "Hot Fuzz," it brings you right back into the film.



"Juno" [Amazon link]


"Juno" stands to inherit the "Garden State" mantle for indie soundtrack sensitivity this year. The album includes Sonic Youth's cover of The Carpenters' "Superstar" and the Kinks' "A Well Respected Man," which now will forever conjure up images of Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) in running shorts. There aren't any life-altering by way of The Shins moments in the film, but it's hard not to fall for Juno and Paulie's winsome duet of the Moldy Peaches' "Anyone Else But You."



"Walk Hard" [Amazon link]


Parodies can be hit or miss, but you have to admit the earnest flashbacky storytelling of "Ray" and "Walk the Line" screamed for a roast. The "Walk Hard" soundtrack, which was released earlier this December, includes "Let's Duet," a suggestive send-up of Johnny Cash and June Carter singing "Time's A Wastin'." A concert tour featuring Dewey Cox and the Walk Harders (à la "Spinal Tap") is already on the boards and sold out. Take that, Hannah Montana.



Too good to go unmentioned: The unfortunately import-only soundtrack for Shane Meadow's "This is England" is a period-perfect collection of ska and punk classics, while the soundtrack to AJ Schnack's Kurt Cobain documentary "Kurt Cobain About a Son" is a mixtape portrait of the artist that contains no Nirvana tracks.

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<![CDATA["Youth Without Youth"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/youth-without-youth.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Youth Without Youth," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


Francis Ford Coppola clearly finds something very cinematic in the idea of someone who not as old as they look. Why else would he make "Jack," a movie about 45-year-old Robin Williams as a fifth grader, and now "Youth Without Youth," about a decrepit linguistics professor named Dominic Matei who receives the gift of a second life from an errant bolt of lightning? Oddly, though Coppola and Matei are both intellectually curious men, they seem strangely disinterested in this incredible turn of events. Imagine if Peter Parker discovered he had the proportionate strength of the spider, shrugged his shoulders and went right back to working on his science fair project.


Though Coppola would almost certainly never couch it in these terms, he's made a comic book flick, albeit one that looks like a beautiful old Italian movie and is based on a Romanian novel. Once Matei (Tim Roth) undergoes his transformation, he gains all sorts of cool new powers to go along with his rejuvenated exterior, including mind control and a rather unique take on the concept of "speed reading." He even gains a scheming split personality who speaks to him through reflective surfaces, not unlike Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin. And yet there is never a moment where Matei takes his nose out of his books about the origins of language to consider what's happened to him and go "Holy crap!"


To a certain degree, "Youth Without Youth" is like one of Matei's ancient library volumes: dusty, stodgy and filled with old-fashioned turns of phrase. Admittedly, much if not all of this is intentional, and suggests the film's title in the same way that even after Matei sheds about 30 years of physical age he still carries his arms and his face the way an old man would (it's one of the nicer aspects of Roth's performance). Coppola and cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. focus on lighting and composition and striking use of color, particularly a red in flowers and even a swastika that is so rich it appears to stain the very film stock, staying on screen even as the rest of the images from one scene begin to fade to the next. If the camera moves even once in a scene, it's a lot. Everything is restrained and reserved, and even the more intense, action-oriented scenes are approached with a kind of academic or painterly spirit.


But the movie is called "Youth Without Youth," not "Life Without Life," and I must admit that I found much of it frustratingly inert (so, apparently, did the gentlemen next to me at the screening, who fell so deeply asleep he actually snored through most of the second hour). After Matei's second life takes him from a Romanian hospital to Nazi Germany, he finds a woman named Veronica (Alexandra Maria Lara) who looks remarkably like Matei's great lost love Laura (also Lara). Before the "Vertigo" overtones become too oppressive, Veronica becomes possessed by an ancient soul named Rupini and further experiments lead Matei to believe he can guide her regressions to help support his research into the history of early man. When Veronica isn't twitching and speaking in tongues, her affair with Matei is supposed to be the sort of unquenchable love that even death itself cannot stop. But Roth and Lara can't sustain enough chemistry to last a typical coffee break, let alone a few centuries. And yeah, part of Matei's flaw as a character is his willingness to prefer his work to his love, but with a relationship this chilly, who could blame him?


"Youth Without Youth" is clearly a personal film — but that's about all that's clear about it. Coppola feels something strongly here, but what exactly? The film is about massive themes and concepts — love and death and time and art and communication — but at its core, there isn't a central idea or compelling story or marvelous performance holding it all together. Magic bolts of lightning provide youth, but not always great inspiration.

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8670 2007-12-10 00:00:00 closed closed youth_without_youth publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008670
<![CDATA["Two-Lane Blacktop," "The Way I Spent the End of the World"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/twolane-blacktop-the-way-i-spe.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Two-Lane Blacktop," Universal Pictures, 1971]


No cultural testimony tracks our national alpha waves as eloquently as road movies — even the most bankrupt examples yowl with the fatally American yen for escape, automotive identity and frontier doom. And no road movie is as in touch with its own road movieness as Monte Hellman's long-martyred "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971). Not widely seen or available on video in any form until 1999 as a victim of music rights and studio neglect, "Blacktop" might be a definitive American expression of roadness — uncompromised, Rorschach-inconclusive, mythic, yet as real as highway weeds, and so eloquent in its mumbling way about basic existential identity and destination dilemmas that every frame has the poignant and needy ache of a child fruitlessly asking about God. It has little competition as the great lost and found movie of the much-missed American New Wave.


Virtually everyone who sees the film is seduced by it, but it's not a charming piece of work: It's laconic, distancing, de-dramatized, soberly shot, totally devoid of visual showboating and campy counterculture à la "Easy Rider." Echoes of Beckett and "Godot," which Hellman had staged in the '60s, abound; think of emptied-out motorheads James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as the lost ones stuck in a ritual dialogue, petulant hitchhiker Laurie Bird as Pozzo and Warren Oates' G.T.O.-driving jabbermouth as Lucky. Still, to witness "Blacktop," for all its metaphoric torque, is to be thrust into the dusty, dirt poor midday of American road culture (most of it "found" by the filmmakers, shooting the movie on a road trip from Needles, CA to the Carolinas), surrounded by overgrown flatlands, vanishing points and the angry chortle of car engines. The movie breathes as only '70s movies breathe, with whole scenes dedicated to nothing more than capturing a place and moment.


Taylor is the Driver, Wilson is the Mechanic, and their life is a series of impromptu drag races against local drivers, almost always winning with their custom dragster in a primer-gray '55 Chevy shell. Their encounter with Oates (whose credit reads "G.T.O."), a slumming dude with a hot car he knows nothing about, leads to a cross country race between the two vehicles that passes for the film's plot. Along the way, à la "L'Avventura," the wager is neglected by the drivers (and Hellman) and forgotten. Though scrupulously unfaddish, Hellman's acidic, calm but desperate vision is far from ignorant of its place and time: Wilson steals local Southern plates to slap on his Chevy because "I get nervous in this part of the country," while a quiet roadhouse confrontation with a redneck chills even Oates into stymied silence.


Few films display such brilliant visual wisdom about our relationship with the automobile (dare you to triple-bill this with Spielberg's "Duel" and Cronenberg's "Crash"); however, Hellman sees the car as an extra-human, quasi-cinematic consciousness, designed both to conform to our bodies' limitations and powerfully extend them into the world like the manifested projections of a collective ego, complete with the Panavision-shaped screen of the windshield. "Blacktop" even lists its cars as cast members. Roadtripping may have been a drop out, turn on hot rod cliché even in 1971, but nobody told Hellman, whose frustrated odyssey feels sui generis — the first and last of the real road movies. The druggy rhythms, the downtime, the meaningless forward motion — the movie itself is like a long drive to nowhere. And it never ends: like his characters, Hellman never admits the frontier is gone, that the road has an end, and simply lets the film grind down and burn in the projector gate instead. This new Criterion edition, neatly obviating the need for the old Anchor Bay issues, supps the film with loads of new Hellman interviews, an essay by longtime Hellman proselytizer/critic Kent Jones, and a copy of the original Rudy Wurlitzer script, famous for being published in its entirety in Esquire before the film's release.


Today's gritty New Wave dead-endness is happening in Romania, which makes sense, globally speaking — one should never underestimate the historical gravitas that comes with generations of brutal Communist dictatorship, the reverb of its violent overthrow, or the deathless ancestral textures of Balkan peninsula peasant culture. The films and their accolades are still arriving: last year's critical triumph of Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (which won Best Film from the nation's most expansive critics' poll on indieWIRE ) was followed this year by Corneliu Porumboiu's "12:08 East of Bucharest" and, opening semi-wide in January, Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," all three anointed with Cannes trophies. Suddenly, a poor ex-totalitarian nation that had little visible film culture at all (outside of Lucien Pintille) for decades is now the hotbed of what the world's film festivals are perceiving as new-millennium cool — fresh, expressive and pertinent. The 1989 coup that ousted Ceauşescu haunts the films in a distinctive way: the primary filmmakers in question are all now 40 or under, and were still teenagers and film school students when Romania became a "new democracy," presenting them with a nervous, newly mercenary sociopolitical world they're still trying to figure out.


Catalin Mitulescu's feature debut, "The Way I Spent the End of the World" (2006), is one of the movement's key films, and the closest thing young Romania has to a generational anthem movie. Set in 1989, its rebel-without-cause is Eva (Doroteea Petre), a tempestuous, smart, rebellious but never stereotypical high schooler dissatisfied with her smitten boyfriend and more or less completely fed up with the Ceauşescu regime, prompting her to fraternize with a crazed anti-Communist nerd and to contemplate escaping. But to where?


Mitulescu's movie sings with the Slav-style mordant wit that so much of Eastern Europe does so well, and it also does the neo-naturalism jig with enormous skill (and without the longueurs and middle-aged grumpiness of many other Romanian hits). Mostly, it has Petre, who earned the film's award from Cannes for her watchful, impetuous performance that knocks out what had become a 20th century cliché — the revolutionary teen, bristling against authority and embracing rock 'n' roll — into four lovely dimensions. (However supercool she seems, Eva is always a tangible, lovable person, as opposed to say, the similar but idealized protagonist of the overpraised, overwritten "Juno.") Inevitably, Mitulescu's movie climaxes with the revolution is being televised events of December 1989, giving Eva's story a thoroughly unsentimental happy ending that comes with its own kind of disappointing blowback, keenly felt across the country. Reportedly, "The Way I Spent the End of the World" may still go theatrical in '08, but for now, Film Movement — a unique video subscription label specializing in overlooked imports — has made it happen on DVD.


"Two-Lane Blacktop" (Criterion) will be available on December 11th; "The Way I Spent the End of the World" (Film Movement) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Tim Roth on "Youth Without Youth"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/tim-roth-on-youth-without-yout.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Tim Roth in Francis Ford Coppola's "Youth Without Youth," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


After appearing in what seemed like every other '90s Amer-indie classic (and not just Tarantino films, thank you very much!), London-born actor Tim Roth branched out and found new critical success with his 1999 directorial debut, "The War Zone." In the years since, Roth the actor has turned up in a few studio projects, but his most notable thesping still tends to be for auteur-driven films; the '00s have so far seen him collaborating with Wim Wenders, John Sayles, Werner Herzog, Michael Haneke and, just in time to be Oscar eligible, Francis Ford Coppola. "Youth Without Youth," Coppola's long anticipated return stars Roth as an aging linguistics prof in Romania who finds himself physically aging backwards and evolving intellectually after being struck by lightning. Admirably pretentious and gorgeously shot (may I just re-emphasize: gorgeously), it's an intimate yet unruly, ultimately romantic epic about the nature of age, memory and the primalism of language. "I knew that if I made the movie, I'd learn how to express time and dreams cinematically," claims Coppola in his director's statement, and what actor wouldn't want to work someone who spoke that boldly? I sat down with Roth to chat about the legendary filmmaker and his own creative passions.


You haven't been as ubiquitous as you were in the '90s. Where have you been hiding?


I don't know. I went off and directed a few years back, then I did a slew of trying-to-get-money-in-the-bank movies, and it's hard to find stuff that you're interested in. Also, I was caught up in the tail end of what was really an interesting time in American film, and then it changed. The way that films are financed and the structure of them became radically different. As a consequence, the stuff that was being made became uninteresting, so I just got bored. This film, and a couple of others I've done recently have made me interested again in acting.


So you're disheartened by the landscape they call independent film today?


Independent of what? You're really not. We were able to make films like "Little Odessa" with a pretty good budget for a film like that, carefully used, and so on. You couldn't do a script like that now unless you had an A-list [actor] in it. They just wouldn't want to make it. It's much harder to tell a story that concerns you as a director nowadays.


Do you plan to direct a second film?


Yeah. I was never in any hurry, really. People kept telling me I should direct, so I did. That was really what it was about, and then I fell in love with it, but that's a different story. But I do, I have two things most definitely that I want to make. It's just a question of putting enough money in the bank so I can take two years off to make a film. It's hard, but I think it's the best job in the world… short of being Cèzanne, or something.


On "Youth," what did you take away from Coppola that could potentially influence your future creative endeavors?


What I think happens is, you find yourself in situations as a director, and then say, "What would he have done?" That's when you find out. I liked to watch how Francis constructed street scenes, how he would place extras, cars, bicycles and all that kind of stuff. We were very limited on the amount we had and he would make the most of that. I would look at an empty street, but when you see it on the screen, it's not. It's very clever stuff. And he very, very rarely moved the camera. Purely as a facile thing, I just wanted to see how a director of his stature works the frame. It was fascinating to me. His cinematographer was a very young Romanian guy [Mihai Malaimare, Jr.]. The two of them had a real connection.


The film is adapted from Mircea Eliade's novella, which is dense with heady, universal concepts. While filming, did you ever find yourself waxing philosophical about your own views of age and memory?


No, I'm very dim. [laughs] I just make the day. Let Francis worry about all that stuff, that's his deal. My job is "what's the scene about at this moment?" Fix that. Work with Francis on what he wants to do, how he wants things to be. His job is to look after the arc, the editing, the whole nine yards. My shit is to be in it, get it done, and get as close to what he wants, so he can say "wrap!" and figure out if he's got something.


You're going to push that off? You didn't once think about your own mortality while filming?


[laughs] No, no. I think about that more outside of the film. For me, it's not a big deal because you have to remember that I see myself aging [on-screen]. It's all there. You guys can see it. I'm looking at the back door of life. That's my deal, because I'm 46. It's coming at me now. So I suppose that was interesting to me in being the old guy, so that if I get there, I can see if there's a comparison. I tried to play him as an old man even though he was young. When he gets his middle age back, he's still old, even in the way he moves. That kind of theatricality is fun. Confusing, but fun.


How did you and Coppola collaborate whenever you felt confused?


Well, he was clear. You know, Francis was making this film for his own reasons. He's an incredibly bright man. He would launch into things, rattle [off] stuff… He's read a few books in his time, and he's absorbed that information. I haven't. I'm an actor, you know? We pretend that we read books. Our conversations were amazing. If I went to Francis [and] asked "What about A, B and C?", he'd go "Okay, this is the reason for this, this is the reason for that." Because he was making something very personal, his direction quite often was quiet and personal and philosophical, or the other way around; something you've missed because you're thinking too much. He's very good with actors. He likes his actors.


Well, if you won't fill me in on the lofty specifics, what can you tell me you've been thinking about?


What happens to my children by virtue of the White House. [laughs] I don't know. I've been thinking about writing a bit, actually. I wrote something that was never made for that "Paris Je T'Aime" movie, but it was a little too dark for them, I think. It's one of those things you can do for free. You just sit down and write, one of the hardest things to do. So when the actors go out on strike, which they probably will, I'll write when they force me to take time off, which is what will happen. I have a bad feeling about this. I already know people who are losing their houses. You have to remember the knock and effect in L.A. First of all, most people don't have much sympathy for white collar strikes. It's a hard thing to get sympathy for, but it's hitting people who run coffee shops, people who have dry cleaners, people who make silly things for films. It's not hitting the A-list. It's never going to touch them. If anything, it'll just make them richer. But there are people out there who are going to get it, and bad. I worry that the strike is exactly what the communication companies want because it can make more "Big Brother." That's what they want to do anyway.


And now this has just turned depressing. Is your outlook on the film industry generally pessimistic?


I'm actually quite hopeful, really. I'm saddened by these huge companies that have nothing to do with film owning film. But as soon as I think down that road, I think about people like Ken Loach, and I know we're all alright. [laughs] There's only a creative decline if you allow it to happen. I don't think that there has to be. It's never stopped Ken. It's never stopped Mike Leigh. It doesn't have to be that way. But they're real filmmakers. I think what is encouraged by these big companies is not filmmaking, but the opposite of filmmaking. It's tabloid entertainment, which sells and makes them tons and tons of cash. There's plenty of room for that, and I love to be a part of it sometimes, it's brilliant fun, but it can't be everything. If we let it, it will be. Unless the audience goes on strike! That would fuck 'em.


"Youth Without Youth" opens in limited release December 14th.

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8668 2007-12-10 00:00:00 closed closed tim_roth_on_youth_without_yout publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008668
<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 14th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/opening-this-week-december-14t.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Nanking," THINKFilm, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Alvin and the Chipmunks"

Here we have yet another major motion picture studio's attempt to destroy our collective childhoods with this cinematic update of the classic 1980s children television series it's likely we all hated anyway. What looks to be a celluloid crime against parents and hipster doofuses everywhere comes courtesy of Tim Hill, director of the sequel "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties." "My Name is Earl"'s Jason Lee gets enlisted as the human Dave who watches over the mischievous musical chipmunk trio, who if the trailer is to be believed, like to eat their own feces.

Opens wide (official site).


"Goodbye Bafana"

Danish director Bille August helms this true story about an white South African prison guard (Joseph Fiennes) whose life was profoundly changed by a black inmate he guarded for 20 years whose name was (wait for it) Nelson Mandela (Dennis Haysbert). The film was awarded the Peace Film Award at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).



"Half Moon"
Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi wrote and directed his latest drama about an old musician's plans to give one final concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. The film won a bevy of awards at the 2006 San Sebastian International Film Festival, including a prize for best cinematography and the Golden Seashell Award for best film.

Opens in New York (official site).


"I Am Legend"

While we'd line up to watch Will Smith beat the crap out of anything — this latest film finds the Fresh Prince kicking both vampire AND zombie ass! — we're not so crazy about the direction of Francis Lawrence, whose previous credits include the ho-hum Keanu Reeves vehicle "Constantine" and a host of Jennifer Lopez music videos. Regardless of whether the film is any good, however, it's safe to expect any Will Smith actioner to dominate the holiday box office. Smith stars as Robert Neville, a man who finds himself to be the lone survivor of a biological attack that leaves New York with a swarm of zombies during the day and vampires at night. "I Am Legend" is the third adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, following 1964's "The Last Man on Earth" and the 1971 Charlton Heston sci-fi flick "The Omega Man," and is the first to use Matheson's original title.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Kite Runner"

Khaled Hosseini's wildly popular 2003 novel finally hits theaters courtesy of "Finding Neverland" director Marc Forster. The film follows Amir, an Afghani who returns to his homeland after spending two decades in the United States following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to investigate the disappearance of his childhood friend Hassan. Kudos to the filmmakers for sticking with mostly local Afghani actors, though the studio is now in a bit of a PR mess after threats made to three of the child actors forced a delay in the film's release. Regardless, we expect the film's Afghani flavor meshed with Forster's gentle direction to at least be better than a bloated lecture from a ham-fisted Tom Cruise.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Look"

"Detroit Rock City" writer/director Adam Rifkin helms this drama pieced together from surveillance cameras, creating the illusion that no matter where you are in the United States, you're being watched. The film premiered earlier this year at the CineVegas International Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Award.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Nanking"

Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's documentary tells the story of The Rape of Nanking, the tragedy that occurred during the 1937-1938 Japanese occupation and resulted in the deaths of 200,000 Chinese men and women and the rape of tens of thousands more before a small group of Westerners formed a safety refuge to save the lives of 250,000. The film won the Documentary Film Editing Award earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Perfect Holiday"

All a young girl wants for Christmas is a new husband for her harried mother (Gabrielle Union) in this holiday comedy from director Lance Rivera. Rivera is best known for 2004's "The Cookout," though we barely remember it.

Opens wide (official site).


"Youth Without Youth"

Francis Ford Coppola's long anticipated return to filmmaking finds the "Godfather" director returning to his film school roots… sort of. Coppola's latest is a deeply personal adaptation of a Mircea Eliade novel about a professor (Tim Roth) who's targeted by Nazi agents after he presumably discovers a formula for immortality in World War II-era Europe. Now if only Coppola could start working on the long-rumored "Megalopolis"…

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #56: Daddy's Little Directors]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/ifc-news-podcast-56-daddys-lit.php Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Jason Reitman on the set of "Juno," Fox Searghlight, 2007]


Jason Reitman, the filmmaker behind "Juno" and "Thank You For Smoking," has done an admirable job of distinguishing his promising career as a director from that of his father, "Ghostbusters" helmer Ivan Reitman. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at some of the other offspring of established directors who've followed their famous parents into the fold, discuss the burdens they have to bear (and the not-inconsiderable advantages they have) and offer an unscientific grouping of who's done well and who hasn't.


Download now (MP3: 27:27 minutes, 25.1 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["Badland"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/badland.php Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Badland," Arcangelo Entertainment Inc., 2007]


"Badland"'s writer-director Francesco Lucente clearly feels strongly about the Iraq War and its impact on returning veterans. But perhaps he feels a bit too strongly. There's an old expression about how people making decisions should "remove emotion from the equation," and I think Lucente could have benefited from following that advice. There's potential here, but it's marred by a clunky screenplay that emphatically hammers its point home over and over again for 160 endless minutes.


Jerry (Jamie Draven) is an Iraq vet struggling to make ends meet in a crummy job and to keep his sanity in a crummy marriage. Quickly, he reaches a breaking point, and murders his wife and two sons. But when he
turns his gun on his little daughter Celina (Grace Fulton) it jams, and he ultimately relents. So Jerry packs up Celina and travels the Midwest and Upper Plains until they find a romantic comedy setup to hunker down in, where Jerry stumbles into a relationship with and job working for the cute owner of a small-town diner.


"Badland" joins a lengthy list of recent films that tell aggressively angry stories from the Iraq War home front, including the similarly themed (and equally heavy-handed) "Home of the Brave" from Irwin Winkler,
as well as Paul Haggis' slightly more mainstream "In the Valley of Elah." "Badland"'s particular contribution to this ongoing dialogue is a portfolio of poetic images of golden hour landscape from cinematographer Carlo Varini (particularly impressive on a relatively low budget) and some moments, mostly early in the film, of quiet reflection that suggest a sense of loss in ways that Lucente's screenplay unsuccessfully strains to achieve again.


He'd be better off letting his images speak for themselves, rather than pelting us with obvious exposition like this mouthful we get from a remarkably pensive TV reporter: "Mr. Rice's apparent murder-suicide follows a recent and tragic trend among a number of returning reservists from Iraq. Some
find their jobs illegally denied them, their families facing financial ruin. Many find themselves unable to cope." Indeed, the best moments are the ones without words, like a potent scene where Jerry paces back and forth in an increasingly erratic pattern (fingering a cigarette, shoving it in his mouth, tossing it away) after receiving an ominous phone call. Dialogue would have only gotten in the
way of Draven's performance (partly because the English actor's Midwestern accent isn't exactly on point).


Sadly, Lucente can't resist doing the opposite most everywhere else in "Badland," explaining and overexplaining and reexplaining his points. Even the score, which wouldn't have sounded out of place on a
very special episode of "Highway to Heaven," won't leave well enough alone. I appreciate the film's good intentions while also acknowledging what good intentions sometimes pave the way to.

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<![CDATA["Revolver"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/revolver.php Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Revolver," Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2007]


"We are all approval junkies. We're all in it for the slap on the back," one character helpfully informs us in Guy Ritchie's "new" film "Revolver." Ritchie will have to look elsewhere for any backslapping, but would you settle for some knee-slapping over this laughably crummy conman thriller and "Kabbalist's Guide to Chess" instructional video?


This long-shelved project — which premiered in the U.K. over two years ago — follows a crook named Jake Green (Jason Statham) with an annoying penchant for waxing philosophical in voiceover as he tries to extract a measure of revenge from a former business associate named Macha (Ray Liotta) who played a part in sending him to jail some years earlier. But before he can complete his plan, Green discovers that he has a terminal blood disease whose only cure rests in the hands of another pair of pontificating ruffians: Zach (Vincent Pastore) and Avi (André Benjamin). Also working against Green? His laughably bad hairpiece and handlebar moustache, a follicle ensemble so wretched it looks like the sort of getup worn in the "awkward teenage years" flashbacks in Farrelly brothers comedies.


The interviews with real philosophers and academics that attempt to make some sort of sense out of "Revolver"'s dreadful ending over the closing credits suggest Ritchie is interested in educating his audience somehow, but his gimmicky camera tricks obscure whatever actual insight the film contains. Consider a lengthy game of chess between Green and Avi, shot almost entirely from the perspective of pieces on the board. The low-angle images are striking, but they distract us from the meat of the two men's conversation, and they make it totally impossible to actually follow the flow of the chess match (you could also argue that Ritchie is calling his audience a bunch of pawns). No doubt the film's Kabbalistically infused lessons make perfect sense to Ritchie, but they're hopelessly lost in the sea of flashbacks and tough guy clichés. Even the "shocking" twist ending is none too shocking; anyone who pays attention through the running time (not an easy proposition, I know!) will figure out the final reveal an hour before the characters do.


The press materials for "Revolver" include an interview with Ritchie in which he explains how to con people. "Feed them an opinion of themselves that makes them feel superior in someway," he instructs. "Make them feel clever, special or attractive." "Revolver"'s empty style, empty enlightenment, and empty story all suggest Ritchie pulled his ultimate con on himself. What kind of movie sits on the shelf for two years before its theatrical release? This kind.

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<![CDATA["Billy the Kid"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/billy-the-kid.php Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Billy the Kid," Elephant Eye Films, 2007]


The first thing we notice about Billy is his eyes, because they never stop moving. When we first meet our titular 15-year-old hero, he's seated in the backseat of a moving car, making jokes and chatting up a storm. But if he's acting like he's comfortable in front of the camera, his eyes tell a different story, darting left to the car window and right to the person behind the camera; up to the ceiling, down to his feet. Funny as he is, there's maybe something just a wee bit off about Billy.


That air of oddness, coupled with a natural affinity for honest self-assessment, are almost certainly what drew director Jennifer Venditti to Billy. Looking for "real kids" (italics hers, per the press notes) as part of her day job as a New York City casting director, Venditti discovered Billy in a Maine high school cafeteria. After hearing about him from a bunch of bullies, she introduced herself. "Within seconds," she writes in her director's statement, "I was both awed and unnerved by his personality." Despite — or perhaps in spite of — the other students' taunts, Billy got cast and eventually became the subject of this film as well.


His life, simplistic as it might seem on paper, is more than enough to carry "Billy the Kid," particularly when shot by Venditti with a remarkable level of access to (and intimacy with) the main characters. Billy's conversations with the two most important women in his life — his patient-beyond-belief mother and the object of his affections, Heather — are, in a world that's grown tolerant to the sort of "reality" portrayed on "The Hills," more than a breath of fresh air. They're like a sucker punch to the stomach, knocking you senseless with their candor and, above all, their true-to-life awkwardness. One rapturously uncomfortable scene finds Billy, who is an utter gentleman but totally clueless about woman, wooing his beloved Heather and trying to impress her family all at the same time ("You must be Heather's grandmother…I'm sure she's mentioned me!"). As more and more members of Heather's clan file in and out of their coffee shop, the scene goes on and on, at least ten minutes of screen-time, morphing into a mesmerizing cross between an Arlo Guthrie song and a "Peanuts" comic strip.


Still, it's not all roses and goofy teenage pining. Even before Billy's now-absent father abused him, he had anger issues and troubles in school so extensive one psychologist told his mom to have him committed. (The pictures of the dad scattered throughout Billy's home blur out his face, a tactic likely due to legal reasons that nevertheless adds a poignant element to Billy's stories.) Venditti witnesses a few of Billy's creepier moments personally, most acutely when, after his first on-camera interaction with Heather, he retreats to a bathroom where we hear him whisper the word "Death..." over and over. Those who saw it might notice that the abused past and penchant for wearing masks resemble Rob Zombie's conception of the young Michael Myers in his version of "Halloween."


But Venditti's aim isn't to vilify or condemn Billy, only to portray honestly the complex life of a real American teenager, blemishes and all (though it should be noted that for whatever other real problems Billy has, acne is not one of them). Billy's confused and, yeah, maybe a little unsettling at times, but he's also well-intentioned, honorable, funny and smarter that you expect. Like another similarly potent documentary from earlier this year, "The King of Kong," "Billy the Kid" finds relatability and universality in a story of outcasts. I'm not ashamed to say I had some moments in my youth worthy of Billy the Kid, and even a few that put him to shame. We're all Billy, in some ways. Except maybe those shifty eyes. Billy should really get those checked out.

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #55: Concerning Costume Dramas]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/ifc-news-podcast-55-concerning.php Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "Atonement," Focus Features, 2007]


Sure, "costume drama" can technically be applied to everything from "Apocalypto" "Pirates of the Caribbean," but for some of us, it means a very specific type of film, filled with restraining clothing and even more restrained emotions. This week on the IFC News podcast, we talk about the recent decline in the genre, its Merchant Ivory heyday and the costume drama hall of fame.


Download now (MP3: 26:24 minutes, 24.1 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 7th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/opening-this-week-december-7th.php Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: John Cusack in "Grace is Gone," Weinstein Company, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"The Amateurs"

Michael Traeger's comedy has been kicking around the festival circuit for the past two years since production completed back in 2004. Jeff Bridges stars as a man in the midst of a midlife crisis who somehow convinces the residents of his small town to band together and make an adult film. Along for the ride are a host of character actors, including Ted Danson, Joe Pantoliano and Tim Blake Nelson.

Opens in Los Angeles and Dallas (official site).


"Atonement"

Keira Knightley has become the go-to gal for period pieces, like some sort of younger, present-day Maggie Smith. Knightley reteams with her "Pride & Prejudice" director Joe Wright as the older sister of fledgling writer Briony Tallis, who as a 13-year-old tells a series of lies, accusing her sister's lover (James McAvoy) of a crime he did not commit, thereby irrevocably changing the courses of all of their lives.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Billy the Kid"

Jennifer Venditti's debut documentary follows 15-year-old Maine teenager Billy as he responds to a painful childhood, first-time love and his experience as an outsider in his local town. The film premiered earlier this year at the South by Southwest Film Festival where it won the Competition Award and kicked up some dust after a Variety review accused it of staging scenes.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Dirty Laundry"

"The Ski Trip"'s Maurice Jamal directs this modern-day prodigal son story about a magazine writer who seems to have the perfect life until a family secret brings him face to face with the traditional southern family he hasn't seen in ten years.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Golden Compass"

Director Chris Weitz (of "American Pie") helms this big-screen adaptation of the controversial Philip Pullman children's novel, rumors of who's anti-Christian bias gave distributor New Line more PR than it planned for. The film is set in a parallel universe, in which young Lyla Belacqua (newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) journeys to the far north to save her best friend, whom she fears has been kidnapped by a powerful and secret organization. Let's hope this film stands out as more than just a "Lord of the Rings" clone.

Opens wide (official site).


"Grace is Gone"

Earlier this year at Sundance, the Weinstein Company purchased this Audience Award-winning drama for several million dollars as critics praised star John Cusack for his role as a father who takes his two girls on a road trip to Florida in order to avoid telling them about their mother's death in Iraq. Frankly, we're hoping Cusack finally earns a long-awaited Oscar nomination, though with a fall season awash in Iraq dramas, that amount of recognition may be a bit of a long shot.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Juno"

After this film's debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, we're pretty sure the term "this year's 'Little Miss Sunshine'" will become an annual staple for years to come. From Best Actress hopes for Ellen Page to "Superbad"'s Michael Cera to currently on-fir screenwriter Diablo Cody, "Juno" is poised to become a favorite at this year's Academy Awards. Page plays a sarcastic teenage girl (think "Ghost World"'s Enid with a bit of a baby bump) who gets impregnated by her best friend and decides to put her baby up for adoption by a local childless couple.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Looking for Cheyenne"

Valerie Minetto's French drama follows Cheyenne, a Parisian journalist, who decides to move to the middle of nowhere after being laid off, leaving behind her lover Sonia. The film premiered at the 2005 Paris Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Man in the Chair"

Christopher Plummer acts in one of his best roles in years as a curmudgeon with a penchant for classic Hollywood movies and booze who helps a troubled teenager (Michael Angarano) create a film for a student contest.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Revolver"

British director and Madonna hubby Guy Ritchie finally gets his long completed follow-up to "Swept Away" a stateside release. "Revolver" finds Ritchie returning to his gangster genre roots, re-teaming with "Snatch"'s Jason Statham as an ex-con and card shark who enters into an alliance with two mysterious men to bring down the gangster (Ray Liotta) responsible for sending him to prison.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Walker"

"Auto Focus" director Paul Schrader's latest features an escort (Woody Harrelson) catering to Washington D.C.'s society ladies who becomes involved in a murder case in order to protect his closest client (Kristen Scott Thomas) and her husband from the ensuing investigation. The film premiered earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA[Guy Ritchie on "Revolver"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/guy-ritchie-on-revolver.php Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Jason Statham in Guy Ritchie's "Revolver," Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2007]


Strutting his pomo plumage with 1998's "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and 2000's "Snatch," English writer-director Guy Ritchie proved then that Quentin Tarantino wasn't the only player on the field who could kick out a witty, whizz-bang crime flick. And because two out of three ain't ever bad, you can almost forgivingly laugh off his "Swept Away" remake in anticipation of what could've been a welcome rebound, until high expectations felled the rising fanboy giant. Finally seeing a U.S. release, Ritchie's hyper-kitschy return to Gangsterville, "Revolver," unloaded upon the 2005 Toronto Film Festival to a notoriously damning critical reception, and the British theatrical run didn't fare much smoother. (Rather than read the hometown reviews, check out this curious investigation into the film's poster-campaign controversy.) "Revolver" stars frequent Ritchie collaborator Jason Statham as a greasy-haired con artist who — after seven years in jail for a crime he didn't, well, you know — has come to exact revenge on Speedo-wearing casino boss Ray Liotta and his quirkily named henchmen. Slather that with countless quotes from the likes of Julius Caesar and Macchiavelli, Kabbalahist symbolism, three days to live from a rare blood disease, sphinx-like thugs André 3000 and Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore, monologuing over chess, an anime interlude, a metaphysical rug-pull of a climax, and well... it's probably better to let Madge's hubby do the explaining.


If you don't mind, I'd like to cut to the chase. What took so long to get "Revolver" to the U.S.?


Well, I don't think anyone understood it. I don't think it's any more complex than that. I mean, one of the cons of the movie is that your mind won't accept a game this big, [nor] accept the simplicity of the concept. But your mind's sort of geared up, that's what the film's about. It's geared up not to understand the premise that you are your own con man, or the con man is hiding in your own head. The reason that we fall for adverts and so forth is that our mind is conditioned to understand illusions. It doesn't understand truth. In fact, it's repulsed by truth.


But tangibly, what do you think wasn't being understood? There are plenty of successful art-house films that deal in abstracts.


Absolutely, and incidentally, once you understand something about this film, it's sort of dramatically simple. I can't remember [its title], but there was a movie that I saw recently that I thought was so fucking complex and I thought, "Hold on, I'm having a hard time thinking mine's complex, and this..." I mean, you're right. There are so many movies that are so abstract. There was a line in the previous [version of "Revolver"] that is "If you try to save them to destroy him, they'll destroy you to save him," which is the idea that you're protecting your own pain. So in proportion to how close you are to exposing your pain, that's proportionate to how much you'll be despised for it. I mean, I don't know what I can tell you. It's the movie that I made, and it's a niche movie. It was never made to be massively accessible. I wanted it to be sort of an intellectual gangster movie. There's not many of them.


That's a bit different from what you say in the press notes interview, where you joked that you never expected to "end up talking about high-flatulent concepts" and that you got into filmmaking because you were "interested in making entertaining movies." How do you find that balance?


Ironically, the premise behind this movie is the most exciting of all premises, but it's hard to see it. I mean, if you speak to Jason [Statham] about this, he'll tell you that it took a while for it to dawn. But when it does, it's "the" premise. It's what all other movies are about. The last three movies I saw are about the same thing. You feed your demons at some point. They start off as infants, and they grow into fucking great dragons in the case of "Beowulf." Or in "Michael Clayton," the corporation got consumed by its own consumption and then tried to deny that someone would do all sorts of nefarious activities in order to deny that it was a nefarious institution initially. So what was all that? The mind was playing tricks, both individually and collectively. The mind's a fucking trickster, man. That's not news, but there's some ambiguity about it. I didn't want to be ambiguous. I wanted to be very specific about the fact that we're at war with our own fucking minds. There's no beating around the bush, that's the reality of the situation. I just want to be really clear about that. [laughs] So that's why it's entertaining, because all narratives are based on that premise. We're all hard-wired to be interested in that.


So who do you see as most guilty of not acknowledging that, general audiences or critics?


There were two things: One, I think the film was marketed in the wrong way, in the respect that it looked like it was just going to be an accessible gangster movie. It looked like we were advertising oranges and really selling apples. I don't think that was too smart. Secondly, you have to be really specific about this movie. From my point of view, let it do what it says on the tin. If it says this movie is gonna fuckin' tax you intellectually, be prepared for that. And in that way, I don't think you're going to be disappointed. It's important that you do know what it is that you're getting into, don't you think?


Sure. But I have to admit, I don't know what I'm getting into because I haven't actually seen this new U.S. cut. I've only experienced the original version that screened at Toronto two years ago. How different is the re-edited film?


It's about ten minutes shorter, maybe a little bit more. We've just made a few points clearer. I mean, we've deliberately made it more complex than the first one because we wanted people to have a hard time working it out. But we found that, once you fuckin' spell it out, people still have a hard enough time trying to piece it all together, even when you tell them what it is in the first three lines. I think there's a line in there now, which is: "There really is no such as an external enemy," which is from the first page of some book on suicide. It just tells you, but people still say, "What's the movie about?" So there's no question that the mind doesn't want to understand. There's a gang of psychiatrists at the end of this, as well, sort of telling you what it's about.


Had you taken this universal premise you speak of and put it into a genre you're not regularly recognized for, do you think maybe the reactions might've been different?


No, I don't think so. It would've been good that "the Guy Ritchie thing" — which in the U.K. is kind of a brand, right? — if that hadn't gotten in the way, it would've made life easier. But you're not going to get around the fact that it's a square hole and a round peg, you know? Either people will suddenly get into that and like it for that, or they won't, and there's nothing really I can do about that. If a film's good, I think it comes through in the end. I can't be the judge of that; it'll percolate or it won't. It's out of my hands.


"Revolver" opens in limited release December 7th.

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<![CDATA[2007: Ten Box Sets We'd Love to Own]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/2007-ten-box-sets-wed-love-to.php Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "Barton Fink," part of The Coen Brothers Gift Set, MGM, 2007]


There's no safer present for the cinephile in your life than a DVD box set — even (or especially) if that cinephile is you. Here are our picks of some of 2007's most covetable collections.



The Coen Brothers Gift Set (MGM)

$49.98 [Amazon link]


If you received 1998's Coen Brothers Collection as a gift, chances are you were disappointed — the combination of "Blood Simple" with "The Man Who Wasn't There," "The Big Lebowski" and (ugh!) "Intolerable Cruelty" managed to miss most of the obvious high points of the brothers' career. Fortunately, this new five DVD grouping gets everything right. "Blood Simple," their excellent debut, is still there, paired with the even better gangster pastiche "Miller's Crossing," the portrait-of-the-artist-in-hell "Barton Fink," the infinitely rewatchable "Raising Arizona" and, of course, "Fargo." No "Lebowki," but c'mon, who doesn't already own a copy of that? This bundle doesn't offer any extras outside of what's already been released on the individual DVDs, but it is a great starter kit or, perhaps, just a much needed path toward falling in love with the Coens all over again — something we're well on our way to doing after "No Country For Old Men."



The Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis Collection, Vol. 2 (Paramount)

$29.99 [Amazon link]


The five films featured in this collection — "Living It Up" (1954), "You're Never Too Young" (1955), "Artists and Models" (1955), "Pardners" (1956) and "Hollywood or Bust" (1956) chart the beginning of one collaboration (comedian Jerry Lewis and director Frank Tashlin) and the end of another (Lewis and his longtime partner Dean Martin). Just as Martin and Lewis went their separate ways, the future nutty professor fell in with Tashlin, a former Warner Brothers and Disney animator who would go on to direct half a dozen of the disorderly orderly's best and liveliest solo films. Tashlin's two films in this set are the real prizes; the road trip film "Hollywood or Bust" and "Artists and Models," one of the few films in cinema history about the people who make comic books rather than the four-colored characters they create. And if at some point Lewis blurts something like "Hey nice LAY-DEE!" well, that's a small price to pay for intricately choreographed slapstick comedy gold.



The First Films of Samuel Fuller (Eclipse)

$44.95 [Amazon link]


Criterion's new Eclipse imprint offers box sets of "lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics," and this collection offers three films that all apply. They're the first three works from director Samuel Fuller, the former newspaperman who went on to direct some of the grittiest and pulpiest American movies of all time. It kicks off with 1949's "I Shot Jesse James" about that old coward Robert Ford, continues with 1950's Vincent Price conman-oater hybrid "The Baron of Arizona," and concludes with Fuller's first big cinematic splash (not to mention the first of several legendary war films) 1951's "The Steel Helmet." The Eclipse series doesn't offer much in the way of extras, but just having these movies in print on DVD is good enough for now. Now if we could only get a disc of "Park Row," we'd be all set.



The Godzilla Collection (Classic Media)

$79.95 [Amazon link]


Look, we all know what Godzilla became, with the dudes in crummy rubber suits crushing the paper houses and what not, but hear this: the original "Godzilla" (or "Gojira" as the big fella's known in Japan) is scary as hell. Before he became an enormous reptilian defender of humanity with a blatant disregard for property value, he was one enormous and enormously potent metaphor for the horrors of the atomic age. (The black and white photography, which is so much more visually forgiving of crummy special effects, and so much more nightmarish to boot, probably has something to do with it.) Ultimately, American producers got their hands on the footage, stripped out much of the original terror, and replaced it with the new terror of Raymond Burr. This box set pairs the recently re-released original Japanese cut of "Godzilla" with the American Burrtastic version and six of the follow-up films, including two previously unreleased kaiju hullabaloos, 1969's "All Monsters Attack" and 1975's "Terror of Mechagodzilla." It's the best of both worlds: when the true scares become too intense, you can retreat to the comforting sight of Godzilla grappling with an enormous moth held aloft by visible wires.



James Bond Ultimate Collector's Set (MGM/UA)

$289.98 [Amazon link]


This gigundo box runs a whopping 42 DVDs: 21 for each of EON Productions' James Bond films, and 21 more of bonus material. Granted, this set just compiles last year's four "Ultimate Edition" boxes with Daniel Craig's dynamic but over-praised debut as Agent 007 in "Casino Royale," but if you don't own them yet, here's a wonderful place to get them all, freshly remastered and restored, with oodles of extras, much of it new (including good humored audio commentary from Roger Moore on his films). Granted, too, that there are a few turkeys in the set — you may as well turn the "The World is Not Enough" into a coaster right now — but any fan of manly action, terrible double entendres and the history of misogyny in American and British popular culture from 1962 to 2006 will be in bliss trying to clear out room on their bookshelf for this monster. I recommend ignoring the naysayers and skipping right to "The Living Daylights" with Timothy Dalton — the best Bond film ever made after "Goldfinger."



Lubitsch in Berlin (Kino)

$79.95 [Amazon link]


I'm pretty well versed in the Hollywood works of German director Ernst Lubitsch, the famed director of some of the most memorable and delightful romantic comedies of the early sound era ("Trouble in Paradise," "Ninotchka"). But I know nothing about the time he spent honing his directorial chops in Weimar Germany, or the very popular films he produced there, and that's what makes this set from Kino so intriguing. "Lubitsch in Berlin" comes with six of Lubitsch's early works, including the awesome sounding "The Doll" (about "an effete young man who must get married in order to inherit a fortune. He opts to purchase a remarkably lifelike doll and marry it instead, not realizing that the doll is actually the puppet-maker's flesh-and-blood daughter!"), plus a feature-length documentary about the director during this fertile and overlooked period. Also worth a look from Kino, "Reel Baseball," a compilation of baseball features and actualities from the silent era, among them a performance from a young Babe Ruth.



Stanley Kubrick - Warner Home Video Directors Series (Warner Home Video)

$79.98 [Amazon link]


Okay, no "Lolita," no "Barry Lyndon." Instead, we're made to settle for Kubrick's constantly reevaluated but certainly imperfect final film, the so-called "erotic thriller" "Eyes Wide Shut." Hey, there are worst things that could happen — and who can complain when this set also includes restored, remastered versions of "2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange," "Full Metal Jacket" and "The Shining"? No one needs to be told why these films are great, only to be reassured that they get primo treatment here, most with a full disc of extras, including talking-head appearances from Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack and others, and commentary from Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, Malcolm McDowell, Vincent D'Onofrio and R. Lee Ermey. The set comes with Jan Harlan's 2001 documentary "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures," narrated by Tom Cruise.



Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (Criterion)

$79.95 [Amazon link]


Like half-remembered fever dreams, the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara are surreal, disturbing and resoundingly affecting. Criterion's collection offers three of his works, all delirious collaborations with writer Kobo Abe, the best known of which is the now classic 1964's "Woman in the Dunes." In the film, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes that year and nabbed Teshigahara an unlikely Best Director Oscar nom the year after, an entomologist (Eiji Okada) is stranded in a small town amidst massive dunes, and is offered a place to stay for the night with a widow whose house lies at the bottom of a sandpit. In the morning, the rope ladder he was lowered down on is gone, and he discovers he's been left as a companion for the woman, who must constantly dig in order to keep her house from being destroyed by the sand. No less unsettling are the other two films in the set, Teshigahara's 1962 fable about a miner and his son, "Pitfall," and the 1966 sci-fi "The Face of Another," about a man, disfigured in an accident, who is given a face transplant. The films are accompanied by a collection of four of the director's shorts and a documentary about the relationship between Teshigahara and Abe.



Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition (Paramount)

$99.99 [Amazon link]


"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic." So passed homecoming queen Laura Palmer, and so started one of the best things to ever flicker across an unsuspecting nation's TV sets. If you've been holding back on owning David Lynch's too strange for network television series, this set should ease any doubts — supervised by Lynch, the 10-disc collection includes the brilliant first season and the... not brilliant (but still watchable!) second season, along with the original version of the pilot (conspicuously missing from the earlier "Special Edition" release of the first season) and the European take with its tacked-on, mystery-solved ending. Other awesome extras include the Log Lady episode intros shot for re-airings of the show; "A Slice of Lynch," in which the director sits down for a piece of everyone's favorite cherry pie with Kyle MacLachlan, Mädchen Amick and crewmember John Wentworth; and four only aired in Japan ads featuring MacLachlan and others appearing in character to hawk Georgia Coffee.



Weird Cinema: 15 Freaky Flicks (Passport)

$19.98 [Amazon link]


For a mere 20 bucks, this cheesily titled set delivers five discs of well-chosen film oddities, including Ed Wood's 1953 transvestite odyssey "Glen or Glenda"; 1951 Siamese twinsploitation flick "Chained for Life," starring Daisy and Violet Hilton of "Freaks" fame; the 1938 all-little person Western "The Terror of Tiny Town"; the 1961 Dennis Hopper-falls-in-love-with- a-killer-mermaid thriller "Night Tide" and others. Sure, it's perfect for the novelty-lover in your life, but there are also genuine gems tucked away in this collection of forgotten, often in poor taste B-movies. Take the 1962 horror film "Carnival of Souls," Herk Harvey's sole feature effort, a dreamy tale of what seems to be life after death that's all the more creepy for its innovative, low-budget effects and its use of one of the most serendipitous locations to show up in cinema — the abandoned Saltair Pavilion on the Great Salt Lake. Shot for $30,000, the film bombed in theaters, only to gather a solid critical and cult following as the years passed. How's that for freaky?

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<![CDATA["Innocence," "Drunken Angel"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/12/innocence-drunken-angel.php Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Innocence," Leisure Time Features/Homevision, 2005]


A semi-secret, anxiety-cranked daydream movie released briefly to a few American cities in 2005, and one of the most original French films of the decade, Lucile Hadzihalilovic's "Innocence" (2004) is pure code, metaphor and mystery, and at the same it's seethingly tangible. Derived from a (currently) untranslated Frank Wedekind story, and pulsing with conceptual potency, the movie feels genuinely sui generis, a verdant, ambiguous reverie on childhood, consciousness and oppression. It's all parable, all the time, a Rorschach-blot scenario played out in feminized Old World ritual: we're in a vast tract of European forest, disarmingly illuminated by chandelier lamps, subgrounded with what seems to be an ancient, rumbling sewer system and surrounded by an unscalable wall. At the center lies a huge girls' school, populated by only two teachers (Hélène de Fougerolles and "La Vie en Rose"'s Marion Cotillard) and a dozen or so prepubescent girls, each wearing age-coded hair ribbons, new students arriving in suddenly materialized coffins and with fading memories of their families and lives outside. There are no men, and many rules. The school maintains a nurturing, if constricting, cloistered atmosphere, but there are glimpses of matters — disappearances, deaths, violations — we, like the students, never fully understand. The girls, gently examined, indoctrinated and trained in matters of traditional girlishness, are being certainly being groomed, but for what?


A debut filmmaker with electrifying confidence, Hadzihalilovic cat-plays with our instant sense of dread — unanswered narrative questions are supposed to have horrifying answers, right? — but "Innocence" has a more sophisticated program than you might suspect from her credits as Gaspar Noé's producer and editor (and girlfriend?). The mysteries at the film's pitiful heart aren't sexual, but then again, they are: Wedekind always worked in lurid metaphoric colors, and "Innocence" is nothing if not a fable of puberty told not as awakening but as subjugation. Call it the feminist flipside to Jean Vigo's "Zéro de Conduite," where revolt is not a condoned option (a single escapee is far from heroic, dropping into the unknown woods over the wall, never to be seen again), and Wedekind's anti-bourgeois take on the "tragedy of sex" prevails. In its view of childhood as totalitarian citizenship, Hadzihalilovic's film stands, quietly, in a gender-furious class by itself.


At the same time, the particularities are intensely imagined and naturalistic, and its symbology is as subterranean as you'd like to dig. Rich as a fruitcake in its Romantic tableaux (photographed, lushly, by Benoît Debie), the movie is not merely ironically titled — like David Lynch's films, its heart bleeds for the systematic death of purity while never idealizing the young. Shun critics who fail to respond to this lovely puzzle, or those for whom it conjures only thoughts of pedophilia. (Like A.O. Scott in the Times, for whom the movie limned a fine line "between cinematic art and exploitation," and like one New York Film Critics Circle member — alright, Leah Rozen — who dismissed it as a film only for those interested in "little girls in panties," this said less than an hour after Rozen argued that documentary features aren't "films" in the context of giving out a "Best First Film" award, in this case to Bennett Miller, whose first feature was not "Capote" but "The Cruise." Never mind that "Innocence" is a First Film achievement unrivaled in recent memory.)


Illiteracy and small-mindedness are everywhere, of course, which is why if The Criterion Collection didn't exist, we would have to invent it. This month they've exhumed Akira Kurosawa's first true career-maker, "Drunken Angel" (1948), a rarely seen classic of the Japanese postwar era, which is distinctive in world cinema as out-noiring noir — no American film from the time can approach the savage metaphors, raging desperation and hopeless squalor expressed in the modern-day films of Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Suzuki, Masumura, Oshima, Imamura, et al. "Drunken Angel" is something of a chamber piece: the setting is a clutch of hovels and shops huddled around a giant sump, which bubbles toxically and into which ripe garbage is regularly dumped. Immediately, we're thrust into a combative pas de deux, between a self-hating alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) and the tubercular yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) he reluctantly treats for a gunshot wound. Every scene the two characters share ends up in a brawl; they loathe each other, but the doctor feels compelled to get the gangster to respect his TB and possibly survive it by living clean, and the hood demurs, lest his machismo be called into question. That is, until another yakuza gets out of prison and starts sniffing around for his ex-girlfriend, who now runs the doctor's practice.


Both of the stars are fierce and fascinating (and omigod, so young), but while the chiseled and romantic Mifune seemed destined for stardom (this was the first of his seven collaborations with Kurosawa), Shimura dominates the film; it's his character, after all, that fuels the plot, and Shimura brings a wary, self-knowing belligerence to the role that's surprising (given how we're used to seeing him, as the elder sage in "The Seven Samurai" or the dying office mouse in "Ikiru" — or the wizened scientist in "Godzilla"). Compare this moment to any American noir: when Shimura's grizzled quack, who drinks antiseptic meant for patients, defiantly confronts the murderous gang leader and scoffs, "I've killed more people than you." (There's also language — the Japanese equivalents of shit, bitch, asshole, whore — you can't hear in postwar films here.) "Drunken Angel" couldn't comment on the ongoing American occupation, due to censorship rules that ended, with the occupation, four years later, as did so many subsequent films (Imamura's "Pigs and Battleships," say), leaving Kurosawa's potent pessimism aimed unambiguously at his own culture, emerging guilt-ridden from the war and barely able to pull itself out of the sewer. The film's Criterionization includes two documentaries about the making of the film and Kurosawa's early career, and the obligatory commentary track by professional Nipponophile Donald Ritchie, reigning king of the Asian-cinema-scholarship monologue.


"Innocence" (Homevision) and "Drunken Angel" (Criterion) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Confessing Some Blind Spots]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/ifc-news-podcast-54-confessing.php Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 You can't see everything -- if 2007 has taught us anything, it's that it's pretty much impossible to see every new release, no matter how hard you might try. Some things will slip by, but that's nothing unusual -- heck, even the most dedicated of film nerds have their blind spots. This week on the IFC News podcast, we confess to some of our most embarrassing: great film, classic films, films we know all about, perhaps, but still haven't gotten around to seeing.

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36807 2007-11-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_54_confessing publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10036807 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Confessing Some Blind Spots (photo)]]> Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10036807 2007-11-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_54_confessing_photo inherit 36807 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["The Savages"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/the-savages.php Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The Savages," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


It's not something one often praises in a film, but there's a mundaneness to "The Savages" that is incredibly appealing. The film is about a brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a sister (Laura Linney) dealing with their ailing father (Philip Bosco). That is all. There is no wacky road trip where they all reconnect, or a romanticized bank heist that solves all their unaddressed problems. That simplicity is refreshing, even if the movie's tone is a little uneven.


Bosco's Lenny Savage has been living with a woman in Arizona; when she dies, he is left without a home. It's clear Lenny needs constant care and supervision — just before his girlfriend's death, he began acting out by writing on the bathroom wall with his own feces #151; so Hoffman's Jon, an English professor, and Linney's Wendy, a temp and struggling writer, must seek out an appropriate nursing home. This process, and all the accompanying stress and guilt that comes with it, sustains the picture for its running time.


Emotional scars weigh on every decision. Jon tries to do right by Lenny but clearly doesn't want to be too inconvenienced; he finds him a decent facility near his home in Buffalo, but is totally uninterested in Wendy's attempts to find a more hospitable environment. In one of their numerous arguments, he protests Wendy's excessive concern, noting, "We're taking better care of the old man than he ever did of us." If they don't particularly like their father, the Savage kids didn't exactly save their love for each other, and their interactions throughout the film underscore their pettiness, their rivalry, and their jealousy of each other's success.


If this doesn't sound like a comedy, that's because it probably shouldn't be. Truth be told, the movie is not very funny, but there are scenes in "The Savages" that are clearly intended as the sort of awkward, quirky observational humor that's evident in a lot of films that appear at Sundance (as this one did, earlier this year). This is probably the only area in which writer/director Tamara Jenkins tries a bit too hard — by nature of its subject matter, this is a dark movie, and it was wise to try to leaven the seriousness with moments of humor. Still, the results feel forced.


The movie is much better when it simply observes its characters. "The Savages" evinces an off-the-cuff visual style that works well with its life-simply-captured approach. One particularly effective scene shows Jon speaking to Wendy on his cell phone while he stands out in the snow. Eventually the flakes begin to accumulate on the camera, smudging the image noticeably. But instead of breaking the illusion of the movie by suggesting the presence of the camera, the vérité-like moment removes the barriers between us and the screen and adds a sense of intimacy to the scene, as if we were there in Buffalo with Jon. In that moment, something as mundane as a dirty lens becomes something quite profound. Or perhaps I've just had my glasses smudged by the snow too many times.

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<![CDATA[Mathieu Amalric on "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/mathieu-amalric-on-the-diving.php Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Julian Schnabel casts from the gut, and his third film, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," was no exception. The artist/director refused to let his comme ci comme ça French inhibit him from selecting an all-Francophone cast and shooting the film in the native language of its subject, 43-year-old Jean-Dominique ("Jean-Do") Bauby. To play Bauby, the Parisian Elle editor left paralyzed by a massive stroke who subsequently dictated his memoir using the only part of his body he could still move, his left eyelid, Schnabel approached Mathieu Amalric, a celebrated actor in France but one American audiences may know best from his role in "Munich" as an amoral supplier of information to the highest bidder. Amalric (along with fellow cast members Emanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze and Max Von Sydow) was chosen by Schnabel not only for his talent, but because he felt right, like someone Schnabel wouldn't mind spending a few weeks with at coastal France's Berck Maritime Hospital, the location where Bauby spend much of his rehabilitation. It's a feeling, however, that didn't stop Schnabel from trying to kill his star, as Amalric suggested when he sat down with me to talk about the challenging role.

Working on a film like this must lead you to some of life's most painful and important questions -- what is a life, what is it to be alive, what would I do or want in this situation -- was anyone's will changed as a result of this film?

Oh definitely. Definitely. For me, the thing that I took away that I still do is just stopping every day and taking a few moments to do this [Amalric flattens his right palm and then contracts it into a fist]. I ask my brain to tell my fingers to move, and then my fingers actually move! It's a small thing, but it's amazing, really, when you think about it, that this works, it does exactly what I ask it to do. That reminds me of how lucky I am.

Ronald Harwood's script was translated into French, but the cast members were encouraged to improvise, did that help smooth any gaps?

Julian was very open to that, especially when we were recording the voice-over. But he would get to something in the script that didn't quite work and he'd say, "Well, how would you say that?" And we would be able to contribute that way.

So much of Bauby's internal life is conveyed through your voiceover, which you recorded live in another room while watching your point-of-view on a monitor as it was being shot next door. Did you have any sort of ritual or preparatory technique to get you into the mood to record it?

The place I was in was like a studio, close to the set but in another room -- it was actually the ballroom of the hospital, because that was the biggest room. And there was a space for me there with a monitor, behind a curtain, where I would sit in my clothes and my make-up, of course without [the prosthetics]. But yes, I was in my bubble [Amalric leans down as if to cup his hands around a monitor], and trying to find that space and that voice. It wasn't very fair to the other actors, actually, who had to do all of their acting directly to the camera. And the way it was set up, the cameraman became kind of like an actor in the scene. He would wear headphones and he was the only one who could hear my voice as the scene was going on, so if I started talking about how bored I was and when was this stupid girl going to shut up, the cameraman would let the lens drift to the wall. The woman would notice this, of course, and say, "Mr. Bauby! Mr. Bauby, regardez-moi, s'il vous plait." And the camera would go back, and I would say to the cameraman, "Now look at the leg, tilt down to her leg!" And we would just have fun, improvising like that -- but the poor actors didn't understand what was happening. And that sort of experience, working like that, it helped me understand how it might be possible to have some fun, in that state -- the power of becoming this invisible man.

Julian Schnabel talked about one day of shooting that wasn't so much fun (involving an underwater scene in which Amalric had to wear a diving bell and a miscommunication between the actor and the cameraman put him in serious jeopardy).

Do you mean in the diving bell?

Right--

I almost died. Oh! But I had to do it. I believe in...being strong, in challenging myself in different ways -- that is important to me. So I had to do that scene myself. But we shot it at the end, it was the last scene and the last take, so it felt like Julian could say, "Okay, now you can die, and we don't care! Bastard!" We had everything else in the film -- the diving bell was the last sequence. And it was complicated, but we had no rehearsal. So I guess he told you that things went wrong, the hand signals didn't work and the cameraman wasn't supposed to lift me out of the water when he did [causing Amalric to nearly drown]. But he didn't know.

That may have been the most obviously challenging scene, but I imagine the film was physically as well as emotionally demanding -- you had to achieve and maintain a complete stillness, with all of that energy contained within. Was it as exhausting as it looked?

Oh, my God. Well, I also do some directing, and I was about to direct my next film. I thought I could take this role -- that's fine, really easy -- I'll do it and be able to lie in a bed all day and think about my film. But that did not happen -- it was exhausting. It was totally consuming. Just getting in that position, even holding the position of the hand, the tension of it.

Did you meet with other locked-in patients, or talk to members of Bauby's family, to help you with the physical aspects of the performance?

Yes. And at the hospital where we shot, some of Jean-Do's nurses and his physical therapist were still there, so they could say, yes or no, this is what this looks like. What was great though, in talking to his friends and family and listening to them -- their stories all contradicted one another, and what I realized what that, "Oh, this is not a hero, this is just...a man." He liked to travel, he was materialistic, he liked cars, he was shallow, he had a temper, he visited brothels in Brazil -- normal things. [laughs] But also, he loved life. Loved his children. That helped me a lot, it freed me, to realize that you don't become a saint when you have a stroke. Finishing the book, for instance, wasn't some great, noble thing for Jean-Do. In fact it was very practical: he wanted to leave something that would [generate income] for his kids, and show everyone else that he could do it. For me, what helped was understanding that he was determined to write the book so that his friends in Paris wouldn't think he was a vegetable! That's all.

Were you wary of being subjected to the kinds of accusations leveled at films that heroicize afflictions and afflicted characters? I have read the term "disability porn" as a description of that tendency.

Of course, yeah. Well [the threat of that kind of accusation] helps motivate you to not...masturbate yourself in portraying such a character, in order to avoid that.

How long was the shoot for the film?

Well, we had seven weeks, but we finished shooting ten days early, because I guess that's way Julian works--

Under-schedule?

Yeah. He works really quickly, with no rehearsal, and I think it's a very intelligent way of dealing with emotion, to make things very immediate. Instead of wasting time, and take after take, on stupid moments, trying to get something "exactly right." So, in fact, in the schedule they had three days to do the scene with the kids on the beach, and we finished it in one. Because, with kids, you don't need to make them do it over and over, you just capture the moment and move on. And Julian understood that.

So you spent seven weeks in this rather exhausting state of being "locked in" all day -- how did you cope with that? How did you literally rise up and walk off of the set at the end of each day? How would you unwind?

I went to the casino [close to the hospital where they filmed in Pas de Calais]. I drank a lot, with the other actors, and then won lots of money.

And that helped?

Yeah! Usually, it did.

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" opens in limited release on November 30th.

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<![CDATA[Mathieu Amalric on "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (photo)]]> Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008655 2007-11-26 00:00:00 closed closed mathieu_amalric_on_the_diving_photo inherit 8655 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Our Hitler: A Film from Germany," "The Freethinker"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/our-hitler-a-film-from-germany.php Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Our Hitler: A Film from Germany," Facets]


It was one of the most fabulous, rumored-about, challenging, psychotic film events of the modern age: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's "Hitler, a Film from Germany" (1977), arriving in New York in 1980 as "Our Hitler," to be shown at the Ziegfeld theater in an unheard-of nearly seven-and-a-half-hour form (it was made as a four-part German TV program, but the networks rejected it), bearing hype as a brazenly non-narrative epic addressing the legacy of Hitler as a kind of cultural consciousness, carrying the crest of Francis Ford Coppola as "presenter," and trailing after it, in February 1980 in The New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag's immediately famous appreciation proclaiming the film to be "unprecedented" and "on another scale from anything one has seen on film." I was but a wee film-hungry shaver at the time, and never got to the Ziegfeld. But "Our Hitler," a film that promised a truly unique experience (every description I'd read about it left me still questioning what on earth the movie could be like), maintained the aura of an Atlantis among sought-after movies, elusive, humongous, too unwieldy and rich and profound for the average filmgoer, but a prize new world for the rest of us.


Finally, Syberberg's monster is DVD'd, and of course today "Our Hitler" cannot withstand the burden, for this moviehead, of all those years of anticipation, all that ballooning Sontagian hype, all of that pioneering rhetoric. No film could. Not that Sontag was wrong, in her extraordinarily reasoned way — her evocation of the film is spot-on. A kind of stagebound, Wagnerian discourse-voyage through the meanings and ramifications of Hitler's place in the 20th century (think of it as "Thirteen x 13 Ways of Looking at Hitler"), the film is a "mosaic," in Sontag's term, a salmagundi of theatrical effects, tropes and set-pieces, and, purposefully, nothing is left out: puppet theater, reenacted history, philosophical speculation (a lot of that), masquerade, vaudeville lampoon, Nazi film and audio clips, memoir recitations, symbolist tableaux, homages to German Expressionism, ad friggin' infinitum, all of it shot in a wreath of mist and in front of a giant projection screen in a cavernous Munich warehouse. A large chunk of the film is taken up with the recitation of Hitler's butler's detailed memories about der Führer's soap brand and underwear and breakfast preferences; another with the recollections of his projectionist. (As Syberberg points out, Hitler never went to the front, and saw the war only on privately screened, nightly newsreels — Hitler as moviemaker, or, as Sontag puts it, "Germany, A Film by Hitler.") Another riveting section involves a Hitler ventriloquist dummy answering his critics — and correctly damning scores of other countries and corporations for their Hitlerian actions ("Hiroshima — your Auschwitz! Bravo!").


What Sontag neglected to mention, or, more accurately, didn't care about, was the slowness of the film, its longueurs and repetitions, its reliance on monologuing. For every five salient, revelatory postulates about "Hitler" the man, the ghost, the enigma, the dialectic inevitable, there's at least one that's fuzzy, inconclusive or silly. And of course the visual dynamic grows familiar, regardless of how much Syberberg tries to recreate the space with Hitler memorabilia clutter and new projected images on the back screen. But such criticisms, Sontag would surely argue, are irrelevant in the face of a film that strives for such massiveness, that dares so boldly, that creates its own way of watching. And she'd be right, as I could well be in suggesting that editing out a just few hours would make the film communicate better and test patience less. Whatever: it's an astounding, intellectually adventurous monument, and obviously a cinephile's required viewing, if in fact the cinephile in question wants to remain worthy of the label.


Another berserker going to extraordinary lengths, at extraordinary length, to plumb the mysteries of history, Peter Watkins has mastered, with Culloden, Edvard Munch and La Commune (Paris, 1871), perhaps the most effective and eloquent methodology for cinematic exploration of historical phenomena yet devised: the full-on, straight-faced mock-doc, exploring the social contexts around a battle or a painter's life or a social revolution, with in-period interviews, narration and texts, woven together to make both a completely convincing now out of what may seem to be faraway material, and a fiery leftist testament for the sake of the poor and oppressed and against the wealthy. Prior to the international revelation of La Commune in 2001, which is largely responsible for the long-neglected Watkins's renaissance in film culture and his long-unseen corpus being released on DVD, the director struggled, amid many struggles, with the cost of moviemaking. That changed, if only in a technical way, with "The Freethinker" (1994), for which Watkins discovered the possibilities of digital video. (Imagine how "The Journey," Watkins's 14.5-hour documentary about his global search for sanity in a fading-Cold-War world, might've taxed the great martyr less if video had been serviceable at the time.)


"The Freethinker," shot over a few years with the devoted assistance of Norwegian students and volunteers but with no official institutional help, is a four-and-a-half-hour essay on the life and legacy of August Strindberg, famed Swedish playwright, controversial misanthrope, notoriously disastrous family man and self-destructive genius. But it's not a straight-on mock-doc — like Syberberg's gargantua, it's a collage of formal ideas, mixing faux-documentary elements with cohesive dramatization, archival footage, photos, huge chunks of Strindbergian text, direct camera address, group discussions, documentary footage of the making of the film itself, texts by Watkins about Strindberg, the film and Watkins's outrageous, but indisputable, summary evaluation of modern media, and so on, at Herculean length and with the defiant seriousness of an obsessive Luddite.


Watkins has often used history as a brickbat with which to assault the present-day system of wealth maintenance and pervasive inequity, but even so, it's clear that Strindberg is a paradigmatically Watkinsonian figure, a recalcitrant backbiter, a man driven to odious arguments by his own experiences with political economics (including anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, but eventually including socialism), a socially critical artist maligned and maltreated time and again by critics and the media, if he was acknowledged at all, and a furiously unpopular pro-working-class polemicist (which, Watkins maintains, is the aspect of Strindberg's work that's least known outside of Sweden, though it might be the most vital). Methodical, studious, passionate and sometimes experimental-theater cheesy, "The Freethinker" is not only a moving portrait of the man and the times (no one need to read more for a solid sense of 19th-century Sweden or Strindberg), but a lacerating political statement as well, specifically targeting various supposedly progressive Scandinavian countries' behaviors at the time, but in implication every state power since. (Authority doesn't come easy to Watkins; as usual, he credits himself amidst an ensemble of filmmakers.) Of course, as per Watkins's record, the movie was shunned by broadcasters and educators alike. Call me a partisan, but if Watkins made it, be it science fiction or ancient history, you gotta be there.


"Our Hitler: A Film from Germany" (Facets) will be available on DVD November 27th; "The Freethinker" (Zeitgeist) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Morgan Spurlock on "What Would Jesus Buy?"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/morgan-spurlock-on-what-would.php Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Morgan Spurlock's a busy guy. Since his Academy Award-nominated 2004 McDonald's take-down "Super Size Me," he's been producing and occasionally appearing in the reality-show-with-a-brain the film inspired, "30 Days" (the third season of which kicks off in January). He's been distributing titles like "The Future of Food" and "Chalk" via his label Morgan Spurlock Presents. "What Would Jesus Buy?", a new documentary on anti-consumerism activist Bill Talen, a.k.a. the Reverend Billy, and his Church of Stop Shopping, finds Spurlock trying his hand at producing films that, like "Super Size Me," pair a message with humor and entertainment. And then there's his own new film, still untitled, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, footage from which was shown to buyers at a tightly monitored screening at this year's Berlin Film Festival, sparking a bidding war and a considerable amount of media speculation. Despite having all this on his plate, Spurlock cleared a few minutes to talk to me about commercialization, responsible consumption and why it's so important to make people laugh.

How'd you end up getting involved with "What Would Jesus Buy?"?

One of the producers of the film, Peter Hutchison, came to me about six months after "Super Size Me" came out. He'd been following Reverend Billy for a while. I knew Reverend Billy — I'd lived in East Village for about 12 years, and he's ubiquitous in that area, everybody knows him. I'd never been to one of his shows but I watched the footage that Peter had and said, "I want to meet him. I want to talk to him in person." Because you don't know when you first watch if it's for real.

I met Bill Talen and his wife Salvatori, and just wanted to get an idea of what they hope to accomplish and what their mission is, what they really believe in. I was sold after that because — these are two people who really walk the walk. They're really trying to make a difference and have an impact and they're using this character and this church and humor to do it, which I think is brilliant. It's like the George Bernard Shaw quote. If you're gonna tell people the truth you better make them laugh or they'll kill you. And I think Billy does a great job of that.

You financed the film, is that right?

Yeah, we came in, we financed the movie. We had a lot of other financiers but the biggest thing for me was to come in and help produce something that I hoped would be commercially accessible. This is a tough topic to tackle. It's an immense issue — how do you tie that into something? I wanted to come in and help shape a film that would potentially get out to as large an audience as possible, and not taste like medicine.

Right — it is, literally, a preachy film.

You don't want to be preached to in this movie and I don't think you are. I think it's kind of fun.

You've been a major proponent of this, for lack of a better word, functional filmmaking—

[laughs] As opposed to years of dysfunctional filmmaking?

Well, films and a series that have messages in them but also humor — they go down easier. I wanted to ask about how this became your form of choice.

The biggest thing for me is that the films I want to make are films that I want to see. I want to make stuff that I enjoy going to, that, when I'm sitting in a movie theater, I actually enjoy watching. I enjoy all kinds of films, but I think there are specific films that resonate with audiences and the biggest ones are usually comedies. And I think that if you can make people laugh then you can make people think, and that's really what we try to accomplish.

With the case of Reverend Billy, there's a real sense that people who are drawn to the Church of Stop Shopping have become disillusioned with the usual means of protest.

Yeah — and what I also find to be really fascinating about the Church of Stop Shopping is you think it's just some bunch of nutty activists, but these are people who are really together in their lives. As Billy says in the movie, they're scientists. They're schoolteachers. They're executives. These are people who are very successful in what they do every day, and who find this to be, I think, an outlet where they can promote social change but at the same time are a part of a community. And the idea of being a part of something is what church is all about.

Can you imagine any other way someone could tackle the issue of consumerism and Christmas? I don't know what Billy's personal beliefs are, but it seems like his embrace of this religious persona has freed him to engage a topic people are otherwise very protective of and sensitive about.

It is a sacred cow in a lot of ways, but the film does a great job of walking that line. And the amazing thing about "What Would Jesus Buy?" is that it's centered around this preacher with this church, and the movie has been embraced by Christian groups all across the country. I mean it's incredible — it's played at all these Christian film festivals. It's become a rallying cry for a lot of groups that, I think, like Billy for different reasons, but everyone can agree that, no matter what your spiritual beliefs, things have gotten crazy. When I start hearing Christmas ads the day after Halloween, it's like "People, come on! Are you kidding me?" When decorations go up November 1 and it's a countdown — it's a race to see who can make the most money by Black Friday and who's gonna win by Christmas.

Tackling consumer culture is, as you said, a larger issue in many ways and less easy to act on than, says cutting back on fast food. What would you hope for people leaving this movie to do?

They recognize this in the film — James Sullivan, then the choir director, says, "You can't ever stop shopping. It's impossible." You have to shop. But can you become a more conscious consumer? Can you become more aware of the things you buy? Where they come from? Who do they affect? Where does the money go? Does it go off into some big bank? Somewhere in Arkansas or New York or wherever the company headquarters is? Or does the money actually stay in your community? These things are all really important, and we've stopped thinking about them. I think that we need to become a little more aware. We need to become more conscious, and, if the movie does that in some small way, then that will be a tremendous accomplishment.

In an interview at indieWIRE, director Rob VanAlkemade mentioned that he got a kind of subversive kick from using, as he put it, "The Devil's own tools," like putting the film's trailer up on AOL's movies page, to promote the film. Obviously if you want your work to be widely seen, you have to work through the systems in place. What's your philosophy been in that way?

I think there's a way to work within the machine where you don't feel like you're just another cog in the machine. And I think that you have to — you have to be a part of this industry and you have to do things to get your movie out.

So is there a particular pleasure in, say, producing "30 Days" under the umbrella of News Corp?

Yeah. [laughs] Maybe "30 Days" is for when people question [Rupert] Murdoch. They say, "You don't have any programming that isn't biased. He says, "What do you mean? Look at this show." We're the out.


"What Would Jesus Buy?" is now playing in limited release.

[Additional photo: Morgan Spurlock in television show "30 Days," fX, 2005]

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<![CDATA[Morgan Spurlock on "What Would Jesus Buy?" (photo)]]> Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025386 2007-11-19 00:00:00 closed closed morgan_spurlock_on_what_would_photo inherit 25386 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["I'm Not There"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/im-not-there.php Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Cate Blanchett in "I'm Not There," Weinstein Company, 2007]


A man stands on a stage and plays ferocious, grinding blues. At first glance, the man is Bob Dylan, defiantly pounding away on his electric guitar despite the protestations of an angry crowd at Manchester's Free Trade Hall. On second glance, the man isn't Bob Dylan at all; the man, in fact, isn't even a man. It's Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn" in an incredibly lifelike simulacrum of the Manchester show in Todd Haynes' Dylan deconstruction "I'm Not There." There's a lot of that in the movie, scenes of eerie familiarity, still photos or album covers brought to life. If you're the type of moviegoer (and Dylanaholic) who enjoys scouring a frame for in-jokes and references, this movie is your dream come true.


Blanchett's Jude isn't the only Dylan on hand, though — there are five more, played by Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin, each representing a different period of Dylan's career or side of his personality. Though we know these six characters are different faces of one die, these guys — and yes, Cate's, playing a guy — look and act like totally different people. Some — like Whishaw's Arthur — aren't even musicians. One (Franklin's Woody) isn't even the same race as the rest; he's sort of a straight-faced version of the old Steve Martin gag "I was born a poor black child." The six Bobs rarely intermingle, and their stories don't even approach something resembling individual narratives. Instead, "I'm Not There" is an accumulation of character sketches and performances by Dylans, both real and imagined, and an all-star roster of cover artists (including Stephen Malkmus, Antony & the Johnsons, Jim James from My Morning Jacket, and a particularly feisty Richie Havens).


The immediate reaction to all these different Dylans is that their attitudes and appearances are so disparate that they simply cannot be reconciled as facets of the same person. That, I think, is Haynes' fundamental point. Haynes the artist is examining Dylan the artist, and marveling at his contradictions. Just when his audience thought they understood him as a protest song writing folk hero, Dylan rejected all of that for the image of a disinterested hard rocker (a clash of styles that led to the infamous Manchester show). At the press conference after his film's screening at the New York Film Festival, Haynes explained that Dylan's freedom to reinvent himself was always more important to him than the freedom to simply be himself. Whether or not Dylan himself actually believes this (the fact that he authorized this film and permitted Haynes to use his music suggests that at the very least he doesn't reject the notion), the idea comes through loud and clear in the film.


Unfortunately, that's about all the movie communicates. Despite Haynes' obvious affection for his subject, as well as his ample cinematic gifts, "I'm Not There" is a bit impregnable. To be fair, Dylan himself is a bit impregnable; his whole mystique, especially in that "Jude Quinn" period, was built on keeping himself at a remove from his answer-craving audience. Representing that idea on screen cuts off the amount of insights into Dylan at the notion, repeated often, that there can be no insights into Dylan. However appropriate that is to the man himself, it's unsatisfying to the viewer. I walked out of the film with a deeper appreciation of Dylan's catalogue, but with little additional knowledge about his life or his ideas. And if Haynes is, as Quinn claims to be, "just a storyteller," the stories he's telling aren't particularly dynamic, especially those starring Gere and Ledger, who do not even attempt to "play" Dylan (in the way that Blanchett and Bale, with their accents and looks, do) and whose storylines feel a bit pointless.


Even as it dances between visual styles and color palettes (the Blanchett portions are Felliniesque black and white, the Ledger chapters are filled with rich greens, the Gere segments sooty and brown), there remains something inexplicably cold about "I'm Not There." I deeply respect its intentions, admire both its filmmaker and its subject, but have very little affection for the finished product.


That famous "Royal Albert Hall" concert in Manchester has one of the most remarkable moments in the history of 20th century music. In between songs during his electric set, one member of the audience calls Dylan Judas. While tuning his guitar for the next number, Dylan responds: "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" then turns to the band and orders "Play fucking loud!" before launching into a blistering rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone." Curiously, in the Haynes version, Dylan does not get his revenge or the last laugh. It's like a cover version without the original's passion or fire, and it occurs to me that that despite all the different angles the film shows of Dylan, that one, maybe the most important, is the thing "I'm Not There" is missing.

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #53: Screenwriters on Screen]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/ifc-news-podcast-53-screenwrit.php Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Nicolas Cage and Brian Cox in "Adaptation," Columbia Pictures, 2002]


While there are plenty of films out there featuring writers, those concentrating on people who write for film or television are few and far between, and an interesting case study — they're very rarely a flattering portrait of the position. This week on the IFC News podcast, as the writers' strike carries on, we present a potential movie marathon of films featuring screenwriters.


Download now (MP3: 29:29 minutes, 26.9 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[Crispin Hellion Glover on "It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE."]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/crispin-hellion-glover-on-it-i.php Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Crispin Hellion Glover; below, "It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE." Volcanic Eruptions, 2007]


Hoping to leverage some hype from his role as the monstrous Grendel in "Beowulf," the irrefutably eccentric Crispin Hellion Glover ("Willard," "Wild at Heart") timed it so that his second directorial feature, "It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE." would be released the very same week. While it's unlikely that the collective audience who shelled out over $28 million this past weekend for that CGI-animated epic will repeat that business for the second leg of Glover's "It" trilogy (following "What Is It?" with its all-Down syndrome cast), he seems astutely aware that his loyal cult following only grows with each unusual new career step. Co-directed by David Brothers and written by its late star, a cerebral palsy sufferer named Steven C. Stewart, "It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE." is a hallucinatory, psychosexually violent, avant-garde fantasy that explores a disturbing theme: even the physically handicapped can act like tyrants. Deeply concerned about piracy, Glover was frequently seen at this year's Sundance carrying his 35mm print of the film wherever he went, so I wasn't at all surprised when he requested I only watch it on his laptop before our interview.


My first exposure to "What Is It?" was a time-coded rough cut you brought along with your slideshow tour in the late '90s. I watched that version of the film in Tempe, Arizona with a non-festival crowd, who were squirming and nervously laughing throughout. Have the crowd reactions been different for "It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE."?


Yes. They're very different kinds of movies, I think. "What Is It?" is specifically my psychological reaction to corporately funded and distributed cinema, and the fact that anything that could possibly make an audience feel uncomfortable is necessarily excised. There's entertainment to it, but on some level, it works almost like a thesis. Whereas "EVERYTHING IS FINE," there's a purposeful reason in making that film second because I feel like the thesis has been stated in "What Is It?": What is it that we're not able to explore? What does it mean to the culture that we're not able to explore these things? Certainly, there will be people who see "EVERYTHING IS FINE" who haven't seen "What Is It?", and if they're uncomfortable with the graphic sexuality that is in both films, yes, there will be concern. But other than that, I feel that [the new film] has a fair amount of universal interest. More precisely, "EVERYTHING IS FINE" has a very strong, emotional experience, concentrating on Steven C. Stewart's catharsis. "What Is It?" is a more distanced, intellectual view of the characters.


Stewart was clearly not a professional screenwriter. What attracted you to his script?


Well, I read it many years ago in the mid-'80s, and there was the central scene where he asks Linda Barnes — the character played by [Fassbinder regular] Margit Carstensen — to marry him. There were other peripheral things that were all interesting, but to me, that was the central emotional crux of the whole movie. I could see that there was an emotional reality. I never asked Steve, but I assume this was something that happened, maybe more than once. As soon as I read that, I just knew this was a film I had to produce.


Besides being personal, how did you recognize the experience as cathartic for him?


Essentially, the film [is bookended] with him in the nursing home. That was the only thing shot on location, not on soundstages, and coincidentally, it was in the nursing home that he'd been locked in for 10 years when his mother died. He couldn't get out, and people would derisively call him an M.R., a mental retard, which is not a nice thing to say to anybody. We found out when we got to the location that it was actually the place, so that footage is very powerful. That was his experience, his life, during his 20s. Steve was a pretty tough guy. We were involved in other things all the time while we working, so I never had an opportunity to sit down and say "Well, Steve, what's it like to be here?"


What was the last time you spoke with him?


I got a call one morning. I found out he was on life support; his lung had collapsed. Cerebral palsy is not degenerative, but he was choking on his own saliva. We'd finished shooting about a month before, and he was basically asking us permission to take himself off life support, to make sure we had enough footage. Of course, that was a very sad day, and a heavy responsibility to let him know that, yes, we did have enough footage. I knew that if I had said "No, Steve, we don't have enough. You need to keep yourself alive," he would have done it. But if he had gotten that operation on time, he would've had to live in a nursing home. I know he didn't want to do that again. That says it there how he felt about that nursing home — it was when he got out that he wrote this screenplay. It was a very particular kind of imprisonment that was a central element of his life.


Are you ever concerned that producing a film so far outside of the mainstream is commercial suicide?


No, this is why I tour with the film. It's a guarantee. Because I've toured with my slideshow, I personally know what my market is. I have to be careful, and it's not a huge amount of money. If I spent a million dollars, I would have trouble. These films are made for somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000. And it takes time, but over time, I can recoup that money. I'm not going to make money on these films, but that isn't what's important. What the films ultimately do is enable me to recoup by performing my slideshow and selling my books. I split the box office with the theater, 50/50, so if it's an $8 ticket, I get $4. [For] the slideshow, the question and answer, and book signing, I generally charge $10 and I take that 100%. So that's $14, plus the money I make on the books, which I publish myself.


I still own an album you recorded in 1989 entitled "The Big Problem Does Not Equal the Solution, The Solution = Let It Be." On the back cover, there was a puzzle where listeners had to figure out what the lyrics to all nine songs had in common, and there was a phone number to call when you knew the answer. Did you ever call anyone back?


No, I never did. I think if people figured it out, that's the accomplishment. They don't have to know they're right. [laughs] But there were people who got it. There was a phone number at the time, but I've since changed it to CrispinGlover.com. This was pre-Internet, so really it was a way for people to get information on where the books were available. But I did have many people call, not just a small amount, and leave messages to what they thought the Big Problem was. I never say what it is because it would spoil the question. There are certain things that I leave mysteries. The question of the film is "What is It?" The appearance on David Letterman, I've never really explained what that is, and so people question me.


What needs to be explained? It looked like you tried to roundhouse kick him in the face.


Well, some people think one thing, and other people think other things. It has life on YouTube. I've never confirmed nor denied that I was on the show. [laughs] But just in general, I like to leave things a mystery. There are people that are naturally thoughtful who think they are being condescended to when things are really explained. I mean, yes, there are people who can misinterpret things or whatever in a negative fashion. When I go and do the questions and answers for "What Is It?", I'm very careful to not explain symbolism, but I do feel with that film that it's helpful to put it in context of what it's reacting to. I'm going to do the same thing with the Steve Stewart film, and I know people will have questions about that as well, and it'll be valuable, but it's even more imperative for "What Is It?".


Are there any major misconceptions about you or your work that bother you?


It's going away in general, but there have been conceptions — and you see it written on the internet — that people think I'm insane or psychotic. It felt for a while that that was almost a majority of opinion. But I mean, I've been in the business professionally since I was 13. Is that almost 30 years? Is that possible? I'm 42, or 43? I can't even remember how old I am. What year is this? [laughs] I was born in '64, and this is 2007, so yeah, 43. I started in film when I was 18, so that's a long time to have been around. I've now published four books, I've had a record out, and I've produced, directed and edited two different films that I'm proud of. It's like, at a certain point, how genuinely insane can someone who's done all that be? [laughs] So it has to be going away. I've never really fought it because I've always felt the truth comes out. But when you start reading things that aren't true repeated over and over again, that does become truth no matter what. It doesn't necessarily hurt my audience for going around and touring with the films; there's an interest in somebody who is passionate about unusual and thoughtful things. So I'm not really concerned about rectifying so much, but it can be a bit irritating. It's really so, so off the mark, but I understand what it's about. I've had something to do with it being there, so I can't really complain because that would be silly.


"It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE." opens in New York in November 21st.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 22nd, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/opening-this-week-november-22n.php Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Lauren Ambrose in "Starting Out in the Evening," Roadside Attractions, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"August Rush"

Freddie Highmore plays an orphaned musical prodigy stranded in the middle of New York who, with the help of a mysterious stranger (Robin Williams), attempts to find the parents from whom he was separated at birth (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Keri Russell). While "August Rush"'s bohemia-heavy vision of the city may remind us of a sappier version of "Rent," we're hard-pressed to hate on director Kirsten (daughter of Jim) Sheridan's musical fantasy — it does seem like a prettied-up response to her father's own heartfelt New York ode "In America." Plus, kudos to Keri Russell for capping off a great 2007 after "Waitress" and a short run on "Scrubs."

Opens wide (official site).


"Enchanted"

For those who still haven't seen the 2005 indie drama "Junebug," welcome to the film that's going to make Amy Adams a star. Adams plays a peasant girl who falls in love with a prince in a Disney-esque animated world, and is banished to real-life New York City by the evil queen (Susan Sarandon). It's about time Disney poked a little bit of fun at its animated history, but we're just excited to see our favorite Winston-Salem resident get the exposure she deserves. Patrick "McDreamy" Dempsey co-stars as a divorce lawyer who falls in love with Adams after she lands in the live action world.

Opens wide (official site).


"Everything's Cool: A Toxic Comedy About Global Warming"

"Blue Vinyl" directors Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand re-team for a documentary about a group of activists who try to raise awareness for global warming. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Hitman"

This latest actioner is based on the PlayStation 2 video game series of the same name, which tells you all you need to know (i.e., this will suck). Reports of director Xavier Gens getting fired from the production have been widespread ever since filming was completed, and while Timothy Olyphant may be a fine actor, why couldn't they get an actual bald guy to play Agent 47? What is Vin Diesel even up to these days? And how did Jason Statham turn down this role?

Opens wide (official site).


"I'm Not There"

Todd Haynes' highly anticipated Bob Dylan biopic finally hits theaters, and we expect it to enthrall as much as frustrated viewers. Haynes strays from the familiar biopic by following six distinct characters, each depicting different stages of Dylan's life and embodying a different aspect of his life story and music. Big names like Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett play the different Dylans. The film won the Special Jury Prize at this year's Venice Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Midnight Eagle"

"Fly, Daddy, Fly" director Izuru Narushima helms this adventure film about a former war photographer who witnesses the crash of a U.S. bomber nicknamed "Midnight Eagle" and becomes involved in an international hunt for its secret payload, a nuclear warhead that threatens to wipe out Japan's entire population.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Nina's Heavenly Delights"

Pratibha Parmar's U.K. comedy film explores national, racial and sexual identities through the character of Nina Shah, a young Indo-Scottish woman who returns to her deceased father's restaurant and falls in love with its new owner, Lisa. The film premiered earlier this year at the Bite the Mango Festival.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Starting Out in the Evening"

Andrew Wagner's drama finds an ambitious grad student (Lauren Ambrose) who convinces a writer (Frank Langella) that her thesis can resurrect his flagging literary career. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Stephen King's The Mist"

Suddenly Stephen King adaptations are in vogue again, and Frank Darabont (of "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile") re-teams with the prolific horror writer for a story about how everyman David Drayton (Tom Jane) is caught up in a freak storm that unleashes bloodthirsty monsters on his small town. Scaaaaaryy...we guess.

Opens wide (official site).


"This Christmas"

Writer-director Preston A. Whitmore II follows up the awful, awful "Crossover" with this well-cast drama about a family's first Christmas holiday get-together in four years. Whitmore enlists ace actors Regina King, Delroy Lindo, Columbus Short and Idris Elba (what hasn't he been in this year?) for this holiday ensemble drama. Eat that, Tyler Perry.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA["I Am Cuba," "Manufactured Landscapes"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/i-am-cuba-manufactured-landsca.php Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson
IFC News


[Photo: "I Am Cuba," Milestone Films]


Though only recently exhumed from the neverworld abyss of forgotten cinema — it was 1992, in fact — it does seem as if Mikhail Kalatozov's "I Am Cuba" (1964) has always been with us, always staking out its small, idiosyncratic turf as Communist agitprop's most unrestrained diva hymn, and one of the most visually titanic works in the century of movies. If you've managed to avoid it up to now, Milestone's new bells-&-whistles DVD release is your present to yourself this Christmas — newly struck from the original Russian master, and coming gift-wrapped in an almost absurdly lavish cigar-box case, accompanied by two supplementary documentary discs and a thorough booklet of explicative material. Still, in my experience, the movie bedazzles regardless of its condition or format — there's just no acclimating to, or being blasé about, the famously superhuman cinematographic stunt work and the unearthly white-wheat-dark-sky exposures (achieved with infra-red stock), all of it mated to an unfettered revolutionary outrage that abstractly details life before and during Castro's rebel war, from decadent tourist pool parties to police brigade atrocities to guerrilla righteousness in the mountains.


The resulting assault seems at this remove to be less about Cuba per se than about the fusillade of movement, shadow, light and landscape on the viewer's tender optic nerves. Indeed, this rare co-production between Mosfilm and Castro's new state-run ICIAC tanked with its intended Communist audiences, proving too languid and impressionistic for the Cubans and too tropical-exotic for the Russians. No one else saw it. I've had suburban college students, otherwise prone to dozy dismissiveness at the very notion of a black-&-white, subtitled movie, weep openly at "I Am Cuba." Once you're confronted with the famous, two-and-a-half-minute one-shot funeral march sequence, in which seemingly the entirety of the city of Havana is participating, and in which the camera climbs buildings, passes over rooftops and through windows and finally flies out over the crowd in mid-air, without a single cut, you've begun to understand how the film certainly represented a kind of cinematic frontier for filmmakers like Miklós Jancsó, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov and Theo Angelopoulos, and still does, in many ways, today.


It's propaganda, of course, and fascinating for that — but still, naïve as it seems, the film (co-written by poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko) makes a feverish case you can't argue with, for the people and against state power. Kalatozov, a veteran from the silent days, made his global mark in 1957 with "The Cranes Are Flying" (an award-winner at Cannes), and along with "I Am Cuba" and 1959's "The Letter Never Sent" (imagine a film that looks like Cuba butthat was shot entirely in the Siberian wilderness), his work with levitating cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky had a still-unacknowledged impact on international art cinema. (Note that before "The Cranes Are Flying" hit the festival circuit, Antonioni and Bergman were still making visually orthodox films.) Each Kalatozov/Urusevsky take is a trapeze stunt, an athletic exercise in seeing how much life can be crammed into a single, breath-holding camera take, and "I Am Cuba" may be their premier achievement (there's at least one other we haven't seen, 1955's "The First Echelon"; Urusevsky also shot with Pudovkin, Donskoi and Grigori Chukrai). Once you've steeped yourself in the film's magical waters, go to Vicente Ferraz's "I Am Cuba — The Siberian Mammoth" (2005), a new and addictive chronicle included in the cigar box, which returns to the places and personnel from the production, and tells us perhaps too much about how the film achieved its transcendent grandeur, amid the lingering vapors of the 1962 missile crisis — the imported cranes, suspended cameras, chemical infusions, camera-operator relay races and a shooting period that lasted almost two years, lengthened by days spent waiting for "interesting" clouds. Kino, kino, kino!, as Guy Maddin has said.


Hunting little-publicized mammoths in its own way, Jennifer Baichwal's "Manufactured Landscapes" is the year's most chilling horror film, a cold-stare portrait of planetary waste that makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like, well, an Al Gore lecture. Baichwal simply follows photographer Edward Burtynsky, documenting his process, showing his work and often dollying through the locations he's studying — which are all unimaginably huge, unfathomably grotesque and morally nauseating arenas of human industrial destruction, from dumping sites to decommissioned mines to dehumanized manufacturing operations to poisoned landscapes glowing with radioactive colors. Properly, Baichwal uses Burtynsky only as a guide into these circumstances; his art stands for itself, and so does Baichwal's unnarrated footage, leaving it less a movie about an artist — fine and good — than about the world he struggles to depict. Numbers can bounce off of us, but these images don't, resonating with guilt and culpability, and breathtaking in scale. It's a new, freshly-sharpened effort to jostle us from our it's-a-shame middle-class complacency, but that becomes part of the film's subject, too, questioning without a word why some areas of the world sit under a billion tons of our industries' toxic refuse and some don't.


"I Am Cuba" (Milestone) and "Manufactured Landscapes" (Zeitgeist) will be available on DVD November 20th.

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<![CDATA["Margot at the Wedding"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/margot-at-the-wedding.php Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Margot at the Wedding," Paramount Classics, 2007]


There are two family trees in Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding," and both are in deep trouble. The one in the backyard of the Zellers' house is overgrown. Neighbors say it's dead and demand it be cut down. The Zellers themselves can't agree on anything except the fact that the tree must stay, protecting it as a way of clinging to their own flimsy relationships.


The title character (played by Nicole Kidman) returns home with her son Claude (Zane Pais) for the title nuptials of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Baumbach's real-life wife). Margot's thoroughly convinced that Pauline's sad-sack fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black) isn't good enough for her sister, just as we're convinced that Margot is probably projecting some of her own marital dissatisfaction onto the situation. Like Baumbach's last film, the wonderful "The Squid and the Whale," "Margot" explores how resilient families truly are in the wake of disintegrating marriages.


Whether these stories are autobiographical or not, Baumbach clearly understands dysfunctional families. In the case of "Margot at the Wedding" though, he may have invented one so convincingly screwed up, so far beyond repair that spending 90 loveless, awkward minutes with them could be seen as a waste of time. "The Squid and the Whale"'s Berkmans were at odds, but likeably so; the Zellers are similarly unhappy, but they don't share the sweetness and wry sense of humor that made their predecessors so entertaining. Margot's most ironically poignant line comes at the end of the film when she tells Claude, "It's good you're going. I wouldn't want to be around me either." It's a sentiment many audience members will share.


That's unfortunate, because Baumbach remains a clever writer, and his skills as a director continue to grow. Nothing is overlooked, and you have to admire how Baumbach micromanages scenes to make big points with little events — consider the way he punctuates a particularly uncomfortable scene at a pool party with the discovery of a dead mouse in the deep end. "Margot" is far and away his best-looking and most carefully visually crafted film as a director, and the underlit interiors and muted colors aesthetic augments the story's emotional realism. He also draws a wonderful performance out of Black, who is at his funniest in a role that isn't necessarily written all that humorously, drawing the laughs out with delivery, posture and glances (his physique and lack of shame in his underwear helps with the chuckles too). The movie would probably be better off, in fact, if it was "Malcolm at the Wedding."


But it's Margot at the wedding, and so the movie hangs on her; the way she rejects her husband and her new lover; the way she treats Claude more like a sibling, or even a psychiatrist, than a son. She's self-obsessed, yet totally devoid of self-awareness. That contradiction is never more fully on display as the scene when Margot decides to climb that dead family tree in order to prove just how good she used to be at climbing trees, only to realize that once she gets up there she can't get back down. And now she's stuck.

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<![CDATA["Berlin Alexanderplatz," "Killer of Sheep"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/berlin-alexanderplatz-killer-o.php Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz," Criterion Collection]


Sometimes, DVD'd movies are events, and though certainly a video landmark, the restored version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1980) is no mere movie — just by sheer dint of its size (15.5 hours), it qualifies as a cultural behemoth, a work that demands a revision in our method of watching, experiencing and assessing cinema. It's a pivotal giant in a very peculiar subgenre of arthouse movie — the TV mini-series-as-all-in-one-auteurwerk, alongside Bergman's uncut "Fanny and Alexander," Wolfgang Peterson's uncut "Das Boot," Kieslowski's "The Decalogue" — but like all extremely long films Fassbinder's mega-work becomes, eventually, about its own length. Any film longer than, say, five hours inevitably calls its own basic shape and length into question, risking tedium and repetition but striving for experiential revelations and immersions for which ordinary mortal movies cannot hope. Some films use extreme time to disrupt our sense of reality (this is one facet of Jacques Rivette's career scheme), others try to capture the breadth of an ambitious novel, neglecting the fact that no one reads Dickens or Joyce or Mann in one or two sittings. (Hence the weekly broadcast mode, which shouldn't be dismissed.) Taken as a whole, Fassbinder's magnum opus — adapting a 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin that has haunted Fassbinder his whole life, and emerges in signs and fragments in many of his other movies — is not an alternate reality so much as a near-endless mildewy bell jar briefing for a descent into hell, from an already hellish Weimar Germany where women are bawling trash, men are lurking hyenas and the world is a combustion engine run on souls.


I've never been a Fassbinderian; though his keening, in-your-face post-Sirk theatricalism and mournful social analyses are undeniable, I've always preferred the unemphatic meta-realities of Herzog. (Has anyone pointed out that Fassbinder, often in his later films, scans like the Leone-Morricone of German flophouses?) Even so, "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is massively essential, epic in length but terrifyingly claustrophobic scene by scene, episode by episode, a nightmare of clueless doom in which Berlin is often reduced to a flat and a barroom, photographed in the ochre haze of an opium den. What happens is like the slo-mo footage of a fatal car wreck: Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), a great, bullish, dim lug of a man, is released from a prison stint for manslaughter, and is thrust back into his old life of pimping and violence. The opening chapter is titled "The Punishment Begins": from the start, it's clear that Biberkopf is unhinging, and as the hours press on, and his struggle to stay honest and happy becomes truly hopeless, the film takes on the aura of a saintly tribulation. Indeed, Doblin's novel, which ran neck and neck with the montage-of-voices experiments of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, is an existential tragedy about a culture as much as about an individual, and therein Biberkopf is one of the most resonant characters in European literature. Fassbinder helplessly loses much of the book's scope — as it was, the film was humunguously expensive for German TV, but how much bigger could it have possibly been? — training in instead on its hero, who, in the uncomprehending, porcine person of Lamprecht becomes, 15 hours later, also unforgettable.


Fassbinder's world of lurid emphasis is strong drink — his characters rail at the heavens, spittle flies at every dramatic turn, and the actors often play to the silent-era back row — and "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is such an immense manifestation of its maker's sensibility no one can be surprised that, as the largest chunk of the almost 23 hours of film Fassbinder finished in his last three years, it did its part in killing him. If you are not, like I'm not, an unqualified RWF acolyte, then think of this mammoth not as an auteurist explosion but as a troubled country's troubled dream about itself, iconic and overwhelming.


What, more? The Criterion extras, if you can stand it, include the 1931, 90-minute version of Doblin's story, directed by Phil Jutzi, a booklet of essays, and now less than four extensive docs about "Berlin Alexanderplatz" in the making, and in the world at large.


Pitting rediscovery against rediscovery, Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep" (1977), at almost one-twelfth the length, might be the more remarkable achievement, a searing experience fashioned out of little more than black L.A. poverty, the post-vérité-post-Cassavetes Zeitgeist, and the filmmaker's bedeviling sense of space, composition, ennui and brute-lyric imagery.


(Again, this shows my cards as a critic, to some degree, which is only fair and helpful.) On the surface merely a mood piece about the enervating, dead-end existence of being black in 1970s America, "Killer of Sheep" attains an inexplicable elemental power, an almost primal thrust and mystery that suggests, at least to the willing viewer, millennia of godless desperation, human embattlement and food-chain horror.


There's no story, but there are people — mainly, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a poor slaughterhouse laborer with a loving wife and curious children whose life in the outer-urban wastes is in the process of bulldozing his pride and confidence. Burnett's film proceeds from the very beginning as if every image and moment of Stan's life is a mythic truth to gaze upon, and damn if it isn't sweepingly convincing in the process. The action, for instance, of attempting to carry a disembodied car engine down a flight of tract-housing stairs has positively Sisyphean traction. It's not a movie you pick dramatic highlights or even visual memories from; instead, it flows before you like a despairing folk song made real, a blues anthem older than movies or Burnett himself. Part of the film's residual force stems from its status as legitimate film maudit — it didn't ever get a full-on theatrical release, or home video distribution, until this year, 30 full years after it was made. (Burnett's stirring soundtrack, which rivals Scorsese's for "Mean Streets" in pioneering jukebox eloquence, was largely uncleared for rights.) And yet, "Killer of Sheep" was one of the first 50 films to be chosen by the National Film Preservation Board as part of the National Film Registry, defined as honoring and preserving movies that are "culturally, historically, or esthetically important," a full 17 years before it was finally made commercially available in any way for people to see. It's a ghost movie, returned to haunt us.


"Berlin Alexanderplatz" (Criterion) and "Killer of Sheep" (Milestone) will be available on DVD November 13th.

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<![CDATA["Southland Tales"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/southland-tales.php Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Southland Tales," Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2007]


Two roads diverged, and director Richard Kelly took the path not taken. The cult wunderkind behind "Donnie Darko" could have taken all that indie cred, gone Hollywood, and directed a sequel to a superhero movie like so many others before him. Instead he made the shambolic "Southland Tales," and he took so long doing it that his vision of an alternate future is already almost an alternate history at this point.


Kelly's vision of an encroaching apocalypse begins on July 4th way back in 2005, when nuclear weapons detonated outside of Abilene, TX start the United States on the march to World War III. Three years later, with the 2008 presidential election fast approaching, the increasingly powerful Republicans sets their sights on California's 55 electoral votes (their new party logo: one elephant mounting another). That's where Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) comes in. He's the biggest movie star in the world, married to the daughter (Mandy Moore) of the G.O.P.'s Vice Presidential candidate, and his affair with a porn star and talk show host named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) threatens to rock the campaign with scandal even as he's doing research for his next role with a confused Los Angeles police officer named Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott). Or, wait, is his name Ronald?


What, exactly, does any of that have to do with the end of the world? Not a whole hell of a lot, it seems. Reading through the press notes, you find that Kelly was working on this "Donnie Darko" follow-up before 9/11, but reconfigured the piece to reflect the world after it. It eventually becomes clear that for all its political bluster, "Southland Tales"'s interests lie elsewhere. Though it occasionally invokes the Book of Revelations, nothing concretely calamitous happens after the chilling opening sequence, where the Abilene attack is presented from the perspective of a kid fooling around with a camcorder at an Independence Day block party. The rest is a concatenation of literary references and pop culture satire, a sort of "Dr. Strangelove" by way of "The Rundown."


Though high art gets a significant nod — Justin Timberlake's somber voiceover refers to T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" as well as the famous Robert Frost poem about the two roads — it's the lowbrow that provides Kelly with most of his targets. The references are so numerous and diverse that every viewer will observe different nods and winks. Sketch comedy devotees will spot the incredible number of cast members from "Saturday Night Live" and "MadTV" (including Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, and Will Sasso). Some will try to wrap their heads around Christopher Lambert in a tie-dyed shirt. My own particular obsession: the endless similarities with the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, from the name of Boxer's next character (Jericho Cane, a cop-on-the-edge who must save the world from an impending Armageddon, originally played by Arnold in "End of Days") to shared thematic obsessions over doubling and twins (the number "2" appears everywhere, from Roland's bulletproof vest to the name of the mysterious "Deep Throat 2").


With so many different threads and so little driving the movie (if Jericho Cane could stop the end of the world, the schizophrenic Boxer clearly cannot) "Southland Tales" basically adds up to the sum of its gags and ideas. Some of them kill — Kelly's jab at crawls on the news is a true knee-slapper — some of them just die — the fake car commercial that plays on Hummers and hummers is too unrealistic to be truly funny. There's a sequence that could have been plucked from "Melrose Place" and a nearly full-length music video for The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" starring Timberlake and a bevy of sexy nurses.


For all its cleverness and evocative imagery, "Southland Tales" is an incredibly uneven movie. By their nature, amnesiacs don't have a character, and this movie has three of them at its center. Some sequences are wildly inventive (Mirror reflections out of sync with the people in them!), some are wildly infuriating (Zeppelin launch sequences that go on for ten minutes!). "Southland Tales" defies good and bad categorization because it's hard to tell at any moment whether Kelly even wants to be good, or minds being bad, or even cares which is which.

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<![CDATA[Noah Baumbach on "Margot at the Wedding"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/noah-baumbach-on-margot-at-the.php Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Nicole Kidman in "Margot at the Wedding"; below, Noah Baumbach, Paramount Classics, 2007]


Some of us have been following writer-director Noah Baumbach's career since his 1995 debut (the addictively quotable, post-collegiate pearl "Kicking and Screaming"), but his wry, semi-autobiographical dramedy "The Squid and the Whale" had even bigger acclaim and success spilling out its blowhole in 2005. Critics have been leaving the bar high for Baumbach, since his fifth directorial feature, "Margot at the Wedding," shares some similarities with "Squid," including a reactionary novelist, self-destructive family politics, parent-child role reversals and brutally sharp-witted dialogue. Nicole Kidman stars as the domineering Margot, on a trip to the country with her son Claude (Zane Pais) to visit her boho sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Baumbach's real-life wife). Pauline is about to marry the shlubbily mediocre Malcolm (Jack Black), a man Margot instantly despises and can't hold her barbed tongue about, making for a cringe-worthy reunion of humiliations, projections and secrets exposed. So why are we laughing so much? I had a chance to speak to Baumbach the week that his film opened.


In "The Squid and the Whale," children learned behavior from parents who show no filter between what they think and their verbal lashings out. In "Margot," nearly everyone acts like this, blood-related or not. The dialogue feels genuine but somewhat stylized to me since I've never met anyone with that personality type. Do you know people who act as scathingly as this?


I know a lot of different kinds of people, and I'm not specifically drawing upon real people. But yeah, I guess I would say I recognize the behavior in the movie. It's familiar to me. I mean, I don't see them quite as unfiltered. There are things they say, Margot in particular, that might make you think: "Oh, I can't believe she's saying that right now." But there's a lot she withholds, also. I don't know if Pauline or Malcolm is so unfiltered. Did you find that?


A little bit. Definitely not to Margot's extent, but I'd also believe a volatile chemistry could cause people to pick up each other's bad behaviors while in close proximity.


Right, and well, I think there's a major difference to how people talk when they're around their family. In Margot's case, if you're in crisis, you're often not your best self. I think the conversation in this movie is very particular to the situation and environment that the characters are in, as opposed to if these people were all at a cocktail party being introduced for the first time. I think sisters feel freer to say things to one another that they wouldn't say to other people. Similarly, Margot says things to Claude that she wouldn't say to other people. That's evidenced when Margot is interviewed by Dick in that bookstore and he takes a swipe at her. She has a really hard time with that.


That scene in particular read as a pointed attack on critics who harp on trying to figure out what specifically is autobiographical in your work. Does the endless analysis of your personal life and upbringing make you want to, say, go make a genre film just to get them off your back?


Well, I guess by [having made] this movie, it didn't. I got tired of answering that, certainly in "Squid" interviews. If it was interesting to me, I would've been more interested in talking about it. I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.


Even though Margot has some dislikeable qualities, you've said before that you hope audiences will understand her. Reverse Shot wrote about this film that "the compassion [Baumbach] once showed toward his neurotic characters, starting from his 1995 debut, 'Kicking and Screaming,' has turned into rancor." In defense of that, would you personally want to spend time with these characters, and how mean-spirited do you see the film to be?


A lot of us do spend time with these characters. People might not want to see that in a movie, but I think this behavior is a lot more common than what people let on or recognize. On the other side of it, I'm not writing about people I necessarily want to go hang out with. It's certainly not why I'm writing about them. In a lot of ways, I think the question is wrong. I'm not saying yours is; you're reading from a review. I don't really know how to start talking about these people with "Oh, they're unsympathetic." First of all, I don't think that's true from even sensitive people's criteria. Pauline is not a perfect human being, but I think she's very sympathetic. I think Malcolm, the kids and John Turturro's character are sympathetic. I have a lot of empathy for Margot, but I understand how people might... you know, I'll give them a pass on that one. She dominates a lot of the movie, and I know that can be difficult for people, but in the movies and books I like, there is such a thing as an unreliable narrator. I suppose it fits in a Jim Thompson novel, but why not have it in movies that are actually closer to our lives, that are about real human interaction [rather] than trying to sympathize with hitmen, murderers, or some sort?


When you write characters who are themselves writers, do you find it difficult to convey how good or bad their work is?


Well, that's not important. Whether or not Margot is a good writer isn't really relevant to the movie. A lot of times, people would refer to Jeff Daniels' character in "Squid" as a bad writer. I don't think that's true, necessarily. But that was people deciding because they had a problem with him as a person. I think at this point, we're all familiar with writers that we may not like as people but we like their work.


You worked with your wife for the first time, which I'm sure was a real pleasure, but was the transition ever awkward in maintaining a professional demeanor?


No, I found it really easy. That's why we did it — because we thought it would be fun, collaborative and great. It's a continuation of the marriage; things that come from marriage also come into the work. I've been on a few movie sets and Jennifer's been on a lot of them, so we're very comfortable and feel very free on them. It's great to have somebody that you know so well who can bear with you. I mean, I'll get annoyed with actors I'm not married to over a 40-day shoot. [laughs] A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that. But it's like any marriage. If Jennifer and I decided to go coal mining together for the first time, I'm sure the anxiety and tension of that might put a strain on things. The fact is, making a movie is something we're both very comfortable with, and excited and happy to do.


"Margot at the Wedding" opens in limited release on November 16th.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 16th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/opening-this-week-november-16t.php Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Love in the Time of Cholera," New Line Cinema, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Beowulf"

Robert Zemeckis' last computer animated effort (2004's "The Polar Express") creeped us out more than entertained, and we're still not sure if he should be handling any future animated efforts, especially after seeing footage from "Beowulf" earlier this year. Sure, the fantastical literary source material is rife for a successful adaptation in this post-"Lord of the Rings" era, the cast is to die for (Crispin Glover as Grendel!), and we will forever thank the film's marketing campaign for the ubiquitous image of an animated Angelina Jolie sideboob, but we're still turned off by the characters' stiffness and soulless eyes. The film was co-written by graphic novelist Neil Gaiman and "Pulp Fiction" co-writer Roger Avary, so there's promise there, at least.

Opens wide (official site).


"Eleven Men Out"

Icelandic director Robert Douglas's latest sounds similar to the German gay comedy "Guys and Balls," as the star player on Iceland's top soccer team is kicked out after admitting he's gay in an interview with the local press. Down but not out, he soon joins a small amateur team made up of gay men and attempts to fight against the mostly homophobic world of Icelandic sports.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Love in the Time of Cholera"

Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez was reportedly reluctant to sell the rights to his 1985 novel to Hollywood studios until producer Scott Steindorff (who spent three years courting the writer) purchased them, and judging from early reviews of this latest adaptation of his work, he may be even more hesitant next time. Considering the film's stellar multicultural cast (Javier Bardem, John Leguizamo, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro) and veteran director Mike Newell, it's a little surprising that early reviews have been so-so at best. Bardem plays Florentino, a man who spends most of his adult life embroiled in carnal affairs after being rejected by the beautiful Fermina.

Opens wide (official site).


"Margot at the Wedding"

Noah Baumbach follows up our personal favorite film from 2005, "The Squid and the Whale," with another intimate take on family relationships. Moving from Park Slope to the Hamptons, Baumbach's new comedy follows Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her son Claude as they visit her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is getting married to the less-than-impressive Malcolm (Jack Black). We're sorry to see that Baumbach's latest is mostly underwhelming according to early reviews, but the thoughts of Kidman and Jason-Leigh going head to head with Baumbach's snappy dialogue is too good to be true.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"

"Stranger Than Fiction" writer Zach Helm...um...helms this family film that appears to be the bastard child of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and "Toys." Dustin Hoffman plays the eccentric (aren't they always?) 243-year-old owner of a fantasy toyshop who wills his business to his shy and impish store manager Natalie Portman. For a bit of the Bluth family, make sure to catch Jason Bateman in his supporting role as the Wonder Emporium's stiff and buttoned-up accountant.

Opens wide (official site).


"Redacted"

While we applaud Brian De Palma's decision to film this difficult Iraq War drama, based on the Mahmudiyah killings and other atrocities committed by American soldiers, we still think the "Scarface" director is more in need of a commercial hit. After the box office failures of "Femme Fatale" and "The Black Dahlia," De Palma has managed to attract heaps of controversy with his latest since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival — De Palma has drawn the ire of both distributor Magnolia Pictures and the families of the American soldiers. It remains to be seen if, in true Hollywood fashion, nothing spells success like controversy.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Southland Tales"

Richard Kelly's long-awaited follow-up to his 2001 cult hit "Donnie Darko" has received somewhat confounding reviews since its premiere at Cannes in 2006. We're hoping that time and a reported 19-minute shearing have improved things since the film's notoriously cold reception at the French festival, but it's difficult to say. "Southland Tales" is a Los Angeles-set dystopian comedy about the intersecting stories of an action star stricken with amnesia (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), an adult film actress looking for respect (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and a police officer with a fractured personality (Seann William Scott) as the city prepares for Fourth of July. Could Richard Kelly become cinema's next David Lynch? If so, this may be his "Dune."

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"What Would Jesus Buy?"

Documentarian Rob VanAlkemade's debut feature film focuses on the issues of the commercialization of Christmas, materialism, over-consumption and globalization as seen through the eyes of activist/performance artist Bill Talen (aka "Reverend Billy") and his troupe of activists/church choir who protest against corporate entities. The film is produced by "Super Size Me"'s Morgan Spurlock.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #52: Motion-Capture and the Changing Face of Animation]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/ifc-news-podcast-52-motioncapt.php Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Robert Zemeckis' "Beowulf," Paramount Pictures, 2007]


The newest face of animation looks awfully like Angelina Jolie. "Beowulf" makes use of motion-capture technology to bring a near-lifelike look to its characters. Too lifelike? This week on the IFC News podcast, we talk about whether or not motion capture can be considered animation, and the benefits of keeping things stylized.


Download now (MP3: 26:12 minutes, 24 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[Anton Corbijn on "Control"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/anton-corbijn-on-control.php Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Most films about real life musicians follow one of two arcs. There's the rise to fame, fall from grace and redemption one — see "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Ray" and "Walk the Line." And then there's the rise to fame, tragic end one — see "The Doors," "Sid and Nancy" and "La Bamba." The life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of post-punk band Joy Division who committed suicide at age 23 on the eve of his band's first U.S. tour, would seem a perfect fit for the latter, but in the careful hands of Anton Corbijn, the Dutch-born photographer and music video director who makes his feature debut with "Control," Curtis' tale becomes anything but that of a rock martyr. Shot in bracing black and white, "Control" follows Curtis from his life as a teenager dreaming of fame in a small town near Manchester through his marriage to his high school girlfriend (a fantastic Samantha Morton) at an awfully tender age, observing the onset of Curtis' epilepsy, and band's rise to fame, Curtis' love affair with a Belgian journalist and eventual downward spiral. It's the unhappy tale of a life cut short, yes, but it's also a grounded, exhilarating look at a place, time and extraordinary band. And Corbijn should know — hearing Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" was part of what spurred him to move to England in 1979 as a budding photographer who would eventually shoot the band.

It's become commonplace for directors these days to use their music video work as a launching pad for a film career — having worked in that field and in photography for so long, what led you to finally decide to make the leap yourself?

I wanted to do a film for a long time. But I'd also done a lot of graphic design and stage design, and I like all kind of different visual disciplines — I like architecture, and want to do something in that. Film was something that I didn't see as a step up from music videos, though obviously, music videos, the fact that you work with a crew and a film camera, are the closest to film I've ever been. That is the only schooling I've ever had.

And still, the prospect of making a film was very daunting to me — that's why I waited till the script came around that I had affinity for, and I felt that that could compensate for the lack of filmmaking skills, to a degree. I felt that if you're driven enough emotionally by the subject, then maybe that does compensate to a degree.

You've mentioned your initial reluctance to take on this film because of fears of being pigeonholed as being someone whose work is always music-related. What kind of film did you imagine yourself making?

A movie that has a universal theme in it, whether it's real, a love story, or whatever. To me, ["Control"] actually is a love story with some great music on the side — it's not a music film, just like my photography is not rock photography. You know, I feel very insulted, actually, when people say it's rock photography — "rock photography" is only about who's on the picture, not how you take the picture. My subjects are so broad these days — from Nelson Mandela to Alan Ginsburg, Miles Davis, Bono and Isabella Rossellini — it's nothing like rock photography.

So I was afraid to get pigeonholed — it limits your audience, and I think that that would be a real waste of energy.

There is this particular formula for films about musician — the big performance juxtaposed against flashbacks to childhood and the like. Did any of that influence you in making "Control" so grounded and linear?

I have to say, I haven't seen that many films in the genre, because it hasn't interested me so much. The few times I have seen them, I was disappointed. I haven't seen that many movies, full stop, to be very fair.

But ["Control"'s] script initially was a bit like that — going forward, flashbacks, and it confused me. And I thought that the drama of the film would be better served if it was a very linear story. So I made it linear when I started shooting.

Curtis' suicide looms so large and has become such a part of his iconicity — in "24 Hour Party People" it was treated in a way that abrupt and almost glib, and I know some people were offended...

Yeah. I was.

I've wondered if it was an attempt to demythologize what happened. Was that something you felt you had to deal with in "Control"?

I wanted to show the end scene to the point where you realize how he committed suicide, but not that he committed suicide. Not the act itself, but, you know, that rather than drowning or taking pills or something like that... that's the only thing I wanted to say, and that's why I showed only up to that point. I like these things in the film better — the first thing in the house you see is her folding up the laundry, and then the last thing — it connects these elements. I'm not interested in the glamorous side of things, because I think life isn't really like that. It's pretty mundane. And I think to show that beauty can come out of these kind of places is far more interesting than making a film that just connects all kind of highlights.

In that sense, did you try to draw visual parallels between Curtis' performance style and his epilepsy?

I remember him performing, and that — that was his movement. Some people say, well, it was based on epilepsy, and maybe it was, but it was very much his — I've never seen anybody he would have taken those movements from. The importance for me to show Joy Division in the film was also motivated by the fact that he became such a different person when he was on stage. He became this other kind of guy, and I think it was important to show that part of his character. And the dancing... we spent a lot of time getting that right.

You have a personal connection to this scene and to the remaining members of the band — what was their response to the film?

They really loved it. And it was a great relief, of course. I showed them all together, the whole band, in November last year. I think they were anxious, and they thought that they probably wouldn't all agree on it, but they did. They all loved it. And they did the score for the film, so that was beautiful. And they've been verbal about it as well now. They came to Cannes, and they did interviews about it — so it's very nice. But again, you know, I just wanted to be very fair in the film. I didn't have any bones to pick with anybody.


"Control" is now playing in theaters.

[Additional photo: Director Anton Corbijn, courtesy of the Weinstein Co, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Anton Corbijn on "Control" (photo)]]> Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025385 2007-11-05 00:00:00 closed closed anton_corbijn_on_control_photo inherit 25385 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[The Directors of "War Dance"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/the-directors-of-war-dance.php Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, "War Dance"; below, directors Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine, ThinkFilm, 2007]


Between the two of them, filmmakers Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine have written, produced and shot documentaries in over 30 countries and for outlets like National Geographic, ABC News Frontline and The Discovery Channel. But it wasn't until "War Dance" (now without the slash between the words as it was titled on the festival circuit) that the married couple had ever directed their own feature together, for which they won the Directing Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Gorgeously photographed and emotionally charged, "War Dance" focuses on three children from the Patongo refugee camp in northern Uganda, a dangerous war zone where kids have been abducted and either sold into sexual slavery or brainwashed into becoming rebel soldiers for the past 20 years. Though theirs is a story as heartbreaking as the countless acts of genocide and other African atrocities we're only now starting to pay attention to, the film seeks out a nugget of hope and peace within all the chaos: Over 20,000 schools across Uganda compete in the annual National Music Competition, and while no one ever expects schools in refugee camps to excel in these singing, instrumental and dancing contests, this year's young underdogs from Patongo may prove more resilient than anyone would have guessed. I chatted with the Fines about their first marital collaboration and their moral responsibilities.


I make films with my wife, so I know it can be tough finding the balance between a professionally creative and a personal relationship. How do you keep those dynamics separate?


ANDREA: It's funny because so many people actually say to me, "Oh my god, I would never work with my husband." We get that all the time. It's an involving process, but I wouldn't want to work with anybody else.


SEAN: I think we're also different from some husband-and-wife teams, at least that we've worked with in the past. Sometimes they'll have separate roles. We pretty much co-direct, 50/50, down the middle, collaborating on everything. When we're in the edit room, sometimes Andrea will take a scene, I'll work on the next one, and then when Andrea's done, I'll see it with fresh eyes. It creates this great discussion, and vice versa, that makes things flow well. On this film, it was really different because we had to work in a war zone. Our son was a year old at the time that I left for Uganda, so we decided we weren't going to be in the field together at the same time. Northern Uganda is such a difficult place to work. I had malaria, we were working under the constant threat of war, and child soldiers are cutting people up. Listening to horrible stories and living in an internally displaced camp has a lot of day-to-day difficulties. I was mentally and physically exhausted. At 3 o'clock in the morning, I'd go to the only place where my cell phone would work, a brick wall next to the local brothel. By balancing on this wall, I could get one cell phone bar and talk for five minutes. Then it cuts out, and I have to call again. But just to have that one person who understands me, understands exactly what I'm talking about, trying to figure out how a scene is going to fit into the bigger picture of the film, was immensely helpful.


I appreciate all that, but come on. You can't tell me you don't occasionally bicker.


A: Oh yeah, I mean we [want to] kill each other sometimes.


S: Even, for example, over the style of the film for the kids to look into the camera. That evolved from an argument on the phone because Andrea said that it would make this more personal. I was like, "That's crazy. I don't want to do that. No way. That'll never work." We didn't have the whole Errol Morris setup where, you know, we're in a different space and they're looking into the monitor. We just had them look into the camera, which actually, made them open up more. I was completely wrong. So we do get into arguments, but you kind of get away from that and realize: "Hey, that person had a good idea."


A: We didn't work together until we were married. We met at National Geographic, and because we both wanted to do our own thing, we made a conscious effort to show up on an even playing field. You sort of get the kinks out about how you [work]. At the end of the day, I feel like making documentaries is just an endless chain of decisions. You have a fork in the road; do you follow this character or that character? It's really amazing to have a sounding board, but we're also hard on each other's work sometimes. When we screen each other's scenes, because we know each other so well, there's no veneer: "Well, I don't think that works." But our aesthetic is very similar. We'll be watching a film trailer or whatever, and we'll both sit up at the same shot.


"War Dance" makes stunning use of what HD cameras can do, but the shared aesthetic you speak of holds a moral complexity, too. For example, the scene with young Nancy crying over her father's gravestone: Did you have any hesitation to stop shooting, that perhaps this extremely vulnerable moment shouldn't be a "pretty" image shown to general audiences?


S: Yeah. I actually went with Nancy and her mother to film them looking at their old home. It's right next to the grave, all overgrown with weeds. Their discovery of that grave is pretty much my discovery of it. I didn't realize Nancy was going to have that response. Here's a little girl who, throughout the whole film, she's a rock. She takes care of her siblings, feeds them, pulls pranks on me and jokes with us. She's never shed a tear the entire time filming, and then she just loses it. I've filmed awful things, like somebody dying, but to see a small child emotionally gutted was probably the most difficult thing I've ever filmed. I can see in my shooting where I get uncomfortable and start to shake. The camera moves farther and farther back. I waved everyone else off. It was just me and the sound man, and I'm thinking the whole time, I shouldn't be here. It went on for two hours.


Then the other half of me was like, I have to be here if we're going to do right by these kids. This might be the one time where you see the complexity unfold right in front of us. You see her [traumatic reaction], but you also see a parent having to deal with her child. This mother has taken her daughter to a place where she buried her father in pieces by herself. No one thinks about the mom, what she's going through, and at the same time, [having to] explain to her daughter how and why this happened. She can't. How do you comfort a young daughter like that? So for those reasons, I think we had to hang in there. It was that golden hour, towards the end of the day. I hope this isn't taken the wrong way, but there is a beauty in something so raw like that.


What do you expect people to take away from this film?


S: I want people to pay attention to northern Uganda. I want people to ask, "20 years? Why is nobody doing anything about this? Why isn't anyone reporting on this? Why don't I know about this? Why haven't I seen this on the internet?" I also want a bigger question asked: "What is my responsibility as a human being to keep tabs on all of these things going around the world?" Children are being exploited and hurt, and it's not going to stop unless people get their voice into it. When people get upset, things happen. I don't want people to think, "Oh yeah, that stuff happens in Africa all the time. They're kind of used to it. That's how they live. They're starving or they've been affected by war, or a lot of Africans have HIV, and they're just used to living with that." I want them to say, "Those kids are a lot like me when I was a kid. They're just trying to live their life and be normal kids. It's atrocious that this is happening." These kids are sharing their story with you, putting it in your face. Yes, we made this, but it's their story and I feel privileged to have been part of that. I want people to think about Dominic, Rose and Nancy. Where are they? What's going on with them? I want those three names to seep into people's souls so they can't forget about them.


But is that enough, just knowing about and getting riled up by these tragedies? What should people do proactively once they've thrown away their Coke products, left the air conditioned theater, and entered right back into their familiar comfort zones?


A: I think they can tell everybody to go see the film. A big portion of the [box office] proceeds is going back to help Shine Global, the non-profit that backed the film. Just by going to the film, you're helping. The funds go to everything from healthcare for kids in the war to rehabilitating kids that were child soldiers, and helping kids in crisis deal with trauma. Then at the end of the film, there's a list of websites saying, "Hey, you want to find out more and help further, here are some other ways to keep informed." Ask [yourself] why you didn't know about this before.


S: Raise a ruckus and try to stay aware. I didn't know about this before I was approached by it, and I'm ashamed to say that. You have to step outside your comfort level. That means going to see films like this or "Darfur Now." I think documentaries are capturing things that news doesn't. That's a new trend, and a really exciting one.



"War Dance" opens in New York and L.A. on November 9th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 9th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/opening-this-week-november-9th.php Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Tom Cruise in "Lions for Lambs," United Artists, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


After Dark HorrorFest 2007

This annual film festival brings eight independent horror flicks (along with possible "secret" bonus films) to theaters around the country. This year's lineup includes a collection of films starring horror favorites Rider Strong ("Cabin Fever"), Emmanuelle Vaugier ("Saw II") and general tough guys Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones, and will run from November 9th to 18th in over 350 theaters across America.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Fred Claus"

'Tis the season to be jolly, or so we'd like to believe. This latest Christmas comedy from director David Dobkins seems a bit more "Elf" than "Bad Santa" as Santa Claus (Paul Giamatti, we like) deals with the arrival of his bitter older brother Fred (Vince Vaughn on a bender) to the North Pole. The trailer apparently offers ninja elves, North Pole bureaucracy, and Kevin Spacey slumming in the "generic bad guy" role, but we're hoping a stellar supporting cast of Miranda Richardson, Rachel Weisz, and Kathy Bates elevates this somewhat tepid-looking holiday comedy to something we care about seeing. But hey, at least it's not "The Santa Clause 7" or whatever.

Opens wide (official site).


"Glass Lips"

Polish filmmaker, artist and poet Lech Majewski presents a feature version of what a originally a gallery installation entitled "Blood of a Poet" — a young writer is recalls past trauma while locked up in an asylum.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Holly"

Guy Moshe's debut feature film tells the story of an American stolen artifacts dealer (Ron Livingston) in Vietnam who tries to save a young girl from child traffickers. The film premiered at last year's Edinburgh Film Festival and contains one of the late Chris Penn's final acting roles.

Opens in limited release (IMDb site).


"Lions for Lambs"

This "war on terror" drama got some attention for being the first film completed by Tom Cruise after his much ballyhooed split with Sumner Redstone, though we give kudos to Cruise for managing to cast the always dependable Meryl Streep and for luring Robert Redford to double duty as both star and director. The film tells the intertwining stories of a congressman (Cruise), a journalist (Streep) and a professor (Redford) who are drawn into an investigation of two injured American soldiers in Afghanistan. Early reviews have been mixed since its premiere at the London Film Festival last month, and while we love Redford returning to what he does best, "Lions for Lambs" looks plenty talky (or is that preachy?).

Opens wide (official site).


"National Lampoon Presents Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo"

Les Claypool (yes, of Primus) makes his directorial debut with a "This Is Spinal Tap" style mockumentary about a jam band.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"No Country for Old Men"

So let's see..."No Country for Old Men" is being hailed as a return to form for the Coen brothers (channeling their "Blood Simple" days), with a chilling Javier Bardem as a nearly supernatural killer and another a surprisingly strong Josh Brolin as a hunter who discovers heroin and $2 million in cash after stumbling on a drug deal gone wrong. This one has drawn nothing but strong buzz since its premiere earlier this year at Cannes.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"P2"

We really don't know what happened to Wes Bentley. Something must have — it's been eight years since his brilliant supporting role in "American Beauty." How else to explain his involvement with "P2," a movie so ridiculous it makes "Captiviy" look like Robert Bresson. On Christmas Eve, a driven career woman (Rachel Nichols) finds herself targeted by a sadistic security guard (Bentley) who traps her in her work's parking garage.

Opens wide (official site).


"Saawariya"

Bollywood takes on Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story "White Nights."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Steal a Pencil for Me"

Academy Award-nominated documentarian Michele Ohayon follows 2005's "Cowboy del Amor" with this Holocaust-based true story about an accountant, his wife, and his lover who are forced to live together in a concentration camp. The film premiered earlier this year at South by Southwest.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"War Dance"

Three children living in a displacement camp in northern Uganda compete in their country's national music and dance festival in Sean Fine and Andrea Nix's compelling documentary. The film won the Best Directing Award (Documentary) earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #51: The Good, the Bad and the Television]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/ifc-news-podcast-51-the-good-t.php Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Onion rings? "The Sopranos," HBO, 2007]


Scripted television has changed a lot in the last few years — in some ways, it has an advantage over film in terms of relevance, reach and range of storytelling. This week on the IFC News podcast, as television and film writers head out to picket for the first WGA strike since 1988, we turn to television to discuss the pros and cons of the medium and why it has finally become acceptable to work for the big and small screens without being sniffed at.


Download now (MP3: 27:10 minutes, 24.8 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["No Country For Old Men"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/no-country-for-old-men.php Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Josh Brolin in "No Country For Old Men," Miramax Films, 2007]


I've seen over 80 new releases in the five months since I saw "No Country For Old Men" at this year's Cannes Film Festival, including fine works by directors like Steven Soderbergh, Michael Winterbottom and Abel Ferrara. But none has stayed as fresh in my memory — or, hell, just straight-up kicked as much ass — as the Coen brothers' "No Country For Old Men." I'd say it's their masterpiece, but they've already put out two or three other movies that might qualify for that title.


I saw the movie in the middle of one of the busiest weeks of my life, after a long day of interviews and live web shows. The movie started at 10 o'clock at night and I half-expected to fall asleep. Not only did that not happen, but when the movie ended I couldn't sleep because I just wanted to keep talking about it. And though I wasn't able to take notes like I normally would, it didn't matter. After all that time, I can still instantly call to mind a whole fleet of moments and images and characters from the film.


Based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, "No Country" follows Llewelyn Moss (a shockingly rugged Josh Brolin), a hunter who stumbles on a botched drug deal and all the dead bodies and cold hard cash that goes with it. He absconds with the money and, before long, the men with claim to it have sent a hitman named Anton Chigurh (a shockingly creepy Javier Bardem) to retrieve it. Despite Brolin's impressively gruff performance, in addition to solid supporting turns from Tommy Lee Jones as a too-old-for-this-shit sheriff and Woody Harrelson as another drug enforcer on the trail of Moss' money, it is Bardem who will receive all the attention and, almost assuredly, all the Oscar nominations for the film — somewhat rightfully so. Sporting an outlandishly bad pageboy haircut and a truly psychotic bug-eyed stare, he's a great movie villain in the Hannibal Lector mold — a vision of heinous, unbridled menace who nevertheless carries a perverse sort of allure thanks, in part, to the purity of his purpose and to his quirky, for lack of a better term, sense of humor.


Eventually, the film settles into a series of cat-and-mouse chases between Moss and Chigurh, but even more than the mercilessly suspenseful set pieces, what lingers is the Coens' remarkable attention to visual details, the way a man struggling for his life on a linoleum floor would scuff it up with his boots, or the look of disturbed dust in a ventilation shaft. Reading those words on the page, they must sound totally mundane. But they demonstrate the Coens' directorial precision: every choice is considered and every element, down the smallest one, has been measured and selected with care. Even the things that must have been happy accidents, like the ominous lightning in the distance of a shot as Moss runs for his life, work perfectly.


Curiously, when I asked colleagues at Cannes what they thought of the movie, they all said almost the same thing: "I think it's their best film; I just don't like them in general." On one hand, that doesn't surprise me. The film is good enough to easily transcend their fan base; though "No Country" features elements of past Coen brothers movies — the grim humor in the face of tragedy, the hard-boiled dialogue, the postmodern twists on a well-worn genre (in this case the Western) — but it is its own movie, and stands side-by-side with their greatest works (a title I'd ascribe to "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski") as an equal, if not an outright superior.


On the other hand, when it did it become cool to bash the brothers? Certainly their last few films haven't been as good as their best works, but "No Country For Old Men" is a true return to form. If they keep putting out movies like this one, my peers are going to look awfully foolish. This has got to be the best movie of the year.


"No Country For Old Men" opens on November 9th.

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<![CDATA["Sicko," "Basket Case 2"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/11/sicko-basket-case-2.php Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Michael Moore in "Sicko," Weinstein Company, 2007]


Here's the thing about Michael Moore, beyond which all critical discourse has the import of self-entranced flatulence: he is an unsubtle slob with no respect for the ethics of discourse, but he is absolutely imperative. He routinely backloads his arguments, slants reality, makes unfair mockery, ignores mitigating material and draws simplistic conclusions, but he is virtually the only public figure in America who puts his movies where his mouth is in terms of believing in a few simple truths: that corporations shouldn't be allowed to fuck us and our resources, that government should serve us and not vice-versa, that the self-serving lies politicians tell shouldn't be indulged as "spin," that capitalism is no excuse for exploitation, that economic equality is not only desirable and viable but necessary, that the citizen comes first, not the dollar. In other words, he's a full-on, pragmatic, new-world-order socialist, and he's not afraid to say so. As he says so plainly in "Sicko," our fire departments and police forces and schools and libraries, socialized public services everyone loves, uses and is thankful for, are "free." Why can't our medical care be as well? Why isn't everything socialized?


Well, because we live in an oligarchy, and the oligarchs, 1% of the population controlling 80% of the wealth, as a retired British Parliament member intones in the film, would lose their fortunes, and since they control the mainstream media and, essentially, all three branches of government, they will do whatever they need to do to insure that doesn't happen. "Sicko" skims the surface with this basic reality, but the moments when the film matter-of-factly exposes the real machinery — the insurance company lobbyist payouts to supposedly moral politicians, the ex-claims reviewers who confess to having knowingly killed people by denying care, the same ex-Parliamentarian who shruggingly asserts that if England's national health service were to be abolished by politics, "there'd be a revolution" — are holy-shit enough.


"Sicko" is of course required viewing, presenting case after case of honestly, seriously sick Americans reamed and often sent to their graves by insurance companies, whose sole evident purpose is to absorb as much in premiums as possible while resorting to any means necessary, even de facto homicide, in order to prevent having to pay out claims. Along the way — a trip that ends up with claim-denied 9/11 rescue workers in Cuba, yet another socialized-medicine nation far higher up than the U.S. on every health standard scale — Moore loads his dice mercilessly, painting a Shangri-La picture of free medical care life in Canada, France and England (and, in the DVD's supps, Norway, routinely number one among the world's nations for health, happiness and crime prevention). Even a sympathetic viewer knows Moore is leaving out the gray — France, say, has a good deal of trouble with medical care in rural areas (as every country does), and doctor visits, though quick, readily available, proficient and unencumbered by bureaucracy, aren't quite free (they're just cheap, much cheaper than the most modest U.S. annual insurance premium). Ambivalences are discarded; why are no poor people interviewed in the socialized countries, and only the poor in the U.S. are? It's easy to assume why: because the relative situations are complex, probably too complex for a mere feature film to unentwine. But that's Moore's peculiar position in the public sphere: he's an activist (not, please, one in the practice of "propaganda," which should, by my lights, be redefined as persuasive media designed by state power, not individuals acting in resistance to that power). Moore isn't interested in fighting fair or attempting a "balance"; he's scrapping with Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch and Sean Hannity on their own terms, and movies like "Sicko" aren't freestanding essays on social issues, but fireball volleys hurled across the landscape. Inciting social change — Moore's real target — is more important than the integrity of cinema, and who could argue? So, the films tend to shoot low, beneath the eye level of the educated audience who commonly see documentaries and more directly at the brain pans of Americans for whom passionate criticism of Fox News would come as a shock. The movies might suffer, but the country might benefit.


Shooting low was never an issue for psychotronic legend Frank Henenlotter, whose 1990 Bosch-on-sweet-air triumph "Basket Case 2" has emerged on DVD — as potent as metaphoric discomfitures as his films all are, Henenlotter's narrative-visual style can accurately be described as yowl-slither-splooge-splat. A giggly, New York alley-trash cousin to Cronenberg by way of E.C. Comics and sideshow taboo, Henenlotter made his first film, 1981's "Basket Case," so cheaply the lights are rarely turned on, but the parable about a Times Square inhabitant plagued by his separated-at-birth, basket-dwelling "half-brother" is so loaded with urban-Gothic family dread that the subtext is barely sub-. The sequel hyperextends the Tennessee Williams-with-slime-monsters scenario away from fraternal angst and toward social conflict, happening upon an entire commune of ludicrously distorted freaks with which Belial the throat-ripping mound with arms and his "normal" twin Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck) become intimate, as the evil world of ordinary humans threatens the secret community's respect for "differences" from the outside. Henenlotter knew some of us were wondering if Belial was sexually active, and so he showed us. Acted terribly but with wild-eyed zest, Henenlotter's magnum opus remains biting for the outrageous subtexts (biological, sexual, racial, you name it) worming around not far beneath the even more outrageous surface. After this and the same year's "Frankenhooker," the filmmaker only managed to straight-to-video his trilogy capper, "Basket Case 3," in 1992; since then, what's happened? No matter; Henenlotter is polishing up his first film in 15 years ("Bad Biology"), and it should be hitting some kind of daylight next year.


"Sicko" (Weinstein Company) will be available on DVD November 6th; "Basket Case 2" (Synapse Films) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 2nd, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/opening-this-week-november-2nd.php Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Fat Girls," Regent Releasing, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"American Gangster"

Ridley Scott re-teams with Russell Crowe for a film that's being crowned a winning achievement over their last collaboration (the middling romantic comedy "A Good Year"). Crowe plays Detective Richie Roberts, a New York City cop who investigates Harlem-based drug kingpin Frank Lucas (a sure-to-be-nominated Denzel Washington) who turns into an informant after being dethroned. The thought of Scott, Crowe and the Denz teaming up for a 1970s-set gritty gangster film that reminds us of the good ol' Scorsese days. We can't wait.

Opens wide (official site).


"Bee Movie"

With a plot that sounds a little too smart for the "talking animals animated kids film" genre, this one reminds us a more of Woody Allen's "Antz" than the popular Pixar effort "A Bug's Life." Jerry Seinfeld teams up with "Shrek" co-directors Steve Hickner and Simon J. Smith to turn out a story about a bee who's recently graduated from college and who struggles with his life after realizing the only thing he can do is grow honey. After discovering that people actually eat honey, he decides to file a lawsuit against humankind. Our advice? One word: Plastics.

Opens wide (official site).


"A Broken Sole"

Anthony Marsellis' indie drama follows six characters along a string of intersecting stories, including a shoemaker and his customer, a cabbie and his passenger, and a dyslexic director and his date. The film is set on September 11th and follows the tragedy's impact on the film's characters.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Darfur Now"

Documentarian Ted Braun examines the genocide in Sudan's western region of Darfur. This film premiered earlier this year at the Toronto Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Fat Girls"

This queer coming-of-age film tells the story of Rodney, a gay Texan high schooler who accepts the "fat girl" within as he wrestles with relationships, sexuality and his evangelical family with the help of his overweight best friend Sabrina. Ash Christian triple bills as the film's director, writer and star, while "Tarnation"'s Jonathan Caouette plays a supporting role. The film premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten"

"Glastonbury" director Julien Temple tackles the legendary Joe Strummer in this doc that follows the former Clash frontman from 1977 till his death in 2001, combining archive footage of Strummer and interviews with friends, family and other celebrities.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Martian Child"

John Cusack stars as a grieving widower who tries to rebuild his life after adopting a troubled young boy who believes he's a Martian in "Max" director Menno Meyjes' drama. The film sounds like "K-Pax" with a pre-teen, but we're always thrilled to see anything with Cusack, even if this film hasn't been as well-received as his Iraq drama "Grace is Gone."

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Tales From the Dark Side of Anthologies]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/tales-from-the-dark-side-of-an.php Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Nick Schager

IFC News


[Photo: George A. Romero's "The Crate," from "Creepshow," Warner Bros. Pictures, 1982]


The only thing better than a deeply terrifying horror film is a deeply terrifying horror anthology. That said, if the latter in theory promises more bang for your buck, it in practice often provides only additional time-filler detritus. With the Halloween season once again upon us, we here at IFC decided to survey some landmark and recent horror collections, and our findings weren't always pretty — for every superb "Creepshow" or "Kwaidan," there are twenty turgid "Tales From the Hood"s. Given the sheer number of scary compilations produced over the past 60 years, comprehensive coverage of every great (and not-so-great) example of the form proved impossible. Thus, our apologies to, among others, unsung Amicus gems like 1972's "Tales From the Crypt" and 1973's "The Vault of Horror" (both recently out on DVD), 1985's corny-awesome "Cat's Eye," and 2004's "Three... Extremes," all of which would have made a more expansive list. And conversely, congratulations to the following five, which in their own special way epitomize the good, the mediocre, and/or the sublimely ridiculous that horror anthologies have to offer.



Dead of Night (1945)


The granddaddy of them all, this 62-year-old Ealing Studios' production remains the subgenre's seminal work. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, this sterling British film binds its five tales via the predicament of Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns), who arrives at a manor house and proceeds to inform the guests that they've all been part of his recurring dream; when a psychologist expresses disbelief at this paranormal déjà vu, the other visitors tell personal anecdotes of the supernatural. That this framing device maintains an overpowering sense of mystery and dread up until the superb, descent-into-insanity finale is reason enough to sing "Dead of Night"'s praises. The fact that its individual yarns — including one about a game of hide and seek that leads a young girl to tuck a ghost into bed, and another concerning a race car driver who, after an accident, is visited by death's coachman — are uniformly efficient and inventive helps makes it an enduring classic. Not to mention that, with the incomparably unnerving "The Ventriloquist's Dummy," about a frazzled ventriloquist and his malevolent wooden partner, it set the template for hordes of (generally less scary, stupider) killer-doll imitators.



Creepshow 1 & 2 (1982 and 1987)


George A. Romero and Stephen King, collaborating on an anthology based on E.C. Comics — "Creepshow" was a horror fanboy's wet dream when it hit theaters in 1982, and aside from "The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrill," in which King (trying his best to act) becomes increasingly covered in moss, it triumphantly delivered on its potential. Lovingly faithful to its source material's macabre humor and fascination with malevolent, vengeful spooks returning from the dead to right wrongs, Romero's film remains a cheeky and chilling model of how to do horror collections correctly. The same can't wholeheartedly be said of 1986's sequel, which was written by Romero (based on original King stories) but lacks its predecessor's cohesiveness and imaginativeness. Nonetheless, "Creepshow 2" (despite featuring three, rather than five, separate narratives) is far from a failure, in part because "Old Chief Wood'nhead" so perfectly gets the goofy-fearsome E.C. Comics spirit, and also because the money shot of "The Raft" — in which the camera pans up from a sleeping young woman's naked torso to her face, which is then revealed to be covered in lethal goo — so strikingly conveys the simultaneous excitement and terror of sex.



The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)


Technically, 1983's big-screen adaptation of Rod Serling's iconic TV series — featuring one original story directed by John Landis, and three classic episode remakes helmed by Joe Dante, George Miller and Steven Spielberg — is as much science-fiction as straightforward horror. And the less said about Landis' pedantic intolerance-is-bad sermon and Spielberg's wretchedly mushy and condescending "Kick the Can" (featuring Scatman Crothers as yet another "magical negro"), the better. Still, the anthology earns its place on this list thanks largely to its final two, visually electric chapters. In Dante's "It's a Good Life," the director playfully examines the darker side of his beloved Looney Tunes universe, highlighted by Kevin McCarthy's nerve-wracking what's-in-the-top-hat magic show. And in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," Miller piles on cockeyed camera angles, turbulent cinematography, and freaky peripheral characters — not to mention the proceedings' only honest-to-goodness monster — with a tale of an air travel-averse passenger (a profusely sweating, ranting John Lithgow) who's driven mad by visions of a creature destroying the plane's wing in stormy mid-flight. Both dispense more anxious, sinister suspense than any routine teen slasher flick. And there's no getting around the fact that the proceedings' creepiness is amplified by its now-mythic on-set tragedy, in which star Vic Morrow and two young Vietnamese boys were killed in a freak helicopter accident during production of Landis' contribution.



Kwaidan (1964)


Masaki Kobayashi's four ghost stories are adaptations of Japanese folk tales that were collected in 19th-century books by Western author Lafcadio Hearn. Given this strange East-West heritage, it's no surprise that they consequently exude a chilling sense of unreal dislocation and detachment. Self-consciously aestheticized, Kobayashi's epic three-hour period piece conveys a haunting sense of the otherworldly, while at the same time frequently — such as with the exquisite "The Woman of the Snow," originally trimmed for its U.S. release, and restored to its original length on Criterion's lavish DVD — employing supernatural elements as vehicles for timeless, universal moral inquiries. Exhibiting a distinctly art-house approach to horror, "Kwaidan" features pale female spirits with long black hair, ghoulish figures who superficially foreshadow modern J-horror's preferred embodiment of undead evil. The last two segments, "Hoichi the Earless" and "In a Cup of Tea," never completely replicate the rapturous frightfulness of their precursors, even if "Hoichi" boasts the film's most stunningly unsettling image. And at times one craves a bit less stylized artistry and a smidgen more visceral, gut-churning terror. Yet even if outright scares are somewhat sparse, the thematic depth and formal proficiency of "Kwaidan" is both imposing and gripping.



Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror (2006)


Meanwhile, at the polar opposite end of the spectrum, Snoop Dogg's second attempt (after 1998's "Bones") to fashion himself as some sort of pimpadelic soul-horror icon. Demonic Snoop, joined by a vomiting midget and two vampire hos, introduces gory stories à la the Crypt Keeper, spouting pearls of wisdom such as "Just like I ran the hood... I run the hood of horrors." I have no idea what this actually means, but one can assume from the ensuing nonsense — involving a woman whose satanically tattooed arm gives her magic spray-painting powers, as well as a pair of wealthy rednecks trying to kill a bunch of African-American vets — that Snoop ran his hood pretty dreadfully. During the course of this fiasco, a thug facially impales himself on his 40-ounce bottle and former Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick literally bursts from being pumped full of caviar. Meanwhile, Jason Alexander makes a brief appearance as a record exec with a British accent, and the realization that the erstwhile George Costanza has been reduced to cameoing in such dreck is — more than all the slit throats and geysers of blood — the scariest thing "Hood of Horrors" ultimately has to offer.



Additional photos: "Dead of Night," Universal Pictures, 1946; "Creepshow 2," New World Pictures, 1987; "Twilight Zone: The Movie," Warner Bros. Pictures, 1983; "Kwaidan," Continental Motion Pictures Corporation, 1965; "Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror," Xenon Pictures, 2006.

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<![CDATA["American Gangster"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/american-gangster.php Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 In his heyday, Frank Lucas was making a million dollars a day, selling unusually pure heroin he got factory-direct, as it were, smuggled from Asian opium fields inside the coffins of Vietnam War casualties. That true story, the one that serves as the basis for Ridley Scott's "American Gangster," is amazing. But Scott's film is not.

Mark Jacobson's article about Lucas, "The Return of Superfly," is still available for free online here, and is worth a read if you're interested in the story and the film. In Jacobson's piece, Lucas narrates his own life, with all the flair (and, no doubt, exaggeration of facts) you'd expect from an unrepentant hustler. The movie is faithful to the broad strokes of Lucas' life, but not necessarily to the specifics of his or Jacobson's story. It leaves out some of the most outlandish (and seemingly most cinematic) details — like an incredible story that implicates Henry Kissinger in Lucas' drug ring, and another that places the site of one of the most important meetings in Harlem drug history in the lingerie department of Henri Bendel's on 57th Street. It also adds the story of Richie Roberts, the man who eventually prosecuted Lucas for his crimes but who doesn't warrant a single mention in Jacobson's piece.

That's fine in theory. And it certainly allows "American Gangster" to explore the "cop/criminal" dynamic that has fueled so many good recent cop movies, from Michael Mann's "Heat" to John Woo's "Hard Boiled" to Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" as well as David Simon's television masterpiece, "The Wire." Lucas and Roberts — who never meet until the end of the film — live on opposite sides of the law with similar sets of problems: both are outcasts, both are loyal to their family and friends above almost everything else, both are underestimated by their superiors, both are discriminated against (Lucas for his skin color, Roberts for his Judaism). To blurry the boundaries between good and bad further, a great deal of time is spent on the men and their respective home lives, and see how a bad person could be a good husband and vice versa.

The problem in execution is that "American Gangster" doesn't add anything new to the dialogue between the cop and criminal archetypes. It's not as pensive as "Heat," not as dynamic as "Hard Boiled," not as sardonic as "The Departed." And at almost three hours in length it's too long and sluggishly paced to work as a thriller, and too short to attain the complexity of a work like "The Wire." (If you're going to spend three hours on this movie, you may as well just spend nine more and watch any season of "The Wire" instead). It doesn't help that this movie was essentially made once before, in period, with a good deal more verve and grit as 1972's "Across 110th Street." This underappreciated blaxploitation-era gem shares plenty with "American Gangster" — including its title song — and surpasses it, in the intricacy of the dynamic between the police and the crooks, in the quality and quantity of blistering action sequences, and in the sweaty desperation of the characters. Plus it never tries to pass off the Williamsburg Bridge as somewhere in New Jersey.

All this comparison is a long-winded way of suggesting that there isn't much else to do while watching "American Gangster" than compare it to other films in its genre. Certainly the acting is good — with Washington and Crowe, even when all else fails you can at least count on that (see "Virtuosity"). But despite having that vivid Jacobson article as a source, Steven Zaillian's script does little more with the Lucas character than turn him into a Harlem Tony Soprano. Roberts, with his rigid moral code in the workplace and disastrous home life, looks an awful lot like Crowe's Officer White from "L.A. Confidential."

Director Ridley Scott always gets a good handle on the style of whatever period he's recreating in his films, and "American Gangster" is no exception; supporting actor John Hawkes in particular looks like he just stepped out of a time machine from the set of a John Holmes films. But his grasp on the fundamentals of storytelling are a little shakier. Slow and repetitive, "American Gangster" doesn't provide half the entertainment value of Jacobson's lengthy article. And it's a lot cheaper and quicker to just read the article.

"American Gangster" opens November 2nd.

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<![CDATA["American Gangster" (photo)]]> Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008633 2007-10-29 00:00:00 closed closed american_gangster_photo inherit 8633 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #50: Ridley Scott, King of the Director's Cut]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/ifc-news-podcast-50-ridley-sco.php Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: The unicorn dream from "Blade Runner," Warner Bros., 1982]


"Blade Runner - The Final Cut," the third official cut of the beloved sci-fi film that first hit theaters back in 1982, is now back on the big screen. It's hardly the first time Sir Ridley Scott has revisited a film — the director of "Alien" and "Kingdom of Heaven" has had a long relationship with the director's cut. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look over Scott's career and the various versions of his work.


[Correction: In this podcast, we mention that "Blade Runner - The Final Cut" is currently available on DVD. This is incorrect; it will not be available for purchase until December 18th.]


Download now (MP3: 29:14 minutes, 26.7 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[Julien Temple on "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/julien-temple-on-joe-strummer.php Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Joe Strummer in "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten"; below, director Julien Temple, IFC First Take, 2007]


Whether you've heard London calling, rocked the Casbah, or have no idea what those mean (if so, shame on you!), the late Joe Strummer's glory as frontman for English punk rockers the Clash will forever be cemented as a keystone in the rock pantheon. Strummer, who sadly died in 2002 at the age of 50, was an astute, politically-charged singer-songwriter and rhythm guitarist whose poetry was as inspired by punk as it was by reggae and world music. Even his work in indie film seems curiously iconic today, from his composing and acting turns in Alex Cox's "Walker" and "Straight to Hell" to his memorable bit as a drunken crank named Elvis in Jim Jarmusch's "Mystery Train."


And then there's filmmaker Julien Temple ("Absolute Beginners," "Earth Girls are Easy"), who can unquestionably boast punk cred himself. While still attending the National Film School in London during the '70s, Temple found himself knee-deep in the early days of punk culture, becoming one of the first to film the Clash. Though he's best known for his work with the Sex Pistols (including 1979's cynical must-see "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" and his 2000 retrospective "The Filth and the Fury"), Temple had personally known and collaborated with Strummer for several years, some of his rare footage emerging in a fantastic new rock doc entitled "Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten." 30 years after the Clash's album debut, this celebration is more about the man than his music, one of those rare perfect matches between filmmaker and subject that presents an elegiac but even-handed peek into the personal life behind an influential legacy. Temple sat down to talk about the ghosts of punk past.


Do you remember what your first meeting with Joe Strummer was like?


It was nasty, brutish and short. The first time I actually met him was at the space where the Clash rehearsed, and I'd got permission to film them. They were supposed to be there, and they weren't. It was freezing cold, and there's nothing in this big room except a table in the middle with some plastic tablecloth over it. This really weird, not very nice smell was coming from under the table, and I lifted up the tablecloth. There was Joe, asleep, under the table with his boots off, where this cheesy sock smell was coming from. It was late morning, and he was not happy to be woken up by some idiot with a camera.


I had been aware of him before that, [when he was] in the 101'ers. I was part of a squat that was right around the corner from the second big 101 squat. It had good moments; the party times were great. But you know, waking up in a December morning not wanting to get out of bed because it's too cold and your waterbed would freeze... You needed antifreeze in the waterbed just to sort it out.


You filmed the Sex Pistols throughout their entire career. Was the rivalry between them and the Clash as palpable as the music press always made it out to be?


No, certainly not at the beginning. They were quite friendly; certainly Glen [Matlock, the original Sex Pistols bassist] and Mick Jones were quite close. There was always a thing between John [Lydon, a/k/a Johnny Rotten] and Joe, and John gave Joe a hard time for being middle class, which made Joe have to kind of push further to justify his punk credential. But I think there was a sense that the Pistols were too unstable a mass to love forever, and the Clash had this idea that they were in the wings waiting to come on stage when the Pistols set fire to themselves. They define themselves as pistols and nihilism and negativity, and we are positive ions. Something like that. [laughs]


Which wasn't totally true! I always thought the Pistols were an incredibly positive act. Joe says: "They were the stun grenade into the room that had to clear the space." That's pretty positive to me. There's a great sense of humor about the Pistols that I think the Clash were lacking at that time. Joe was a very funny person, hilariously witty — that comes through in his lyrics — but at that first moment of the Clash, there was this kind of self-criticism and hard-line sell up in North London that didn't communicate with anyone else, plotting this kind of thing.


"The Future is Unwritten" comes across like a tribute to an artist and friend, but it's far more impartial than the typically fawning fan account. How did you juggle that, making something that honored Strummer but was critically balanced?


[Having] become close friends with him during the last seven or eight years of his life, I certainly didn't want to assassinate him at all. I wanted to celebrate him. But I was lucky, because I knew that if I didn't show some warts, then he's come out of his grave and strangle me. I was very keen to show the defects and contradictions to an extent. I didn't want to get every bag of dirty linen out and spread it all over the street. I wanted to elude to things without getting into a big personal history of his relationships that you can do, I suppose, with any rock star. We're all flawed, so I wanted to make it about the spirit of the man and how he worked with his flaws as a source of energy. He didn't hide it under the carpet like a lot of people who become really famous and think they don't have any flaws. [laughs] Or, they've lost them along the way, somehow, magically. So, it was trying to do justice to him, and he would have hated a hagiography of Joe Strummer.


The film zips along with an appropriately rapid, punk-rock pace. Was there any great material that had to fall out to make the final cut carry that energy?


Yeah, definitely. I had an hour or so on the 101'ers, for example. A movie doesn't want to outstay its welcome. It's still quite a long film, two hours-ish depending on what speed you play it on. [laughs] I know it's quite long to sustain an audience in the dark, but as it's a man's life, I don't think it's too long. I did try to get it down as much as I could, but after some point you do want to stand your ground: "If I start taking more out, I think I'm taking out things that'll bring other things falling down, too." It's hard to know when you've finished a film like this. At least with a script, there's "The End."


There's a great story of Joe painting his father's apples blue in his orchard. His father woke up, and suddenly all his apples were blue. I quite like that. Then he threw blue and white paint over a car and drove off. It was a funny moment, but I think you understand his relationship with his father okay without that. I had painted a load of apples blue in my apple trees, so I was kind of attached to it because I had done all this work, but it was disposable, really.


You use a clever device where all your talking heads give their testimonies around communal campfires, a kind of assembly Strummer was fond of. Is it true your first campfire test footage went a little crazy after magic mushrooms broke out?


Oh yeah, it was a dry run. There was a blizzard, it looks great. I shot it because the cameraman collapsed from the mushrooms, so we didn't have a cameraman. I was shooting the mayhem with infrared so the snow really stood out — the sparks going up, snow falling down, and people were flying high. It was great, all the Manchester guys like [Happy Mondays percussionist] Bez, [former Stone Roses bassist] Mani, and I think I brought mushroom tea, or I put mushrooms in the tea. I can't quite remember but everyone was not really concentrating on being interviewed after a while. This was always going to be a trial run just to get something done down at Joe's house, but then Bez threw up, still finished the interview, and I started to feel strange myself.


Joe Strummer eventually outgrew it, but let me ask anyway... Is punk dead?


I think the ideas behind it have a very long history. They've found expression in cultural ways of expression that go back thousands of years. I'm sure they'll come again in a different way, at least I hope, than an old punk turning up at CBGB's to try to stop it from being closed down. That doesn't do much for the future. Old punks are just as bad as old hippies. But the ideas are part of a ground rebel human tradition that become more and more important as we get closer to maybe [becoming] the first species to design our own extinction. If you want to be human, you should have some of those ideas aired again. I'd like to think this is a bit of a punk film. It's about a punk guy, but the way I made it. There's not a Mohican on the front of the film can, but it's a more anarchic approach to making a film.


You've seen so many legendary rock acts, even collaborated with them as you're still doing with your upcoming film on the Kinks. Are you wowed by any today's up-and-comers?


I hear things I like a lot. Amy Winehouse, for example. But it's hard to wow me in the same way as when I was 18, or 12, or 10 in the case of the Kinks. When I first heard the Kinks, that totally changed my life. I'm not going to change my life by hearing Amy Winehouse or Pete Dougherty. But kids may, or some people probably will, which is good. I tend to know more English stuff than what's happening in the States: There's this guy named Kid Harpoon, and I like the Selfish Cunts, who surprised me by being a punk band that really felt new and dangerous. There's always good music out there, but I think it's hard to have the same impact these guys did back in the '70s because the whole cultural landscape is so fragmented now. In England at that time, they could take it in one swoop. Even with oppositional rebel music, it was possible for that to be commercial across the board. Whereas now, you can have an indie or hip-hop hit in England, but you're never going to have every tabloid paper proclaiming some new movement.


It's also what makes it so much harder for artists of all mediums to get their work exposed. We're perpetually bursting at the seams with new media.


And there's too much for your life. You only have 24 hours in a day, and you can't hope to access what's out there. In the past, because there wasn't that much, you could know the culture you're in. Now, if you wanted to listen to everything, you'd have to live for millions, billions of years. You know, [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge read every book that had ever been published in English up to that point; that's pretty amazing. That's not possible in any form to have that kind of grasp of everything that's going on. Maybe it's good. It's inevitable. But maybe the whole thing doesn't have to go on like this, does it? It could all pop.


Pop?


You know, the Roman Empire, a hundred years after it fell, it was like: "How did that happen?" You sit and watch cars in gridlock in a city like New York, no one going anywhere. I'm sure in 40 years' time it could be possible to say "What the hell were they thinking, living in that way?" Things could happen with electronic media, the world relying on digital information; if the power goes, you're fucked. There'll be back-up power and that could go, too. I'm excited by that idea. People would have to think in that context. At the moment, they don't think which is the biggest worry because that's what defines you as a human being. If you give up your right to think, all your other rights are meaningless.


"Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten" opens November 2nd in limited release.

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<![CDATA["Into Great Silence," "Adanggaman"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/into-great-silence-adanggaman.php Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Philip Gröning's "Into Great Silence," Zeitgeist Films, 2007]


It might seem like a daunting challenge, for the filmmaker as well as the viewer: a 2 1/2+-hour portrait of a French vow-of-silence monastery that does not mitigate the quiet and the stillness with narration, interviews, gimmickry, etc., but instead embraces the void, and acts more or less like a monk itself, avoiding stimulus and achieving a kind of state of grace by observation and contemplation alone. But German filmmaker Philip Gröning's "Into Great Silence" is an arthouse hit all over, pulling in many more ticket-buyers than scores of other, more audience-engineered, star-packed "specialty" films, including "Reservation Road," "Sleuth" and "The Flying Scotsman." How could this be, for a digitally shot movie that has less "going on" in it than a Warhol movie or a video helicopter travelogue of France? Gröning got into the Grande Chartreuse monastery with only himself and a camera, and stayed for six months, shooting the monks — young and old — praying, doing chores, hymning, never inserting himself into their routine but rather just observing it, as if in a tangible search to find and document the secret of their purified, simplified life.


And surely it has been the promise of that lifestyle that has lured audiences, often for repeat viewings. Gröning's gorgeous film, without trying very hard, makes a seductive case for the monk's ascetism, nestled as it is in the French Alps (holy smokes, does Gröning know how to shoot with available light; the countryside is vacation porn, while the interiors, far from being dark and grim, are always saturated with golden morning rays). Imagine: a life virtually without noise, rushing, time constraints, busyness, electronics (though one monk is glimpsed doing the books on a laptop), distraction, upheaval, media, advertising, hipness, competition, crassness, irrelevancies. Instead, you have close contact with the earth, genuine attention paid to constructive tasks, and the time to do nothing at all but concentrate on your God, your soul, your clear intentions. It looks a lot like bliss, though the monks do not seem to be a particularly joyful lot — they are, for the most part, serious and searching, undeterred by the camera's daze from focusing their energies inward.


For all of Gröning's patience, and ours, the film remains fatally on the outside (of course), and the director compensates, as if in frustration, by capturing the dust in the sunlight, the trees in the wind, the countryside's animals on the roam. There's a fascinating tension in the film between what Gröning wants to show us and exactly how little he can — that is the point, after all, of the monastic life, that what happens in the material world is irrelevant. Yet it's all you can film. The technology of cinema is, therefore, standing in for spiritual struggle itself, the desire for the atheists and agnostics and wannabe devotees among us to genuinely commune with the heavens, and our straining failure to accomplish the task. (The reviews for the film have been wildly prone to raw-nerve hyperbole.) Do the monks of Grande Chartreuse know God? Or are they in effect refining their minds toward enlightenment, like good Buddhists? Or are they pitiable, self-deceiving outcasts? They're not talking, and we're free to impose what we wish upon their silence. The DVD includes hours of additional footage, and how much you'll be up for (even the segment on the making of Chartreuse liqueur) is probably contingent on your need for spiritual pathfinding.


In another, more worldly territory: only a handful of African films, so far, are worth the high shelf, including several of Ousmane Sembène's, Souleymane Cissé's "Yeelen," Djibril Diop Mambéty's "Hyenas," Faouzi Bensaïdi's "A Thousand Months," Nadir Moknèche "Viva Laldjérie." And Roger Gnoan M'Bala's "Adanggaman" (2000), an Ivory Coast historical micro-epic that claims to have been the continent's first movie about the slave trade, as it was experienced on African soil, where the victims and enslavers were both native peoples. Gnoan M'Bala doesn't have to mention contemporary Congo, Sudan, Angola, Sierra Leone or any number of other self-immolating nations to make his movie's point; the spectacle of tribesmen hunting and slaughtering each other for Western profit says enough. So much for our historical sense of mythic dualities, good and evil, white and black — it's significantly unsatisfying to be instructed that for centuries Africans were captured and sold by gold-lusting, bloodline-righteous Africans. Still, the film's characters don't talk race, they just run, beginning with Ossei (Ziable Honoré Goore Bi), a young warrior in love with a slave girl his father won't allow to muddy the family's lineage. After a raid by painted, spear-wielding "amazons" wipes out the village, the survivors are marched to the village of King Adanggaman (Rasmane Ouedraogo), an archetypal African plundercrat happily shilling off humans for English rum and rifles. The filmmaker paints the pig-pile politics of hierarchies vividly — "Stinking beasts!" is a common slur across the board, between more than four distinct social levels, each trying to exploit the one beneath. (The movie uses up to five distinct languages, plus French.) But since it is color-blind, the movie dismisses race and even tribal grudgery, leaving only the Moloch of capitalism.


"Into Great Silence" (Zeitgeist Films) and "Adanggaman" (New Yorker Video) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Haunted House Alternatives]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/haunted-house-alternatives.php Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Haunted houses -- those old things? Sure, they're a staple setting for horror films, but they've been done to (un)death. Fortunately for anyone looking for ghostly thrills beyond the creepy manse on the hill where all those terrible things happened that one time, horror flicks have also ventured out into just about every location that can be macabred-up and a few that really can't. Here are eleven movie alternatives to the haunted house.

Haunted Spaceship

A spaceship is a great place for a haunting from a logistical standpoint because it solves a classic haunted house narrative problem, that being, if this place is so terrible, why do people stay there (generally solved by explaining that either a)they're forced to by a terrible rain or snow storm or b)they're being paid to do so)? In a rocket, it's a simple answer: they can't go anywhere else because the ship's the only place where they can do integral things like breathing. So movies ranging from the smart (the various iterations of "Solaris" where a man confronts what appears to be the reincarnation of his dead wife) to the dumb ("Event Horizon," about a vengeful douchebag of a living ship that tortures its crew) have a pulpy pace-quickening vibe that wouldn't exist if the characters could just hightail it out of there when things get hairy.

Also see: "Alien" (1979), which substituted a hostile deep space species for a ghost, but still refreshed the genre like no other film.


10292007_hauntedhousalternatives2.jpgHaunted Airplane

True story: After Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades on its way to Miami in 1972, killing 103 people, salvaged parts of the plane were used to refit other aircraft -- which were then reported to be haunted by crewmembers from the unfortunate flight. Writer John G. Fuller investigated the anecdotes and put together an overheated non-fiction book, and before you could say "This sounds like a job for a TV movie!", "The Ghost of Flight 401" arrived on the small screen in 1978. These days, air travel is unpleasant enough to send a shudder down anyone's spine without an assist from the supernatural, but this Emmy-nominated film remains a classy artifact as TV movies go -- Gary Lockwood and an early career Kim Basinger star -- and managed a few chills that might not even be the sole providence of nostalgia. But it's the casting of the ghost of the flight engineer that we all remember -- who'd have guessed what terrors lurked in the heart of Ernest BOOORGNINE!

Also see: John Lithgow and gremlin to their airborne thing in the final segment of 1983's "Twilight Zone: The Movie."


10292007_hauntedhousalternatives1.jpgHaunted Orphanage

If recent regional cinema is to be believed, then the scariest place on earth is an old Spanish orphanage. Guillermo Del Toro set his chilling "The Devil's Backbone" in just such a place, and now the upcoming "The Orphanage" from Del Toro protégé Juan Antonio Bayona does the same with equally creepy results. Orphanages make nice symbols -- for lost youth, or arrested development, or wasted potential -- and all of that factors into Bayona's vision of an abandoned orphanage turned into a home by one of its former tenants. Plus, placing a haunting in an orphanage lets you draw on one of the creepiest motifs in horror: evil ghost children who stare at you silently with their vacant expressions. For some reason, complete indifference is really scary in the eyes of a child. Remember the lesson here, abandoned orphanages -- especially Spanish ones -- are abandoned for a reason.


10292007_hauntedhousalternatives8.jpgHaunted Prison

Before Viggo Mortensen became Aragorn and before Renny Harlin became known for helming such flashily forgettable action fare as "The Long Kiss Goodnight" and "Driven," the two made sweet incarcerated horror music together with the aptly named "Prison" (1988). Well, not that sweet, but "Prison" does have the dubious distinction of being one of Harlin's best as well as the finest film to come out of the late '80s trend of the return of the vengeful executed (remember Wes Craven's "Shocker"?). Mortensen plays an inmate who, along with former pro-wrestler Tommy 'Tiny' Lister and others, is moved into a rundown, just reopened Wyoming prison where the new warden (Lane Smith) was once responsible for the electrocution of an innocent man. Natch, the dude's ghost has been lurking in the penal complex waiting for a chance at revenge and to kill off characters in all manner of imaginatively gruesome ways. "Prison" was shot on location in the abandoned Wyoming State Prison, an asset Harlin uses to full advantage, with its gothic atmosphere and bedraggled yards and hallways. Ghost aside, "Prison" actually manages to make incarcerated life look wearying, boring and difficult, which is more than can be said for many movies of this ilk.

Haunted Apartment

Japanese novelist Koji Suzuki couldn't have guessed that his 1991 gothic skin-crawler "Ringu" would inspire -- among other spin-offs -- Hideo Nakata's film adaptation, an American remake ("The Ring"), sequels for both and the meteoric rise of Asian Horror fever on these shores. Though the trend has waned, Hollywood still milks the imports for shitty remakes ("The Grudge," "Pulse," plus 2008's "One Missed Call," "The Eye" and "A Tale of Two Sisters"), including "Dark Water," a ho-hum Jennifer Connelly vehicle for the square footage-challenged set. Again based on a Nakata film from a Suzuki novel, this easy paycheck for "The Motorcycle Diaries" director Walter Salles stars Connelly as a newly divorced mom who is regretting her angry move into a squalid Roosevelt Island hellhole that's as leaky as the script: Is this a supernatural, psychological or maybe even a crime thriller? Only the black, demonic goo dripping incessantly from the abandoned flat upstairs would know, as Connelly is going too insane to pay attention, her daughter's too preoccupied with her imaginary/undead friend, and we're too bemused by smarmy building manager John C. Reilly to realize we're watching a horror movie with plenty of gloom but few actual frights.

Also see: More paranormal hassles not covered by renter's insurance can be found in Japan's "Apartment 1303," Korea's "APT," the Philippines' "The Echo," or Brooklyn's Ralphie, my old slumlord who used to let a crackhead camp out in the basement without water nor electricity... well, it creeped me out, okay?!


10292007_hauntedhousalternatives3.jpg
Haunted Hospital

"The Kingdom" isn't a movie, but an over-ambitiously twisted soap opera, courtesy of Danish provocateur (and in his mind, boss-of-it-all) Lars von Trier. Set entirely in the Copenhagen hospital Rigshospitalet, nicknamed "Riget" (the show's original title, literally translating to "realm," as in "of the dead"), von Trier's TV miniseries follows the staff and patients as they encounter bizarre phenomena, all shot in a sepia-tone, shaky-cam, Dogme-friendly style. Practically out-Lynching "Twin Peaks," the series featured a phantom ambulance pulling into the E.R. entrance every night, an elderly woman investigating the weeping ghost of a little girl within an elevator shaft, Udo Kier as both a murderer and his giant-baby offspring and two dishwashers with Down's syndrome acting as the omniscient Greek chorus. After finishing eight episodes and then "Breaking the Waves," von Trier returned for four more episodes that ran even longer than the first season, ending in a ridiculous cliffhanger that he then abandoned ("USA Trilogy," anyone?) after the actor who played the lead role -- a Swedish surgeon who mostly just bitched about Denmark -- suddenly died. Von Trier actually finished a third-season script, which may have been used in Stephen King's remake "Kingdom Hospital," but by then four more cast members had already died, spookily enough.

Also see: There are more medical manifestations to be fond in "Unrest," "Infection," "Fragile" and the straight-to-DVD cheapie "Room 6" (starring Christine Taylor, probably thankful here that hubby Ben Stiller can still make millions on pratfalls and kvetching).


10292007_hauntedhousalternatives9.jpg
Haunted Submarine

Co-written by Darren Aronofsky (of the shamefully underrated "The Fountain" and equally overrated "Pi"), the 2002 "submarine noir" "Below" also stirs up the manly men WWII action flick with a twist of ghost story, a B-genre cocktail so frou-frou that even Aronofsky wouldn't drink it after serving it up like some sort of childhood dare; he instead went for the harder stuff and shot up "Requiem for a Dream." A couple years later, the project landed with director David Twohy, who reworked the script, having already conquered murky claustrophobia with "Pitch Black." What now sits collecting dust at your local video store is a better-than-average piece of schlock with an inspired cast (a stalwart Bruce Greenwood, lone female presence Olivia Williams, weirdo comic Zach Galifianakis), a shadowy Jacques Tourneur-inspired ambience, an eerie "The Shining"-esque music cue (Benny Goodman's "Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing)," used only because the rights to a Sinatra song were too difficult to obtain), Nazis! -- and yes, after all the fake-out flinches, an escape-proof sub haunted by the revengeful dead. If it weren't so overlong and taken so freakin' seriously right up to its cockeyed ending, this one might've floated above similar high-concept junk to become a campy cult classic, but only under its rightful title: "Das Boo!"

Also see: More spectral shenanigans on the high seas can be had in the trashier "Ghost Ship" and its low-budget cousin, "Haunted Boat."


10292007_hauntedhousalternatives4.jpg
Haunted Hotel

Stephen King needs a new travel agent. I don't know where he stays on his book tours, but obviously they're not very cozy because any place that offers turndown service is just a nexus of bugaboos in his work. No one who's seen Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of King's "The Shining," and freaked while watching the ghostly goings-on at the Overlook Hotel will ever enjoy shacking up at a remote ski lodge again. And in the recently released "1408," based on the King story of the same name, an author of supernatural travelogues checks into a cursed room in an old New York City hotel and comes face-to-face with his darkest demons. Sound similar? They definitely are. In both movies, the horrors King's stand-ins (tortured writers with drinking problems all) face extrapolate from the far more mundane (but no less spooky) chills we've all felt checking into a lonely hotel that had seen better days.

Also see: Takashi Shimizu (of "The Grudge") adds a twist to the haunted hotel theme in 2005's "Reincarnation" by focuses on a movie crew trying to film at the site of a tragedy, only to run into some old (or are they?) ghosts.

Haunted Asylum

Next stop, the dank Victorian corridors of "Session 9"'s (2001) Danvers State Mental Hospital. (And yes, we realize a haunted asylum is technically still a haunted hospital, so write your own list next time, alright?) Writer-director Brad Anderson ("The Machinist," "Happy Accidents") was, along with George Lucas, one of the first to employ 24p hi-def cameras for this freaky ensemble chiller, about a five-man asbestos cleaning crew so desperate to get a high-paying gig that they bid to douche out the dilapidated insides of an abandoned Massachusetts asylum in exactly one week. The team includes Peter "My Name is Joe, but you may call me Peter" Mullan, David "The failed movie star who scurried back to TV" Caruso, Josh "No relation to that neckless guy mentioned above" Lucas and Brendan "I'm gonna rape you, Dawn Weiner" Sexton III. Effectively unsettling in its widescreen black holes and ominous, out-of-earshot skronks (think "Blair Witch Project" with more technical skill), the haunted aspect comes more from audience expectations: when one of the crewmembers finds lobotomy screws and starts listening to warped recordings of a particularly disturbed patient's old psychotherapy sessions, another from the team suddenly disappears. Somewhat betraying its intense tone of shapes-in-the-darkness creepiness, the eventual endgame twist isn't even remotely supernatural, but its blend of old-fashioned suspense feels practically innovative compared to the crap they call American horror today.

Also see: The 1999 remake of "House on Haunted Hill" attempted to up the scary quotient of the William Castle original by making the house in question a shuttered asylum. Fair warning: Geoffrey Rush is very much no Vincent Price.


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Haunted School

The four films of the Korean "Whispering Corridors" series are unrelated but for the fact that they're each set in all-girl high schools in which the cruelty of the adolescent social hierarchy and the infamous harshness of the country's school system vie with ghosts and usually win -- the spirits exist like undead echoes of academic trauma, of which there's plenty, given the amount of competition, humiliation and school-related suicides the films show. The titular first installment finds a ghost girl re-enrolling and returning to class again and again, while uncaring teachers fail to even notice; the third (and least successful), "Wishing Stairs," presents a "Monkey's Paw" scenario amongst rival ballet students; the most recent, 2006's "Voice," takes a ghost's-eye view to a string of killings. But it's the second and most stylistically ambitious installment, "Memento Mori," that most memorably splinters its tale into a swirl of disturbing, impressionistic images (including a reoccurring visual theme of wings and trapped birds) of overheated, angsty youth. The film's educational institution becomes caught up in the fractured aftermath of a love affair between two of the girls that ends in one dying and coming back to, it seems, quite literally crush everything in her path -- it's way beyond the usual wandering of creepy hallways at night.

Also see: "Dead Friend," another K-horror film, explores similar dead schoolgirl territory less well.


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Haunted Movie Theater

"Goodbye, Dragon Inn" (2003), Tsai Ming-Liang's pensive film about the last night of a famous old Chinese movie theater, is an atypical haunted location: there's little in the way of dead-on fright but lots in the way of slow-burn chills as the reels are projected onto the screen and the employees go about their routine as a pounding rainstorm leaks in from cracks that litter the rooms. Little is said and nothing is accomplished, but it's clear that more than just an old theater is dying (it might be symbolically taking the entire theatrical moviegoing experience with it). With so little communication or interaction between anyone on the screen, the most unsettling thing about the movie might be not knowing who is alive and who is dead and, even worse, who actually cares one way or the other.

Additional photos: "The Ghost of Flight 401," NBC, 1978; "The Devil's Backbone," Sony Pictures Classics, 2001; "Prison," Empire Pictures, 1988; "The Kingdom," October Films, 1994; "Below," Dimension Films, 2002; "The Shining," Warner Bros. Pictures, 1980; "Memento Mori," TLA Releasing, 1999; "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," Wellspring Media, 2003.

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20655 2007-10-29 00:00:00 closed closed haunted_house_alternatives publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020655 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Aaron Hillis ]]> _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Haunted House Alternatives (photo)]]> Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10020655 2007-10-29 00:00:00 closed closed haunted_house_alternatives_photo inherit 20655 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 26th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/opening-this-week-october-26th.php Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Kevin Bacon in Alison Eastwood's "Rails & Ties," Warner Independent Pictures, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"

After 2006's critically underappreciated courtroom drama "Find Me Guilty," Sidney Lumet reportedly returns to form with this crime thriller about two brothers, both in dire financial straits, who conspire to rip off their parents' jewelry store, only to have their plan go horribly wrong. The film's strengthened by a powerful debut script from playwright Kelly Masterson and a solid cast all-around (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and an often-naked Marisa Tomei).

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Bella"

Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's debut feature charts the lives of a cook (Eduardo Verástegui) and a waitress (Tammy Blanchard) whose lives are changed forever after an act of kindness binds them together in New York City. The film won the People's Choice Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Black Irish"

"Invincible" screenwriter Brad Gann helms his first directorial feature, based on his own screenplay about a teenage boy (Michael Angarano) in South Boston trying to avoid the pitfalls of his dysfunctional Irish family — a little bit like an Irish-American take on "A Bronx Tale" with less gangsterisms and more Guinness. Brendan Gleeson stars as the boy's emotionally distant father.

Opens in New York and Boston (official site).


"Dan in Real Life"

We've been feeling a bit of Steve Carrell overload for the past year and a half, and we're still conflicted over his latest choice of project, a comedy/drama from director Peter Hedges, who explored a somewhat similar family dynamic in 2003's "Pieces of April." Carrell plays a widower who ends up falling in love with the woman currently in a relationship with his brother. Dane Cook supports in a role that we're sure is about as forgettable as this sentence, while Juliette Binoche takes on the role of the fraternal love interest.

Opens wide (official site).


"How to Cook Your Life"

Zen priest Edward Espe Brown relates the connection between Zen Buddhism, cooking and everyday life in this documentary from Doris Dörrie. The film premiered earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Opens in San Francisco (official site).


"Jimmy Carter Man from Plains"

Academy Award-winner Jonathan Demme chronicles Jimmy Carter's press tour for his most recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" in this doc. We're expecting this one to battle "Sicko" for the Best Documentary Oscar, though we're routing for "No End in Sight."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Lynch"

It's tough enough to understand a David Lynch narrative feature, so imagine making a documentary that attempts to get inside the auteur's mind. Filmed over two years, during Lynch's production of "Inland Empire," the doc has made festival rounds while keeping the name of its director under wraps — which makes us wonder if a documentary about David Lynch could only be filmed by Lynch himself.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Mr. Untouchable"

Marc Levin's well-timed doc charts the rise of junkie-turned-drug kingpin Nicky Barnes, imprisoned for drug smuggling and murder and released after cooperating with authorities after working as an informant — a perfect companion piece to next week's "American Gangster," in which Barnes is played by Cuba Gooding Jr.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Music Within"

Steven Sawalich's debut feature finds Ron Livingston playing Richard Pimentel, a young man with a passion for public speaking who, after returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam with a hearing impairment, finds his purpose as an advocate for people with disabilities. We're always happy to see our favorite "Office Space" star finding work on the big screen. Melissa George and Michael Sheen support.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Rails & Ties"

Alison Eastwood, daughter of, yes, Clint, directs this Lifetime-y drama about the unlikely bond between a young boy whose mother commits suicide and a train engineer who witnessed her death. Though Eastwood enlists the help of her father's "Mystic River" co-stars Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden, early reviews of the film have been mixed since its debut at Telluride earlier this year.

Opens in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto (official site).


"Saw IV"

Another Halloween, another "Saw" film. Yes, Jigsaw and his apprentice Amanda are dead after the third installment, but director Darren Lynn Bousman makes sure to create another twisted and grisly game for FBI agents Strahrn and Perez. With recent news of a projected fifth and sixth entry into the series, it's looking like we'll be seeing more adventures of Jigsaw and Amanda long after they've passed. We long for the days of Freddy, Jason and, hell, self-parody.

Opens wide (official site).


"Slipstream"

Anthony Hopkins writes, directs and stars in this time-bending noir-comedy about a man caught in a "slipstream" of time falling back on itself as he remembers his own future. The film may sound like the weirdest movie of the fall next to "Southland Tales," but we're excited to see into the mind of Hannibal Lecter...er...the guy who brought us Hannibal Lecter. An ace supporting cast includes Gena Rowlands, Christian Slater, John Turturro, Camryn Manheim, Jeffrey Tambor, and many others.

Opens in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago (official site).

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<![CDATA["Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/before-the-devil-knows-youre-d.php Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," ThinkFilm, 2007]


Sidney Lumet's new film begs the question: which is more important, family or money? Everyone in his pitch-black thriller and morality tale needs cash, and they all have to go to others to get it. Marisa Tomei's character comes to Philip Seymour Hoffman's, Hoffman's goes to Ethan Hawke's, Hawke's someone else's, and so on. If, as the title suggests, the characters would do best to get to heaven half an hour before the devil know they're dead, one can only assume that the devil is a debt collector.


Hoffman and Hawke play brothers Andy and Hank. In order to secure the finances they both need they plan a jewelry store burglary. Eventually, we learn the store belongs to their mother and father, played by Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris. It takes a truly demented sort of person to rob your own parents; Andy in particular is just that sort. What better place to toss, he reasons, than one you know intimately, down to the locations of all the hidden alarms. Plus, he reasons that his parents are insured for anything he pinches. It's crazy, but maybe not that crazy.


The film has a hopscotchy structure; bouncing back and forth between before and after the heist, as well as between the perspectives of the characters. Though some of the temporal knots are just for show — the film goes out of our way to explain how a door buzzer got busted without explaining why we should care — but others enrich our understanding of not only the characters themselves, but of their own understanding of each other. To younger brother Hank, Andy is a put-together businessman who exudes charm and confidence. From Andy's side of those meetings, he's barely holding things together between drug fixes.


The material is familiar territory for Lumet; one of his very best pictures, "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975) also pushed damaged characters and families to the foreground of a heist-gone-wrong. Lumet's twist in "Before the Devil" is to push the characters so deep into darkness that the light at the end of the tunnel isn't even visible. Melancholy as the criminals in "Dog Day" were, they have nothing on Andy and Hank, as well as Finney's Charles, whose veneer of grandfatherly suffering is further wiped away with each jump in perspective. By the end of the film all three men have done horrible things to each other; the family is so twisted, they make the Sopranos look like the Kennedys.


The cast is superb, as you'd expect from masters like Hoffman, Hawke, and Finney, but even the smaller roles make big impressions, like Tomei impressively naked (both emotionally and physically) as Andy's long-suffering wife and "Bug"'s Michael Shannon as Dex, who is at once a terrifying heavy and the most oddly sympathetic and reasonable character in the film. Auteurists who look down their noses at Lumet's half-century career can reject him on the grounds of his seeming lack of distinctive visual technique, but that sort of tunnel vision ignores his almost unparalleled skill with actors. His characters are big and broad, and actors, even good ones, could easy turn into their parts into enormous slices of ham. If the man can keep Al Pacino and Vin Diesel in line, he must be doing something right.


So back to that first question. What is more important: family or money? For Lumet's film, the answer's the latter. But how much do you want to bet the actors all took pay cuts to make the film and work with him?


"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" opens in limited release October 26th (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #49: Sophomore Slump]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/ifc-news-podcast-49-sophomore.php Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "The Fountain," Warner Bros., 2006]


The film that follows a filmmaker's big-splash debut or major breakout is burdened by a considerable amount of expectation and anticipation. This week on the IFC News podcast, we consider the sophomore slump, whether literal or just in spirit, and take a look at how and why it's affected some of our favorite directors.


Download now (MP3: 27:44 minutes, 25.4 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["A Cottage on Dartmoor," "Casshern"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/a-cottage-on-dartmoor-casshern.php Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Anthony Asquith's "A Cottage on Dartmoor," Kino Video]


Poor British cinema — no matter how you slice it, it just never gathered steam like other national cinemas (several of which have multiple peaking eras). Its "new wave" — the post-Free Cinema "social realism" movement of the '60s — was never quite world-class; prior to that, only Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell were landmark voices, and Hitchcock, along with many or most of the first half-century's best British directors, followed the money to Hollywood. In the last quarter century, there have been blips of brilliance, but only Ken Loach emerges as a pantheon figure. For such a prosperous, well-cultured and cosmopolitan nation, you'd have expected more from a century of cinema.


Perhaps Hollywood's brain drain, for English-speaking artistes, was a major factor; so too might be Britain's undemonstrative public character. Whatever the diagnosis, it has been difficult to, say, even name an English silent film not directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and this is why Anthony Asquith's "A Cottage on Dartmoor" (1929), recently rediscovered and restored, comes as a legitimate revelation. Given my dire summary of Brit film history, it may not seem extraordinary to assess this tumultuous, restless, eye-popping masterpiece as, arguably, the greatest English film until "Brief Encounter" — but that's almost a 50-year period we're talking about, and one that includes early Powell, "The 39 Steps," "Pygmalion" (another Asquith film) and "In Which We Serve."


A kind of modern-Gothic psycho-thriller that is astonishingly frank for its day, Asquith's movie manifests what old-school movieheads have long said about silent-vs.-sound cinema — that had sound come along a few years later, rather than in the silent-renaissance year of 1927, then film itself would've reached heights of expressive power it didn't attain for years afterwards (if it ever has). One look at the '27-'28 roster — "Sunrise," "Metropolis," "Napoleon," "October," "Le Passion de Jeanne d'Arc," "The Crowd," "The Man Who Laughs," "The End of St. Petersburg," "The Wedding March," "The Wind," "Hindle Wakes" — gives you pause. Here's one way to consider the difference between what we had and what was lost: "A Cottage on Dartmoor" feels like a movie that doesn't need sound, and that doesn't lean upon the conventions of silent film (overacting, numerous intertitles, simplistic characterization, etc.). It begins with a prison break and a chase on the moors, but soon "wakes up" to life in a busy London salon, where a socially awkward barber (Uno Hemming) loves a manicurist (Norah Baring), who really has eyes for a goofy rich client (Hans Adalbert Schlettow). You'd think the scenario would careen down predictable avenues, but it doesn't — and neither do any of the three characters remain defined by our initial impressions.


In the meantime, Asquith pulls out the Expressionist-Murnovian-Eisensteinian-Hitchcockian stops — POVs reflected within other reflections, arch shadow design, hypnotic use of Vermeerian light, sweaty off-kilter close-ups, skewed compositions, even instances of illustrative montage (cutting to what the characters are thinking or talking about as they talk or think about it) several years before Fritz Lang's "M." Even the second act's throat-cutting climax, complete with the dazed razor-wielder absent-mindedly wiping his victim's blood on his own face, has nothing on an amazing 13-minute set-piece in a movie theater, in which we never see the screen — on one hand, it's a smashing multiple-perspective satiric dig at the early talkies, where the orchestra relaxes with beer after the overture, and the audience relearns how to watch (and strain to listen to) movies. On the other, it's a propulsive montage of viewers being menacingly watched and homicidal fantasies being shared. Perhaps most of all, the drama of "A Cottage on Dartmoor" crystallizes in the characterizations and the shockingly subtle acting, the most adroit and telling I've ever seen in a silent film. Imagine — exalted ambivalence, in a medium dependent on the emphatic. British silent cinema may well have been unjustly maligned and ignored, as goes the argument in the new, supplementary BFI doc by David Thompson, "Silent Britain," which also reveals that the language of narrative cinema was not in fact invented by Edwin S. Porter in 1903, but four years earlier by George Albert Smith, an Englishman.


Something of a new way forward, you could say, spills out of Kazuaki Kiriya's "Casshern" (2004), one of the first "greenscreen" movies released in the same year as "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," "Able Edwards" and "Immortel (ad vitam)," all of them manufactured (as were "Sin City" and "300") as live-action dramatics played out in front of optical greenscreens and then stage-dressed with all manner of high-flying digital poppycock. As a form, greenscreen movies are beautiful to look at but are often as lively as posed dioramas, and their stories and characters can be as flat as the comic-book pages from which they originated. Never released here, "Casshern" is the microgenre's high-water mark — its visuals are denser, its story (derived from an old Japanese TV series) is crazier and its emotional tone is truer than the competition's. That said, the primary product on sale in Kiriya's film is confabulated futuristic chaos like you've never seen before, not even in the looniest anime; the mecha-destruction visuals and action set-pieces are conceived, designed and edited like elaborate, tarnished, whiplash clockworks. The plot is classically Japanese — a mad collision between "Akira"-style übermensch, genetic mutation, robot-war back story, and swoony heartbreak, plus an inexplicable stone lightning bolt — but its "Blade Runner"-ish future is immersively realized, and the current of tumult and crisis is startling.


"A Cottage on Dartmoor"/"Silent Britain" (Kino) and "Casshern" (Paramount Home Video) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Blue Balls: Al Gore in 2008?]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/blue-balls-al-gore-in-2008.php Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By William Rabbe and Sarah Scully

IFC News


[Photo: Al Gore on the 2006 Sundance red carpet for "An Inconvenient Truth"]


On Friday, former Vice President Al Gore was bestowed with his most prestigious award yet — The Nobel Peace Prize. Rumors of a potential White House bid swirled as murmurs from the Draft Gore movement grew to full roars. Will Gore run?


To get to the bottom of it all, IFC decided to speak to a cross section of likely voters to see what they think. We've commissioned
our first poll ever (!), the results of which can be seen here at IFC.com.


Click here to see the poll results.


Is the award the ultimate qualification for the presidency? Our polls
indicate that Republicans largely do not think so, but, in contrast, a
majority of Independents and most Democrats view winning the Peace
Prize as more meaningful than winning the US presidency. Yet there
doesn't appear to be a significant impact on polls. Perhaps this is
because most of those polled have neither read nor watched "An
Inconvenient Truth," despite claiming to know why he won and holding
the prize in high esteem. 56% of all likely voters do not believe
that he is a stronger candidate than he was in 2000. Our poll shows
Gore consistently trailing Hillary Clinton when matched against potential Republican nominees Romney and Giuliani.


Many Gore supporters looked at last Friday as a flashpoint for their
draft to finally catch fire and they, along with media and other
candidates waited on pins and needles for Gore to announce his
candidacy at his scheduled press conference. Instead, he made a brief
statement of thanks and pledged to continue his work on behalf of the
environment. He has to date refused to definitively state his
intentions, leaving the door open - or at least slightly ajar.


Certainly the award is a great accomplishment to add to an already
impressive resume. It is undeniable that Al Gore is an extremely
popular public figure... but not necessarily as a presidential
candidate. National polls within the Democratic Party show
non-candidate Gore trailing Clinton and Barack Obama, though an
official Gore entry could prompt Obama and Edwards to drop out,
thereby leaving a large section of anti-Hillary supporters up for
grabs.


To sum up, we can't possibly know what Gore is thinking, but we can
take a look at all of the factors that would compel him to jump into
the race or explain why he would not.


WHY HE WOULD RUN


Gore has never been more popular. Devoting his post-political life to environmental causes has won over an entirely new fan base and he has effectively shaken off the derogatory label "Washington Insider." He has the anti-war stance of Obama with experience that trumps Clinton.


If he did choose to run, he would already have a solid grassroots base
in the Draft Gore movement from which to organize and fundraise. The
Oscar winner's Hollywood connections could prove very helpful in
financing as well.


On paper, Gore resembles our past US presidents more than any other
candidate, with a family history in politics, Harvard degree, honorable war service and the title of vice president. He is also from the South- a point, which superficially or not, is worth examining, as the only Democrats to win the White House since Kennedy have been Southerners.


While Hillary's popularity has grown, many party loyalists still see her as polarizing- unable to overcome high disapproval ratings and association with the scandals of her husband's administration.


Perhaps one of the biggest reasons why people want Gore to run is to
reclaim an office than they feel he rightfully won back in 2000. A
Gore victory in 2008 would stitch that wound.


WHY HE WOULD NOT RUN


There are practical matters that Mr. Gore would need to consider before announcing, chiefly bad timing and inflated expectations. All of the current candidates have been knocking on doors, shucking corn and taking checks for the better part of a year. Even if Gore could
manage to collect as many $2,000 checks as Clinton and Obama, would he
have time to use the money effectively? The Draft Gore organization is a start, but he would still need a substantial amount of time to create active campaign offices and schedule events.


Gore adherents may see him as the charismatic white knight of 2008 — much like another candidate who successfully entered late in the 1968 election: Robert Kennedy. Yet, an indecisive Kennedy joined only after the other Democratic candidates had shown significant weaknesses, thus assuring Kennedy's success. The Democratic field of 2008 is already
saturated with qualified candidates. While others might see him as
able to "transcend politics," it is doubtful that Gore's own outlook
on the field resembles that of RFK's in 1968 — he simply could not
waltz to victory.


Lastly, of course, Gore must decide whether he wants to be president.
If the answer is yes, then he must then decide whether it is worth
putting himself and his family through the scrutiny of yet another
campaign. Without overwhelming support, he risks being a two-time
loser of the presidency — an experience that must have been
excruciating the first time. Gore has repeatedly stated his devotion
to his current role as global environmental activist. While one could
argue that he could accomplish even more as a president, the fact is
the next president will have their plate full with Iraq and the
economy.


There is rationale behind either prediction but for now, all we do know is that he is not not running. Some pundits have speculated that he will endorse Hillary (despite their rocky past) in exchange for a specially created environmental position in her cabinet. Politically, Gore has more in common with the other candidates so it is possible he could endorse Obama or Edwards, giving them a helpful boost in the primaries. He could stage a last minute challenge, surprising some and thrilling others. It is also possible that he could stay out of politics entirely, endorsing no one and continuing on with his mission.

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8624 2007-10-17 00:00:00 closed closed blue_balls_al_gore_in_2008 publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008624
<![CDATA["Gone Baby Gone"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/gone-baby-gone.php Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Gone Baby Gone," Miramax, 2007]


We hear Patrick Kenzie before we see him, as he narrates images of his blue-collar neighborhood. "This city is haaaahd," he says, and if the visuals don't give away the setting, that thick Boston accent sure as hell does. Patrick tells us he believes that the things we don't choose — where we grow up, who our friends are — are the things that really make us who we are. "Gone Baby Gone" is about the process by which Patrick discovers he is wrong.


The film is actor Ben Affleck's directorial debut, as well as his first return to screenwriting since his Academy Award winning script for 1997's "Good Will Hunting," and it is an impressive one. There are similarities to "Good Will Hunting" and other movies — most notably "Mystic River," which is also based on a Dennis Lehane novel set in working-class Boston — but the movie stands on its own, as a thriller that, like the recent "Michael Clayton," is more concerned with the morality behind its thrills.


Affleck doesn't appear in the film, but his brother Casey plays Kenzie, a tough private investigator with a deceivingly youthful exterior. Kenzie has a reputation around his neighborhood for his connections to people who won't speak with the cops; he's hired, along with his partner and girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan) by the family of a missing girl to augment a police investigation led by Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) and Detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris). The cops often underestimate Kenzie — when Bressant first meets him and Angie he snickers, "I was expecting an older couple" — and it's easy to see why. He's 31 and looks at least five years younger and Affleck's fragile voice (which is higher than Monaghan's) cracks in a way that suggests a state of suspended pubescence. But Kenzie knows this place, has access to its secrets, and hints, occasionally, at a past that was probably as dark as the men he's chasing.


Most of "Gone Baby Gone" is about character rather than action, but there are two bravura sequences, and in each Affleck (working with veteran cinematographer John Toll) distinguishes himself with a knack for building, sustaining and then releasing tension. Instead of relying on a noisy soundtrack to provide emotional cues, Affleck conveys excitement and suspense through silence. In the midst of a terrifyingly bloody siege of a drug den, Affleck turns down all the sound until all we hear is Kenzie's frantic breathing. The camerawork is often handheld in a way that recalls "Children of Men" — long takes that never sacrifice clarity for the easy intensity that comes with shaky shots. And the screenplay is littered with brilliant little nuggets of hardboiled morality ("Murder's a sin." "Depends on who you do it to.").


When Doyle and his cronies dismiss Kenzie for his youth they also assume his innocence equals naïveté. "You don't know what the world is made of yet," they warn. They may be right; Kenzie has a much different understanding of morality after he follows the kidnapping plot through to the end. The movie is littered with tough choices but the worst comes at the end of the movie, when Kenzie has to make a decision in which neither option is right or wrong. We watch as he weighs the alternatives and then we watch further as the repercussions of his actions begin to ripple through his life. The film's film shot lingers long enough on its subjects to remind us that it's the choices we make — and how we live with our choices — that define us. That great last shot shows Kenzie finally understands. He's made his choice and he's prepared to do what he must to see it right.


"Gone Baby Gone" opens in limited release October 19th (official site).

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8623 2007-10-15 00:00:00 closed closed gone_baby_gone publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008623
<![CDATA["The Roger Corman Collection," "Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/the-roger-corman-collection-tr.php Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Roger Corman's "X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes," part of "The Roger Corman Collection," MGM]


One of American film's most famous producers, Roger Corman is also a thoroughly maligned figure, critically speaking. No one has yet made a thoroughgoing case for Corman as an auteur, and it's easy to see why: Corman himself has never professed to be anything but a money-monger, and his boasts over more than a half-century of prolific culture-making have always been about how cheaply and quickly his movies were made. (His merciless thrift is also what allowed him to become something of a film school brat intern factory, giving low-paying first jobs to Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, George Armitage, Monte Hellman, Peter Bogdanovich, et al.) But even the most profit-minded producer/director, if he personally churns out an average of seven films a year for more than a half-century, stands a good chance at stumbling into disarming originality and resonance on occasion, and Corman's own hunger to capitalize on social trends brought him to many rich arenas. As it is, his famous Poe films, despite the weaning presence of Vincent Price, are marvelously inspired wonder cabinets of gothic cardboard and smoke-machine artifice. But there are finds elsewhere in Corman's prodigious filmography — the new eight-film DVD box set of film from Corman's prime era, while being helplessly filthy with mid-century kitsch, is rich in universal anxieties. Along with youthquake hilarities like "The Young Racers" (1963), "The Wild Angels" (1966), featuring real Hell's Angels alongside Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, and "The Trip" (1967), there lies "The Premature Burial" (1962) and "X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" (1963), two claustrophobic nightmares making full use of Ray Milland's late-in-life self-disgust. "X," in fact, is one of the period's cruelest and most eloquent pulpworks, an existential odyssey in which Milland's super-vision-enabled hero receives his gift like a curse that gets cosmically worse the stronger his eyes grow.


But let's consider "Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It" (1971), an oddly ambitious venture for Corman and an outrageously loopy Cold War-hippie-apocalypse farce (written by a 28-year-old Armitage) that plays like a serious of amphetamine-driven blackout skits set in the southwestern deserts and garnished with theatrical surrealisms. After a cartoon credit sequence making royal, contemporary-sounding sport of John Wayne military-conservatism, civilization is essentially destroyed by a leaked gas that kills everyone over 25, a development revealed narratively in a press conference and in impish joke exchanges. This is no Doomsday: our anarchist-free-love hero and heroine (Robert Corff and Elaine Giftos) are so high on life-love they practically romp, exiting Dallas (by way, ominously, of Dealey Plaza) for a legended commune in the barren west. They attract a few stragglers (Bud Cort, Talia Shire, Ben Vereen and Cindy Williams), and drive, encountering one absurd lawless-society parody scenario after another; a town is overtaken by the high school football jocks, mixing proto-Nazism and rape-happy barbarism with Gipper-style gung-ho, while the Hell's Angels rule over a golf course with a Socialist bureaucrats' obsession with rules of order. Meanwhile, Edgar Allen Poe, complete with raven, issues warnings from atop a Harley, psychedelic orgies break out and God dialogues from the sky in a Borscht Belt accent.


Armitage's script is fiercely inventive and witty, and the cast largely bristles with comic conviction — giving the lie to any supposition that Corman didn't know how to, or care to, direct actors. Finally, "Gas!" is only intermittently funny ha ha, but is rather adroit in its tossing of satiric hand grenades and seductive in its post-adolescent energy. It's also a whip-smart window on the 'Nam era in America, in ways that most of the films of that era that strived to be simply weren't.


Also from the vaults: the third elaborate storehouse of cultural memories from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the non-profit supported by the Library of Congress that's largely responsible for the nation's rejuvenated efforts at rescuing the country's cinematic heritage — not Hollywood classics, which preserve themselves, but "orphans," historical shorts, newsreels, forgotten features, two-reelers, promotional films, ad infinitum, which would otherwise deteriorate into nitrate goo. Each four-disc, 12-plus-hour set has arrived as a rocket from the forgotten past, with a library's worth of annotation and historical context for each film, which vary in length from seconds to over two full hours long. The new box comes with a theme: the portrayal, exploration and exploitation of social issues in American cinema, from 1900's one-shot crime-&-corruption short "How They Rob Men in Chicago," to Cecil B. DeMille's astonishingly nitwitted and astonishingly visual feature "The Godless Girl" (1928), a morality play about religious extremism that poses atheistic propaganda as a huge problem among American students, but which also spatially out-amazes all of DeMille's subsequent output, particularly in a fascinating, death-dealing riot scene taking place entirely in an elaborate apartment building stairwell.


The historical frisson here comes with the passionate take on sociopolitical issues which are no longer issues — anti-Bolshevism is hot, as are prohibition, WWI-era pacifism, suffrage, the need for universal schooling and mail-order marriage. But of course, the films feel remarkably timeless in their arguments for or against humanism, war, poverty, capitalism, social control, social freedom and equality. "Ramona," a one-reeler by D.W. Griffith and starring Marty Pickford, adapts a popular novel about the injustices perpetrated upon Native Americans — in 1910. The labor films may be the most revealing today, because in the first quarter of the 20th century the labor movement in this country was ferocious, strong and influential in ways it isn't today; whether made by U.S. Steel or the American Federation of Labor, these glimpses of a huge cultural argument long since lost are startling in their passionate proto-Socialism. All told, "Treasures III" is not merely a record of cinema history, but a frozen-in-amber block of America itself.


"The Roger Corman Collection" (MGM) is now available on DVD; "Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934" (Image Entertainment) will be available on October 16th.

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8622 2007-10-14 00:00:00 closed closed the_roger_corman_collection_tr publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008622
<![CDATA[Peter Bogdanovich and the Four-Hour Tom Petty Doc]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/peter-bogdanovich-and-the-four.php Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Tom Petty and Peter Bogdanovich during the filming of "Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers," East End Management, 2007]


Hey, isn't that Dr. Melfi's shrink from "The Sopranos"? Maybe that's all he is to a younger generation, but to anyone with half a clue about Hollywood history, the 68-year-old Peter Bogdanovich is sooner noted as the director of film classics like "What's Up Doc?", "Targets," and two bona fide masterworks: "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon." Plenty's been written about the bespectacled, scarf-wearing icon (His encyclopedic knowledge of John Ford and Howard Hawks! His affair with young Cybil Shepherd! His life-long friendship to Orson Welles!), so what more needs to be added now, except... How in the world did he end up helming a 253-minute documentary (yes, over four hours) about aging Southern rocker Tom Petty? "Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers," which screened at this year's New York Film Festival and which will be released this week as an extensive four-disc box set, is unmistakably the most comprehensive document ever recorded on the underrated, 17-time Grammy nominee. And to be perfectly honest, that running time breezes by quicker than a dissipating cloud of pot smoke, thanks largely to some well-curated performances, sharp editing and surprisingly intimate footage that the masses have never before seen. I was fortunate enough to sit down with the quite-avuncular Bogdanovich to talk about Petty and the director's newfound appreciation for rockin' out.


The film's extended length may have been unavoidable since you seem to have made two full films in one: the artist's portrait and the concert doc. Why not one or the other?


I felt that here we are telling the story of a guy and his band over a period of 30 years. What are they doing? They're making music. Well, how can we really do a definitive work about this band without showing the result of what they were doing? In some cases, I felt the performances warranted being seen from beginning to end because that's part of what Tom is. The songs aren't just great, he's a terrific performer. When you see him singing or the band playing their instruments, you're interested because you get to know them. "Oh look, it's Benmont, he's really playing up a storm." Or Mike, who's so cool he hardly makes any expressions, listen to what he's doing. It's like if you're making a film about a great filmmaker and you say he's a great filmmaker, you have to show some sequences. You gotta let them run sometimes so you can see what you're dealing with. That's how I felt. You couldn't really make a movie about a man and his music without showing a lot of the music. If you like rock and roll, I don't see how you can resist it. I really wanted it to be comprehensive, the full monty.


Still, four hours might be a tough sell considering it's more a celebration than a critical exploration. How do you think this will play to those who aren't fans?


I don't know. We were really thinking of the fans, people who like Tom Petty. That was our main concern, as was: how much did it interest me? I could have added another half hour, probably — songs that I would have liked to play longer, like "Crawling Back to You" or "The Best of Everything," which is a song I love. But we kept saying while we were making it: If it plays, it doesn't matter how long it is. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how short it is. The only way you can tell is if it flows, and the only way to tell that is to sit through it, and see if there's any place where you say: "This isn't working." We talked at one point toward the end about making a shorter version for easier distribution. But Tom and I both felt that here we knocked ourselves both out to make this complete... how could we do that? If we could've made a shorter version that worked, we would have. And if we make it now, we'll always be saying, "Well, you should see the longer one." [laughs]


You were pretty unfamiliar with Petty's work prior to jumping onboard, no?


Right, I wasn't a fan. But I'm not of the generation. When rock and roll came in, I was into Sinatra, then I got into jazz and Armstrong, and then I got into country because I did "The Last Picture Show." I did get into rock and roll, sort of, with The Beatles and then later, in the '80s, with Bruce, because I knew him. So it wasn't alien to me, but it wasn't something that I was chasing after. I think that's one of the reasons there's a certain freshness to the movie, because it wasn't old to me. It wasn't like I knew any of the songs well. I had heard a few of them, but I didn't know the story nor the music.


But I did use quite a bit of rock and roll in a film I made called "Mask." In fact, we had Bruce Springsteen's music and then we had to take it out. But now it's back in the DVD version of "Mask." We have the full Springsteen score, and Little Richard, Gary Bonds, and I got into some '60s rock.


It's funny, I find this collaboration so fascinating because of your tastes. I'd sooner associate you with Cole Porter than Bruce Springsteen.


That's because I did a lousy movie with Cole Porter music... "At Long Last Turkey."


Are you really that down on "At Long Last Love?" I usually find that the most notorious commercial bombs tend to be better than the masses like to give them credit for.


Well, you know, it wasn't good enough. It should've been better. I'm going to see if Fox will put it out in a correct version, because there have been, like, six versions of it. But I'm not dying to put it out. It's okay, it's a curiosity.


What did you learn about rock music itself through Petty?


Size. It has enormous size for me. The concerts start kind of intimate, then build, and it finally has kind of the size onstage that you get from grand opera, a really great opera performance, which there aren't very many of. But when they really get big, really good, they have a size to them that's colossal, the music and the voice, it's the best. I felt that with Tom, and I said that to him. He said, "I've never seen an opera." I said, "You don't have to, I'll tell you." The audience gets that lift, too. There's enormous precision to the music and yet, it's instinctual. It has to be a certain way. I don't know if he could even analyze why, it's just the way he works.


Petty's sold the records, won the awards, and remained uncompromised. But in the rock pantheon, he's fallen through the cracks compared to many of his peers. Did you feel that while making the film, like you were unearthing a treasure?


Yes, I felt he was underrated. He's very popular with the people, but the critics seem to take him for granted. Or they seem to not understand the profundity, or depth of humanity, he brings to the work. I think they will, and maybe this movie will help. It's an amazing career when you look at it. He's kept the nucleus of that band together for 30 years. It's extraordinary. As Warren Zane says, "Name me another." The fact of the matter is, he has many loyal fans. They understand him and the work, and that's what it's all about for him. The more I worked on it, the more I said: "This guy is really top notch, you know?" He's a very important artist.


You originally bonded with Petty over a single dinner conversation, ironically about four hours long. What did you two have in common to talk about?


Well, Tom's a big movie fan. He watches Turner Classic Movies all the time. When he goes on tour, the hotel has to have TCM or he won't stay in the room. One of the first things we talked about was "Rio Bravo," which is the first clip [shown in the doc]. He loves that movie, and I do too. I think westerns, Hawks and Ford were a bonding element. He also loved the documentary I did on Ford, and volunteered to do a promo for it on TCM. He liked "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon." Those are a couple of his favorite films; that was why he had asked for me. The conversation, I'm told, is that [legendary producer] George Drakoulis brought my name up as a possibility to direct this, and Tom said: "Can we get him?" George said: "Can we get you?" I said, "You got me."


But you're not a guy who needs to take work-for-hire. Do you have personal projects in the works?


Yeah, I've got a bunch of things I want to make. The vagaries of the business are such that I can't say necessarily which film I'll be making first, but I've got a thriller — kind of a trailer-trash melodrama — that I'm working on called "Killer Joe," based on an off-Broadway play by Tracy Letts, a very good writer. He's adapted the script and I think we're going to do that in the early part of next year. Where are we now, '08? The '00s have gone by so quickly. I have more things I want to do now than I think I ever have, it's just a question of whether I'll survive to make them all. I think so... I'm in pretty good shape.


"Runnin' Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers" will be available as part of a CD/DVD box set on October 16th.

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8621 2007-10-14 00:00:00 closed closed peter_bogdanovich_and_the_four publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008621
<![CDATA[10 High-Concept Movie Visions of the Afterlife]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/10-highconcept-movie-visions-o.php Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Shannyn Sossamon in "Wristcutters: A Love Story," After Dark Films, 2007]


In Goran Dukic's "Wristcutters: A Love Story," opening this week, suicides find themselves in an afterlife much like the world they sought to escape, "only worse" — all the jobs are menial and the landscape looks a lot like industrial L.A. (The horror!) Fortunately, though limbo seems to be a place where nothing really happens, the inhabitants are quirky and cute, and even death can't put a stop to the movie meet-cute.


Clever representations of the afterlife are a treasured topic of cinema, whether they be budget constructions like "Wristcutters" or extravagant versions like Peter Jackson's upcoming $65 million adaptation of "The Lovely Bones." Here are ten high-concept movie imaginings of life after death.



After Life (1998)

Director by Hirokazu Kore-eda

The afterlife is: a social worker-run indie movie studio.


In Kore-eda's bittersweet, extraordinarily charming vision of what waits after death, souls are processed to regional offices where a group of caseworkers helps them choose the happiest moment of each of their lives, in which they'll then live for eternity. The counselors guide the dead through this decision, coaxing a young girl away from her fixation on a visit to Disneyland, and giving an elderly man videotapes of his life to prod his memory. Once the moment has been picked, the counselors adorably recreate it, home movie-style — a pilot's account of flying is done with cotton ball clouds and fans, and we never see what becomes of some of the surely more salacious choices — and that movie, screened, sends the soul off. The civil servant nature of office makes this set-up work — the afterlife is mundane, pragmatic, a little shabby and deeply human, particularly once we learn that each of the caseworkers is him or herself a soul passed on from life, one unable to choose a memory on which to settle.



Beetle Juice (1988)

Directed by Tim Burton

The afterlife is: a "Jackass"-style prank war.


Maybe I'm as crazy as a bio-exorcist, but I find Tim Burton's concept of death strangely reassuring. Sure, if you're Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis), your two-week vacation at home turned into a 125-year prison sentence after you drove the family station wagon off a bridge, and now you're powerless to stop your house's new tenants from transforming it into a postmodern nightmare. And, yes, it's true that no one likes to deal with the sort of impenetrable bureaucracy that keeps Burton's afterlife running smoothly (hilariously, all fresh corpses are issued a handbook for the recently deceased, but it's so poorly written no one can understand it well enough to follow its advice). Plus, you're forced to contend with Michael Keaton's titular prankster, who vows to exorcise your unwanted guests but is mostly interested in banging their daughter. But, on the positive side, you get to spend all of eternity with your spouse, you can cut off your head or flay off your skin without any ill effects, and you get to chill with a super-gothy Winona Ryder, who I had a total crush on in this movie when I was eight years old. Like I said, I'm crazy.



The Crow (1994)

Directed by Alex Proyas

The afterlife is: a music video for a goth-metal band.


Eric Draven, guitarist for the band Hangman's Joke, gets brutally murdered on Devil's Night along with his fiancé Shelly and reincarnated by a magical crow one year later as an invincible rock god superhero to take revenge on the thugs who murdered him. (It's based on an old goth saying.) It's sort of like "Jaws: The Revenge" as directed by Gene Simmons — director Alex Proyas combines brutally violent gun battles and brutally weepy power ballads without even a hint of irony, and the namelessly ghoulish city that Draven returns to is so unrelentingly bleak it's practically a hell unto itself: endless rainstorms, perpetually smoldering fires and crime rates that make New York in the 1970s look like Disneyland. Basically, Draven's afterlife is the most macho death fantasy a goth kid could possibly imagine: he's so damn sensitive he kills the bad guy with emotional suffering rather than his fists. Star Brandon Lee's death on the set of "The Crow" only enhanced the film's undead aura and added yet another eerie note to a movie that decries unjust murder while celebrating gun violence.



Defending Your Life (1991)

Directed by Albert Brooks

The afterlife is: New Age in sentiment, yet strangely litigious in practice.


In this film written, directed by and starring Albert Brooks, a yuppie named Daniel Miller who wrecks his new BMW and finds himself in Judgment City, where the dead gather, and, with the help of a defense attorney, argue in hearings with supplemental video footage that they lived their lives to the fullest. If they win, they move on; if they lose, they're sent back to give life another try — it's a sort of Buddhism lite, with "letting go of fear" replacing "letting go of attachments" (this close to the '80s, everyone was still very attached to attachments). "Defending Your Life"'s purgatory looks not unlike a corporate campus in which everyone has to wear long white gowns and take buses, but its nightlife offers something about which your average health-conscience exec could only dream — when you're dead, there are no calories, and you can eat as much as you want.



Field of Dreams (1989)

Directed by Phil Alden Robinson

The afterlife is: a front row seat to America's pastime.


As much as it explores America's long twin love affairs with baseball and nostalgia, Phil Alden Robinson and W. P. Kinsella's "Field of Dreams" is primarily about rectification, fixing the things in death that the characters had never been able to get right in life. Even people who've never seen "Field of Dreams" can recite its famous ghostly refrain — "If you build it, he will come," — but the moment that will always linger in fan's memories is when he, meaning Ray's (Kevin Costner) dad, appears on that beautiful cornfield in Iowa to finally have that catch they'd never shared when he was alive. "Field of Dreams" features ghosts, but it's more concerned with their impact on the living, and the movie suggests that redemption lies not in grand gestures (like ripping up your crops to build a baseball diamond) but in taking the time to slow the world down to bask in life's simple pleasures before we're no longer around to enjoy them. It gets me sniffly just thinking about it.



Human Nature (2001)

Directed by Michel Gondry

The afterlife is: very white.


Lots of books and movies have featured ghosts narrating their own story — "Rashomon" springs to mind as a particularly famous and interesting example — but Michel Gondry's lamentably underrated first feature "Human Nature" from 2001 puts a particularly distinct visual spin on the idea. Rhys Ifans is a kind of real world Tarzan, a human who grew up in the wild with an implacable libido; Patricia Arquette, through a freakish twist of fate, suffers from an inordinate amount of body hair; Tim Robbins is the scientist who falls for Arquette and eventually discovers Ifans and attempts to teach him to adapt to civilized life. Like "Rashomon," "Human Nature" lets all its main characters tell their story, even the dead one. And so Robbins shares his portion in an all-white room, dressed in an all-white suit, with a bullet hole in his head and a trickle of blood seeping into his eyes. It's a striking image, one that could only come from that dementedly fertile Gondry brain, where hell is a room that will never be fully dusted.



Liliom (1934)

Directed by Fritz Lang

The afterlife is: a police station.


"Liliom" is based on a play by Ferenc Molnár that's been adapted to the screen many times, the first, unfinished, in 1919, the most famous a cheered-up, musical incarnation from Rodgers and Hammerstein — "Carousel." But it's Fritz Lang's take, shot in France between when he fled Germany and when he headed to Hollywood, that's the most memorable imagining of the dark tale, in which the womanizing, wife-beating carnival barker of the title (played by Charles Boyer) kills himself to avoid getting caught by the police when a hold-up he takes part in goes wrong. The bleak joke is that the afterlife is exactly like the legal system he hoped to escape, except more bureaucratic, less sympathetic and way expressionist. Everyone working in the heavenly way station sports a pair of insultingly meager white wings, and the heavenly court has film footage of all of Liliom's wrongdoings (a familiar theme on this list), with his thoughts as an optional commentary track. "Even in heaven, there's only justice, nothing but justice!" Liliom yells. Well, mostly — the film still gives him a pass for that whole wife-beating thing.



Outward Bound (1930)

Directed by Robert Milton

The afterlife is: A slow boat to circumstance.


A group of passengers, among them Leslie Howard and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., wake up on an fog-encased ocean liner bound for nowhere in Robert Milton's adaptation of a Broadway play of the same name (remade in 1944 with a WWII twist as "Between Two Worlds"). They're dead, but not all of them know it — this being originally intended for the stage, they've got to talk it out quite a bit before they arrive in the presence of the Examiner (Dudley Digges), who'll tell them if they're ending up in heaven or hell. Suicides get the worst of it in "Outward Bound" — Fairbanks and Helen Chandler play a couple who assumed death would be the only way they could be together, but, being not quite dead, are given another chance. The ship's steward, on the other hand, turns out to be a successful self-offer doomed to sail around forever — here's betting he only gets paid in tips.



What Dreams May Come (1998)

Directed by Vincent Ward

The afterlife is: an interactive art gallery


Vincent Ward's vision of the great beyond (based, with some significant alterations, on the novel by Richard Matheson) is best known for its intense imagery, from the pastoral beauty of Robin Williams' heaven to the abject horror of of Annabella Sciorra's hell. But the ultimate message is less about how things look after death and more about how we see them. Sciorra's character Annie is sent to hell not because she chose to commit suicide after the death of her children and her husband Chris (Williams) but because those who commit suicide are so utterly despondent that they cannot accept the reality of their own death. It's only by coming to grips with her own mortality that Annie can escape her fate and rejoin her husband. Of course, after all that effort, they decide to get reincarnated anyway, and do the whole living thing over again from stem to stern. Obviously they were a very sequel-minded couple.



Wings of Fame (1990)

Directed by Otakar Votocek

The afterlife is: the Chateau Marmont.


In Otakar Votocek's film, a famous actor (Peter O'Toole) and the fan/frustrated writer who murdered him (Colin Firth) both end up an afterlife that looks a lot like a very swank hotel. Why? It turns out that there's a special place in heaven reserved for the famous and infamous, as long as they remain that way amongst the living, and regardless of whether they're renowned for a great painting or an egregious war crime. Of course, such a place might just be a very subversive version of hell, particularly when your standing and the service you receive depends on your current level of fame, something over which the resort's inhabitants no longer have any control.

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #48: Vampires Through The Ages]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/ifc-news-podcast-48-vampires-t.php Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "30 Days of Night," Columbia Pictures, 2007]


The ads for "30 Days of Night" promise that in the film "a new vision of the vampire comes to life." Well, the vampire has kept up a steady presence on screen since the early days of cinema, and "30 Days of Night" wouldn't be its first reinvention. This week on the IFC News podcast, we browse vampires through the ages, from Bela Lugosi to the Hammer films to 90s indie vamp angst.


Download now (MP3: 28:35 minutes, 26.2 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 19, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/opening-this-week-october-19-2.php Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Jennifer Connelly in "Reservation Road," Focus Features, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"30 Days of Night"

Steven Niles' popular graphic novel gets the big-screen treatment in this horror film about a collection of vampires who descend upon the tiny Alaskan town of Barrow in midwinter, just as the sun is about to set for 30 days. Josh Hartnett and Melissa George lead the town's citizens in a fight to survive. Director David Slade follows up "Hard Candy" with a horror film that's thankfully not another "Saw" rip-off or horror remake.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Comebacks"

They might as well have just called this "Sports Movie." Comedian David Koechner gets a long overdue lead turn as the losing coach of a failed football team who vows to turn his ragtag crew of misfit players into a collection of winners. Tom Brady (of "The Hot Chick", not the New England Patriots) helms this film that attempts the completely unnecessary feat of spoofing "Radio."

Opens wide (official site).


"Gone Baby Gone"

In a crowded and busy fall season, with offerings from acclaimed and Oscar-winning directors like Redford and Coppola and Burton, we're still a little astonished that our most anticipated film of the fall is by an...Affleck? It's no "Jersey Girl," but we're willing to bite, especially since we love it when actors go Spielberg. Ben directs brother Casey in this crime drama about a pair of detectives who attempt to track down a missing four-year-old girl in one of Boston's toughest neighborhoods. Parallels to "Mystic River" (both films are based on novels by Dennis Lehane) and the addition of Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris certainly can't hurt Mr. Sydney Bristow's directorial debut.

Opens wide (official site).


"Meeting Resistance"

Molly Bingham and Steve Connors' debut documentary charts the resistance movement of the "Insurgency" against the American-led occupation within the Adamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad.

Opens in New York and Washington D.C. (official site).


"Out of the Blue"

This New Zealand drama from director Robert Sarkies (of 1999's "Scarfies") reimagines the 1990 Aaramoana Massacre, in which small-town resident David Gray (portrayed by Matthew Sunderland), an unemployed gun collector, snapped and went on a rampage in which 14 people were shot dead, including Gray himself. The film premiered at last year's Toronto Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Rendition"

"Tsotsi" director Gavin Hood directs this politicalish thriller that's got Oscar written all over it...if it were any good, that is. The rumored real-life romance between stars Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal seems set to overshadow the film, which has a topical political backdrop (the torture and imprisonment of an Egyptian-born suspected terrorist) and fine supporting cast (Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin and Peter Saarsgard), but which was also met with an icy reception at Toronto last month.

Opens wide (official site).


"Reservation Road"

"Hotel Rwanda" director Terry George helms this suburban drama about a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls apart after witnessing his son's death at the hand's of a hit-and-run driver (Mark Ruffalo). Jennifer Connelly supports.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Things We Lost in a Fire"

A recent widow (Oscar-winner and "Catwoman" Halle Berry) invites her husband's troubled best friend (Oscar-winner and future Che Guevara Benicio Del Toro) to live with her and her two children. As he gradually turns his life around, he helps the family cope and confront their loss. "After the Wedding" director Susanne Bier makes her English language debut with this one.

Opens wide (official site).


"Wristcutters: A Love Story"

Goran Dukic helms this indie comedy set in a strange afterlife waystation reserved for people who've committed suicide. Patrick Fugit stars as a heartbroken recently deceased young man who goes on a road trip to find his ex-girlfriend (Leslie Bibb). Any film that has Will Arnett starring as the Messiah has us stoked. The film premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[Abel Ferrara on "Go Go Tales"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/abel-ferrara-on-go-go-tales.php Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Left, Willem Dafoe and the ladies of "Go Go Tales"; below, Abel Ferrara, Bellatrix Media, 2007]


In the tradition of Charles Bukowski, Samuel Fuller and other two-fisted, hard-living poets whose work bares teeth, Bronx-born auteur Abel Ferrara ("King of New York," "Bad Lieutenant") seizes the gritty, often violent beauty within the sleaze and decadence of the urban experience. Specifically, Ferrara's films lurk in the shadows of his favorite locale, New York City — from the Bowery-based rampage of his feature debut, 1979's "Driller Killer," to one hectic night at a failing strip club (and after-hours cabaret) in his latest, "Go Go Tales." In Ferrara's first flat-out comedy, Willem Dafoe stars as Ray Ruby, the well-intentioned club owner who can't seem to catch a lucky break: his dancers are demanding their money, the landlord (a hilariously crusty Sylvia Miles) wants her rent, and both his accountant (Bob Hoskins) and his brother/partner (Matthew Modine) serve as further threats to the future of his business. As sordid as it is warm and lighthearted, the film has been a welcome addition to the sometimes hoity-toity schedule of this year's New York Film Festival, and besides, where else will you find a half-naked Asia Argento making out with her pet Rottweiler? I had a chance to sit down with Ferrara after the NYFF press screening of his film, and was amazed that I had the notoriously distractible filmmaker's attention long enough to finish an interview. (Full disclosure: the last time this writer met Ferrara, he walked away from me in the middle of his own sentence.)


Your whole oeuvre is so entrenched with the sights, textures and ideas of New York, yet you've abandoned the city to live in Rome for the past few years. What do you miss about the old NYC?


As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing. That goes for the winos on the street. That goes for the people that can find places to live that don't have to pay what [they're supposed] to pay. It was also about how you can fail, you could take a shot at things, and then you can just chill out. You could "kick it," as they say.


In New York now, it's pedal to the medal. There are no bad neighborhoods, and it's hardball with a capital H. That's fine in its own way, but I don't know if it's something I miss. We're doing a documentary on the Chelsea Hotel, and that's a typical example of what real estate prices are doing. Where can you live? Where does New York exist? The fact is you can't find a place; to pay the rents you have to pay, you need to be successful. You can't take a chance on doing something that might not be profitable. Forget it. You can't even sleep on the street.


[Ferrara's phone rings. He gets off the call quickly and apologizes.]


It's alright, you're a busy guy.


No, I'm not a busy guy. Some scumbag fuckin'... I'm sorry. Are you married? I'm getting married again, and I've been married a long time. I've got two kids. Anyway, about "Go Go Tales"... as much as they talk about how loose and fast it is, it's done in the way any other motion picture is made, with all the accoutrements and schedules. I'm very strict. So to shoot digitally, where you can let the cameras run, I think it's great. It doesn't matter if it's film or not, it's a different form. After this, I'm in the middle of a film in Naples, in Neapolitan, about the city. It's about a women's prison, kind of a TV documentary. I realized to understand these women in prison, we had to get outside of the prison. On top of that, we started writing re-enactments to try to use fiction to get to the truth. So for the Chelsea Hotel thing, we're interviewing the people there that have anything to say about it, typical talking heads way. We're pulling up archival footage, some outrageous stuff: the outtakes of "Chelsea Girls," the music that was playing, people who had stayed there. It's really a goldmine; we're going to find 90 minutes in here. I'm also working with my writer from "New Rose Hotel," who wrote "Fat Albert." So we're all writing different things, like vignettes — small, five- or maybe ten-minute scenes — that could be re-enactments, told through fiction. I'm doing one with Willem as a vacuum cleaner salesman from Wichita Falls who is accidentally in the wrong hotel. He doesn't know where he is, and he's in a room between Sid Vicious and Dee Dee Ramone. We're also doing a Sid Vicious scene about what happened that night in that room. I met him once in passing, and there are a lot of people that say there's no way in the world he could have done that, but two people wound up dead, you know what I mean? You try to document and get to the heart. It's journalistic.


Back to "Go Go Tales" for a bit... What prompted you to try a screwball comedy? I'm glad you finally did because I laughed my ass off.


Thank you, that makes me feel so good. You know, we've done the vampire movie, the gangster movie, and this is almost a genre, like "La Cage Aux Folles" or "Broadway Danny Rose." I mean, that's basically a Woody Allen movie, but there is that genre, kind of a musical comedy. That's what it is. For me, it's like haiku poetry; you have certain parameters to work within. As an American genre filmmaker, it makes me understand the movies I watch so much better. It's funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it's fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh. When I was interviewing people, there was this grandson for one of the writers of the Marx Brothers, and he told me this great story: For something like "Duck Soup," [the Marx Brothers would] start on stage in New Haven or wherever, and take the show across the country on the train. The writers sat in the audience because it was a play, and they would work [the script] until they got two bona fide laughs per minute — the producers would sit there with stopwatches. Then, when they got to L.A., they shot the film.


It's been said that you're very demanding, even hard on your actors. Would you agree?


They're demanding on me! At this point, we don't suffer fools lightly. On one hand, it's one of the reasons I work with the same people over and over again. At the same time, you need fresh blood, different people and ideas. Sometimes it doesn't work out. In this business, some people shouldn't work with each other. They can be friends, they can be whatever. The actors that I love to work with, they're hard on me. They're pushing me. Willem is a tough taskmaster. He's from our school of independent filmmaking, that we're all out there to get that film made. Willem was on the set every day; Modine was there, too. Those guys were making that film with me. When you have that big of a cast and that much work, one director can't... when you're making a commitment to work with people who have never been in front of a camera, going for that real thing, it's just a matter of my technique — just to teach them how to move in a shot so they're in focus, all this stuff. It's a group effort. If you're not rocking with them... The actors, you expect everything from them. I tell these people, "What do you think, De Niro comes to the set and expects some person he doesn't know to give him a shirt or the right shoes?" A lot of these people think acting is finally getting the right to have somebody dress you or pick you up. It's a very tough gig. Sure, the feeling of the crew is picked up by that camera, but you're filming the actors. In the end, the film is the actors.


What's it like, coming back to the New York Film Festival for the first time in many years?


The fact is none of our films played here after "King of New York," which may have been a little too rough and ready for the kind of audience that was there, I don't know. Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want. I just feel disappointed, hurt maybe, because so many times our films don't get seen properly. They get demoted. This is a great venue, and this year is especially great, but I gotta say: it upsets me when I see 22 films from 22 separate places, and it's the New York Film Festival. Then again, it's their film festival. So I became more actively involved in the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. That, to me, is more my kind of thing, which is: you got three hundred bucks? You're in the festival. Nobody's judging films, nobody's passing judgment, you know what I mean? Every film that's made, if you got the money, somebody's paying the projectionist; you get a shot to run your movie. But now, I was like a traitor this year because I knew we needed to be in this festival.


What would it take to get you to move back to New York?


A cheap apartment. [laughs]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 12th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/opening-this-week-october-12th.php Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Jude Law in "Sleuth," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Berkeley"

TV director Bobby Roth's first feature since 2003's "Manhood" is the coming-of-age tale of a straight-laced conservative 18-year-old who gets caught up in the youth revolution movement during his freshman year at UC Berkeley in 1968. The film draws on Roth's experiences attending the college in the '60s.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Canvas"

"Canvas" explores mental illness through the eyes of a boy learning to cope with his schizophrenic mother, and was apparently inspired by writer-director Joseph Greco's childhood. Joe Pantoliano and Marcia Gay Harden star as the boy's parents.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Control"

Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis gets the biopic treatment in music video director Anton Corbijn's feature film debut, a black and white account of his life and death by suicide at age 23. "Control" made a splash earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, netting the Golden Camera and Prix Regards Jeune awards. The relative unknown Sam Riley stars as Curtis, while Samantha Morton plays his high school sweetheart turned tortured wife.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Elizabeth: The Golden Age"

We have Shekhar Kapur to thank for introducing us to then-newcomer Cate Blanchett in 1998's "Elizabeth," which earned a slew of awards and Oscar nominations. Since then, Blanchett's gone on to become one of Hollywood's most dependable and exciting leading ladies, while Kapur misfired with 2002's "The Four Feathers." But in a season of formulaic sequels and threequels, it's nice to return to an Elizabethan England where Blanchett reprises her role as the enigmatic queen struggling to maintain power. Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush and Samantha Morton support.

Opens wide (official site).


"Fat Girls"

This queer coming-of-age film tells the story of Rodney, a gay Texan high schooler who accepts the "fat girl" within as he wrestles with relationships, sexuality and his evangelical family with the help of his overweight best friend Sabrina. Ash Christian triple bills as the film's director, writer and star. The film premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Final Season"

"The Sandlot" director David M. Evans gives the feel-good sports film another go with this tale of the final season of the Norway Tigers baseball team in Norway, IA, before the school is merged into another. Sean "Samwise Gamgee" Astin plays an assistant coach hired to lead the team to victory while Powers Boothe plays the gung-ho winning coach who was fired following a championship season.

Opens wide (official site).


"Golda's Balcony"

"Rhoda" star Valerie Harper plays Golda Meir, Israel's first female Prime Minister, in this film that focuses on the crisis days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and Meir's struggles to maintain Israel's survival and peace in the Middle East. The film was adapted from William Gibson's long-running Broadway play.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Khadak"

On the frozen steppes of Mongolia, a young nomad is confronted with his destiny after animals fall victim to a plague that threatens to eradicate the lifestyle of his people. Filmmakers Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth co-direct and co-wrote this drama.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Lars and the Real Girl"

So you've just been nominated for your first Oscar, you finagled a strong role opposite Anthony Hopkins — what to do next? Clearly, the correct decision is to star in a romantic comedy about a guy and a Real Doll. Yes, Ryan Gosling plays a delusional young man who falls in love with a doll he finds on the Internet, freaking out the people in his life. Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer and Kelli Garner support in director Craig Gillespie's follow-up to "Mr. Woodcock."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Sleuth"

Kenneth Branagh directs this remake of the 1972 film of the same name, with Michael Caine taking over Laurence Olivier's role as a wealthy mystery writer and Jude Law taking over Caine's original role as lover of the writer's wife. We're normally not very crazy about remakes of classic films, but the thought of Caine and Law going "mano a mano" is too good to pass up.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?"

"Diary of a Mad Black Woman" director Tyler Perry writes and directs this comedy based on his stage play about an adulterous incident that causes four couples to take a hard look at their respective marriages over the course of a week-long vacation. After achieving solid box office success with "Diary" and his follow-up "Madea's Family Reunion," Perry finally underperformed with early 2007 film "Daddy's Little Girls," the first of his films in which he didn't star. "Why Did I Get Married?" features Perry in his first lead role sans Madea drag.

Opens wide (official site).


"We Own the Night"

Director James Gray seems to be somewhat of an acquired taste — his first two films, the grim crime genre pics "Little Odessa" (1994) and "The Yards" (2000) reek of Scorsese-lite, but there's something about his latest that just excites us to no end. "Yards" co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix play estranged brothers, one a cop and the other a shady club owner, whose lives collide after run-ins with the Russian mafia. Robert Duvall and Eva Mendes co-star.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #47: An Appreciation of Mark Wahlberg]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/ifc-news-podcast-47-an-appreci.php Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Mark Wahlberg in "We Own The Night," Columbia Pictures, 2007]


Having negotiated the particularly challenging career move from white rapper to respected actor, Mark Wahlberg now shifts between middling leading roles ("The Italian Job," anyone?) and generally kickass supporting ones ("I Heart Huckabees"). This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a closer look at the artist formerly known as Marky Mark.


Download now (MP3: 25:35 minutes, 23.4 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[A Kinder, Gentler Sexual Fetish]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/a-kinder-gentler-sexual-fetish.php Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 In "Lars and the Real Girl," Ryan Gosling plays the reclusive young man of the title who suddenly finds a fulfilling romance... with a sex doll he ordered online. But anyone on the hunt for something salacious might as well stay home — Lars doesn't use "Bianca" for the anatomically correct purpose for which she was created, but instead treats her as a genuine (mobility-challenged) companion, bringing her to dinner at his brother's, taking her with him to church and inventing a whole back story for her while the town gamely plays along.

This isn't the first time a film has spun an outrageous fetish-based premise into something softer and soulful — in fact, the kinder, gentler tale of unconventional sexuality has become a trend, particularly in indie film. Is the treatment of such topics like a fairy tale a way of normalizing them or just sanitizing them for wider, titillated consumption? Here are a few notable entries in the field:


Boxing Helena (1993)

Leanings: Acrotomophilia

Generally considered an abysmal howler of a motion picture, this film from Jennifer Lynch (daughter of David) stars Julian Sands as Nick, a surgeon obsessed with a woman named, yes, Helena (Sherilyn Fenn) who scorns his attentions until she's conveniently hit by a car outside of his house. A few emergency and then non-emergency amputations later, Helena's a foul-mouthed torso with nothing better to do than dig into Nick's sad psyche and eventually fall in love with him. What's meant to be a gauzy exploration of love at its darkest is mostly just extremely silly, even before the "it was all a dream" capper.


10082007_fetish2.jpgKissed (1996)

Leanings: Necrophilia

Lynne Stopkewich's first film caused a minor furor when in premiered at the Toronto Film Festival — which is as you'd expect, given that it follows Sandra (Molly Parker) from a death-obsessed girlhood to a life as a full-blown practicing necrophiliac/embalmer. The film isn't squeamish about Sandra's sexual preferences, but it is insistent on painting her acts as ones of spirituality, flooding a shot of her, erm, communing with a corpse with white light as she compares what she's doing to "looking into the sun and going blind."



Secretary (2002)

Leanings: S&M

Director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson transformed Mary Gaitskill's dark little short story into an improbably sweet film about sadomasochism. Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a damaged girl with a self-mutilation tendency who finds in her new boss (James Spader) unexpected salvation when he bends her over his desk and spanks her for making a few typing mistakes. The film keeps its exploration of S&M practices on the tame side, being more a film about an unconventional romance than an underground lifestyle, but, as one character observes in support, "Who's to say that love needs to be soft and gentle?"


10082007_fetish4.jpgTalk To Her (2002)

Leanings: Macrophilia

The lives of the two men in Pedro Almodóvar's "Talk To Her" are subsumed by those of the women they love, who burned brighter while conscious and who, even in comas, seem to loom larger than their caregivers. It's appropriate, then, that in "Talk To Her"'s movie within a movie "The Shrinking Lover," that dynamic is literally realized in the form of a scientist who takes a potion that shrinks him to Tom Thumb proportions. Wandering the landscape of his sleeping lover's body, he ultimately (and Freudianly) crawls inside her and vanishes, an act of love and sacrifice that, in the film, is followed by a far more disturbing real life echo.


Zoo (2007)

Leanings: Zoophilia

Any documentary that focuses on a man who died from a ruptured colon after having sex with a horse is going to have an inherent rubberneck factor. Director Robinson Devor is clearly intent on subverting all those who'd wish to gawk, perhaps to his film's detriment — "Zoo" is a lyrical, beautifully shot meditation on love and connection that mostly manages to avoid the man-on-horse sex that it is, in theory, about. Good taste and humanism all have their place, but it's hard to imagine that even those involved in the bestiality community that investigations later broke up would be so prudish.

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<![CDATA[A Kinder, Gentler Sexual Fetish (photo)]]> Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025391 2007-10-08 00:00:00 closed closed a_kinder_gentler_sexual_fetish_photo inherit 25391 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["12:08 East of Bucharest," "The Kenneth Anger Collection Vol. 2"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/1208-east-of-bucharest-the-ken.php Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "12:08 East of Bucharest," Tartan, 2007]


The emergence of "new waves" may well be a matter of Newton's Third Law — fatuous, homogenized blockbuster "action" produces an oppositive reaction, from the otherwise optionless cultural industries of nations the New Globalism forgot, be they Iran or Malaysia or Mexico or Romania. The reaction is not just the filmmakers'; discriminating audiences around the globe gobble up the proto-new-wave syntax of hyperrealism, open-ended narratives and daring art-film ethos, as they have recently with the Romanians, represented for the most part by Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (which won Best Film from the nation's most expansive critics' poll, on IndieWire.com), Cristian Mungiu's upcoming "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days" and Corneliu Porumboiu's "12:08 East of Bucharest." (All three landed trophies at Cannes.) Of course, 95 out of a hundred Americans couldn't find Romania on an unmarked map if their mothers' lives depended upon it, and the films remain the quizzical film-year prizes for the anointed minority, for whom cinema is a challenge and a blessing and a mystery, not a mouth-breathing weekend-night distraction.


So, suddenly, a poor ex-totalitarian Balkan nation that had little visible film culture at all for decades (outside of Lucien Pintille, something of the new generation's granddaddy) is now the hotbed of what the world's film festivals perceive as new-millennium cool, fresh, expressive and pertinent. "12:08 East of Bucharest" is a key film in the movement, because it explicitly addresses the 1989 revolution that ended the Ceauşescu regime, a pivotal moment in the country's sense of itself — during which the filmmakers of Porumboiu's herd were still teenagers and film students. (Indeed, the best primer for "12:08" and all of modern Romanian film is Harun Farocki's found-footage doc "Videograms of a Revolution," available from Facets, which assembles all of the broadcast material from the week of the revolution, which was, thanks to the seizure of the nationalized TV network, televised from beginning to end.) Porumboiu's movie, like its contemporaries, possesses a Slavic-style death-rattle humor, and is set in a muddy, worn-down post-Communist Bloc village of newly capitalist predators and broken losers. On the 15th anniversary of the overthrow, we meet three of the trashy little town's men: a smug, upwardly mobile local-station anchorman (Ion Sapdaru), a cynical history teacher completely wrecked from epic alcoholism (Teodor Corban) and an eccentric codger focused on playing Santa Claus for the local kids (Mircea Andreescu). The TV host's show that afternoon will address the anniversary, and the resonant question, did the revolution happen in the town, or not? The comedy slowly leaks out of the inability to rope in anyone but the drunk and the old man as guests; once it begins, with the three men seated before the camera as if on a tribunal, half of Porumboiu's film is consumed with the program and its collapse, as neighbors call in and rabidly dispute the teacher's assertion of having participated in the historical moment, by (as he claims) heroically rallying in the town's square at the moment (12:08, December 22) that Ceauşescu surrendered power.


Porumboiu's actual title translates to "Was There or Was There Not?"; beneath the film's head-on simplicity and deadpan wit lies an effortless docket of expressed ideas about memory, national pride, community politics and the new Romania, enduring as so many quasi-Third World states do on the outskirts of legality, poverty and social order. But unlike "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," also shopped by Tartan in this country as a comedy, "12:08 East of Bucharest" is authentically funny, in a boozy-Renoirian kind of way — the laughs drip organically from the characters. Porumboiu's camera allows us to observe them in real time (as liberating a strategy as it is eventually brutally claustrophobic), and there's no need for jokes.


A far more hermetic experience, Kenneth Anger's rarefied avant-garde film output exists nowhere except inside his stormy skull — which by the looks of it is a lava pit of Satanist iconography, homoerotic kitsch, Tinseltown detritus and mythomania. Fantoma's new Vol. II of Anger's collected films, following up the juvenilia and precious early films of Vol. I, includes the opuses that made him famous: "Scorpio Rising" (1964), the landmark free-form portrait of rough-trade, James Dean-loving, leather-wearing, cycle-driving gay culture; "Invocation of My Demon Brother" (1969), the assaultive black mass montage featuring an unbearable synthesizer score written and performed by Mick Jagger; and "Lucifer Rising" (1972/1981), Anger's vivid, semi-Egyptian "magick" epic (which had to be reshot from scratch after Manson cohort Bobby Beausoleil buried the first negative in Death Valley; as penance, apparently, Beausoleil recorded a score for the film from his prison cell). For several generations of American youth, this is what the real counter-culture looked like, and Anger's crazed, fringy, non-linear syntax gave birth to thousands of idiosyncrat underground imitators, music video collages, nightmarish dream sequences, and even the new breed of post-"Se7en" credit-roll montages. The Fantoma package is practically genuflective, stocked with extras, including Anger's full-on commentary, a rarely-seen 2002 short by Anger about his "magus" Aleister Crowley, restoration demonstrations and an artfully illustrated 48-page booklet featuring new essays by Martin Scorsese, Gus Van Sant, Guy Maddin and Beausoleil himself, all of 60 and still locked up.


"12:08 East of Bucharest" (Tartan) will be released on October 9th; "The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. II" (Fantoma) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA["Kurt Cobain About a Son"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/kurt-cobain-about-a-son.php Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: AJ Schnack's "Kurt Cobain About a Son," Balcony Releasing, 2007]


Though Kurt Cobain is (obviously) the subject and star of this documentary, he does not appear on screen at all until the very end of the film's 90-minute running time. Instead, "About a Son" is a compilation of the highlights of some 25 hours of never-before-heard audio interviews with Cobain, set against a collection of images of the Pacific Northwest where Cobain grew up, lived and worked. The result is interesting and, at times, a little unnerving, like taking a walk down the haunted streets of Seattle, WA while the ghost of Kurt Cobain whispers in your ear.


The most famous musician of his generation guides us through his unhappy upbringing, his unhappy formative years and his unhappy time as one of the biggest rock stars in the world. Very little of what Cobain has to say about anything is positive; he's sort of a far less funny (and far less Jewish) Woody Allen: angry at life, skeptical of others and pessimistic to no end. He talks about his drug use ("I did heroin a lot," he states bluntly) his desire to quit the band and hints at the sad end of his life when he discusses his chronic stomach pain and his suicidal thoughts.


Because we never see Cobain, it's easy to forget that he's the one who's talking. For someone with one of the most distinctive singing voices in a century, Cobain's speaking voice is so indistinct. There is none of that iconic howl that was so crucial to Nirvana's success in these interviews. And by refusing to show him to us, director AJ Schnack has stripped Cobain of his mystique. Cobain's allowed to be who he perhaps was beneath all that: an incredibly thoughtful, discontented musician.


Michael Azerrad, former Rolling Stone editor and author of as "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana," conducted the first of the interviews with Cobain on my 12th birthday. Months before my 13th birthday, Cobain was dead. Though some of my hipper friends had already discovered grunge, I was still mired in the comedy record ghetto, years away from discovering pop music. If you'd played those opening iconic notes from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" back then, I'd have probably started singing the words of the Weird Al parody version, "Smells Like Nirvana."


Which is all to suggest that I am not a Nirvana expert, and not even really much of a fan (I'm probably a bigger fan of Azerrad, who also wrote the superb book "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground 1981-1991") and I can't speak here to how a Nirvana obsessive may react to the film. My reaction was largely sadness, not just for Cobain's problems, but for his self-awareness of them coupled with his inability to correct them. He sounds like a man strapped into an amusement park ride who's discovered he wants to get off just after the train's left the station. A lot of documentaries about musicians make you want to go and put on one of the band's records as soon as the film is over. "Kurt Cobain About a Son" — which doesn't a feature a note of Nirvana music on its soundtrack — didn't make me want to do that. It made me want to take a deep breath and a long walk in the sunshine.


"Kurt Cobain About a Son" is now in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA[Tony Kaye on "Lake of Fire"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/tony-kaye-on-lake-of-fire.php Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Left, "Lake of Fire"; below, Tony Kaye, ThinkFilm, 2007]


A wildly successful commercial and music video director, Brit-born Tony Kaye's eccentric behavior (or in his words, "lunacy") made him an inadvertent media sensation when his feature debut, "American History X," led to very public clashes with New Line Cinema and star Edward Norton. Unhappy with changes made to his neo-Nazi saga without his consent, Kaye took out several full-page ads denouncing Norton and his producers in trade mags, tried to have his directorial credit changed to "Humpty Dumpty," took a studio meeting with a rabbi, priest and monk in tow, and eventually befriended the late Marlon Brando, who infamously greeted him with: "I hear that you're as crazy as I am." You'll have to do your own research to find out how an Osama bin Laden costume helped Kaye fall permanently out of favor with Brando, but that was years ago...


Now in his mid-fifties, Kaye has calmed down considerably, and his career is finally getting back on track. His latest film, "Lake of Fire," is a devastating 152-minute documentary that probes the religious, political, moral and philosophical questions surrounding the hot-button issue of abortion. Shot on black and white film over a period of 16 years (which, yes, predates "American History X") and covering all the relevant points without drawing subjective conclusions, "Lake of Fire" may just be the definitive film on the topic. In an age of muckraking and polemics, Kaye's must-see is refreshingly even-handed and yet still progressive-minded. It's a remarkable feat from a guy who, once upon a time, was deemed never allowed to work in Hollywood again. I sat down with the quiet-spoken, occasionally stuttering Kaye to talk about the doc and his notorious past.


You started filming "Lake of Fire" in the early '90s before being sidetracked by other projects. Why did it take so long to get back into the swing of things?


Well, I've been working on it this all the time, but obviously not every day for 16 years. When you're making a film about a person or an incident that took place, it's kind of easy because there's an obvious beginning, middle and end. When you make a film about an issue, none of that exists. It took quite some time to hit upon the realization that I needed to tell the story of a particular woman as she goes through the procedure: traveling to the clinic, checking in, having a conversation, having [the abortion], then talking about it afterwards. It was a very difficult film to edit, to get the balance just right, and it was also a very expensive film because I wanted to make a documentary that was epic. I financed it all myself, so I had to make lots of TV commercials and music videos, which take time because I have to care about those and do a good job.


Then I went bust while making this film, and [there was] my adventure in making "American History X." I had to recover from that, and for a while during editing, the film wasn't even owned by me. I had to buy the film back because my company owned the film and that company went bust. I had so much other crazy shit that I was dealing with because of my lunacy over "American History X," my reactivity... I kind of had the confidence that no one else would want it anyway, so no one else was going to buy it because it didn't have a value. It wasn't even finished at that point in time. It's easy to say now because it's finished and I obviously got it back, but I always had the confidence that it would be okay.


I find it fascinating that you yourself refer to your past behavior as "lunacy." Do you think that moment in your life has permanently affected your career or changed how people characterize you?


Yeah. I mean, now it's getting better. I have just written and directed a film I'm editing now [called "Black Water Transit"], and now "Lake of Fire" is coming out. Maybe a couple years ago, there was barely an actor who would've taken a meeting with me because of my dealings with Edward Norton and Marlon Brando, the fallout there. So yeah, no one... people wouldn't take a meeting. It's been very hard. I only have myself to blame and I don't blame them. It's a tremendously difficult ride making a film. It's a wild horse, you know? And if you're an actor, your voice is your voice, but it's so much in the hands of the director you're working with, so you definitely have to be careful.


"Lake of Fire" is so wide-ranging in both content and context that I can't imagine how you boiled it all down to two and a half hours. Was there enough usable material to justify, say, a seven-hour cut?


I think it will be at some point. I don't consider the work to be finished yet. I want to do a television piece and a series of DVDs, because I have so much stuff. But with anything, there's always a cream that rises to the top, and it quickly became apparent what the best things were. Then it became a decision: I wanted it to be as impartial as it could possibly be, but it needed to have a structure. When you do have the fortune of [working within] the Charlie Chaplin school of filmmaking — shooting, editing, shooting, re-editing — you can mold the clay however you wish. So after a period of time, I realized why I needed [to include] the story of one woman, which was not in my mind when I began. I needed to fully see how the process emanates, not that a man can ever understand what a woman goes through.


At one point I had eight researchers working for me who found a series of clinics that trusted us and felt this was a very important piece we were working on. They helped us find those women. When I shot [clinic patient] Stacey and the recovery room at the end, which I guess I did about five or six years in, I knew that was the end of the film; I was always working towards that. Because the pro-life argument is the more attacking argument of the two and the pro-choice argument defends the right, I felt the film should open as pro-life, which it does. Then you piece together the murders and the tos and fros in the grey areas, and you end in a situation that... There's no such thing as a woman who irreverently does the best she can with the circumstances of her life. Even Stacey, who [is having] her sixth abortion, you feel a sympathy towards her. Though she's absolutely a thousand-percent sure she's done the right thing, there's this sense of loss at the end, and a sense of irony about that. There's no better way to have a conclusive ending to a story than with irony. So with all those factors, the film is what the film is. Whatever I do to it in the future, it's not going to become a different film. It's just making certain points bigger so that there's a different kind of turn, like light and shade.


You say you couldn't understand what a woman goes through. Was that a concern when you started, how people would perceive this coming from a male filmmaker?


I don't really care about that, or it's not that I don't care, but... What I'm addicted to is the process and struggle of learning about the rhythms of filmmaking: story, pictures, sounds and the way editing cuts in, what works and what doesn't. I'm completely addicted to trying to figure that out. It's something that I don't think anyone can really achieve in a lifetime, so it's kept me fascinated. I'm not bored a minute in any day. Now, 16 or 17 years ago, when I began, there was an element of me that said, "Wow, this comes out and you'll see it big in this theater and everyone is there," and there was an element of that, but that's not what it's about for me now. All I'm concerned about is learning, getting better and being involved in projects that are honest, just glued to this spectacle and truth. I'm totally addicted to that. I mean, I was very good at making television commercials about cars, and I don't even drive.


When pro-life advocate Randall Terry looks straight into the camera and says he can't get through to the pro-choice crowd he's standing within, it reminded me just how strong people's convictions can be when they don't just believe something to be true, they "know" it's true. With this in mind, do you think the film will appeal to both sides of the argument?


It's very difficult for me to talk about what the film says. I can talk about how it's made or what I set out to achieve. Pro-choice is supporting an idea. Pro-life is supporting something that they can see; it's "the known." There are only two things that happen in the whole film: a late-term abortion at the beginning, and a regular abortion at the end. The rest of it is said, even the murders. Yes, phenomenally, I've got the bloke who was killed where it took place before [it occurs], but you don't see anything happen. You are told that that took place. I don't know if I'm going to answer your question appropriately, but as a human being firstly, and secondly as a filmmaker, I am very interested in the unseen. "Lake of Fire" is about religious fanaticism and the debate over abortion, but it's about something else, too. It's honestly very difficult to talk about anything other than why I chose to do certain things; I wish Noam Chomsky was here. The film is somewhere between "the killing of a three-year-old and washing your hands" — that's the best line of the whole film.


"Lake of Fire" opens in limited release October 3rd (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Darjeeling Limited"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/the-darjeeling-limited-1.php Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The Darjeeling Limited," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


Is Wes Anderson's schtick getting tired, or am I simply getting tired of Wes Anderson's schtick? This is what I know: I was as big a fan of Anderson's after "Rushmore" as has existed on this earth. But his each of his succeeding films — from "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" and now "The Darjeeling Limited" — has touched me less than the one before it. I can remember the rush of shock that met me when I saw "Rushmore" for the first time — there was a movie brimming with cinematic invention. It felt new and special and unique. I think the most frustrating thing about Anderson's new movie is that that sense of surprise his films used to provide is completely gone. At this point, we all know what a "Wes Anderson movie" is going to be. His work was once a break from convention; now he's practically a genre unto himself.


There is a distinction to be made between a director exploring a personal theme over and over and a director making the same movie over and over. Hitchcock was obsessed with icy blondes and mistaken identities but he examined those ideas in movies as radically different as "North by Northwest" and "Marnie." Unfortunately, I find it increasingly difficult to tell one Anderson movie from the next which, in turn, feeds that feeling that there is nothing in "The Darjeeling Limited" that I haven't seen before, from the aggressively immature brothers Francis, Peter and Jack (played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) and their perpetually dour demeanors to the British Invasion soundtrack and dreamy slow-motion cinematography.


The brothers board the titular train as part of an attempt to reconnect after the death of their father and the disastrous funeral that their mother (Anjelica Huston) did not attend. All the brothers have problems: Francis is badly beaten after an automobile accident (which, as tabloids circling Wilson's personal problems have already noted, is likely self-induced); Jack is reeling from another busted relationship with a woman; Peter's too busy dealing with his father issues to get a grip on the fact that he's about to become one himself. The train ride and several extensive detours into the Indian countryside are transformative, of course, though not in the ways the brothers initially intended.


The one member of the creative team who does impress is Schwartzman, who collaborated with Anderson and Roman Coppola on the screenplay, and who gives the finest and most complex performance in the company. After he followed the runaway success of "Rushmore" with his, shall we say, less than impressive turns in films like "Slackers," one might have been tempted to write Schwartzman off as a footnote on the indie film landscape of the late-1990s. But he made a strong impression in Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" and here exudes a surprising amount of charisma (aided, no doubt, by one of the finest cinematic moustaches in ages). With time, he could become the least likely but most beloved leading man of the day, a, Elliott Gould for the '00s.


Anderson's direction is confident, maybe a little too confident. There's no sense of daring or risk, just calm complacency. Back in college, I once got into an argument with a roommate over a rock band whose just-released new album was radically different than the previous one we'd spent all year listening to. He argued that the new record stunk because it was nothing like the last one; I said who cares about that, it's still a great CD with tons of great tracks — which it was — and you have to admire artists who constantly push themselves and try new things. We could have been talking about Anderson. If you want to see him repeat the same movie he's made for going on a decade now — the same sorta-jokes, the same old music, the same stock shots — you'll probably enjoy "The Darjeeling Limited." But if you're a fan like me, and you believe him capable of much bigger, more dynamic things, you may find yourself wondering when Wes Anderson will get around to making something that isn't just another "Wes Anderson movie."


See Alison Willmore's review of the film from last week here.


"The Darjeeling Limited" is now in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA["Lake of Fire"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/lake-of-fire.php Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Lake of Fire," ThinkFilm, 2007]


The subject of "Lake of Fire" — the decades-long debate over abortion — is exactly the kind of thing we typically go to the movies to escape from. Director Tony Kaye knows this, and he has no interest in making any concessions to the audience: his is one of the most defiantly uncommercial films ever made. It wasn't enough for Kaye to make a documentary on abortion, and it wasn't enough to make it three hours long. It wasn't even enough to film it in black and white. Brashest of all, he's dared to make the film even handed; to treat both sides equally and honestly. If he'd presented either side in a particularly positive or negative light, he might have had an easier road to travel, financially. It's easy to make money preaching to one choir or another. Instead, he ignored all of that on the way to crafting an authoritative and possible definitive portrait of one of the most controversial issues of our time.


Kaye's been shooting the film, often with his own money and a skeletal crew, for over a decade: the earliest footage we see in the film dates to an anti-abortion rally in January of 1993. "Lake of Fire" follows a loose timeline (and includes graphic footage from real abortions) but the film is largely concerned with letting critics on both sides of the issue expound on their positions. The discussions run the gamut from illuminating to disturbing to infuriating. Your feelings about abortion may not change, but it's virtually impossible to walk out of the film with anything less than a great deal more information on the issue than when you walked in.


For me, the largest revelation involved understanding more fully than I ever had before how abortion sits at the nexus of so many different issues: from the right to access to birth control, to the belief in the death penalty, to race, to religion, to gender. Abortion draws "true believers" from all sides who want to trade in absolutes while discussing enormous moral, ethical and spiritual issues that are based in the fundamental unknowns of life on earth. Watching "Lake of Fire," you begin to see this enormous tapestry of the human condition; we all experience things differently yet we try to make ourselves believe we are all exactly the same.


There are many interesting speakers and a range of viewpoints in the film (it's hard to conceive of any that Kaye doesn't air at least once), but the most provocative may be the one espoused by The Village Voice's Nat Hentoff, a pro-life liberal who argues that abortion is almost certainly murder, and that someone who is truly pro-life is someone who is also anti-murder, and thus also anti-war, anti-death penalty and anti-poverty. As Kaye's film shows, this is rarely the case.


It's unfathomable to consider how many choices Kaye must have had to make over the course of shooting and editing his 152-minute opus, and indeed how many of them were the right one, including the decision to shoot in black and white, which not only adds an unsettling dimension to the scenes inside abortion clinics, but also gives the film a timeless look amidst all the ridiculous 90s haircuts, not to mention the air of a historical document. Those who prefer a distanced documentarian with at least the appearance of impartiality will approve of the way Kaye becomes almost invisible within his own film, never seen on camera and rarely heard off it.


The film ends with a sober and non-judgmental account of a woman having an abortion, one who is clearly unfit to raise a child (on her own, after her relationship with an abusive spouse has ended) but who finishes her message of happiness to Kaye's camera by breaking down in tears about what she's done. While discussing the abortion with her clinic's caretakers, she worries that she is "scared of the uncertain" for her unborn baby. Aren't we all.



"Lake of Fire" opens in limited release October 3rd (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 5th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/opening-this-week-october-5th.php Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Finishing The Game," IFC First Take, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Feel the Noise"

Take the storyline from "Glitter," flip the gender of the main character, immerse the film in Latino culture, and add a flimsy gangster plotline to create "tension" and there you go: "Feel the Noise." Omarion Grandberry, formerly of boyband B2K, stars as a young man from the Bronx who's forced to relocate to Puerto Rico after a run-in with some thugs — he develops a love for Reggaeton. If the words "From Producer Jennifer Lopez" mean anything to you... well, you know what you're getting into.

Opens wide (official site).


"Finishing the Game"

After slumming around on Hollywood trash with "Annapolis" and "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" (which, actually, we fond of) we're really glad director Justin Lin is returning to the indie roots that made us love him in the first place. 2002's "Better Luck Tomorrow" made a name for the then-unknown director as it tackled Asian-American stereotypes. "Finishing the Game" is a mockumentary about the true story of the production of Bruce Lee's unfinished "Game of Death," where studio executives held casting calls in search of a replacement. The film features a number of appearances from "BLT" cast members and even MC Hammer. Good times, y'all.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"For the Bible Tells Me So"

Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival earlier this year, director Daniel G. Karslake's film charts the relationship between homosexuality and Christianity through the observations of five Christian American families wrestling with sexual identity and faith.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Good Night"

British thespian Martin Freeman plays Gary, a depressed man in a stagnant relationship who begins dreaming about romancing a beautiful woman (Penélope Cruz) who appears to him while he sleeps. Tired of her boyfriend's lack of interest, Gary's girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow) jets off to Italy, allowing Gary to fully immerse himself in his own dream world. Written and directed by Gwyneth's bro Jake, the film sounds not unlike like a Michel Gondry pic without all the nifty visuals. "Hot Fuzz"'s Simon Pegg and Danny De Vito co-star.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Heartbreak Kid"

We're getting the felling that we've seen all that Ben Stiller can do, so we've got our doubts about this remake of the 1972 Elaine May film of the same title. Bobby and Peter Farrelly, desperately in need of a comedic hit after the drab romantic comedy "Fever Pitch" in 2005, enlist Stiller to play a newlywed who regrets marrying his wife and ends up meeting the girl of his dreams (the girl of our dreams, Michelle Monaghan). Wacky hijinks, we predict, shall ensue.

Opens wide (official site).


"Kurt Cobain: About a Son"

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to break out the flannel. "Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)" director AJ Schnack helms this intimate documentary on iconic grunge frontman Kurt Cobain, based on the popular Michael Azerrad book "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana." The conversations heard in the film have never before been made public, and they reveal a highly personal portrait of an artist much discussed but not particularly well understood.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Lake of Fire"

"American History X" director Tony Kaye returns with another film that we're sure is going to ruffle a few feathers. Kaye tackles the ever-controversial debate on abortion and the lasting effects of the Roe vs. Wade judicial case of 1972 — the filmmaker reportedly spent the past 15 years working on this film which, as we've seen with his previous works, will likely cause heated debate, but which also premiered to fantastic reviews at Toronto last year.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Michael Clayton"

George Clooney gets his lawyer on as an in-house "fixer" at a top New York law firm who risks his career (and possibly more...!) on a sabotaged class action suit that pits him against a rival litigator (Tilda Swinton, who always makes a movie better). Tony Gilroy, previously known for writing the Jason Bourne trilogy, makes his directing debut. Hopefully poor George's ribs will be all healed by the time award season rolls around — his performance just screams of a nasty Cary Grant. And if Tom Wilkinson doesn't get a supporting nod for his Howard Beale-esque turn as a brilliant attorney gone mad, we're might have to hire a "fixer" of our own.

Opens in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto (official site).


"My Kid Could Paint That"

If you think the parents of CBS's controversial new reality show "Kid Nation" were crazy for letting their children star in an unsupervised "social experiment" about an adult-less world, wait until you see the parents of four-year-old Maria Olmstead, the subject of this documentary courtesy of Amir Bar-Lev, chronicling the rising stardom of a young artist often compared to Pablo Picasso — and whether or not she's actually behind the art credited to her.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Seeker: The Dark is Rising"

For every successful "Harry Potter" film, there needs to be at least five "Eragon"'s. "The Seeker: The Dark is Rising," based on the Susan Cooper novel, follows a young boy whose life is turned upside down when he learns that he is the last of a group of immortal warriors who have dedicated their lives to fighting the forces of the dark. Yeah, it sounds a bit like "Star Wars" without the stars or the wars and with a lot more magic, but if you want to see "Deadwood"'s Ian McShane show up for a paycheck, it might be worth it. Personally, we're still dreading the long-rumored remake of "The Karate Kid." Sweep the leg!

Opens wide (official site).


"Strange Culture"

"Teknolust" director Lynn Hershman-Leeson's documentary follows a collection of actors interpreting the legally touchy subject of artist Steve Kurtz, currently imprisoned as a suspected terrorist because of his controversial works. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Weirdsville"

Director Allan Moyle helms this slacker comedy about two stoners (Wes Bentley and Scott Speedman) who get in way over their heads when they try to dump the body of a dead girlfriend in the basement of a drive-in movie theatre where a satanic cult performs ritual sacrifices. Considering the film's offbeat premise and our love for all things "Empire Records," we're pretty sure Moyle can handle slacker comedy with the best of them (we're lookin' at you, Linklater), plus we can't even remember the last time we saw Wes Bentley (has it already been five years since "The Four Feathers"?). The film premiered earlier this year at the Slamdance Film Festival.

Opens in Austin (official site).

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<![CDATA[Why The Farrelly Brothers Deserve Your Love]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/why-the-farrelly-brothers-dese.php Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: Left, "The Heartbreak Kid," Paramount Pictures, 2007; below, "Dumb & Dumber," New Line Cinema, 1994]


Bobby and Peter Farrelly, like it or not, are two of the most fascinating American directors of the past two decades. Despite taking routine critical beatings, the brothers have created a unified body of work, elaborating on their pet theme of what constitutes normality ever since Jeff Daniels' monsoon of a bowel movement in "Dumb and Dumber" (1994). Each successive film follows a remarkably similar trajectory to that debut hit: a social outcast (usually scarred by the loss of a loved one), embarks upon a journey to achieve a goal that will restore their dignity. They fail. After this disappointment, they realize the social norms they're straining for are bullshit, and their self-respect is restored, if only to spite society-at-large. This pattern is consistent all the way through to "Stuck on You" (2003), and their latest, "The Heartbreak Kid," looks to continue it by way of a honeymoon road trip.


Then there's the flood of bodily fluid punch lines that are the core of their comedy — those outrages upon the anatomy, semen hair gel or adult breastfeeding, that immediately invalidate any claim to middle-brow respectability. They'll never be taken as seriously as Judd Apatow — whose "Knocked Up" The New York Times' A.O. Scott called an "instant classic," and which inspired a few think-pieces about the state of American comedy (David Denby's grumpy "A Fine Romance" in The New Yorker). Apatow is forgiven his vulgarity and birthing sight gags because of his underlying sentimentality, the "serious" way in which he handles the effect of pregnancy on a relationship. The Farrellys aren't cut that slack, even though their recent work has become increasingly personal and joltingly emotional — far more daring, and much more moving than Apatow's closed-off world of sarcastic young suburbanites.


The key to the Farrellys' films, as vague as it might sound, is their generosity. It extends from their hiring of friends and family as extras and the use of location shooting in their hometown to the video packages that end each film. "Me, Myself, and Irene" (2000) ends by showing still photos of every actor who was cut out, while "Shallow Hal" (2001) closes with images of all the behind-the-scenes tech workers. These gestures are representative of the democratic way in which the comedies are made (everyone's encouraged to suggest jokes) — and that spirit seeps into the films. The stories consist of a search for this feeling of community — as the classic Farrelly character has fallen outside of the proscribed normal lifestyle. In "Dumb & Dumber," Carrey and Daniels are idiots who break every possible social code because they aren't aware of them. In "Kingpin" (1996), Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson) is a disgraced (and poor) bowler with a hook for a right hand, while "Irene"'s Charlie is the town punching bag, a pathetic cuckold that pigtailed girls curse off the street.


One of the major markers of outsider status in their films is mental or physical disability — and this makes people nervous. Whether it's the treatment of schizophrenia in "Irene," mental disability in "Mary" and "The Ringer" (produced by the Farrellys' in 2005), or the conjoined twins in "Stuck On You" — there's always the accusation that these people's disabilities are being laughed at, which is never the case. They are presented without pity or condescension as independent individuals, never defined by their disability, just people with vices and faults of their own. A childhood friend of Peter Farrelly, Danny Murphy, became a quadriplegic after a diving accident, and has appeared in every film since "Kingpin" (1996), and in all of them he plays an acid-tongued bastard — flipping the switch that chops off Munson's ill-fated hand.


The Farrelly hero, after expressing contempt for the status quo, searches for a new community to belong to — every film (aside from Hal), arranges this in the form of a journey, either to search for a loved one or to rejuvenate their careers. This pursuit fails (as it does in "Dumb & Dumber," "Kingpin," and "Stuck on You"), or succeeds only after the character rejects the social codes he originally hoped to live up to (as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Shallow Hal"). In both cases, traditional morality is proven false or overthrown, and the line between normal and abnormal is blurred. New splinter communities are formed or maintained: "Dumb & Dumber"'s Lloyd and Harry maintain their country of two; "Kingpin" ends with an Amish village forming an alliance with Roy and his girl; Mary's final group is a circle of obsessives that surround the central couple; "Me, Myself, and Irene" affirms the relationship between Charlie and his bastard children; Hal joins a merry band of Peace Corps volunteers; and "Stuck On You"'s Walt and Bob end the film in a triumphant shot-countershot that emphasizes their new-found independence while also re-integrating them into their hometown (after nailing a musical number with Meryl Streep).


While the content has remained consistent, the box-office has dwindled. Every film since "There's Something About Mary" has made less than the previous one, decreasing until "Stuck On You" (their masterpiece) made only $34 million domestically, five times less than Mary. This despite their increasing visual sophistication ("Stuck On You"'s superb use of the 2.35:1 frame) and emotional delicacy — it's what Peter calls the "sensitve trilogy" ("Hal," "Stuck on You," "The Ringer") that has tanked the worst. In order to recover their fans, it seems, they need to restore a higher joke-to-drama ratio, or at least return to more bankable stars than Jack Black, Kinnear-Damon and Johnny Knoxville. Their next film following the trilogy, "Fever Pitch" (2005), was a contract job — for the first time they had no input into the screenplay or casting — and it has little relevance to the rest of their work. Their stock has fallen to the point where their name isn't even used in most promotional material for "The Heartbreak Kid." The success of "Kid," their most commercial sounding (and R-rated) film in years, may determine how much freedom they have in the future — and may be the deciding factor in whether their long-gestating Three Stooges project (with Russell Crowe as Moe!) gets out of the planning stages. Here's to hoping "Kid"'s a blockbuster.

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<![CDATA["Green Chair," "Cinema16"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/10/green-chair-cinema16.php Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Green Chair," ImaginAsian Pictures, 2006]


I could go on all week about the Korean "new wave" movies that deserved theatrical release in this country but didn't get them, just starting with Hong Sang-soo's "The Power of Kangwon Province" and "Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors," Hur Jin-ho's "Christmas in August" and "One Fine Spring Day," Lee Seong-kang's "My Beautiful Girl Mari," Lee Chang-dong's "Peppermint Candy," Kwak Jae-young's "My Sassy Girl," Yim Soon-rye's "Waikiki Brothers," the sublime portmanteau collection "If You Were Me," the "Whispering Corridors" trilogy, and so on. Some of these have seen life as DVDs here, more weight thrown toward the argument that an official video release is the legit B-movie-slash-"specialty" distribution stream of our time, and therefore such films should be eligible for awards and critics' lists. (Last year saw only maybe two theatrical films, maybe, that could be said to beat out the overdue 2006 DVD'ization of "The Power of Kangwon Province.") Park Cheol-su's "Green Chair" (2005) is another gemstone on the overladen scale: a tempestuous, achingly lovely, slightly batty and overwhelmingly horny romance that makes intimacy palpable in ways no American film has ever tried.


The setup is news-story familiar: a thirtysomething woman caught having a sexual relationship with an underage teen. But the upshot is much more complex — the two energetic, vrooming lovers fit together like ragged puzzle pieces; they have fun, and gamble everything that society holds dear to be together, to test each other, to yank the most out of whatever time they can steal in each other's naked company. Provocatively, we meet them as she, Mun-hee (Suh Jung, the infamous succubus from Kim Ki-duk's "The Isle"), gets released from her prison stint, greeted in the jail parking lot by a scandal-mongering news crew and by Seo-hyun (Shim Ji-ho), now a strapping 17+ and heroically going public with his feelings, ready to whisk her away and pick up where they left off. It takes but one wary moment for Mun-hee to embrace him in full view of the cameras — we're expecting the steamroller of law and propriety to once again roll over them as the film progresses, but something else magical happens. The couple do in fact vanish from the public eye and plunge into their mutual addiction for each other, flopping in the apartment of an artist friend and generally having more spirited, moving, realistic sex than I think I've ever seen in a movie before. This isn't movie sex, nor is Park's film "about" mere sexual obsession — Mun-hee and Seo-hyun talk in the middle of coitus, disappoint each other, get sidetracked, pause to eat, try to thrill each other with risk and sometimes fail. But the passion and generosity that lures them is always there, and always tangible to us, and so it never, ever gets boring.


Their romance is a sincere but rocky road, ending up in a semi-surreal, semi-theatrical dinner party in which everyone they know, including their families, philosophically argues out the couple's moral situation and potential future. "Green Chair" dazzles because it is almost entirely unpredictable — the two protagonists leap into your lap, defiantly behaving in inexplicable ways — and because the conviction of the actors is unwavering. Shim is utterly convincing and lovable as the self-assured soon-to-be-18-year-old, but Suh is the movie's motor; her default position in her lover's presence is astonished, doubtful, heartbreaking joy, and the character's honesty and desire makes most other romance heroines look like brainless fakers.


If great Asian imports have to rely on DVD to be "released" in the U.S., the world's notable short films remain almost unseeable. A new and ambitious corrective is Cinema16's European Short Films set, a beautifully designed collection of 16 of the continent's greatest and most famous festival-award winners, reaching back as far as Ridley Scott's 1958 art-school film "Boy and Bicycle," and including several 2005 films, including Bálint Kenyeres' breathtaking "Before Dawn." Set entirely in a Hungarian field in the pre-sunrise moments and shot entirely in one stupefying, 35mm 13-minute take, Kenyeres' film is a portrait of social conflicts and secrets — human traffickers, refugees, police, who knows what else? — that conveys such a thoroughgoing three-dimensional sense of the world beyond the frame, beyond our capacity for seeing, that it feels like a feature.


Anders Thomas Jensen's pre-Dogme "Election Night"(1998), Matthieu Kassovitz's "Pierrot le Pou" (1990) and Christopher Nolan's "Doodlebug" (1997) are historically interesting, if revelatory of those filmmakers' weaknesses, and the inclusion of Jan Švankmajer's "Jabberwocky" (1971) is a boon to Švankmajer completists, since it hasn't yet been included on any of the Kino collections. But the real prizes include Juan Solanas' "The Man without a Head" (2003), a lavishly fabulistic French daydream that suggests that Solanas, son of Fernando, inherited the mantle of Caro/Jeunet and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"; Roy Andersson's "World of Glory" (1991), a Kafkaesque study that begins with one of the most chilling three-minute shots in the history of movies; Lynne Ramsay's "Gasman" (1997), the dour, low-class Glasgow short that led to the phenomenon of "Ratcatcher"; Lars von Trier's moody, impressionistic student film "Nocturne" (1980); and Martin McDonagh's Oscar-winning "Six Shooter" (2004), an all-Irish worst-day scenario — starring Brendan Gleeson as a bruised widower — that is as richly and sardonically written as any short film I've ever seen.


"Green Chair" (ImaginAsian) and "Cinema16: European Short Films" (Warp Films) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Ang Lee: The Master of Repression]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/ang-lee-the-master-of-repressi.php Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Nick Schager

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Tang Wei in "Lust, Caution"; below, Ang Lee on set, Focus Features, 2007]


Ang Lee's films are fixated on the repression of desire, either by the self or by social constructs, so it's fitting that the acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker's canon is defined by a cool, subdued style that stifles exhilaration. Unlike his more illustrious and rarefied Taiwanese contemporaries, boundary-pushing modern masters Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lee's sensibilities are about as mainstream as they come. Habitually measured, pensive and beautiful, Lee's films subscribe to an approach that might best be described as graceful, innocuous stateliness, the director's penchant for visual and sonic elegance likely responsible for his well-regarded critical reputation in the U.S., and yet matched by an atmospheric remove that frustrates any sense of passion. Lee is an able craftsman whose reserved techniques are tailor-made for Oscar season, in which tastefulness and thoughtfulness are, generally speaking, the preferred storytelling modes. So how to explain his latest, "Lust, Caution," a fiery WWII espionage drama (recent recipient of the Golden Lion, aka Best Picture, at the Venice International Film Festival) that, despite a predictable fascination with facades and containment, is so sexually explicit that it garnered the doggedly middle-of-the-road director an NC-17 rating?


In terms of its raciness, the film — which builds to an explosive crescendo of sadomasochistic release between Tony Leung's Japanese collaborator Mr. Yee and stunning newcomer Tang Wei's Chinese spy Mrs. Mak — couldn't seem more tonally removed from its creator. Born in Taiwan but filmicly educated at NYU, the diminutive, soft-spoken, 52-year-old Lee initially made a name for himself with 1992's "The Wedding Banquet" and 1994's "Eat Drink Man Woman," both archetypal examples of early-'90s metro-arthouse cinema. Smart, sophisticated and formally unadventurous, they proved his adeptness at character-driven tales while laying out what would become familiar preoccupations with the family unit, the relationship between fathers and children, and the means by which — whether it be Wai-tung and Simon in "Banquet," Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," or Jack and Ennis in "Brokeback Mountain" — cultural constraints and attitudes complicate attempts to attain security, happiness and love. Those two well-received efforts led to his first big-studio break, "Sense and Sensibility," a kindred thematic spirit to his prior projects that also, despite being an English-language period piece based on Jane Austen's Brit-lit classic, naturally meshed with Lee's dignified, muted direction. The ideal marriage of artist and material, it unsurprisingly garnered seven Academy Award nods.


If Lee's methods are restrained and conservative, his subsequent career choices have nonetheless exhibited a persistent dedication to risk-taking. Immersion in, and examination of, alien cultural microcosms is a prime characteristic of all Lee's work, whether it be the Taiwanese family unit in "The Wedding Banquet," upper-middle-class American suburbia in "The Ice Storm" (1997), or the South during the Civil War in "Ride with the Devil" (1999). Avoiding comfort zones by choosing unfamiliar milieus is one of his most admirable traits, though it's not a tack that consistently pays off, since his unwavering directorial staidness doesn't always complement the given story at hand. This is most readily apparent with regards to "Devil," a handsome but wholly inert epic about brotherhood and nationhood drained of any ardor or rousing excitement by picture-postcard compositions and a mundane sweeping score. To be fair, the unwise gamble of casting Skeet Ulrich and Jewel in key roles contributes drastically to the overwhelming torpor. Yet there's also a sense that, in this instance, Lee has simply strayed too far from his creative sweet spot, his temperamental mildness ill at ease with his story's portrait of inner tumult and transformation.


The same might also be said about "Hulk," which after 2000's uniformly well-received "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," found the director valiantly attempting to craft a summertime comic-book extravaganza without losing his trademark focus on characters' conflicts within and with their environments. Roundly slammed as a failure, "Hulk" is nonetheless one of Lee's most underappreciated and finest works, in large part because — in a manner 180-degrees contrary to that of his other unqualified triumph, "Sense and Sensibility" — the contrast between subject matter and approach is pronounced to the point that it generates a funky, electric friction. There's constant disorienting tension between Lee's interest in Bruce Banner's Jekyll-and-Hyde torment — not to mention his concern with both Bruce's testy relationship with his paterfamilias (Nick Nolte), and the repercussions wrought from society's stipulation that man suppress his rage — and the dictate to deliver CG-aided Hulk-SMASH! action set pieces. Like so much of his work, "Hulk" epitomizes the filmmaker's frequent modus operandi of reworking standard genres into "Ang Lee films," a process in which introspection is considered as important as stirring thrills and spectacle, whether it be for the better ("Hulk," "Crouching Tiger") or worse ("Devil").


In many ways a more polished (and stirring) version of Paul Verhoeven's recent "Black Book," "Lust, Caution" doesn't significantly renovate or subvert spy movie conventions or expectations. During its steamy, highly charged centerpieces, though, it does radically upend the director's usual nippy detachment. In these violently erotic trysts, with sweaty ecstasy and tortured agony freely blending together, "Lust, Caution" seems like the anti-"Brokeback Mountain," which tackled its homosexual love story with a delicate modesty that, while mirroring the tale's repressive air, self-consciously avoided any of the matter-of-fact graphic bluntness of Annie Proulx short story source material. With its picturesque vistas of Western landscapes and its intense concentration on its protagonists' emotional and social condition, "Brokeback" is typical Lee, a film so attuned to his strengths that it's little surprise it nabbed him his first Academy Award for Best Director. "Lust, Caution," conversely, finds him moving, however gingerly, away from the safe and traditional confines of his celebrated prior achievements. It isn't a resounding success — its protagonist's motivations are ultimately too thinly developed, and its story a tad too drawn-out. Yet in its blistering heat, it also potentially portends a new future path for Lee, one in which the shelter of glossy aloofness is abandoned in favor of ever-more audacious, fervent modes of creative expression.

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #46: "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and Philip Seymour Hoffman]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/ifc-news-podcast-46-before-the.php Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," ThinkFilm, 2007]


Sidney Lumet's new thriller "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" screens as part of the New York Film Festival before opening in theaters next month. This week on the IFC News podcast, we discuss the film and the admirable career and unusual appeal of one of its stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman.


Download now (MP3: 23:51 minutes, 21.8 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]



Matt Singer and Alison Willmore webcast live from the New York Film Festival September 28th through October 5th at 1pm ET daily. Watch them here.

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<![CDATA["The Darjeeling Limited"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/the-darjeeling-limited.php Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Wes Anderson, I love you, but you're bringing me down. The hermetically sealed world of your films — the man-children; the inexplicable melancholy; the flat, wide shots; the fetishized artifacts of adolescence and carefully chosen vintage pop soundtracks — has always resonated so strongly for me. I shrugged off all accusations of tweeness, I defended "The Life Aquatic" against the most virulent of critics, I saw in that AmEx commercial promising signs of self-awareness and gentle self-mockery. But with "The Darjeeling Limited" you may have finally vanished into your own well-contemplated navel and, I'm sorry to say, lost me entirely.


"The Darjeeling Limited"'s dysfunctional family includes the three wealthy Whitman brothers: Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman). A year ago their father was hit by a taxi and killed in New York, and the three haven't spoken or seen each other since his funeral. A near-death experience prompts Francis to organize a sibling reunion aboard a train traveling through India, where they'll attempt to achieve spiritual enlightenment by visiting shrines and following the advice of a guru, all things laid out on daily laminated agendas by Francis' assistant. Francis is the controlling one, Peter the nervous one and Jack the writer/ladies' man/runaway, but they barely conform to those identifiers — mostly, they're a squabbling three-headed, puppy-eyed monster wolfing down prescription meds and toting around a lot of figurative and literal baggage (designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton — this may be the first film to costar a matching suitcase set). The three are all in the grip of the kind of bruise-eyed, deep-rooted malaise that so often plagues Anderson characters, on the Whitmans' part because they're still mourning their father and because their mother has abandoned them. It's hard to blame her — the Whitman brothers, despite the considerable charm of the actors playing them, just aren't very likable. They're stylized imaginings of poor little rich boys whose main burden in life is a search of meaning, a tough sell even without the petulance and the fighting over $6,000 belts. They mistreat people until they're thrown off to fend for themselves, leading them to the inevitable moment of real-life trauma that breaks the film's bubble of whimsy and forces the characters to find their way to an emotional epiphany, a segment that, when it arrives, feels jarringly and insultingly unearned.


Anderson's world is shrinking, from the full run of Rushmore Academy to 111 Archer Avenue to the Belafonte to "The Darjeeling Limited"'s titular train, which in one shot is shown to contain all of the characters of the film in their own cramped, themed compartments. The natural progression is for his next film to take place entirely in a series of intricate dioramas (which I suppose is one way you could look at the planned stop-motion "Fantastic Mr. Fox"). There's no denying that Anderson could use a bit of fresh air and a look outward. The film is still rife with reminders of his talent: the aforementioned pan along the train; another encounter out of two separate windows as it travels in the night; an early shot in luxurious slow-mo as Adrien Brody runs past Bill Murray — in a tiny role, billed simply as "The Businessman," he seems, more poignantly, in retrospect, to be a stand-in for Whitman Sr. — while the Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow" surfaces to overwhelm the soundtrack. But these moments are adrift in a whole lot of half-hearted crap. Maybe it really is time to put the prolonged boyhood to rest — there are plenty of genuinely sad things happening out there in the world to make all this unaccountable, fanciful woe seem past its due date.



"The Darjeeling Limited" opens in New York on September 29th (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Darjeeling Limited" (photo)]]> Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025390 2007-09-24 00:00:00 closed closed the_darjeeling_limited_photo inherit 25390 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Feast of Love"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/feast-of-love.php Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Greg Kinnear in "Feast of Love," MGM, 2007]


The movie is called "Feast of Love" and, indeed, there is much love in the movie. Too much, in fact. If this is a feast, it is one in which the host bought an enormous quantity of food, and now the guests feel obliged to stuff their craws until they're nauseous and bloated. This sort of movie and that sort of meal calls for a kind of moderation that director Robert Benton appears unwilling to provide.


And it's not just that so many characters are falling in and out of love — it's that they do it so quickly as well! The various couples that come together and break apart in "Feast of Love" do so so quickly that it's as if they're participating in a timed track and field event. Take the film's young couple, Oscar and Chloe. They decide to have children together after their second night together. Even if you fall in love with someone at first sight, even if you're convinced you're going to spend the rest of your life with the person, who drops that little nugget on date number two? At that stage, don't people hint and tease and let their feelings out in drips and drabs? "Feast" is running a love sprint here, there's no time for that.


The onslaught of swooning launches from the memories of Harry Scott (Morgan Freeman), a grieving college professor who assuages his insomnia by sharing with the audience his recollections of the past 18 months in the lives of his various friends and neighbors in Portland. There's Bradley (Greg Kinnear), who runs Harry's favorite coffee shop and doesn't notice as his long-suffering, softball-playing wife (Selma Blair) falls for another woman ("I'm not the only one she tagged out!" she ambiguously informs Bradley when she finally comes out of the closet). And there's also Oscar (Toby Hemingway), Bradley's best barista, who's the guy who informs his brand new girlfriend Chloe (Alexa Davalos) he's ready to make some babies. Along the way, there are at least two extramarital affairs, a wedding, one off-screen death, one on-screen death, two different drug abusers, a kidnapped dog, and oodles of softcore sex scenes. No wonder Harry can't sleep — who could with all this stuff on their mind?


Despite undeniably pretty cinematography by Kramer Morgenthau, despite a fine performance from Kinnear in a thankless role as a hapless baffoon, "Feast" gives off an undeniably "Crash"-ian vibe of didactic plot machinations: hell, someone even dies in a car. And with such a large ensemble all vying for screen time, too many of the characters remain little more that sketches (like Fred Ward as Chloe's eeeeeevil father). "The unexpected is always upon us," Freeman intones near the end of his drippily paternal voiceover. "And so we begin again." Ready whenever you are, guys.



"Feast of Love" opens on September 28th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 1, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/opening-this-week-october-1-20.php Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Trade," Roadside Attractions, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Bordertown"

Much has changed in the ten years since director Gregory Nava helmed "Selena," the biopic about the late Latin music star that shot Jennifer Lopez to fame. Lopez went on to become a musical sensation, selling millions of CDs while working on award-winning films with directors like Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone and Martin Brest (a Razzie is still an award). Nava has kept a low-key profile, working on the Frankie Lyman biopic "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" and producing the PBS series "American Family." This re-pairing of the two finds Lopez playing a journalist investigating a series of murders on the border of Juarez and El Paso — the film met with an infamously bad reception when in premiered at Berlin this year.

Opens in Dallas and El Paso (official site).


"The Darjeeling Limited"

Owen Wilson's recent troubles saddened us, but there's no better opportunity for a rebound than a starring role in frequent collaborator Wes Anderson's latest — even if the part contains some uncomfortable real-life echoes. Wilson plays a man who hopes to reconnect with his two younger brothers (Jason Schwartzman and Anderson newcomer Adrien Brody) by taking them on a train trip across India. Jeer of the year goes to Fox Searchlight for cutting the 13-minute accompanying short "Hotel Chevalier," which gives background on Schwartzman's character and features a nude Natalie Portman: Boo!

Opens in New York (official site).


"Feast of Love"

Director Robert Benton, best known for helming the Oscar-winning "Kramer vs. Kramer," hasn't really directed anything that's peaked our interest since the 1994 drama "Nobody's Fool," but if there's one thing Benton is most known for, it's getting strong performances out of his actors — the man's directed eight different actors to Oscar-nominated performances. We'd be a little surprised if Benton's latest gets any Oscar love, as this ensemble piece concerning the love lives of a small community in Oregon sounds a bit overdone, "Big Chill" style.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Game Plan"

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson attempted to shed his action star status with last year's well-received football film "Gridiron Gang," and this year the People's Champion looks to tackle (sorry) the kid-friendly crowd with his family film "The Game Plan." The Rock plays an NFL quarterback whose bachelor lifestyle gets turned upside down with the arrival of the seven-year-old daughter he never knew he had. Hey, it worked for Vin Diesel, sort of.

Opens wide (official site).


"I'll Believe You"

Director Paul Francis Sullivan, who worked previously as a field producer for "The Daily Show," makes his feature debut with this film about a late-night radio host who receives a panicked phone call in an indecipherable language and enlists the help of his friends to uncover the true identity of the first-time caller after the FBI gets involved. David Alan Basche, best known for "United 93" and last seen playing the Crab on "30 Rock," stars alongside supporting actors Patrick Warburton, Fred Willard and Ed Helms.

Opens in limited release (IMDB Page).


"The Kingdom"

Before we become inundated with end of year "serious" movies featuring important stories about American influence in the Middle East, government conspiracies and Tom Cruise pretending to be a senator who watches too much Fox News, we have what looks to be a solid thriller courtesy of "Friday Night Lights" director Peter Berg and new screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan, about an FBI team sent to Saudi Arabia to investigate the bombing of American citizens living on Middle Eastern soil. We're (truly!) glad to hear that Berg cut down on the politics and focuses more on the action — the film's like a history lesson followed by a monster truck rally. Now that's a rollicking good time.

Opens wide (official site).


"Lust, Caution"

Ang Lee's hot and steamy follow-up to his Oscar-winner "Brokeback Mountain" has drawn some serious buzz ever since the project's original inception — this Shanghai-set period piece has everyone from the MPAA to Chinese government officials all stuffed up. The film tells the story of a young woman (newcomer Tang Wei) who gets swept up in a dangerous game of emotional intrigue with a powerful political figure (Tony Leung, who just oozes sexuality). The film is to be released in the US with a dreaded NC-17 rating, while Chinese censors are cutting nearly 30 minutes for release in Lee's native homeland. The film also recently won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, which should reassure you that this ain't no "Showgirls."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Outsourced"

Director John Jeffcoat helms this indie comedy about an American novelty products salesman (Josh Hamilton) who must relocate to India to train his replacement after his entire department is outsourced. The film won the Golden Space Needle Award at this year's Seattle International Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Price of Sugar"

Paul Newman narrates this Bill Haney-directed documentary about the efforts of a Catholic priest advocating for thousands of Haitian workers employed by the sugar trade. The film premiered earlier this year at South by Southwest, where it went on to win an audience award.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Trade"

A Polish woman, a Texas cop, a young Mexican man come together when a girl is kidnapped and sold into slavery by sex traffickers. "Summer Storm" director Marco Kreuzpaintner collaborates with "The Motorcycle Diaries" screenwriter Jose Rivera on this adaptation of a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Peter Landesman. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles ( _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008601 <![CDATA["The Boss of It All," "Red Road"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/the-boss-of-it-all-red-road.php Sun, 23 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Boss of It All," IFC Films, 2007]


The Danish-slash-global mini-revolution known as the Dogme movement, initiated by bratboy-auteur Lars von Trier and a few cineastes, lasted only a few years — ostensibly a pledge of bullshit-free purity in moviemaking, it was always a questionable set of strictures, and von Trier himself put the decisive nail in its coffin with "Dancer in the Dark," which featured decidedly impure musical dance numbers. It was quite obviously von Trier's ship to sail from the beginning, because he has revealed himself in the long haul to be not only an ingenious artist and master of melodrama (meant in a good, Aeschylus-Hardy-Sirk-Fassbinder kind of way), but also a self-flagellating imp who loves struggling with a straitjacket (and loves watching others struggle as well). "Breaking the Waves," "Dogville," "The Idiots," "The Five Obstructions" — each are defined by formal restrictions von Trier himself imposed on the filmmaking process. "The Boss of It All" is a Dogme film in most particulars — no music, natural lighting, etc. — but it's also got an extra set of thumbscrews: this time, von Trier's decided to semi-automate the creative procedure, and leave the camera angles and placement up to a computer program, nicknamed Automavision. The director only imposes his will upon it when the software produces a wholly unusable image; as it is, Von Trier gives the machine pretty free reign, and the film is filled with oddball angles and absurd cutaways, ostensibly revealing the perspective of a binary-code brain on a visually simple modern comedy scenario.


Of course, that's not entirely the case; whatever brilliance and idiocy went into the programming just comes out again on the other side, like food. But for "The Boss of It All", the affect works wonders: however "unmotivated," the movie's disruptive, off-kilter syntax fits the story like a rubber glove. Von Trier was of course careful to concoct a plot in which hierarchal social structures, like boss over employee, are never what they seem. Von Trier vet Jens Albinus plays a self-obsessed but not terribly bright actor hired by the true owner of what might be the world's most neurotic IT firm (Peter Gantzler) to masquerade as the company's mythical CEO, a canard he contrived to maintain a sense of warm camaraderie that has evolved into a workplace prone to outbursts, indulgences, fistfights and desk sex. The reason for the sudden need for a big boss in the flesh is a plan to sell the company to a Dane-hating Icelandic businessman (a hilariously gruff perf from Reykjavik filmmaker Friðrik Þór Friðriksson), which in itself creates emotional turmoil and ethical compromise every which way. It's savagely clever down to the sound of the copy machine, and suggests yet again that von Trier's yen for experimental penitence may be merely the smoke of his sideshow, obscuring his real achievements in storytelling and directing actors (there hasn't been a misjudged performance in a von Trier film in the two decades since "Medea," and there's been a wealth of world-beaters). Has anyone told him?


Andrea Arnold's "Red Road" is also a post-Dogme entity, borne out of an idea by Dogmatists Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen (three films by first-time filmmakers, using the same set of preordained characters), and it also involves the action of robotized camera visuals. This time, it's in the sauce: we're introduced to Jackie (Kate Dickie), a bony, haunted middle-aged woman working as a monitor to Glasgow's plethora of CCTV surveillance cameras. Think of it as "Rear Window," exponentially expanded — with as much echo of our experience sitting in the dark, feverishly watching. Her life is otherwise an empty shell; her tether to humankind is in being an official voyeur, taking pleasure in children, sympathizing with the owner of an ailing dog and getting off surreptitiously observing back-alley sex. Things shift into high gear, plotwise, when Jackie spots a familiar face — the post-coital mug of a man she'd hoped never to see again. So she keeps watching, and begins entering the frame herself, as it were, revisiting places where she'd seen him and eventually crossing over into his social sphere.


Resonant and atmosphere-saturated, "Red Road" withholds its heroine's motivations and thoughts for a very long time, gratifyingly — not knowing reflects eloquently back on how much she doesn't know about the lives she watches on her bank of video monitors. When the subterranean story surfaces, the film loses a lot of its gas, partly because arousing mysteries are being demystified, and also because the backstory revealed is close to cliché. To circumvent that eventuality, Arnold would've had to go out on an art-film tangent all her own — metaphysical, post-modernist, or otherwise — and it's a shame she didn't. But had she, "Red Road" may not've won its trunkful of fest awards, including a Jury Prize at Cannes.



"The Boss of It All" (IFC Films) and "Red Road" (Tartan) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[The Dreaded Video Game Adaptation]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/ifc-news-podcast-45-the-dreade.php Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Few film genres have been as unfairly maligned as the video game adaptation... er, scratch that, actually, that malignment is totally deserved. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at what goes so wrong when adapting massively popular game titles into films, at the one director representing indie film in the field (like it or not) and whether video games can be considered art.

Download now (MP3: 29:33 minutes, 27.7 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

]]> 25224 2007-09-17 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_45_the_dreade publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025224 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]> <![CDATA[The Dreaded Video Game Adaptation (photo)]]> Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025224 2007-09-17 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_45_the_dreade_photo inherit 25224 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["The Jane Austen Book Club"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/the-jane-austen-book-club.php Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Emily Blunt and Marc Blucas in "The Jane Austen Book Club," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


The oft-quoted critic Robert Warshow once wrote "A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is a man." That man has no place in the new chick flick "The Jane Austen Book Club," a movie so thoroughly anti-dude for most of its running time that the only sensible male reaction to it is guilt.


The movie is about a group of disgruntled women (and one brave man) who form a book club to read the works of Jane Austen. Though they all have problems, they all manage to find salvation through Ms. Austen's work, which apparently has all sorts of handy practical applications. I must acknowledge that I, like all the male characters in the film, have never read a Jane Austen novel. In my defense, I loved the recent adaptation of "Pride & Prejudice." Plus, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for "Clueless."


It's refreshing to see a movie that promotes literacy and, like the women of "The Jane Austen Book Club," I also know the rush of excitement that comes from recognizing yourself in a great work of art. But is that feeling ever really as simple as this film makes it out to be? Does every single aspect of our lives have a correlation to the works of Jane Austen? Can every worldly dilemma be solved by picking up a copy of "Mansfield Park?"


The answer, as evidenced here, is yes. Austen can teach a bad lover to be better, or a bad listener to be better, or a bad husband to be better. You may sense a pattern, since, as in the style of so many chick flicks, nearly all the male characters are total pricks, from Jimmy Smits' cheating bastard to Marc Blucas' thoughtless bastard. The only likable guy in the bunch is Grigg (Hugh Dancy) a sci-fi nerd and potential suitor for a few of the JABC members, and he's made out to be a Lycra-wearing buffoon. I'm not sure what's more aggravating: that all the men are so horrible or that they all are magically rehabilitated through the power of "Emma." Why don't psychiatrists prescribe this stuff to their patients?


So the man watches the movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is a man, and that, in this case, the movie is not for the critic or the man. Jane Austen fans might love the film, and maybe the movie will encourage others to start their own book clubs, which could only be a good thing. But, to me, this feels like a well-made Lifetime movie. But then, how would I know what a Lifetime movie looks like? That's TV for women, and I'm a man.



"The Jane Austen Book Club" opens in limited release on September 21st (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/the-assassination-of-jesse-jam.php Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Casey Affleck in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," Warner Bros., 2007]


According to Andrew Dominik's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," that famous outlaw's last words were "Don't that picture look dusty." Dominik's picture is dusty too, a throwback to the last great period of westerns in the early 1970s, those days of Peckinpah and Siegel and Altman. It succeeds in invoking that era, but not necessarily in equaling its great works.


The title, taken from the novel of the same name by Ron Hansen, ostensibly explains the entire story, what little there is. But rather than focusing on the story, the movie is more about the end of the West and a variety of melancholic moods from grief to desperation to resignation to regret. It's beautifully shot and acted, but languidly paced in a way that blunts most of the movie's emotional impact.


The movie follows James (Brad Pitt) after the dissolution of his gang in the early 1880s as he attempts to make a home with his wife Zee (Mary-Louise Parker) and their children. A young man who idolizes James named Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) and his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell) fall in with the increasingly paranoid and distrusting bandit. Eventually Robert decides to kill his hero and James realizes that Robert's decided to kill him. The question then becomes what will each do next.


Pitt's comfortable in the role of the enigmatic nut — his performances in that mold in both "12 Monkeys" and "Fight Club" remain two of his most memorable — and he brings a similar vibe of charismatic psychosis to his take on James. His version of the gunslinger is a little bit Jason Bourne, a little bit the Bogeyman: he's blessed with an uncanny ability to anticipate danger and scare the hell out of everyone around him. He masks his derangement with overly cordial gestures and speaks in niceties while planning to commit murder. In those past loon roles, Pitt's opened the characters up to the audiences, let them inside the dementia a bit. His James is a closed book; his motives are as unclear to us as they were to those around him. After he begins to suspect that Robert plans to do him in, he gives him a beautiful new pistol as a gift. How, Robert wonders, is he to interpret the gun? Could the cunning thief have given him a defective weapon to save his own life? Or does Jesse James have a death wish?


It's these questions that make "The Assassination of Jesse James..." worth watching. But they're answered in such a vague, haphazard fashion, and they are approached so incredibly slowly (the movie clocks in at over 160 minutes) that the movie almost dares you stop watching it. More frustratingly, the film is a pile of contradictions. It's a movie all about the intricacy of character despite the fact that it treats shots of rustling thistles with greater care than the dialogue scenes. It exposes the fallacy of some aspects of the Western mystique even as it upholds others. And it is about transience in a remarkably static way.


Dominik is clearly a student of the genre, and he has recaptured much of the mood of those great old '70s western and even some of their nagging sense of impending doom (just look at that title). When the James gang breaks up, Jesse becomes a bit aimless. But that doesn't necessarily mean the movie about him should be equally aimless.



"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" opens in limited release on September 21st (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: September 21, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/opening-this-week-september-21.php Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Emile Hirsch in "Into The Wild," Paramount Vantage, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"

This coming Oscar season is looking to be a good one for co-stars Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, though director Andrew Dominik ("Chopper") may have had a hard time getting this rather arty Western to the big screens. Pitt recently won the Best Actor award at Venice, while Affleck also plays the leading role in brother Ben's heavily buzzed-about directorial debut, while Dominik...well, we're not quite sure this is still his movie after reports that director Ridley Scott stepping in to fiddle with it. And maybe it's just us, but do all Westerns nowadays need homoerotic undertones? Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Beauty Remains"

"Shadow Magic" director Ann Hu returns for her sophomore effort, this Qingdao-set post-WWII drama about two sisters whose lives become complicated by their late father's business interests and the shared love of an ex-boxer.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Good Luck Chuck"

You know it's bad when a film looks like Adam Sandler passed on it — where's Rob Schneider when you need him? "Comedian" Dane Cook stars as a man who must break the curse that has made him wildly popular with single women (bed Dane and you find your true love!) in order to be with the women of his (and our) dreams. This film presents itself like a Maxim magazine on screen: Jessica Alba panty shots and lots of dude humor. We think it's safe to say that Dan Fogler is going to be the best part of this one.

Opens wide (official site).


"Into the Wild"

Over a decade after his death, debate still rages on over the lasting legacy of 24-year-old Christopher McCandless, a college graduate turned drifter after becoming sick of his middle class life. McCandless journeyed to Arizona, California, South Dakota and to his final resting place in the Alaskan wilderness. Early buzz so far consists of praise for both director Sean Penn and actor Emile Hirsch, who churns out a career-making performance as the increasingly distant McCandless. Penn assembles an ace supporting cast including Vince Vaughn, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook. The Academy is gonna eat this one up.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Jane Austen Book Club"

Robin Swicord, known mostly for writing female-friendly films like "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "Practical Magic," directs her first feature film, an adaptation of the popular Karen Jay Fowler book about a group of six women who begin a book club to discuss the works of Jane Austen, only to realize that their lives mirror Austen's protagonists. Honestly, we'd rather just get our Austen fix from "Clueless."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Last Winter"

Horror director Larry Fessenden, last seen with 2001's "Wendigo," directs this thriller about an oil company team of researchers who slowly go mad after one member is found dead. Ron Perlman, James Le Gros and "Friday Night Lights"'s Connie Britton and Zach Gilford star.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Man of My Life"

French director Zabou Breitman's gay-themed drama finds a husband and wife divided by the husband's new friendship with his gay neighbor. The film premiered at last year's Toronto Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Randy and the Mob"

Oscar-winner Ray McKinnon directs this Southern-set comedy about a good ol' boy (McKinnon) who gets into trouble with some mobsters and then must seek assistant from his estranged, identical twin gay brother (also McKinnon). "The Shield"'s Walter Goggins and Lisa Blount co-star.

Opens in Atlanta (official site.


"Resident Evil: Extinction"

Australian director Russell Mulcahy, last seen with 2003's "Swimming Upstream," returns from television director obscurity to helm the third (and hopefully final) film based on the popular video game franchise. Milla Jovovich returns as Alice in a film that, we're pretty sure, no longer at all resembles the video games it was based on. Is, er, Nemesis in this one? We might just skip the movie altogether and play Resident Evil 4 for the weekend.

Opens wide (official site).


"Sydney White"

"Sleepover" director Joe Nussbaum helms this modern retelling of Snow White set against the college greek system. Amanda Bynes stars as Sydney White, who, with the aid of her seven dorks (get it?? subtle!) must do battle against the wicked...head sorority girl in order to become the most popular chick on campus for some reason. Expect "Sydney White" to be available on DVD by the time you finish reading this sentence.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Larry Fessenden on "The Last Winter"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/larry-fessenden-on-the-last-wi.php Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, "The Last Winter"; below, director Larry Fessenden, IFC Films, 2007]


The future of modern American horror can look mighty grim when considering how little originality there is to all the remakes of far-better films (listen up, Rob Zombie) and how little suspense there's been in the hopefully waning trend of torture porn. So thank goodness we have actor-producer-director Larry Fessenden ("Habit," "Wendigo"), whose smart and unconventional take on indie horror tackles larger human issues in ways that draw easy comparisons to George Romero, John Carpenter and Larry Cohen. His latest is "The Last Winter," an arctic frightmare set in Northern Alaska in which an oil company advance team (including Ron Perlman, James LeGros and Kevin Corrigan) find themselves slowly being offed by an ambiguous creature that could just be the environment itself. Think "The Thing" meets "The 11th Hour" and you'll realize that Fessenden may have found the best way to address the global warming issue in a film — by scaring the crap out of us. I sat down with Fessenden to talk about the film, climates both environmental and political, and other terrifying topics. [WARNING: Minor spoilers follow!]


I've been waiting for a new Fessenden film for a few years now. Where have you been?


No one wants to make my movies, so it just takes forever. It's tough. I wrote this in 2001 when "Wendigo" was coming out. It took a year to really get it going, to get Jeff [Levy-Hinte] enthused and willing to produce again. Then we traveled to Alaska and made more adjustments to the script while we looked for money. It took a year to look for money, [another] year to realize we weren't getting it from the mini-majors, and then we had to wait for the season. Once you're between $3-5 million, you have to get it from somewhere. [Execs] sort of liked my script, they thought it was admirable, but it's a "tweenie": in between genres, nobody knows what it is. The whole business model of making a horror film is that it's going to deliver the kind of gore and extremism the fans are expecting. It's funny, there's a cliché in Hollywood: We all want to make the next "Rosemary's Baby," but they don't, really. They want to make the next "Saw"; that's what they're looking for. And global warming, does it get any more dreary than that? [laughs]


Why do you feel the need to include social or more universal issues in the form of a horror film?


I can't help myself. I love the horror genre so I'm inclined to write scary films filled with dread, and the things I find dreadful are where we find ourselves as a society and as individuals. You know, "Habit" isn't really a critique of anything but addiction and self-deception, so I don't know if that's considered social commentary; that's just what comes out. As for global warming, I consider it an extremely potent symbol of our failings as an entire species, that we've come to the point where we're destroying ourselves and unwilling to do anything about it. I find that fascinating — that is horror. So it's really the same theme as "Habit," [which] was once going to be called "Denial," and denial is what's certainly in play with global warming. To me, it's all really the same theory, and it's all very personal. Self-destruction is something I've been experimenting with my whole life. [laughs]


Besides scaring your audience shitless, are you hoping that your genre approach to environmental issues will transcend the preaching to the choir of "An Inconvenient Truth" or "The 11th Hour"?


Basically, my films are about conveying an emotion. In this case, it's dread and deep, deep sadness coming from the feeling of not being able to go home. That's a theme in the movie; it's even visually tagged in the end when Hoffman is being dragged away to his doom. His last memory is as a kid, almost making it to [his front] door. The centerpiece of the movie is that sadness: if we change the planet irrevocably, we can't go home. We can't return to the fall leaves in New England if they're now palm trees. So, there's something emotional about it, and that's what interests me. I mean, I would like people to change their light bulbs to compact fluorescents, but I'm just trying to express my feelings of fear and sadness about a train wreck that seems to be happening in slow motion.


Do you live green?


I'm extremely aware of green, and I'm a complete hypocrite like so many people. I drive to the country on the weekends, end of story. However, I drive a hybrid. I don't buy water bottles. I try to avoid that. The irony is that I've been using compact fluorescents for 15 years, so I've probably contributed something to my carbon footprint. I'm a vegetarian — or [at least] I eat fish, I'm a pescetarian — and I think it's a huge contribution because I love meat. I used to suck the marrow out of bones, but factory farming is atrocious, and I'm going to take a stand. That was a personal sacrifice of some merit to me. I could still sit down to a T-bone right now. [laughs] Whatever, I do my best. There are things you can do, and I have a whole website about it: runningoutofroad.com. I make the effort. But I don't want to be a propagandist in my films.


How did you come up with how "The Last Winter"'s entity would look? Did you ever attempt to make the creature more ambiguous, or had you always intended it to be wendigo-like?


In the writing, if you read the script, it's constantly saying you can't quite see it. It's just a blur. It was fun to work with CGI this time because I'd have the ability to deliberately make it transparent. Maybe I lost my focus, but it became more corporeal than I had written it to be. But that's because there's a part of me that loves to see the monster. The more blurry it got, I was like, "C'mon guys, let's make it a little clearer." It's a shortcoming, but at the same time, to me, the monster is in the mind of [LeGros' character] Hoffman and each character as they cross the line into this sense of dread about what they've done to the planet. They anthropomorphize this dread and it looks like this weird caribou thing.


I don't mind seeing it. It's brief enough, and it grew out of the original wendigo creature, which you'll see in mythologies and comic books and so on. I'm particularly drawn to the wendigo with antlers, which is sometimes how it's depicted. Oddly enough, it's also depicted as an abominable snowman. He fights Spider-Man in a comic, and he looks like a goofy, white ape. I love it because there's this sort of side mythology that is in the public imagination, but not completely. And it's by no means owned; there's no one depiction that's definitive, which is part of its charm. It's very elusive in body. Mine always has antlers, and we basically varied it from the one in ["Wendigo"] to something more caribou-like because now we're in the North. It's just nutty.


How do you think the film will go over when most American horror films today have been going in a direction of envelope-pushing gore?


Well, as you know, there are a lot of articles saying that that movement has come and gone. I think historically it will be relevant that, in an age of torture, that's what our horror movies were about. So I don't condemn the "movement," so to speak. But it's not what interests me. I'm interested in another type of horror, which is the idea of self-betrayal, all the issues of reality and imagination and how they interact. Mythology, if you will; the more metaphysical elements of horrors. As far as how I'll do with it, people pay a lot of lip service, that they wish that horror had other textures besides extreme gore. We'll see if it's true. I have a different kind of a gore — an Al Gore vibe. Hopefully, it'll go over. I don't calculate what my movies will be in terms of the marketplace, because then I'd just pack it up and become a plumber, which might be more fun anyway. [laughs]


I'm just jaded by the genre today. For every "The Last Winter," there's a half-dozen subpar efforts.


Listen, it's because the studios are involved, it's about the bottom line, and if they're taking risks, it's in other genres. Look at this slew of remakes. It's almost boring to complain about it, but it's stupefying, the amount of unique, original films that come out compared to the staggering quantity of remakes. That doesn't mean you can't do well with a remake — I thought "Dawn of the Dead" was very cool, and forgive me if I can't list all the others that were successful. But in general, I get this feeling of deep cynicism in the marketplace. What the fuck, do we really need the sequel of a remake? It's also devastating because you get great film directors who have made some strange nugget, and then they're immediately brought to Hollywood and forced to make a remake, instead of "We like you because your movie was a smash hit coming out of nowhere, and now what else do you have to offer?" No, no, there's none of that. It's right back to the cookie cutter.


Is that the main reason you're supporting some of these up-and-comers by producing their smaller films through your production company, Glass Eye Pix?


Absolutely. I believe in the original voice, the unique voice in the movies. I believe you can do stuff cheaply and make a good show of it. Now, look at my guys: Ti West, he made two movies with me, and the first thing that happens is he makes a sequel to "Cabin Fever." Mind you, that came organically out of meeting Eli Roth, so be it. Still, that's not what Hollywood wanted him to do. They didn't want him to write an original script, which he had done, and he was trying to find the money and eventually came to me, and made a second small feature for me. Douglas Buck, another auteur if you will, his lot in life was to make the "Sisters" remake. It's a unique film, and thereby it's fine that it exists and so on, but why not his own original movie, you know?


There's one particularly dazzling scene in "The Last Winter" — a single, unedited take with four characters, two snowmobiles and a measured, Antonioni-like choreography against a snowy backdrop so edgeless that it looks like a soundstage — which made me think: Why isn't there more artfulness in horror films today? Why aren't even the slasher flicks looking to Argento and Bava for inspiration?


It's such a cliché to even say it, but it's the MTV-inspired style of filmmaking, where you have the 45-degree shutter, or what we might call the "Private Ryan" look. It's used in "300" as well. Anyway, it sort of stylizes everything, but to me, it fetishizes the horror. It makes it an object. You can't wait for the next kill. That's why I think "torture porn" is an appropriate term because, in porn, you're waiting for the next cumshot, and you're going to get it in about 12 minutes. Or, in the movies I get, it's every six minutes. [laughs] But that's the point, you're just waiting for that. To reduce horror to the body count and the next kill — Is the stake going to go through the heart, or maybe the eyes will be gouged out first? — it just becomes this sort of clinical, ADD-objectifying of the experience. So you're never really in the moment, experiencing it, and so the agenda is [artless] by definition. Any number of us would think, why aren't there really great sexy movies, where the sex is treated in this more erotic way? It's weird, sex and violence are categorized in our culture so that they're these things you peer in at. They're not integrated into the story the way life is.


Could a change in the sociopolitical climate pave the way for more challenging, artful horror films?


It's a really puritanical country. There's something screwed up about the country, and I'll tell you what. The country is a certain way which leads to our sociopolitical climate. The way we think as a culture is why we can have such bozos saying complete mistruths and have people buy it. "Support the troops!" Excuse me, "support the troops" means blindly following some clown in the White House who is sending our boys and girls into battle for no reason. How is that supporting the troops? And yet it works. You kind of think: "I guess I don't support the troops because I'm not for the war." This is madness. So what's happened to our culture that we can do that? I think it has more to do with advertising, the pummeling of subtlety, the erasure of magic realism — which is a quality in films I admire, like a Buñuel film where things are literally absurd, where you're not quite sure what the truth is. Americans don't like that. They like it clear and simple, short and sweet, and so I believe this has happened through a culture that is all about immediate satisfaction, upheld because of the corporate agenda to advertise consumer goods. We're just in a pickle, and I don't know how we're going to get out it. That's why the movement that I prefer is the progressive movement, as opposed to the liberal movement, because "liberal" has been turned into a dirty word. I like the notion of progressiveness because we need to progress here into a mindset. Maybe we should all take a powder, slow down, ponder the lilies — that's what Jesus the Lord said, and everyone thinks he's the cat's pajamas.



"The Last Winter" opens in limited release on September 19th (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Many Movie Lives (and Deaths) of Jesse James]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/the-many-movie-lives-and-death.php Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: Brad Pitt as Jesse James in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," Warner Bros, 2007]


When Bob Ford shot infamous outlaw Jesse James through the back on April 2, 1882, James the man turned into James the myth, a martyr to Unionist repression, corporate greed and one man's cowardice. He was trumpeted as the Robin Hood of the South, and that's the image that endures in the cinema. All those less savory details of his life were brushed aside, like the fact that he was a member of the brutal Missouri bushwhacker gang led by "Bloody" Bill Anderson, that he participated in the 1862 Centralia massacre of unarmed soldiers, and that all he gave the poor was lip service, never cash. The legend-mongering didn't spring entirely out of his dramatic death — James had carefully cultivated his public image throughout his career. He jotted press releases that he'd leave at the scenes of his crimes, and agreed to long interviews with newspaperman and proud Confederate John N. Edwards, his mentor and informal P.R. rep.


In 1872, busy denunciating President Grant's "corrupt, tyrannical administration," Edwards penned an editorial in the Kansas City Times entitled "The Chivalry of Crime," a puff piece on James that set the template for the idolization that would follow. Quoted in T.J. Stiles' invaluable biography "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War," Edwards says that a recent robbery at the Kansas City Industrial Exposition was "a feat of stupendous nerve and fearlessness that makes one's hair rise to think of it, with a condiment of crime to season it, becomes chivalric; poetic; superb."


And that's how he was on-screen. The first documented James Gang film is "James Boys in Missouri" (1908), produced by the Essanay Company. It was such a success that two months later they released "The Younger Brothers," about the other notorious members of the outlaw group. In 1921, Jesse James, Jr. was persuaded to portray his father in "Jesse James Under the Black Flag," which was quickly followed up by "Jesse James As The Outlaw" that same year. "Black Flag" is one of the first films to make the argument that Jesse's outlawry was caused by an incident in 1863 where Union troops invaded his home, strung up his father and whipped him in the fields. This event actually did occur, but it was perpetrated by the local militia who were searching for his brother Frank, already a feared guerilla fighter for Quantrill's Raiders. Still, as a creation story, it explains and excuses James' later behavior, making this hero's crimes palatable to audiences (and more importantly, later on, the censors).


James' sound film career started with the hugely successful 20th Century Fox Technicolor film "Jesse James" (1939). Directed with workmanlike efficiency by Henry King, it stars the blandly handsome Tyrone Power as Jesse, and a drawling, charismatic Henry Fonda as Frank. The film aimed for the widest audience possible, so all political affiliations are erased. The Union troops are replaced by an evil railroad agent who murders James' mother — justifying his train robberies and violent revenge in one fell swoop. The figure of Edwards is caricatured by Henry Hull, who plays the ink-stained propagandist as a warm-hearted curmudgeon who gives his daughter away in marriage to James (who in reality married his first cousin Zee, named after his own mother).


The film was a box office hit, and Zanuck capitalized quickly, signing Henry Fonda to reprise the role of Frank in "The Return of Frank James" (1940). Henry King was replaced with the then-floundering Fritz Lang, who was attempting to recover from his massive (and underrated) Brechtian flop "You and Me" (1938). Eager to play nice and return to a studio's good graces, Lang churned out a flavorless sequel indistinguishable from its predecessor. Despite Fonda's tense relationship with the director, which went back to their work together on "You Only Live Once" (1937), he delivers a relaxed, charming performance in tune with the forced folksiness of the script, which throws history out the window fairly quickly, but neatly transfers the martyred hero complex over to Frank.


The greatest of the James films was made in 1949, in Samuel Fuller's debut, "I Shot Jesse James." It's the first one that deals with the Ford-James relationship on a personal, rather than mythic, level. It's more psychological drama than historical epic — and Fuller's feverishly intense close-ups hammer this home. It focuses on Bob Ford in the years following James' death, and the lies Ford tells himself to stay sane in the face of personal doubts and increasing public disdain. Motored by Fuller's raw dialogue and invasive camera (Godard coined the term Kino-Fist after a viewing), it pulses with an energy the more whitewashed James stories lack. While hardly historically accurate, it channels the violent tenor of the period and intensely questions the concept of the "hero" well before the revisionist Westerns of the late '60s and '70s.


Fuller was able to pursue this rather uncommercial goal because he worked with an independent producer who didn't impose the restrictions of a big studio. In 1957, Nicholas Ray had no such luck with "The True Story of Jesse James." The remake of Henry King's 1939 "Jesse James" was taken on as the assignment that sounded the least obnoxious in order to fulfill his contract with 20th Century Fox. The disappointments came early and often: he wanted to cast Elvis Presley as Jesse, but the studio forced their contract player Robert Wagner on him. He wanted to film it as a ballad, "Stylized in every aspect, all of it shot on the stage, including the horses, the chases, everything..." That idea was tabled immediately, and Ray soon lost interest as every decision of his was overruled. The result is a disjointed work with an awful tacked-on flashback structure, but which contains a few moments of inspiration, mainly at the expertly shot and paced Northfield Bank raid sequence.


The most acclaimed James film of the '70s focused entirely on that robbery: Philip Kaufman's "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" (1972). At this point, de-mythologizing American icons was de rigeur, so Robert Duvall's James was depicted as a full-on Confederate ideologue, his murders payback for Union atrocities. The image of James had flipped from Robin Hood hero to near-psychotic villain. Neither is entirely convincing. Walter Hill's "The Long Riders" (1980) continued the revisionist trend, a more formal work which avoided psychological motivations. It also cast three sets of brothers (Quaids, Carradines, and Keaches) to portray the sibling outlaws.


There has been no significant Jamesian film since... until this week's release of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," Andrew Dominik's uneven character study that pilfers its visual ideas from "Days of Heaven" (1978). Brad Pitt slaps on the holsters this time, and depicts James as a mannered, gaunt paranoiac quite fond of licking his lips. His past is obscured, his politics absent. No longer hero nor villain, he's simply a presence. Constantly framed against steam, sky and land by DP Roger Deakins, James is equated with nature, and is equally unexplainable. The legend of Jesse James has been so worn down and used up that Dominik doesn't even engage with it — he just posits him as an enigma and leaves him be. He saves all his dime-store psychology for Bob Ford, a thin character give unexpected depth by Casey Affleck's halting mewl of a delivery.


Jesse James has gone through infamy, idolization, deconstruction and dissolution in the Hollywood system. With his genre moribund and his legend fading, it might be time for the James myth to take a break. He can hide out in an abandoned Fox backlot until an intrepid/desperate producer calls his name, asking to remake Henry King's "Jesse James" yet again — and he'll crawl under the lights hoping there's an iconoclast like Fuller to inject life into him again.



[Additional photos: "Jesse James," Twentieth Century-Fox, 1939; "I Shot Jesse James," Screen Guild Productions, 1949; "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid," Universal Pictures, 1972]

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<![CDATA["The Wind that Shakes the Barley," "From Beyond" and "The Return of the Living Dead"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/the-wind-that-shakes-the-barle.php Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," IFC Films, 2006]


By now Ken Loach is no longer merely the last of the red-hot neo-realist British-Marxist filmmakers, but an international master, having rebounded from his '80s semi-blacklisting with 12 features in 16 years (and more awards than Loach retains hairs on his aging head) that have become the world standard for doc-style naturalism and for the unvarnished depiction of working-class life, British socioeconomics and life-or-death social struggle. There is virtually no major issue Loach hasn't touched upon, from homelessness (1966's policy-influencing "Cathy Come Home"), to child abuse (1969's "Kes") to day labor (1990's "Riff Raff") to the civil war in Nicaragua ("Carla's Song," released in 1996), and he remains an uncompromised activist voice, and the Anglo lower-class's most dogged champion. (My favorite Loach remains 1971's "Family Life," a family passion that may be the greatest movie ever about generational gaps, and which follows the downward emotional spiral of a teenage girl badly attended to by her overbearing, painfully repressed parents, played to brittle, insidious perfection by Bill Dean and Grace Cave. The film's familial firefights could make the average dysfunctional-clan survivor break down with shuddering flashbacks.)


It's taken Loach this long to address the Irish Troubles (beyond the based-on-a-true-story Belfast context for 1990's political cover-up thriller "Hidden Agenda"), and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" is a kind of brother film to the ordinarily contemporary-minded Loach's period portrait of the Spanish Civil War, "Land and Freedom" (1995). Set in 1920, the movie is fairly methodical in its march through history: we begin with Cillian Murphy's young doctor-to-be looking to flee Ireland to finish med school, before he is confronted too many times with British troops assaulting his countrymen. Once he takes his oath of allegiance to a Free Ireland, Loach's film (written by longtime comrade Paul Laverty) follows this earnest naïf from plotter to guerrilla assassin to low-rung politician, refusing to obey the Government of Ireland Act treaty that would soon enough pit Irish against Irish. The story takes classic shape: Murphy's Damien sees family torn apart and fellow patriots and childhood friends felled in the fight, making him more and more resistant to compromise and more resolved to die for his cause. (Sound familiar?) Loach's objective, natural-lighting filmmaking is its own eloquent, humane statement, about history viewed as ordinary people's lives, not as grand melodramas of the rich and powerful — why would anyone want to shoot period films any other way? Loach being Loach, the film is filled with revolutionary leftist cant, all of it sound and true and unimpeachable, and much of it concerned with Irish industry and economics — which is largely what the Republicans knew quite well they were fighting for, not merely for vengeance or justice. It's safe to say that "The Wind" is the greatest, most observant and most authentic-feeling film ever made about the civil war (not that very many filmmakers have dared to begin with), and that Loach is a virtual godsend as a cultural voice, in these days of pernicious spin, political mercenariness and neo-imperial slaughter.


And for an aperitif, finally Stuart Gordon's "From Beyond" (1986) and Dan O'Bannon's "The Return of the Living Dead" (1985) arrive on DVD, blasts from the not-so-distant, Reagan-befouled past when horror farce wasn't harmlessly Mel Brooks or "Scary Movie," but something much more perverse and bizarre. Gordon, riding the mystery train that he started up in 1985 with the seminal "Re-Animator," extrapolates on a Lovecraft story once again (this time, it's pineal glands gone horribly, phallically amok) and strides happily into mucky, self-destructive territories otherwise only visited by Frank Henenlotter. (Frank, where art thou?) With the spectacularly game Barbara Crampton again as his accomplice, Gordon may've finished up the most audacious double whammy in modern horror. Dan O'Bannon, on the other hand, is an old-school genre freak who has largely rolled around for decades now in the cash being a co-creator of the "Alien" franchise has brought him. But his 1985 zombie satire — almost 20 years before "Shaun of the Dead" — is a ripping, grue-slicked riot, complete with schlock princess Linnea Quigley as a nihilistic punkette named Trash ("Hey, somebody get some light over here, Trash is taking off her clothes again!"), James Karen overacting, a plethora of Nazi in-jokes and cinema's first sprinting, dashing, leaping flesh-eaters (17 years before "28 Days Later"). I know, zombies both grim and risible are glutting the mediascape right now, and if you see another, your head will messily, gorily explode. But O'Bannon's film is the microgenre's first slap in the face, and it's still a hoot.



"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" (IFC Films), "From Beyond" and "The Return of the Living Dead" (MGM) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Paul Haggis on "In the Valley of Elah"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/paul-haggis-on-in-the-valley-o.php Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Charlize Theron and Tommy Lee Jones in "In the Valley of Elah"; below, Paul Haggis, Warner Independent Pictures, 2007]


The irony of Oscar-winning writer and director Paul Haggis ("Crash," "Million Dollar Baby") making a U.S. military drama with a nonpartisan approach is that he may be the most polarizing filmmaker since Michael Moore. Whether you find his to be the work of an astute humanist or a middle-brow manipulator, "In the Valley of Elah" has certainly grabbed people's attention, and it surely doesn't hurt that Haggis has roped in a triple threat of award-winning actors. Tommy Lee Jones plays retired Army sergeant Hank Deerfield, a Tennessee patriot and loving husband to Susan Sarandon, whose soldier son Mike has returned from Iraq. When Mike suddenly goes AWOL from the base, Hank heads to New Mexico to try to track down his boy with the help of a local detective (Charlize Theron). I chatted with Haggis briefly about the film and the fiery debates his work has inspired.


It seems like everybody is making an Iraq film these days. What prompted yours?


It was 2003 when I started researching ["In the Valley of Elah"], when I started looking at images online that were being posted by some of the troops in Iraq, and I found them really disturbing. These are kids, 18 or 19 years old, making their own home movies and putting them up there like our kids do on YouTube. They were getting around the Pentagon censors somehow, and you'd see them cut to some song like "We Will Rock You" — the first few images would be fine, the stuff that we've seen on the nightly news: laser-guided missiles blowing up buildings, tanks rolling by, men shooting heavy machine guns at enemies they can't see. And then this image came on of a young boy — who had obviously made the video — hugging a burnt corpse by the side of the road, and putting a hat on it. I thought, "Wow." Just goofing off like kids would do, but my god, what's happening here? That particular video didn't last long online. [laughs] But I found more and more of these pictures, and I started asking these questions: What's happening to our men and women? Then in May of 2004, I found this article by Mark Boal about a father who goes searching for his son who had gone missing. I was so deeply moved that I knew I had to do something about it.


What do you want audiences to take away from the film?


I can't ever really guess that. What I try to do is pose difficult questions, and then hope people will talk about it. I don't know what the conclusions will come to, but I think [about] if we had to face those pictures of the dead that our troops have to face every day. — maybe we could make a better decision about whether this is a just war or a corrupt endeavor. We can make up our own minds.


We have a really wily government that has convinced us that these images are too disturbing to see, and we have a media that has agreed because they think — correctly so — that you're not going to buy toothpaste after seeing a headless child on the news. So, we're just not seeing these things, and that's wrong because we're making [other] men and women face these horrors. The reason we can't understand [the U.S. soldiers] when they come home and the reason they're having a lot of problems is because there's a huge disconnect between them and us. That's why I made a film that I hope is political without being partisan. It doesn't say, okay, you're smart for having opposed this war, or you're stupid for having supported the war. This is our shared problem. We're all in this, but now we have to see what's happening to our troops who are returning home with these terrible, terrible scars and deep wounds that are just evident on their faces. We have to look at what they're facing every day.


Did you ever feel that you'd neglected any responsibility by not putting your personal point-of-view in the film?


No, I have a responsibility to take myself out of it, I think. It's pretty easy to figure out where my leanings are. If you go online, you can find out I was demonstrating against the invasion of Afghanistan, for chrissakes, so you can imagine how it was with Iraq. I felt that I'm too easy to dismiss; who wants to see that point of view? What you want to see, what I hoped, is the point of view of a man like Hank Deerfield, who we can all point to from the left or right and say, that's an American. We may not agree with his politics, but we know that proud man. I thought I should tell this story through his eyes, through the eyes of the G.I.s, the returning men and women who just want to be heard. For all the research I did, and I talked to many veterans who were active duty soldiers, they kept saying over and over that we're not hearing what's happening over there. If we see what they see, like WWII, that there are horrors, [maybe] it's worth it. Or we can look at those same things, and say: "You know what? It's not worth it." But at least they're informed, and the truths are much more informative if, while they're in it, it's haunting them.


What do you think about all the right-wing political bloggers who are up in arms about this movie without having seen it yet?


I don't. There are always stupid people out there. Anyone who criticizes before seeing it or reading the script is just a moron. You don't try to convince people who can't be convinced. They have a political agenda. They don't want to see what's going on. I would tell them, don't talk to me. Don't see my movie. Just go find a veteran and ask him or her what's going on, and listen. Don't try to judge from your own point of view. I tried not to judge these characters. I put myself in their places, and I don't know what I'd do. I'm not interested in what bad people do and the wrong decisions that are made. I'm interested in what good people do and the right decisions that haunt them forever. If these people can put themselves in that same place and say, "Oh yes, well I would make the morally correct decision," then they're horses' asses.


Having written (and directed one of) back-to-back Best Picture Oscar winners, do you feel pressure to keep the bar set high when approaching new projects?


I guess it's difficult for me to take meetings these days because my head is so huge it's hard to get through the door. I have to make sure there are double doors so I can get in. [laughs] You just continue to do things you feel passionate about, and you use those Oscars and nominations to reassure people. This was really hard for me because in 2003 and 2004, we had a president with an 80% approval rating. Democrats and Republicans alike were driving around with flags on their cars in Santa Monica, where I live, which is like the most liberal place in America. [laughs] So it was not easy to get this film made. They look at those awards and go, "Well, we didn't understand 'Crash' and 'Million Dollar Baby,' and Clint's the only reason that succeeded, but okay. We don't understand this one either, but those films made money and awards, so maybe this one will make money, too." So I guess that helps a lot.


The hot debates surrounding "Crash" are suddenly being dug up again. What's your reaction to those accusations that "Crash" panders to liberal guilt by accusing its audience of being racist?


Well, I like to disturb people. I think I succeeded because a lot of people are really disturbed by what I do. That makes me feel great. Who would want to do a film where everybody says, "Hey, nice job. I wonder what comes next?" If people are still disturbed by this two or three years later, I'm thrilled.


I think the concern is more with the means than the content itself.


If you had a particular point of view and an axe to grind, would you necessarily always say, "I'm blank, this is what I feel, and this is what I'm going to criticize"? You never hear things straight out. Someone will come up with all sorts of justification to why they hate things. Oddly, 99% of the audience didn't hate ["Crash"] until it won Oscars, and then people were outraged, especially for me. Well, I didn't vote! [laughs] I'm sorry, I never said it was the Best Picture of the year. It's a ridiculous thing to judge one picture better than another. I like the Oscars, don't get me wrong. I'd like to get more of them. People felt betrayed because they loved ["Brokeback Mountain"], and they felt outraged that I somehow boondoggled people into voting for mine. Well, I left the country six weeks before because I couldn't stand the P.R. machine. I went to hide and write. I'm a Canadian, I don't promote myself; I don't like it.


Of course it stings, but this is the business we have chosen. My job is not to be liked, but to make films that are provocative. If I stop doing that, then people should hate me. I would much rather be loved or hated than just go down the middle of the street and have people say, "Oh yeah, he's a nice filmmaker. He's okay." I think people will be vilifying me for all new things: it's too subtle, or whatever. There were two articles about "Crash" that I felt were just hysterical. One was an opinion piece in the Washington Times, I think, and it was called "Why the Left Hates 'Crash'". Then a month before or after that, I can't remember which, another article in some liberal-ish rag was titled "Why the Right Hates 'Crash'". I knew I was doing something right.



"In the Valley of Elah" opens in limited release on September 14th (official site).

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<![CDATA["King of California"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/king-of-california.php Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Michael Douglas in "King of California," First Look, 2007]


Michael Douglas won an Oscar for Best Actor in 1988 for his performance in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street." Watching his latest film, Mike Cahill's "King of California," I got the feeling he's hungry for another. His character, Charlie, has everything an actor looking to make a big critical splash could want: mental illness, a haunted past, a troubled relationship with a daughter and loud facial hair.


Douglas is good in the part, though I couldn't help but wonder what his father, Kirk — the best of the best when it comes to playing manic intensity — would have done in his place. He would have brought a bit more to the part, I think, more gravitas and more craziness. The junior Douglas aims instead for comedy, and though he's quite funny at times, it doesn't always work with the emotional core that Cahill seems to have in mind.


Charlie's freshly out of a mental institution and living with his teenage daughter Miranda, played by Evan Rachel Wood. Miranda's been living on her own ever since Charlie was committed; mature beyond her years, she dropped out of school and survived by working at McDonald's. Now Charlie's back, and he's not too keen on her working there, although he has no interest in getting a job himself. He's too busy, you see, trying to find a treasure that he believes Spanish settlers buried centuries ago. After much searching, he determines that the treasure is real and it lies beneath a nearby Costco's nigh-impregnable concrete floor. As you can imagine, Charlie does not take nigh-impregnable for an answer and enlists a less-and-less skeptical Miranda to help him retrieve the gold.


So is the treasure real? Is Charlie on a quixotic quest or is he simply a mad Quixote tilting at windmills? Cahill plays the answer close to his vest. As Charlie follows his leads from one place to the next, he's presented with sign after sign that the gold isn't real. But he always manage to come up with an excuse, a reason that this dead end is in fact just another signpost on the road to wealth and a sort of immortality. The finale of Charlie's quest is subjective enough to allow for an audience's interpretation, one that will probably vary depending upon a viewer's own tolerance for wide-eyed romantics.


I admired Cahill's sly juxtaposition of the California of Charlie's imagination, one of yellowing maps and shimmering doubloons, and the California of Charlie's life, which is littered with chain stores and restaurants and where the most exotic wildlife is found on a carefully landscaped golf course. But speaking personally, there's only so much forced whimsy I can take. Though it seems were meant to ultimately admire Charlie and his dreams, I most felt sorry for Miranda, who has to clean up after her irresponsible father over and over again. So I wouldn't give Douglas the Oscar. But I'd go see the movie once.



"King of California" opens in limited release on September 14th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: September 14th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/opening-this-week-september-14.php Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Keira Knightley in "Silk," Picturehouse, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Across the Universe"

"Frida" director Julie Taymor follows up her Oscar-nominated biopic with a musical that, as is Taymor's fashion, is anything but typical. The film follows a group of college students coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, as a boy named Jude and a girl named Lucy fall in love against a, yes, Beatles-heavy soundtrack. The film generated some ink earlier this year when Revolution Studios began test screening a cut of the film against the wishes of Taymor, who threatened to take her name off the project if the studio cut was released. Love is all we need, indeed.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Brave One"

Jodie Foster plays a woman in distress (yet again...) who seeks revenge on the thugs who brutally beat her and left her fiancé for dead. As she knocks off her attackers one by one, her anonymous exploits begin to grab the attention of the media and a detective (Terrence Howard) getting closer to catching her. While we feel like we've seen Jodie Foster play this role about a million times by now, can anybody play it better? "The Crying Game"'s Neil Jordan directs.

Opens wide (official site).


"Darkon"

This doc from co-directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel follows the ongoing struggle in the land of Darkon, a fantasy live action role-playing club set in the outskirts of Baltimore, MD, where members and LARP enthusiasts use wooden swords, foam axes and rubber arrows to fight for glory. We prefer to restrain ourselves to table-top gaming, but there's no denying that LARP enthusiasts prove a great source for entertainment — check out this short video of LARPing, if you're unfamiliar. Lightning bolt!

Opens in limited release (official site).


"December Boys"

Daniel Radcliffe centers a collection of otherwise unknowns in this film about four orphans taking a reprieve from their group home on the South Australian coast. We're certain they'll be weeping in the aisles as the "Harry Potter" star, rumor has it, loses his on-screen virginity for the first time. And we thought riding naked on on-stage horses was bad enough...

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Dragon Wars (D-War)"

This film probably won't be winning over any critics the way fellow Korean monster movie "The Host" did earlier this year, but "D-War" broke all kinds of records in its native country, so who's to say? Korean-financed, but shot in SoCal with English-speaking actors, the film focuses on two warring dragon armies who tear apart downtown Los Angeles. Director Hyung-rae Shim reportedly spent years working on this project, reportedly spending the past three on the film's CGI alone (principal photography wrapped in late 2004). It remains to be seen how many the film's much ballyhooed computer graphics will actually impress, but we're guessing "D-War" already has a solid following among B-movie enthusiasts the world over.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Eastern Promises"

Cult filmmaker David Cronenberg's last feature, "A History of Violence," remains one of our favorite films of 2005, so we're sure that "The Fly" director will not disappoint with his latest thriller, in which a hospital midwife (Naomi Watts) encounters a Russian mob enforcer (a snaky Viggo Mortensen) who leads her on a path to discovering the identity of a dead prostitute. The film has already generated plenty of buzz both at film festivals and on the web, leading to fan speculation (and hope) of a third Viggo-Cronenberg collaboration.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Great World of Sound"

Director Craig Zobel's first feature is a harsh look at the music business in which a newbie record producer gets excited by the prospect of signing undiscovered artists, only to realize that his new job isn't what he expected it to be. Most of the performers shown auditioning did not know the auditions were fake ahead of time. The film premiered earlier this year at Sundance.

Opens in New York (official site).


"In the Valley of Elah"

The beginning of the "Hollywood Gets Political!" season kicks off with this Paul Haggis-directed war drama about a career officer (Tommy Lee Jones) who investigates the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of his son during his tour of duty in Iraq. While we don't expect Haggis's latest to be as polarizing as his Oscar-winning "Crash," we're certainly elated by the reportedly brilliantly muted performance from Jones, who, with this and "No Country for Old Men," is prepared for one heck of an Oscar season.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Ira & Abby"

"Kissing Jessica Stein" writer Jessica Westfeldt scripted and starred in her latest New York-based romantic comedy about a hastily married couple (Westfeldt and "Six Feet Under"'s Chris Messina) whose marriage quickly devolves into a string of affairs, meddling parents and therapy. The film's got an ace supporting cast that includes Fred Willard and Frances Conroy as unconventional parents and Jason Alexander and Chris Parnell as couples therapists. The film won the Best Narrative Feature prize last year at the LA Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"King of California"

Michael Douglas gets all zany on us in a role that we're so glad Robin Williams passed on. Douglas plays an unstable father recently released from a mental institution who tries to convince his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) that there's Spanish gold buried somewhere under a Costco. Newcomer Mike Cahill wrote and directed this comedy.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Moondance Alexander"

Young girl gets a pony and realizes that it can be a champion. We believe we've already seen this, and not so long ago; it's called "Flicka" (or "Dreamer"). "Nancy Drew"'s Kay Panabaker stars as the titular girl, with Olympic medalist Sasha Cohen and "Miami Vice"'s Don Johnson filling in supporting roles.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Moving McAllister"

Television director Andrew Black helms this independent comedy about a law intern (Ben Gourley) who passes on taking his bar exam in hopes of scoring points with his boss (Rutger Hauer) by moving all of the hot-shot lawyer's possessions, including his daughter (Mila Kunis) and her pet pig, across the country. Jon Heder, in a supporting role, was briefly rumored to have died in a car accident following "Moving McAllister"'s cast party.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Mr. Woodcock"

Seann William Scott returns for his first film since 2005 (not that we've been counting the days...) in this comedy about a motivational speaker and self-help author who returns home to prevent his mom (Susan Sarandon) from marrying his old high school gym teacher (Billy Bob Thornton), a man who made school hell for Scott and numerous other generations of students. Reports that the film tested poorly led to the studio enlisting "The Wedding Crashers" director David Dobkins for reshoots. Quite frankly, even with Dobkins' help, we're still not expecting much.

Opens wide (official site).


"Pete Seeger: The Power of Song"

Documentarian Jim Brown's film chronicles the social history of folk artist Pete Seeger through the use of interviews, archival footage and home movies. The film premiered earlier this year at Tribeca.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Rape of Europa"

This documentary from filmmakers Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham documents how a collection of young art historians and curators from America and across Europe scours the globe in search of lost and stolen art works displaced by the Nazi regime after WWII. Joan Allen narrates.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Silk"

"The Red Violin" director François Girard returns with his first film since 1998, about a 19th century silkworm smuggler who refocuses his business interests from Africa to Japan and starts an affair with the concubine of a local baron. Michael Pitt plays the trader while Keira Knightly pouts her way through this period piece — her second, "Atonement," is due later this fall.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Great World of Craig Zobel]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/craig-zobel-on-great-world-of.php Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 The personals are full of them; want ads promising easy fame and fortune for people with undiscovered talent. Music industry neophytes show up, audition, and receive every promise under the sun, if they put up a little of their own cash first "as a show of good faith."

The practice is called "song sharking," and though the scam's potency has faded in recent years, it still exists in smaller communities, on means to prey on people's dreams and finances. Writer/director Craig Zobel, a longtime producer and production manager for David Gordon Green, heard about song sharking from his father, a lifelong salesman, and decided to turn the subject into his debut feature, "The Great World of Sound," which has toured the festival circuit to widespread acclaim and opens in limited release from Magnolia Pictures this week.

Beyond its intriguing premise, "Great World" has a killer hook: though the story starring actors Pat Healy and Kene Holliday is fictional, Zobel placed song sharking ads in newspapers to bring in real people to play their unsuspecting victims. Healy and Holliday would conduct the interviews while Zobel and his crew captured the whole thing on hidden cameras. Zobel discussed the fascinating results with me at Magnolia's New York offices.

You've exposed this scam -- any shady characters coming after you as a result?

[laughs] For half a second I was worried about that, but then it occurred to me that people more often than not are like "Well that's not me. We're different. We really are going to help your career!"

So once you decided to make a movie about song sharking, how did you come to use real people singing their own songs in the movie?

Practically, the reason I wanted to do it was I wanted to get an unaffected performance, and when I put actors into this situation, I found that there was a different vibe. It didn't feel like these people were really sincere. Honestly, it was mostly that.

It makes for a less splashy, dynamic article but, in all earnestness, there's a range [of people who knew and who didn't know they were being filmed]. There are certain musicians who knew it was a movie. The gospel singers in that scene with Kene knew they were in a movie; they didn't read the script, they just came in and knew they were supposed to be in a movie and just react to whatever happened.

So it was a combination of things. I wasn't doing it so I would have this great gimmick. That wasn't my intent -- it wasn't "Borat." It was, "How do I make this movie feel this way?" And I decided "Well, I'm not making a documentary, so I can break any rule and just do all sorts of different weird things!" [laughs]

How do you direct your actors in those hidden camera scenes? Are they wearing ear pieces?

We wrote a cell phone specifically into the script so that I could call them. They'd be in the middle of an audition and I'd ring them. They'd go, "I'm sorry, I have to take this. It's my boss." Which wouldn't be a lie! And then I'd be like, "Try to start talking about this..."

More often, we wouldn't really know what was going to happen, but we'd look at who was coming in and go "Okay, the next person is a rapper named Ganja. So Pat, no matter how good or bad he is, you need to be really uncomfortable with the fact that his name is Ganja and that that might not be marketable." And they would just run with it. We'd sit before and go "What do we want? What haven't we done that's interesting?"

Hollywood's standard way to make movies about con men is to glamorize them; just this summer we had "Ocean's Thirteen," for example. Your movie is about con men, but it's the total opposite -- the con men's lives are almost worse than the people they are conning.

Yeah, I was very conscious of that. I mean, wouldn't they be miserable? I can't imagine that it's a glamorous lifestyle, being a con man. Nobody wants to be a Machiavellian bad guy. So you have to think that you're either doing something not that bad or you have to be rationalizing it constantly.

It's not the same thing, but I worked as a phone sales operator for a while. Pat worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. When you're doing those jobs, you're doing them because you need fucking rent money, like, next week. You're not in a glamorous place in your life when you have to go non-legit. Rich people don't sit around going "How do I do something ethically weird?"

Was it sadder when someone came in to audition and they were really good or really bad?

It's an interesting question. I think... when they were bad. I felt like the really good people knew that they were good and probably had a ton of people around them supporting them. Maybe it's rationalization on my part, but when people were really good I'd think, "Well, they're gonna be okay."

You hope that talented people will eventually rise to the top.

Yeah. Which did you think was sadder?

Well when I was watching the good people, I'd think "This person is really talented!" and yet I look around and see lots of people who are successful and are untalented.

I'd been thinking about it like that, but I guess I'd intellectualized it by the time we were shooting. I also tried not to put the untalented people in the movie. There's one person who sings really badly in the beginning of the movie who's a ringer, so I wouldn't be making fun of anyone.

What was the percentage of people you saw that were actually talented?

Certainly over 50 percent. I'd say that of the people who came in, only 30 percent of them made me feel uncomfortable because they weren't good enough. Everybody else was good; it was just that they hadn't been able to crack the code of how to become a professional musician. And that's what the scam attracts -- not stupid people, and not naïve people even, but people who want to figure something out and just don't know. And they, for one reason or another -- self-esteem or financial circumstances or family problems -- haven't been able to just jump in and be like "My whole life is going to be about me trying to be a musician." So they're trying to figure out a shortcut that works.

Let's give someone a plug, then. Who was the most talented person who came in to audition?

Gosh. I fell in love with this woman who's a teacher and who has a very small part where she hands out the lyrics to her song. She came in and played a banjo song that I thought was the most amazing thing. I think Alison Krauss fans the world over would love her. Her name is Mindy Spainhour. And I still keep in touch with her.

"Great World of Sound" opens in New York on September 14th (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Great World of Craig Zobel (photo)]]> Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10030439 2007-09-10 00:00:00 closed closed craig_zobel_on_great_world_of_photo inherit 30439 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #44: Eastern Promises]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/ifc-news-podcast-44-eastern-pr.php Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel in "Eastern Promises," Focus Features, 2007]


David Cronenberg, the "King of Venereal Horror," has made a transition in his last few features toward more mainstream films. This doesn't mean they don't bear his distinctive touch — "A History of Violence" challenged audiences with fight scenes that were both exhilarating and repellent, while "Eastern Promises," a more prickly film, takes on themes of honor and manhood. This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a closer look at Cronenberg's latest, which just made its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.


Download now (MP3: 23:50 minutes, 21.8 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["On the Silver Globe," "The Valentino Collection"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/on-the-silver-globe-the-valent.php Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Andrzej Zulawski's "On the Silver Globe," Polart, 1987]


What we talk about when we talk about "lost film" pertains, more often than not, to celluloid allowed to decay into nitrate goo, usually at the hands of neglectful businesses who saw little reason to preserve films once they'd had their theatrical run. But Andrzej Zulawski's "On the Silver Globe" (1987) is another kind of lost altogether — a berserk, one-of-a-kind science fiction epic, conceived and fashioned by Europe's most notorious hyperbolist, the production of which was halted and destroyed in 1978 by the censors in Poland, who probably didn't know what in the name of a pagan god to make out of Zulawski's outlandish, gory, screaming-mimi footage, but saw clearly that it wasn't what the Politburo had in mind when it came to Communist culture. Zulawski expatriated to France in a depressed rage; after he returned to a democratized Poland in 1986, he was convinced by Film Polski and the loyal cast and crew to assemble the film anyway, shooting new footage, recording narration to fill in the story gaps, etc., for a kind of honorary screening at Cannes. After that, "On the Silver Globe" vanished — Zulawski did not want it publicly shown, and it quickly became one of the most hankered-after unseen films of the modern age.


In fact, when I wrote about Zulawski and "On the Silver Globe" for Film Comment five years ago (I'd seen a bootleg), I labeled the film (and I promise, this will exhaust my self-quotation rights for the next decade), "one of cinema's most appalling, breathtaking follies, and the most frightening art film you will never see." That is, until now — somehow, someone wrested it from Zulawski's embittered grasp, and here it is, sans explanation, on DVD. Newcomers to Zulawski's filmmaking might be discombobulated even if the film weren't a fragmentary cobble-job: the tone he doggedly attains, the manner in which he ratchets up his cast and camera, is as close to skull-splitting psychotic frenzy as movies have gotten. No actor reads lines realistically in a Zulawski film when he can howl them in maddened agony; no shot simply captures a landscape when it can scramble and catapult and race like a starving cheetah. "On the Silver Globe" is, of course, a special case (the only Zulawski film to ever get a theatrical release here was 1981's "Possession," a portrait of dissolving marriage that involved a Carlo Rambaldi monster and a measure of procreative-sexual unease that makes David Cronenberg look like Nora Ephron). The story is pulled from a famous series of Polish science fiction novels, the "Moon" trilogy, written by Zulawski's own granduncle, and here it is mostly told in narration over footage of contemporary Warsaw: A disastrous mission to the Moon (Zulawski used the Gobi desert and the shores of the Black Sea) spawns a primitive society that, a few generations down the road, hails an investigating cosmonaut as their messiah and warrior-king in the battle against a race of winged mutants.


But it's the primal, ghastly originality of Zulawski's Dantean visuals that brand the memory: armies of black-robed savages dancing through mysterious rituals on white-sanded beaches; the sea water in flames behind a slow-motion shore battle between moon-men and mutants; tribal dramas played out in what looks like a hand-carved cavern the size of a warehouse; cinema's most appalling crucifixion; a mob of heretical victims impaled — as in, Vlad-the-Impaler-impaled, through the rectum — on 25-foot, intestine-roped stakes on the same beach, captured by Zulawski in a crane shot that launches high enough to hear one of the poor bastards choke out a few last words of protest. "On the Silver Globe" is an unfinished thing; it's both difficult to say it's a successful film as it stands — that was certainly never Zulawski's intention — and to imagine what it might've amounted to, almost 30 years since its plug was pulled. But you're not likely to see anything remotely like it, ever.


A more traditionally lost-and-found box of rarities, the new Flicker Alley two-disc set of Rudolph Valentino vehicles acts like an immaculate time machine, not to a silent-film era of auteur masterpieces, but of the simple, empathic melodramas easily captivating Americans in a TV-less world. Herein lies the allure of archival effluvia for the hardcore cinephile — a sunset filmed in a classic iris-halo in 1921 retains an inevitable poignancy that, far from being beside the aesthetic point, encapsulates what is sad and beautiful and memorial and human about cinema. Then there's Valentino himself, an icon as legendary for his unprecedented popularity among moviegoers (well, female moviegoers) as for that popularity's peculiarly short shelf life (only five years or so, from 1921's "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" to his spectacularly mourned death in 1925, and even the latter half of that period saw Valentino's star waning). Today, he's an oddity: an inexpressive, Italian-born snake-like gigolo-type (which is how he was branded by a disdainful masculine press), half angelic nancy-boy and half dolphin-esque hunk. (No one, not even Douglas Fairbanks, displayed so much well-defined buffness, and no one in Hollywood would until 50 years later.) He was clearly the first male movie star made famous only and exclusively by his ability to ignite the loins of his female viewers. All other considerations were off the table.


The DVD set is comprised entirely of his non-hits — not the movies that created a nationwide craze, but the films that otherwise shored up Valentino's strange and precarious career and serve as a background to understanding his phenomenon: pure romantic hokum as a well-meaning society heir in "A Society Sensation" (1918), the three-reel version of which was edited down from six and re-released in 1924 to capitalize on Valentino's fame; swarthy villain work in the Marguerite Namara melodrama "Stolen Moments" (1920); "Moran of the Lady Letty" (1922), a blithely enjoyable yarn about a stranded society fellow taken aboard a mercenary ship and shown the ropes, a project that was conscientiously devised to macho-up his image; and "The Young Rajah" (1922), a faux-exotic return to Sheik-dom that survives here only in pieces, abetted by stills, original intertitles and promotional materials. Naturally, the set is bubbling over with supps: promotional ephemera, stills, vintage shorts, new docs, bio info, a map of Valentino's homes and famous funeral site, original tribute songs from the '20s, a 1925 audio recording with the mysterious memorial-attending "Lady in Black," rare trailers and scrap footage, and, preposterously, a good deal more.



"On the Silver Globe" (Polart) is now available on DVD; "The Valentino Collection" will be available on September 11th.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: September 7th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/opening-this-week-september-7t.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "3:10 to Yuma," Lionsgate, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"The Brothers Solomon"

Will Arnett of "Arrested Development" fame stars in his second Bob Odenkirk comedy after last year's dismal "Let's Go to Prison," this time playing one of two socially inept home-schooled brothers who attempt to sire a child for their dying father. The film was written by former "SNL"-er and other Solomon sibling Will Forte.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Bubble"

Israel's most promising young director, Eytan Fox, delivers another exposé on sexuality and the political climate, following a group of friends whose lives are affected by the gay romance of an Israeli and a Palestinian man. The film and its title both serve as a love letter to the city of Tel Aviv, where the film is set.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Fierce People"

Filmed over three and a half years ago, this Griffin Dunne comedy sounds a bit like "Mean Girls" meets "Running with Scissors" meets every other independent coming-of-age movie from the last five years. The teenage son (Anton Yelchin in his pre-"Huff" days) of an anthropologist moves with his drug-dependent mother (Diane Lane) to the estate of an aging billionaire (Donald Sutherland). Dunne's comedy has been making the film festival circuit the past few years, having premiered at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Hatchet"

Completely unrelated to the children's novel by Gary Paulson we all grew up reading in elementary school, this horror film comes courtesy of newcomer Adam Green, whose attempts to restore the traditions of ye olde horror films of the '70s will hopefully allow us to forget all of the "Saw"'s and "Hostel"'s of the world. Jason Voorhees himself, Kane Hodder, stars as an ax-wielding psychopath who preys on a group of tourists in the New Orleans swamps.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Hunting Party"

Richard Gere and Terrence Howard star in this new comedic thriller courtesy of "The Matador" director Richard Shepard, about a three-person news team who embark on an unauthorized mission to find the number one war criminal in Bosnia for an interview, but who instead find themselves in serious jeopardy when they are mistaken as a CIA hit squad. The film premiered earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With"

Yeah, so we totally love the title, the supporting cast, and pretty much anything Jeff Garlin is in. Garlin writes, directs and stars in this unconventional romantic comedy (is there any other kind?) about an overweight comedian who's unable to hold on to a girlfriend, including his new chubby chasing female companion (Sarah Silverman). The film premiered at Tribeca last year.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"In the Shadow of the Moon"

This new documentary from filmmaker David Sington chronicles the events of the NASA Apollo missions as the surviving crew members recount their stories of moon landings. While astronaut Neil Armstrong declined an interview and remained as elusive as J.D. Salinger, the film features archival footage of space never before released.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Romance & Cigarettes"

John Turturro's much storied directorial feature finally finds a release after a heated battle between the director and the distributor, Sony Pictures Entertainment. While Sony may have balked at the film's peculiar use of popular music to tell the tale of a construction worker's adulterous affair with a lingerie boutique owner, we can't help but feel giddy at the prospect of hearing James Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon belt out "The Girl That I Marry" from "Annie Get Your Gun."

Opens in New York (official site).


"Shoot 'Em Up"

Before we settle in with all of the heavy-handed "serious" films of the fall season, we can't help but get excited about "Monster Man" director Michael Davis's latest action film, in which a British nanny with an extensive military background (Clive Owen, looking like the James Bond he almost was) helps a woman (Monica Bellucci) protect an infant from a ruthless hitman (Paul Giamatti). The film, unsurprisingly, received an overwhelmingly positive reception at this year's Comic-Con.

Opens wide (official site).


"3:10 to Yuma"

"Walk the Line" director James Mangold remakes the classic Glenn Ford western in which a captured outlaw (a mean Russell Crowe in a return to form) attempts to psych out a small-time rancher (Christian Bale) before his transport to Yuma prison. Standard action flick or good ol' cat-and-mouse thriller? We could care less, we're just excited to finally see award season started with.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Unknown Soldier"

German director Michael Verhoeven's documentary charts the history of the Wehrmacht Exhibition between 1999 and 2004, which challenged the preconceived notions that Nazi war crimes during World War II were committed by a minority of officers by showcasing photographs and footage of ordinary soldiers gleefully tormenting and executing civilians on the Eastern front.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[Revisited: Notable Cinematic Self-Offings]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/revisited-notable-cinematic-se.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "Last Days," Fine Line Features, 2005]


When we first ran this piece over two years ago, we debated whether or not it was in poor taste to dwell on such a topic. Now, following the media frenzy provoked by Owen Wilson's reported attempt at taking his own life, we feel...well, not quite justified, but at least far from alone in our fixation, and so we thought we'd take a look back at some of our choices.


This week, Gus Van Sant tops off the trilogy of films he's devoted to the deaths of the young and lovely. While "Gerry" meandered, in narrative form and spirit, in the desert with its two doomed hikers, and "Elephant" took sidelong glances at the motivations behind a Columbine-like high school shooting, "Last Days" is something stranger and more focused: a near-mystical look at a Kurt Cobain-like rock star as he drifts closer and closer to his inevitable suicide.


"Last Days" is hardly the first film to bask in the dramatic potential of people offing themselves. Movies have always luxuriated in dramatic deaths, and none so much as the well-scripted suicide, which has punctuated endings, come shockingly out of nowhere to yank a plot down an unexpected path, or happened before a film even began, precipitating the events we actually see. Morbid types that we are here at IFC News, we decided to look at some of the most memorable self-offings, attempted and otherwise, that have been committed to celluloid.


Heathers (1989)

No film, save "Welcome to the Dollhouse," has ever managed to say "school is hell" with quite the bite of Michael Lehmann's black-on-black comedy. It's possible that no film ever will again, at least not in the now verboten territory "Heathers" treads. (A student wiring the bleachers under a pep rally with bombs? Hah!) The scene in which the abused, overweight Martha "Dumptruck" Dunnstock throws herself in front of a car — only to survive, crippled, and worse, be forced to return to school — is a bleak tour de force of comic misery, but nothing compares with Christian Slater's goodbye. His plot to off everyone under the guise of mass suicide thwarted by his girlfriend (Winona Ryder), he stands on the steps with arms outspread and reveals that he's wearing a personal stash of dynamite. And as the timer ticks down...well, let's just say it remains the best cigarette lighting we've ever on screen. —Alison Willmore


The Dreamlife Of Angels (1998)

Two penniless 20-year-olds, Isabelle (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Régnier), become fast friends when they meet at a Lille sweatshop. French filmmaker Erick Zonca's camera follows them, documentary-style, as they move in together and struggle to find a life that will sustain them, Marie eventually falling in love with a rich jerk who drives her to amorous self-effacement. This hard-hitting movie gives us two angels, one open to everything life has to offer — pain, joy, absurdity and sorrow — and the other constantly baffled by those same forces. When one of them gives up hope, it feels as though your heart has cracked. But then Zonca instructs you to mend it right up again and keep trudging through another day. —Andrea Meyer.


The Big Heat (1953)

In just about all the films we're discussing (including the other four I've picked), suicide is a climactic act. Suicide is dramatic and intensely emotional, exactly what a good climax should be. In "The Big Heat," on the other hand, the suicide happens before the film, as the incident that incites the action, and so the film deals instead with the event's impact on others rather than on the act itself. Detective Dave Bannion (played by the solid-if-stolid Glenn Ford) investigates the suicide of a police sergeant who, it turns out, was on the mob's payroll. Bannion is a good cop; possibly, director Fritz Lang implies, a little too good. He pushes too hard, and so his enemies push back, killing Bannion's wife in an explosion meant for him. "The Big Heat," one of the best (and coolest, smartest, edgiest) film noirs ever made, subtly comments on the repercussions of suicide, which in this case are as responsible for Bannion's wife's death as Bannion is, if a little less directly. Throughout the film, Lang repeatedly asks: Is it morally appropriate to do right when doing right can result in more wrong? —Matt Singer


Oldboy (2003)

"Oldboy" starts off a great movie, though it ends up just an okay one. The first half-hour crackles with life, as vibrant and fresh as "Pulp Fiction" felt a decade ago — it's no wonder Quentin Tarantino swooned all over the film at Cannes last year. As Oh Dae-su, shattered and far from sane after years in captive solitude, wakes to find himself on a rooftop, free for the first time in 15 years, he comes across a man preparing to jump. Given what's come before, we have no idea what to expect from this encounter, but it's funny and perfect, and ends with our hero walking out of the building and not looking back as the man decides to jump after all. His smile is deserved — after all, who would choose death? After 15 years, given an unfaltering purpose, he's ready to devour life with both hands. —AW


Bad Timing (1980)

In Nicholas Roeg's elusive love story, Milena (Theresa Russell), is brought into a Vienna hospital following her attempt to overdose on pills. Trying to determine whether there's been foul play, a suspicious cop (Harvey Keitel) interrogates her reticent lover, Alex (Art Garfunkel), and what emerges in flashback is the history of an overwhelming passion between people who can't live with or without each other. In its twisted conclusion, we learn that the violent act that seemed to be a cry for attention on Milena's part might be as much an attempt on Alex's part to finally have her — wholly, without friction, game-playing or tears, all to himself. —A.M.


Boogie Nights (1997)

In the mesmerizing scene that leads to one of the most unflinchingly brutal onscreen suicides in history, William H. Macy's Little Bill wanders through a bustling house party on New Year's Eve 1980. He's looking for his wife, who has spent the better portion of the previous 90 minutes brazenly screwing everyone in the movie but him. When Billy finally finds her with yet another nameless dude, he calmly walks out to his car, finds and loads his gun, walks back in, shoots her, turns to the camera, flashes a pathetic smile, places the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Director Paul Thomas Anderson stages the scene for maximum shock value, and doesn't cut for almost three minutes as Macy enters the party, exits and enters again (the one cut in the entire sequence, just after he kills his wife, is only used to allow for the placement of the makeup effects that provide the illusion that Macy is really blowing his brains out). The suicide scene recalls the film's jubilant introduction but, coming just at the start of the ensemble's collective downward spiral through the 1980s, suggests that the party is most certainly over. One interesting tidbit; the interview between Julianne Moore's Amber Waves and Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler immediately after the suicide begins with a pointed question about accusations of violence against women, as if "Boogie Nights" director Paul Thomas Anderson is already fielding questions about the previous scene before the movie has even ended. —M.S.


The Piano (1993)

I was really too young to fully appreciate Jane Campion's dark romance, all sharp edges and clutching hands, when I first saw it in the theater. It says something that the final moments of the film stand out in my mind more than all of the Harvey Keitel nudity Campion saw fit to subject us to. Out on rough seas, trying to take Ada McGrath's other great love, her piano, to a ship and a presumed happy ending, the crew is forced to choose between dumping the unwieldy instrument or all going down. As the piano sinks to its final home, Ada, as if she had no other choice, sticks her foot into a loop in the rope unspooling after it, and abruptly gets pulled into the water. "What a death! What a chance! What a surprise!" as she says later, looking back, having chosen life. —A.W.


Harold and Maude (1971)

Hal Ashby's black comedy has taken on the status of cult film beloved by loners, cynics and the more sentimental of cinephiles. Bud Cort plays a rich teenager who spends his days faking his own suicide and whose bleak existence turns rosy when he meets Maude (Ruth Gordon), an energetic 80-year-old who attends funerals for the fun of it. The movie shocks because the sexual relationship at its core matches a misfit boy with a vibrant octogenarian, but its story is one we've heard before: A depressed man meets a woman who teaches him to love life and then dies, leaving him sad and lonely but strangely full — of the joy his lover has given him. —A.M.


The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

"I'm going to kill myself tomorrow." And immediately after that, Richie Tenenbaum slashes his wrists. Inexplicable and powerful, a summing up of the quiet undercurrent of unhappiness running through the film. Luke Wilson, doe-eyed and square-jawed, faces the camera as he shaves off his beard and Björn Borg hairstyle and emerges from the caricature to become a human being of flesh and blood, which he proceeds to shed all over the borrowed bathroom floor. And set to Elliott Smith, nonetheless. —A.W.


The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey, not Liev Schreiber's faded carbon-copy in last year's rehash) is one of the great tragic figures of the movies. Manipulated by forces beyond his control (like, for instance, his harpy of a mother, played by Angela Lansbury), he is made to assassinate the enemies of a group of subversive Communists hiding, rather deviously, as the most hawkish anti-Communists in the country. Harvey, impossibly soulful as a soulless killer, plays Shaw as a jerk and a coward, daring us to hate him. But we can't, not when he begins to understand his problem and, with the help of Frank Sinatra's Ben Marco, fight back. His suicide, after breaking his programming, is the most distressing I can think of in the movies: after he finally regains his free will, he uses it one last time to end his own misery. —M.S.


One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Ken Kesey's novel, adapted for screen by Milos Forman, takes on institutions and the ways they can smother the spark out of anyone with a little fire in them. Blazing boldly is McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a prisoner who lands in the loony bin after playing crazy to avoid doing time backfires, and tries to revolutionize the place. Determined to stamp out his rebellious fervor is the demonically rigid Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). In the devastating scene that provokes the film's final fireworks, Billy (Brad Dourif), a terrified, childlike stutterer who flourishes under McMurphy's prodding, regresses tragically when Ratched venomously extinguishes any last glimmer of sanity in him. —A.M.


Solaris (1972)

Psychologist Kris Kelvin's wife, Hari, kills herself before Tarkovsky's enigmatic sci-fi magnum opus begins, but the impact of her act ripples across the film, particularly once Hari begins reappearing, conjured by the alien presence Kelvin and other scientists have set out to study. The Hari that Kelvin sees is one constructed entirely of his memories of her, one that has none of her own, and yet, as she begins to understand who she is, one that commits suicide again. But this new Hari, this Guest Hari, can't die, just as Kelvin cannot strip the guilt he feels over abandoning the old Hari from his mind. And so we see her resurrected, jerking back to life to join her husband once again in a scene that is great and terrible. Tarkovsky's film is about many things, and writing this makes me want to rewatch it for all of the themes I've forgotten, but it has always been most of all, for me, about the ultimate isolation that is human consciousness. Other people, despite all of the experience we share with them, remain at their depths as unknowable as "Solaris'" shimmering alien sea. —A.W.


Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Okay, yes, the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) claims he cannot "self-terminate" and so Linda Hamilton lowers him into the vat of smelting metal that will destroy him. And even if the Terminator had leapt into the death bath while squealing "My what a lovely tea party!" can a robot technically commit suicide? After all, in the near-future, Terminators, even the bulky Austrian kind, are widely available at all Ace Hardware locations. Whatever, there's no denying the awe-inspiring drama of the last moments of the sacrificial cyborg who saved us all from the sinister polymorphous clutches of Robert Patrick. In that shining moment where Arnold slipped under the molten goo and shoved a triumphant thumb into the air, we are too overcome by grief to realize that "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" was always just a $30 million paycheck away. Arnold, you had me at "self-terminate." —M.S.


Thelma & Louise (1991)

In Ridley Scott's adored girls-on-the-road flick, Thelma (Geena Davis), the wife of an obnoxious bore, and her friend Louise (Susan Sarandon) leave their humdrum lives behind for a weekend jaunt. When Louise shoots a man attempting to rape Thelma in a parking lot, they head for Mexico instead, becoming fugitives tracked by a swarm of policemen led by kind cop Harvey Keitel. As tension increases and the girls grow tanner and more self-assured, they hone in on what they want and what they can't go back to. And when they drive off a cliff in the end, surrounded by wailing sirens and Keitel's devastated protest bouncing off canyon walls, the act does not seem self-destructive. It's an escape, a triumph, a celebration of life lived without compromise. Their high-speed leap is as ecstatic as suicide gets. —A.M.


Vertigo (1958)

It is one of the supreme masterpieces of cinema from the man who is arguably the medium's greatest artist. It is about an obsessive necrophiliac. James Stewart is Scottie, a former policeman turned private detective, hired to follow a rich old friend's crazy/beautiful wife, Kim Novak's Madeleine. Scottie and Madeleine begin an affair, but he can't seem to stop her strange hallucinations. Eventually Madeleine is compelled to commit suicide by jumping from the clock tower of a Spanish mission, and Scottie, gripped by uncontrollable vertigo, is powerless to stop her. Scottie, and the audience, is devastated by the suicide — it's rare that a Hollywood movie hero is allowed to fail so utterly — but it only gets worse when he finds a woman who resembles Madeleine and sets out to remake her in the first woman's image, changing her hair, clothes and makeup until she is the spitting image of Madeleine. Only Alfred Hitchcock could make such compelling mainstream fare out of such icky sexual deviancy. As Scottie grows more consumed with replacing Madeleine, "Vertigo" grows darker and more disturbed, building to a shocking revelation and another confrontation in the Spanish clock tower. This time Scottie conquers his vertigo at an even greater cost than before and the final image, Jimmy Stewart standing at the tower's edge, looking down into a metaphorical abyss, is as hopeless and beautiful as movies get. —M.S.

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<![CDATA["In the Shadow of the Moon"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/in-the-shadow-of-the-moon.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: David Sington's "In the Shadow of the Moon," ThinkFilm, 2007]


Traveling inside what amounts to a giant tin can strapped to front of an incredibly powerful rocket hurtling through space 13 times faster than a speeding bullet only to get to a desolate place with no air, sustenance or shelter can really readjust the way you look at life on Earth. The 24 men who made this remarkable journey, and saw our home from a distance, floating serenely and precariously amidst the rest of the cosmos, took away from it an appreciation of the marvel and beauty of our planet, even at its most tedious. "I'm glad there's weather! I'm glad there's traffic!" one chuckles. The astronauts interviewed in "In the Shadow of the Moon" speak of the perspective they gained by visiting another planet. Anyone who sees this absorbing documentary will likely have a similar experience.


Of those 24 men, 12 actually got to step foot on the moon. Nearly all those who are still alive (save the reclusive Neil Armstrong) appear in this documentary, directed by David Sington, to talk about the trip. Their interviews are honest, warm and insightful, and the accompanying footage, most of it never before seen (at least by me), is uniformly beautiful. And some of those shots of that very first lunar landing, the "One small step..." one, that show it all from new and different angles, put a serious hurting on those conspiracy theories that the whole thing was faked from some warehouse in Texas.


I didn't think astronauts were dopes, but I was surprised to see just how thoughtful these men are. They talk about the difference between fear (which they don't have) and worry (which they do). They describe the surreal feeling of going to sleep one day a nobody and waking the next an American hero, the idol of millions. They explain what it feels like to fly inside a fireball. And they remind us just how courageous they were: back in its early days, this stuff was so incredibly dangerous men died simply conducting tests on the equipment.


Some of the shots of Earth from space — like one taken from inside one of the rocket staging pieces as it separates from the capsule and slowly falls back through our atmosphere — are so gorgeous they could bring you to tears. And it's nice to see that Michael Collins isn't the least bit bitter about the fact that he's always going to be known as the guy who went on the first mission to the moon but got stuck back in the command module while those other two lucky bastards, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, got to have a big party on the surface.


"In the Shadow of the Moon" is significantly more than a made-for-television documentary. It's awe-inspiring and uplifting, a reminder that when mankind puts aside its squabbling and works towards a goal, it can achieve great things. On July 20th, 1969, more than half a billion people watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and were united, not by death or fear or hatred, but by joy and pride and the hope for a better tomorrow.



"In the Shadow of the Moon" opens in limited release on September 7th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Romance & Cigarettes"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/romance-cigarettes.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: John Turturro's "Romance & Cigarettes," 2007]


In his unorthodox new film, "Romance & Cigarettes," director John Turturro takes an unconventional approach to the musical, one of the most conventional of genres. Deeply felt, but not especially deep, it works best at its most passionate, which could probably be said of most other musicals as well. But most other musicals don't also include shockingly vulgar language, dancing garbage men, pencil-thin mustaches and the most sexualized fire hose in cinema history.


The road to American theaters has been a hard one for "Romance & Cigarettes," as it often is for movies this eccentric. Owned by United Artists, it premiered at the 2005 Venice Film Festival, but found itself in a Miramax-esque purgatory for two years following Sony Pictures' acquisition of UA. Though the film has an incredible cast of bankable stars, including James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi and Christopher Walken, it's never gotten any sort of domestic distribution. Even now, it's opening in just one theater, New York City's Film Forum, after Turturro convinced Sony to allow him to release the picture himself.


Despite its charms, it's easy to see why "Romance & Cigarettes" might make a conglomerate a bit skittish. Though audiences have shown a renewed interest in Hollywood musicals, those films tend to be made of glossier, less confrontational stuff than this. They also tend to return the genre to its earliest cinematic form, as chronicles of backstage dramas taking place around the making of a show or concert. The characters in "Romance & Cigarettes" aren't performers: they're salt-of-the-earth types like construction workers, police officers and homemakers. And when they burst into song to reveal their innermost desires and fears, they don't sound like performers, either. This is not a Jennifer Holliday-esque coming out party for the mellifluous vocals of James Gandolfini, I can tell you that much.


Gandolfini, whose casting and vocal range bring to mind the sight of Jimmy Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," plays Nick Murder, an unhappy family man living in Queens with his wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon) and his three daughters. The casting of said daughters is one of Turturro's weirdest choices: he's got the age-appropriate Mandy Moore, but he filled the other two parts with Mary-Louise Parker, who's just three years younger than Gandolfini, and Aida Turturro who, you may recall, played Mr. Murder's sister on five seasons of "The Sopranos." And so Nick must deal with typical teenage rebellion coming from the atypical form of a middle-aged woman.


Nick's having an affair (with a fiery-haired Kate Winslet) and his relationship with Kitty is in trouble. "Marriage is combat, soldier," he tells another character. "And not clean combat." In other moments, he's less philosophical. He talks about "wet vaginas" and even drops the t-word into conversation (that word's so dirty, even I won't type it here, but it rhymes with a movie starring Colin Farrell and Samuel L. Jackson).


Most classic musicals are about the way people fall in love. "Romance & Cigarettes," with its obsession with coarse language — sample dialogue from Steve Buscemi's character: "I like to fuck a woman with a behind as big as the world!" — and infidelity plotline, is more about the way people cope with the reality of a world depressingly lacking in love (hence the particular appropriateness of the Engelbert Humperdinck tune "A Man Without Love," which serves as Nick's theme). Other musicals, from "West Side Story" to "The Blues Brothers," have forsaken the traditional confines of a soundstage for real city streets, but Turturro has stripped off whatever remaining varnish still coated those frames. The language, the visuals and the literally cancerous ending all burst with raw reality. Yet Turturro juxtaposes all of that with over-the-top musical numbers featuring backup dancers who writhe for the camera with wild abandon. It's like a John Waters version of Martin Scorsese's "New York, New York."


There's no denying the visceral pleasure one gets from the incongruous sight of a mustachioed Gandolfini belting songs in between trips to the urologist, or of Kate Winslet performing a number underwater like a mermaid trollop. But this is not the sort of pleasure that's going to transmit widely and to all people. You kind of have to be as nutty as John Turturro to appreciate it. "Romance & Cigarettes" is unique; but then so was "Myra Breckinridge," and that nearly killed the studio that released it. No wonder Sony didn't want to touch the thing.



"Romance & Cigarettes" opens in New York on September 7th (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Castle," "Horrors of Malformed Men"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/the-castle-horrors-of-malforme.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Haneke's "The Castle," Kino, 1997]


The ascension of Michael Haneke of late has been a blessing in a number of ways already, including the DVDization of his notoriously cold-blooded earlier films (notably, "Funny Games," "Benny's Video" and "The Seventh Continent"). But the vaults are just opening up: Haneke's years of work for Austrian TV remain unimported (including films in an episodic series entitled "Lemmings," no relation to the National Lampoon skit show of yore), but now we can see his dry-eyed romp on Kafka, 1997's "The Castle." Things Kafkaesque have long been as rich pickings for cinema as they have been everywhere else (including, ironically, given the source, several operas), but none of the mere handful of adaptations of this, the great uneasy Czech's richest and biggest, albeit unfinished, work, are as ingeniously faithful to their source as Haneke's. It's a low-budget, streamlined vision, as gritty and cramped as other Kafka films (even Orson Welles's fascinating version of "The Trial") are grandiose and lurid.


The odyssey of self-righteous and clueless land surveyor K. in the social nightmare that is the village surrounding the unseen castle, to which K. can never quite arrive or receive clear communications from, is shot in an indecorous, washed-out palette that evokes Jan Švankmajer's films — sunshine is nonexistent, surfaces are timeworn and rough, rooms are cheap, decaying and claustrophobically small. This is not the Kafka of surreal juxtapositions but of dusty, bureaucratic bad-dreamness, Byzantine but unwritten social rules and arbitrary governmental cruelty. Haneke virtually transcribes the book, emphasizing not Kafka's now-mythic metaphors but his cut-to-the-bone mundaneity (another Švankmajerism, and it's surprising to note that the prolific Czech animator has never adapted Kafka himself). In Kafka's writing, essential anxiety isn't supposed to be "felt," viscerally, by the reader, but observed from a wry, appalled distance, and it's this sense that Haneke nails — despite the fact that often the dithering irrationality of "The Castle"'s paranoid minions is so in your face you can smell the clammy sweat.


It is, in the end, a comedy whose chuckles dissolve like hopeful thoughts before they come clear of your throat. The unwashed cast handles Kafka's cloggy dialogue with a conviction that sometimes borders on the manic, with the exception of the late Ulrich Mühe (of "The Lives of Others") as K., exuding hilarious waves of maddened frustration and suspicion with sad, watchful eyes and a perfectly straight face. Having seen "The Castle" and, like its hero, failed to get comfortable and secure in its secretive spaces, you feel as if you've genuinely been there, in the rundown, petty-power-distorted Mitteleuropan villages of Kafka's bitter memories.


Madness isn't at all grounded in tangible reality in sadistic Japanese pulp-nut Teruo Ishii's "Horrors of Malformed Men" (1969), now unleashed on unsuspecting psychotronic-philes, pining as they are wont to do for a forgotten absurdity that was never even seen outside of Japan until 2003's selective festival tour. (The DVD supplements include interviews with contemporary Japanese auteurs like Shinya Tsukamoto, dazedly recalling their childhood experience of seeing it.) Based on an Edogawa Rampo tale, the film begins as an amnesiac-wrong-man nightmare (which, like "Ringu," finds its mysteries on one of Japan's many alluringly remote islands), and then sidles into an anti-übermensch version of "The Island of Dr. Moreau." But there's little reason to have faith in a story that lurches and twitches like a junkie in withdrawal, and not to simply wallow in this parade of lactating psycho women, feral man-beasts, secret swastika scars, whoring Buddhist priests, dual-sex Siamese twins, surgical abominations, silver-painted futuro-nightclub dance routines, live crab eating, gangster masquerade, circus freaks and cinema's first exploitation of Butoh (starring the creepy avant-garde dance form's founder, Tatsumi Hijikata).


Ishii is clearly Takashi Miike's spiritual granddad, with, amid scores of gangster and prison films, a filmography saturated with crazed mashups: ghosts, torture, giants, superheroes, aliens, you name it. Probably his most notorious film, "Malformed Men" is a ridiculous, ambitious mess, and thus a paradigm for a certain type of movie pleasure-high — the unassuming discovery of a forgotten genre ditty bursting with its eccentric maker's unique perversity.



"The Castle" (Kino) and "Horrors of Malformed Men" (Synapse) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Ryan Reynolds on "The Nines"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/ryan-reynolds-on-the-nines.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Nick Schager

IFC News


[Photos: Ryan Reynolds in ""The Nines"," Newmarket Films, 2007]


Ryan Reynolds' résumé doesn't prepare you for his performance in "The Nines." Or rather, his three performances, as the former sitcom star ("Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place"), wisecracking sidekick to Wesley Snipes in "Blade: Trinity" and upstanding gunslinger in "Smokin' Aces" tackles a trio of roles to impressive effect in the indie mindbender. The directorial debut of "Go" and "Big Fish" scribe John August, "The Nines" revolves around three unique Reynolds characters — an actor whose life is in Lohan-ish freefall, a show creator being followed by a reality TV program crew, and a man stranded with his wife and daughter in the woods — all of whom are mysteriously, inextricably related to each other. Answers aren't easy to come by in this trifurcated media-satire-by-way-of-metaphysical-head-trip, and the same might also be said about the Canadian-born Reynolds, a funny, handsome actor whose most memorable big-screen exploit — stuffing an éclair full of bulldog semen in "Van Wilder" — never hinted at the mature, nuanced and varied turn he delivers in his latest. While in New York, the actor sat down to discuss life in the spotlight, the challenges of playing a character based on his director, and his penchant for going topless.


The first segment's protagonist, Gary, is an out-of-control actor. Can we assume this is based on your own life?


[Laughs] No. If you look at the news, there are all sorts of out-of-control actors, but it wasn't based on anyone I know. Gary's acting style on his TV show, which we only see for a couple of brief moments, is based on some people I know. But other than that, no.


Gary's crack and booze bender seems to be driven, at least in part, by a desire to rebel against his own celebrity. Is that something you can relate to?


Well, the spotlight is as attractive as it is scary. It's always a push-pull sort of thing. But I don't know if Gary is necessarily feeling like he's giving the finger to celebrity. I don't think Gary is that intellectual, to process something like that. He's definitely going through something, but I don't think he's actualized enough to figure out what it is.


Despite a somewhat revelatory finale, the film refuses to posit easy resolutions to its entwined mysteries. Was that what drew you to the project?


My attraction to it was a bit more microcosmic. I liked the moments in it, and I really loved the transition from one character to the next, in the sense that it didn't feel as indulgent as it could have been. In playing three different characters, there's a temptation to go overboard. The challenge was to find their similarities, not their differences, and that really attracted me to it.


But of course, I love that the film is, in and of itself, a question as opposed to an answer. I think that's a treat, nowadays, to have a film that isn't about the bottom line, that doesn't leave the viewer walking away from the theater with that satisfied grin, that they've been coddled throughout the movie. With "The Nines," they can walk away and have a cordial debate about it. I like that.


It actually sparked a street-corner discussion between myself and a friend immediately after our screening.


That makes me happier than any box-office revenue. This movie is obviously not designed to pull in $100 million. That's the reason to do it, to have people walk out and want to discuss it. To be a part of that is infinitely cooler than anything else I can imagine.


I assume your preparation for this film was quite different than for something like "Smokin' Aces" or "Blade: Trinity."


Unlike those other movies, the things that are interesting about "The Nines"' characters are the little things, the small idiosyncrasies. The character I play in part two is a real person, and that's [writer/director] John August. That was both exciting and terrifying for me, because it was the one piece that I didn't feel like I'd connected with until we started shooting it. That's just going in pants-less right there, and that's a scary feeling. We obviously shot the film out of sequence, and part two was actually the last thing we shot, and I was glad because it gave me an opportunity to spend as much time as possible with John to get to know him and his experiences. But the film was largely unscripted, and that adds a whole other level of depth and difficulty. I was so concerned about it that it was beginning to affect my work on the other two segments, so I just let it go, and decided I was going to drive it like I owned it. And it ended up being my favorite part of the film.


Was it difficult playing August while he was sitting behind the camera?


It's painfully awkward in the beginning, but there's so much trust between John and me that he really gave me license to go for it. He said, "Expose me, warts-and-all." A lot of what that character is dealing with is hubris, and that's not a flattering trait to be portraying in somebody who's standing in the same room as you. A lot of that stuff is improvised, and that made it even more of a challenge. I'm aping things I've heard him say. I'd have conversations with him and go home and furiously take notes on everything he said, and I would somehow find a way to [include those things] within a scene.


You've generally alternated between comedies and genre films, while "The Nines" feels like your first foray into drama. Is serious fare something you've been actively trying to segue into?


I'd like to work toward an evenly balanced pie chart of a career. A lot of times, the more comedy you do — and even "Blade" I consider a comedy, we had so many difficulties during shooting that it was just like, "Well, let's do this, then" — the more comedy is sent to you. The more drama you do, the more drama is sent to you. It's nice to have a mix of both. I just finished another straight drama, and there's no humor in it at all. And the next two have elements of both.


Coming from a sitcom and comedy background, has it been tough to reverse preconceived notions and prove you can do more than just "Van Wilder"?


That movie took on a cult status, which was actually great, because it didn't expose me to everybody on planet Earth. It wasn't a huge box office success; it found its audience later, so it didn't overexpose me, but it exposed me enough that it really helped. But I imagine that for people who really hold a movie like that dear to them, it's probably a little bit more difficult. Still, at my last press conference, people didn't even know I had done a television show. So you go, "Oh, wow, it's been enough time that they don't even know." Honestly, I don't know. I assume it's probably a little bit difficult, but you just have to do it, and believe in yourself.


"The Nines" once again features you shirtless. Is that in your contract?


No! I try to avoid it, actually. This will be the only movie out of the last four that I had to do it. But it was necessary for the narrative, because you had to see his belly button — or lack thereof. That's key.


Ever have any thought about going back to TV?


Um, no. There's good TV out there, but film is more synchronized with my lifestyle. I love telling stories, I love being part of that process. And I also like never seeing some of those people ever again.



"The Nines" is now in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA[Griffin Dunne on "Fierce People"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/griffin-dunne-on-fierce-people.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Chris Evans and Anton Yelchin in "Fierce People"; below, Griffin Dunne, Lionsgate, 2007]


Owing to the cult favoritism paid to his roles in "After Hours" and "An American Werewolf in London" (or if you're feeling really perverse, the Madonna vehicle "Who's That Girl?"), Griffin Dunne may forever be known first as an actor, then as a director. But since his 1996 short "The Duke of Groove" was nominated for an Oscar, Dunne has stayed busy behind the camera, having helmed half a dozen features, both studio fare ("Practical Magic," "Addicted to Love") and indies ("Lisa Picard is Famous"). His latest is "Fierce People," a dark and lurid coming-of-ager adapted by Dirk Wittenborn from his 2002 novel of the same name. Anton Yelchin stars as a New York teen whose 1978 summer plans to survey an indigenous South American tribe with his anthropologist dad are squashed when he's busted buying coke for his masseuse mother (Diane Lane). To repair their relationship and sober herself up, Lane brings her son to the haut monde Jersey estate of a billionaire ex-client (Donald Sutherland) whose aristocratic offspring (including hot-to-trot granddaughter Kristen Stewart) seem to Yelchin as foreign and dangerous a tribe as the Iskanani Indians he had hoped to study. Dunne, who is already busy with post-production on a new rom-com called "The Accidental Husband," spared some time to chat with me from his home in NYC.


How did you get your hands on this story before it was even published?


Well, I knew Dirk socially, but I didn't know much about his writing. I knew he was a novelist. He had written this incredible yarn, but he was stuck on the ending. He gave it to a couple of his friends, of which I was one, just to get an impression of it. It ended at this incredibly mysterious, tense place where the ending could have gone [in two different directions]. He had sort of painted himself into a corner there. I wasn't sure how to get out of the corner, but I knew I wanted to tell the story in a movie, so I told him I'd option the book. When he finished the ending, he sold it very handsomely to Bloomsbury. When there were movie inquiries, I had already gotten there before anyone.


I haven't read the book, unfortunately, but I'm told the movie has a significant alteration.


The ending is different. It ended with the kid getting the inheritance of the estate. Dirk had written it — and you can get away with the tone in a novel — as a sort of ironic, bittersweet, almost cynical ending. But in a movie, it suddenly translates into a happy ending. After what this kid had gone through, paying him off with a lot of money wasn't very satisfying. It came across [that after] the brutalization the kid goes through, "Well now, this should make it better, here's some millions of dollars," as opposed to the theme of the movie being the ultimate coming of age of what kind of man he'll grow up to be in light of the brutality and fierceness he's seen in society. How will he take that and become a better person?


Having grown up with high-profile writers like your father Dominick and aunt Joan Didion, did you personally recognize any of the behavioral traits of the different classes represented in the story?


I've always believed that people who have acquired vast amounts of power or fortune have made great sacrifices on their own morality somewhere along the line. A lot of the decisions are made at the expense of someone else to come out on top. That's how society, power and the economy work, so I recognize this. I was brought up in Los Angeles, not amongst old money, but Dirk was quite familiar with it. It's actually more autobiographical to his life than to mine. I related very strongly to the kid being at a point in life before you've ever fallen in love, when you're seeing your parents and adult figures having moments of real weakness and frailty, and the line between being the son, the friend and the one who takes care of the mother. All these things, I relate to as both a parent and remembering myself as a kid.


Not to make any insinuations, but what attracts you to a dysfunctional family story?


Oh, I think every family is dysfunctional, or everyone assumes their family is. There's almost a competitive pride in people's dysfunctions. It's a natural inclination to assume we are the result of the way we were brought up. We spend our lives trying to overcome, embrace or blame that, use it as an excuse. People love telling stories about it: "You think that was bad? You know, when I was a kid..." I think about what kind of stories my kid is going to tell about me. But I actually find dysfunction in families a humorous subject rather than any sad-sack tragedy. The next movie I'm doing is about the siblings of the parents who wrote and appear in the illustrations of a book like "The Joy of Sex," and how they've been brought up with that their whole life. Family never ceases to interest me.


What creative itch does directing scratch that acting doesn't?


I think directing always exercises both the pragmatic and creative instincts. You know, I love acting, but going from job to job as an actor was never quite enough for me. I didn't like the lack of control, both of what the next job would be, as well as being a cog in the overall picture. One of my strengths as a director is performance and working with actors, having been one. I feel like I get to play all the parts internally without having to wear the make-up.


After "Lisa Picard is Famous," would you ever cast yourself again in something you directed?


Yeah, I would do it. I had cast and then fired myself in both "Addicted to Love" and "Practical Magic." Both scenes in which I'd given myself a part involved hundreds and hundreds of extras. It was a huge production day, and I thought like an actor in that singular way. But when it got to really imagining all the logistics, I suddenly thought: no, no, no. I called someone up in the middle of the night and said, "Step in for me." I laid it off to "This is the wrong day to multi-task." "Lisa Picard" was great to put myself in because there was an improv aspect to it. I was directing, sort of controlling it, and throwing the actors off, whatever they were going to do. That was very natural, but yeah, it's something I would like to do. I just haven't had the right opportunity.


I enjoyed all the late '70s gems on the soundtrack like the Dead Kennedys and the Talking Heads, and I thought the score blended in nicely.


A guy named Nick Laird-Clowes did the score. He was in a band called Dream Academy, and he's someone whose work I really like. His roots are very much in the sort of Nick Drake, Joe Boyd-produced, early Pink Floyd kind of feel. My temp track was filled with early Neil Young like "Cortez the Killer," and guitar-driven sounds that went from acoustic to a velvety kind of electric strum — half junky, then its gets a little ominous. I guess that's still my favorite era of music. I've never quite outgrown it, but luckily, it keeps coming back with every new group reinventing that sound.


So if I looked at your iPod right now, this is what I would see?


It would be riddled with it, plus Broken Social Scene and these new groups doing the same old thing. My battery just died on my iPod, hang on... I'm still into Arcade Fire, they're all good. Citizen Cope. Devendra Bernhardt. I used Explosions in the Sky on the temp track for a while... Interpol, and all those guys. If I could get that guitar sound of Pavement, I would've loved to have had Steve Malkmus do my score.



"Fierce People" opens in limited release on September 7th (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Indie Musical]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/09/ifc-news-podcast-43-the-indie.php Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Banished for years to the realms of animation, the movie musical finally seems to be making a comeback. This week on the IFC News podcast, we speculate on what led to the demise of the musical, and look into how the burgeoning genre of the indie musical plays up the disconnect between a song and dance number and a harsher reality.

Download now (MP3: 28:29 minutes, 26.1 MB)
Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

]]> 37205 2007-09-03 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_43_the_indie publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10037205 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]> <![CDATA[The Indie Musical (photo)]]> Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10037205 2007-09-03 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_43_the_indie_photo inherit 37205 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Broken English," "The Young One"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/broken-english-the-young-one.php Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Broken English," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


This is the way it's done, U.S.-indie-filmmaking-wise: Zoe Cassavetes's "Broken English" is so far 2007's reigning small Ameri-movie, by simple and lonely virtue of the mature intelligence and respect it pays to its characters and life at large. If we had a dime for every indie that tries and fails to nail down the nutty texture and sad comedy of being a single, lovelife-troubled woman in Manhattan, we'd be in Paris Hilton's hot tub, but Cassavetes's film leaves us no spare change, just the truth. Parker Posey is Nora, a swanky hotel concierge (a beautiful choice of employment, both a respectable earner and a dead end) whose path through her 20s and 30s and stampeding to her 40s is littered with the refuse of ruined relationships and disappointments. Everybody's got advice (that includes Gena Rowlands, Mama Cassavetes, as her mother, and Drea de Matteo as her irately married girlfriend), and every idle conversation turns quickly toward Nora's crisis-mode status as a never-married, manless spinster. The movie's all about character; Cassavetes (honoring her father's memory as her brother Nick never has, despite his straining efforts) and Posey never project and emphasize when they can play it subtle, cagey and close to the vest — as Nora herself does by the time we meet her, bruised and bitter about her seemingly inevitable loneliness. When she spontaneously cries at lunch with her mother, it's not a big acting show-piece — it just is, and life goes on.


But it's a comedy, rife with deadpan New York dryness and performance tidbits (Justin Theroux, as an actor with a Mohawk, "playing Choctaw" in a movie, is so sly you hope that everything he says isn't a lie, but you know it is). It may also be the first movie to bring the full personality of Posey to bear since her dynamite supporting riff in 1994's "Sleep with Me" — and this despite "Broken English"'s overall restraint and bullseye accuracy. Despite having worked so much she runs the risk of being an overfamiliar presence in American movies, Posey has, it seems, been drastically underused, and so perhaps for the first time you get to see this wondrous woman of the al-dente-noodle limbs and wide sarcastic smile act like a whirlwind, making more out of a single reaction shot (watch her after her date to Film Forum gets shanghai-ed) than she's been able to make out of entire screenplays in the past. (Not that it's ever been truly her fault.) Nora's neediness, caught in a middle-shot as a seemingly sweet and honest Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud) sits on her bed and admits he has to leave, is positively rending.


Posey-triumph and single-chick indie miracle that it is, "Broken English" may also be the most eloquent portrait of its subject demographic ever made, despite changing two-thirds of the way through into a slightly ditzy French-movie version of itself and robbing a little, in the end, from Linklater's "Before Sunset." While "Sex in the City" reruns are merely the idiot's guide to lonely-girl anesthetization, Cassavetes's feature-film debut is the true gem.


Indies of another day and age: Luis Buñuel's "The Young One" (1960) is an unarguable freak amidst one of cinema's greatest filmographies — it's the only film Buñuel shot in English (it's a Mexican co-production); the last he'd make in relative anonymity, after years of toil in Mexico, before "Viridiana" (1961) would reawaken the world to things Buñuelian; the only Buñuel film written by a certified HUAC blacklistee (Hugo Butler); and the first of only three films, over a 50-year span, adapted from the fiction of powerhouse Peter Matthiessen. In fact, "The Young One"'s swampy white trash vibe suggests Matthiesen's later bestseller "Killing Mister Watson" more than most of Buñuel's other movies, but the fact is that Buñuel wrote the screenplay from the ground up. Matthiesen's short story "Travelin Man" had only two characters, a black man on the run from erroneous rape charges, and the bigoted white hunter who stalks him through the Southern swamps. That's far too lean and neat for Buñuel, who gives the bigot (Zachary Scott) a game warden compound (he's also a poacher) where his dead partner's uneducated 14-ish wild-child daughter (Key Meersman) also lives. The appearance of a desperate black man on the run (Bernie Hamilton, brother to Chico Hamilton) sets us up for a Stanley Kramer-ish lesson in civil-rights-era race relations.


Would that it were so simple: as usual, Buñuel is fascinated by sexual impulse — his characters' and his audiences'. Ignore the wooden acting (Buñuel was so frustrated, reports have it, that he had to ask Hollywood pro Scott to act worse, so some semblance of uniformity could be attained), and scout for the Buñuelian discomfitures. Witness the scene in which Hamilton's renegade exchanges dialogue with Meersman's clueless babe while she stands naked in an outdoor shower — Buñuel shoots them from the thighs down, summoning up antsy prejudices in the 1960 audience even as the characters act as if nothing is odd. White vs. black dictates the plot, but the primary concern is for the body of that underage girl (Meersman is a double for the young Liv Tyler): who will rape her first, who will find out about it, and, finally, how the issue might resolve itself in a hillbilly wedding. In many ways, "The Young One" fits thematically right alongside "Las Hurdes," "Los Olvidados" and even chunks of "Diary of a Chambermaid," with its vision of humankind living on the level of predatory animals (there's lovely footage of a raccoon eating a chicken alive, amid the doomed tarantulas, crabs, bees and rabbit cadavers). A must-have for Buñuelians, this rarely-seen detour is now officially DVD'd alongside his truly forgettable debut in Mexico (and his first full-on feature), "Gran Casino" (1947); both come with explanatory commentaries by cinema historians.



"Broken English" (Magnolia) and "The Young Ones" (Lionsgate) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Rob Zombie on "Halloween"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/rob-zombie-on-halloween.php Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Left, Rob Zombie; below, Tyler Mane and Kristina Klebe in "Halloween," Dimension Films, 2007]


While we tend to collectively groan at the mere announcement of a beloved film being remade, it's easier to be forgiving with genre cinema. That's not to say there's anything in dire need of an upgrade in John Carpenter's 1978 slasher landmark "Halloween," but the idea of a bloody face-lift becomes more intriguing when the plastic surgeon in question is heavy metal superstar-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie ("The Devil's Rejects"). Fresh-faced Scout Taylor-Compton takes over as 2007's Laurie Strode (a part made famous by Jamie Lee Curtis), the victimized younger sister to the white-masked, psychotic mute who spawned numerous sequels, imitators and this very remake, Michael Myers. Whether Zombie's take will be any better than the recent slew of 70s-horror remakes or their sequels ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "The Hills Have Eyes") remains to be seen, but at least his supporting cast of cult talent — Udo Kier, Danny Trejo, Clint Howard, Adrienne Barbeau and Mickey Dolenz (?!) — hints that Zombie's is a genuine labor of psychotronic love. The former White Zombie frontman, who even named his band after a Bela Lugosi horror flick, chatted with me briefly via phone.


Did you have any trepidation tinkering with a classic?


No, not really. [laughs] I didn't have any interest in doing anything with "Halloween" when the opportunity first came up. It wasn't something I was thinking about, so I wasn't really prepared for the offer. But then I thought about it for a while, and you know what? Classic characters and stories can always be told again in a completely different way.


Are there any sacred-cow horror faves that should never be touched?


I don't think that way. You don't want to box yourself in because you never know what's going to happen. If somebody remakes a movie and it's awesome, great. If you don't like it, who gives a shit?


Why do you think Michael Myers has lasted so long as a horror icon, especially since Jason Voorhees from "Friday the 13th" has usurped the silent, masked murderer look?


The first movie is great, so that's a good way to start. For a character that's 30 years old, there's nothing about him that appears dated. Sometimes they come up with these characters which are much more extreme or over the top, so five or ten years down the line, you think, "God, that looks ridiculous." Anything that's trendy or in an "of the moment" scenario always becomes dated, but Michael Myers is so simple and classic that I think it'll always work.


The original "Halloween" featured Laurie Stode as the protagonist, but your update focuses more on Michael Myers' perspective. How does this work since he doesn't speak, and are we to sympathize with the serial killer?


Well, he does speak when he's a child. So really, all his personality and vibe I've set up with him when he's ten. When he does become an adult and isn't speaking anymore, you feel like you've had enough of a glimpse inside his head, that he isn't just a guy in a mask standing there. You feel something, some sense of understanding the character. I mean, it's a conflicted movie. At times, you might feel sympathy, but overall, no. He's a flawed character, to be sure. I'm a fan of making characters a little conflicted because if it's just "good character, bad character," it's too simplistic for my tastes.


Slasher flicks have a very limited, pared-down set of tropes, which have been mined to death in countless sequels, knock-offs, and — no offense — remakes. As both a director and knowledgeable fan, what's left to do in the genre?


I think what's left to do, sort of what I was trying to do with this film, is to make movies more character-driven. Over the years, they've become very gag-driven. How crazy can the kills be? How wild can the scenarios be? That stuff grows tired. You have to be watching a movie about characters you're interested in, or you're just going to get bored. That's why I turned Michael Myers into a character whose journey you follow; same with Laurie, same with Loomis. It's not just about a big guy running around doing horrible things — I mean, who cares? You have to have some sense of what you're watching.


The way I describe it to people, even those working on the movie, I say, "This sounds really weird, but think of this as a real movie." I swear, everyone thinks there are different rules if you're making a horror movie. "Oh, the acting should be like this, and that should be..." Fuck all that bullshit, you know? It doesn't make any sense. That's why I've never been a fan of horror movies that are campy — that drives me crazy. I hate that shit. I want things to be serious. Even a movie that's not a horror movie, like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" — think about how fuckin' intense the shit in that movie is, from Brad Dourif's character killing himself to Nicholson getting the shock treatment. You're so caught up with these real people, it's like you're there living it for real. But when you're making way over-the-top scenarios, I don't know... People watch these things for different reasons. I've never been a big fan of giant special-effects gags where everyone yells and screams. It's like a Roadrunner cartoon.


You mention characters a lot, and your films tend to co-star so many unusual character actors, often from classic genre cinema. Do you write parts specifically for them, or is it all in the casting later?


Well, sometimes I have someone specific in mind for a role. Sometimes I don't. I always knew I wanted William Forsythe for the boyfriend. I always wanted Ken Foree [from the original "Dawn of the Dead"] for the truck driver whom Michael Myers steals his jumpsuit from. You start going through your memory banks and start coming up with stuff.


What about Mickey Dolenz? You don't strike me as a Monkees fan.


How could you not love The Monkees? I think they're the reason I even liked music. When I was a little kid, before I even discovered there was a radio or The Beatles, I watched TV. The first bands I ever saw were The Monkees, The Banana Splits and The Partridge Family. When I was in kindergarten, I thought that was the greatest thing of all time.


Many American horror films of late have been of the "torture-porn" variety. Do you think there are sociopolitical implications to that, just as when slashers reactionarily appeared in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate?


Well, I think there was, back in the day. All the directors of those films have always said that, like Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper or George Romero. But I don't know about now. Do you really feel that the war in Iraq is affecting the average person? I don't get that feeling. If there was a draft, I think it might be affecting everybody, but people just carry on with their lives. They're more concerned with Paris Hilton than the Marines.


So you believe it's a coincidence?


I think so, but maybe the trend you're talking about is losing its luster. Maybe it's hitting too close to home, and something like "1408" is grabbing people's attention because it's supernatural and seems more like a horror movie. I do know a lot of people who say, "I want it to be scary, not gross."


You're known for your encyclopedic knowledge of psychotronic cinema. What's the sickest, most depraved film you've ever seen?


I don't know if it's the sickest, but "I Spit on Your Grave" is always one of those films that you're like, "Eh." You know what I mean? There are depraved films like "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS," but there's still some stylistic element to it, so that you can watch it. But "I Spit on Your Grave," what's the point of this? It's just such a nasty film, and you're like, "What the hell?!"


Your artistic reputation is so morbid. Do you ever kick back with a good romantic comedy?


I'll watch almost anything unless it's total shit, then I won't want to waste my time. I don't have any prejudice against movies; a good movie is a good movie. I think the last one I got out to see was "Knocked Up," and I thought that was great. "Superbad" looks really funny, I'll probably go see that. I like comedies when they seem inspired. It's the same thing with everything else: too many comedies feel like cookie-cutter shit.



"Halloween" opens August 31st (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: August 31st, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/opening-this-week-august-31st.php Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Melissa McCarthy and Ryan Reynolds in "The Nines," Newmarket Films, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Balls of Fury"

Director Ben Garant of "Reno 911!" fame directs this underdog sports comedy about a former champion ping-pong player (Dan Fogler) who's recruited by the FBI to infiltrate ("Enter the Dragon"-style) an underground tournament in order to take down the crime boss who runs the event (Christopher Walken).

Opens wide (official site).


"Death Sentence"

Kevin Bacon dons his best Bronson impression in this new thriller from "Saw" creator James Wan about a regular man who sets out on a mission to kill each thug involved in the brutal beating of his son.

Opens wide (official site).


"Exiled"

Legendary Hong Kong action director Johnny To returns with another Triad-centric tale about hit men who are sent to Macau to take out a renegade compatriot trying to turn over a new leaf with his wife and newborn baby.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Freshman Orientation"

A typical Midwestern 18-year-old college freshman eager to delve into the college party life pretends to be gay in order to be with the girl of his dreams in this Ryan Shiraki-directed comedy. We're just glad the film's distributor didn't stick with the original title, "Home of Phobia," or else it would've required a "National Lampoon's" sponsorship.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Halloween"

It's likely this much ballyhooed remake of the classic John Carpenter slasher flick won't top the original, but at least this "reimagination" is helmed by horror master Rob Zombie. The "House of 1000 Corpses" director ditches his scattershot visual style for a more classic understanding of Michael Meyers' (Tyler Mane of "X-Men" fame) psychosis.

Opens wide (official site).


"Ladron Que Roba A Ladron"

Two former thieves reunite to rob a TV infomercial guru/former thief who made millions exploiting poor Latino immigrants, enlisting the help of day laborers to pull off the heist in this Joe Menendez-directed thriller.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Monastery: Mr. Vig & the Nun"

This documentary directed by Pernille Rose Grǿnkjær chronicles the blossoming relationship between an 82-year-old bachelor who has never known love and a young Russian nun who becomes a part of his life. This Danish film won the Joris Ivens Award at the 2006 Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Self-Medicated"

Monty Lapica wrote, directed, produced and starred in this autobiographical tale of a troubled young man who is kidnapped by a private company and forced to participate in an unorthodox psychiatric program funded by his drug-addicted mother. The film has been traveling the festival circuit for the past two years and won over 40 international film awards.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Nines"

John August's first foray into direction sounds a bit like "Inland Empire" meets "Adaptation," a metaphysical take on the creative process in which a troubled actor, a television show runner, and an acclaimed video game designer find their lives intertwining in mysterious and unsettling ways. Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy each play three different roles in this film that must be making Charlie Kaufman smile.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA["Exiled"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/exiled.php Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Exiled," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


Watching "Exiled," you get the sense that director Johnnie To believes that old expression about a picture being worth a thousand words. The film is about a group of old friends, gangsters who grew apart and who are now thrown back together by chance. To hints at what drove the five men in separate directions, but he lets the audience infer most of the backstory from the juxtaposition of two photos: one new and one from years earlier, when the men were still boys.


To, like a lot of action directors, doesn't have much use for words in general; the most important exchanges in "Exiled," as in most of his pictures, are of bullets, rather than dialogue. Get ready for shoot-outs, and you better like them absurd-slash-borderline ridiculous. The film is filled from start-to-finish with massive gunfights that rival anything in the bombastic To's oeuvre. Every couple minutes another sequence begins and men, bullets, exaggerated puffs of blood, and even large doors fly and spin through the air. Whatever else the title may refer to, it also reflects the fact that real-world physics have no place in this film.


Complexity and style are important to action sequences, and "Exiled" has enough of both for ten films. But these scenes also require clarity to bring the whole thing together, something To often misses. Some of the gunfights, like a beautiful (if men desperately killing one another can be described as "beautiful") sequence in an underground clinic, are lit harshly to create dark shadows and intense atmosphere. But they're so darn murky, and the exchanges so full of combatants wearing dark suits, that it can be very difficult to tell moment-to-moment who is shooting, who is getting shot, and why. One minute you gasp at an intense blast of coolness (say, the way To stages that clinic scene in a room full of curtains that can be thrust about like bullfighters' capes) the next you're scratching your head trying to figure out which character just fell out a window.


Regardless, those scenes are breathtakingly stylish and they add to the overall mood, which is dark, foreboding, and incredibly manly. Heavily inspired by the Western, and by Leone in particular (Strong silent types! Triangular standoffs! Grizzled men smoking cigars!), "Exiled" extends the gangsters-as-frontier outlaws further. It's set on the island of Macao in 1998 as a change of leadership is about to take place and our protagonists and their "old ways" are about to be made obsolete: think Peckinpah's "Ride the High Country." Lawlessness rules: the only policeman in sight is a bumbling oaf who plays the comic relief. Instead the gangsters live by their own code of ethics: one that dictates that you can try to kill a man one moment, and then help him refurbish his apartment the next.


That hilarious sequence comes early in the film and establishes the dynamic between the friends: Blaze (Anthony Wong) and his partner have come to kill Wo (Nick Cheung); To (Francis Ng) and his have come to protect him. After a stalemate, the five agree to table their differences temporarily and work together to get some money for Wo's wife and infant. It's the appearance of Wo's baby, in fact, that stops the first bout of gunplay. The men are killers, but not the cold-blooded variety.


Though the action is a bit murkier than, say, To's "Breaking News" (2004), the characters are richer and the story more satisfying than his recent (and arguably over-praised) "Election and "Triad Election." In the end, in the midst of a showdown to end all showdowns, there is one more photograph, and this one speaks even more loudly than the others. It will linger in your memory long after the "cool" parts with the guns have faded.



"Exiled" opens in New York on August 31st (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #42: The Fall Film Preview]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/ifc-news-podcast-42-the-fall-f.php Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Anton Corbijn's "Control" opens October 10th, Weinstein Company, 2007]


As the (metaphorically) dark days of August come to a close, we prepare ourselves for fall and award season. This week on the IFC News podcast, we pick out ten films we're looking forward to in the upcoming months.


Download now (MP3: 29:31 minutes, 27.7 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: August 24th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/opening-this-week-august-24th.php Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Samuel L. Jackson in "Resurrecting the Champ," Yari Film Group Releasing, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Closing Escrow"

Three eccentric families hoping to buy a home collide when they each decide they want the same house in this mockumentary by newbie director Armen Kaprelian. The film premiered earlier at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Las Vegas.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Dedication"

Indie fave actor Justin Theroux steps behind the camera in "Dedication," which goes the Woody Allen route (though perhaps a bit more frantic) in this New York-based romance about a misogynistic children's book author (an unlikable Billy Crudup, which we totally believe) and an untested illustrator (a highly mascara-ed Mandy Moore) who begin to fall in love shortly after being paired to work together. Theroux's directorial debut features a soundtrack out of Zach Braff's wet dreams, including music by Deerhoof, Cat Power, The Stokes and more.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Deep Water"

The producers of 2003's "Touching the Void" present a documentary that takes a look back to 1968, when a collection of nine men competed in a nautical journey to see who the first would be to circle the globe. The story focuses on one particular competitor, Donald Crowhurst, who eventually would go missing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Hannah Takes the Stairs"

"LOL" director Joe Swanberg co-wrote his new feature about a recent college graduate (Greta Gerwig) who embarks on relationships with two coworkers ("Mutual Appreciation" director Andrew Bujalski and Kent Osborne) while hoping to keep her friendships intact. The movie was a hit earlier at this year's South by Southwest Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Illegal Tender"

Violence is the name of the game in this urban thriller from punctuated "Empire" creator Franc. Reyes. A young Latino man (Rick Gonzalez) learns from his mother (Wanda De Jesus) the true nature of his murdered father's past while on the run from a crime boss's henchmen. The film was produced by "urban thriller" king John Singleton.

Opens wide (official site).


"Mr. Bean's Holiday"

We don't really understand why the original "Mr. Bean" film deserved a sequel, but hey, that's what late August is for, right? Destined to be forgettable, this sequel finds the beloved Rowan Atkinson character traveling to France when one of his video diaries somehow winds up as a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Truly a premise only a film school graduate could dream of.

Opens wide (official site).


"Resurrecting the Champ"

Samuel L. Jackson gets all homeless in this new sportsish drama from "The Contender" director Rod Lurie. A young newspaper reporter (Josh Hartnett, who badly needs a hit... er, not of drugs) encounters a homeless man (Jackson) who used to be a renown boxer and who many believed was dead.

Opens wide (official site).


"Right At Your Door"

A dirty bomb goes off in Los Angeles, jamming freeways and spreading a toxic cloud in this indie apocalyptic thriller from Hollywood vet Chris Gorak.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"September Dawn"

Finally, an honest and respectful film about September 11th...1857, that is. A group of settlers en route to California encounter a Mormon sect in Utah and are slaughtered for religious purposes in this fictional take on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The film finds itself in a storm of controversy on both sides, while we wonder if there's a role somewhere out there that Jon Voight won't take.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Hottest State"

Ethan Hawke directs, writes and stars in his latest directorial feature, based on one of his earliest novels about a struggling young actor (Mark Webber) who crisscrosses the country in pursuit of an elusive musician ("Maria Full of Grace"'s Catalina Sandino Moreno, who really needs to be in more). Early reviews of the film have been somewhat negative, as critics claim Hawke fails to get the best out of his performers, who play characters who are mostly unlikable. Ouch.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Nanny Diaries"

Poised for a release earlier this spring, this film was pushed back to fall by the Weinstein Company due of Oscar hopes, only to be settled into a late August release because, well, we're guessing someone actually watched it. Guessing that both Brittany Murphy and Kate Hudson were unavailable, directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (of "American Splendor") settled on Scarlett Johansson to play the college student who goes to work as a nanny for a rich New York family. Main reason to see the film? Laura Linney as the uptight Mrs. X, who we bet steals every scene.

Opens wide (official site).


"War"

Jet Li plays baddie while Jason Statham seeks revenge in this no-nonsense (or all-nonsense) action thriller directed by music video vet Philip G. Atwell.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Seth Gordon on "The King of Kong"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/seth-gordon-on-the-king-of-kon.php Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Left, Steve Wiebe in "The King of Kong," below, director Seth Gordon, Picturehouse, 2007]


As evidenced by their behavior in the stellar new documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," competitive video gamers are an insular and suspicious lot. So how did director Seth Gordon earn their trust and gain access to their world? "I'm a geek," he shrugs, "and I believe an arcade game record is a completely legitimate and kind of awesome thing to go for. I think that came across in the interviews."


The record in question is the world's highest score in Donkey Kong, an old arcade game involving a little guy leaping over barrels thrown at him by a disgruntled, woman-stealing monkey. Against this backdrop is set one of the most exciting real-life competitions ever captured on film, between perennial video game champion and current record holder Billy Mitchell and dark-horse challenger and high school science teacher Steve Wiebe, but, as Gordon noted in our interview, "Kong" is about more than just the battle over the record.


In between updates on the movie's protagonists and admissions of his own gaming obsessions ("Paperboy and Karate Champ," the director confesses), Gordon shared some revealing insights into his characters' psyches and explained why he wants to remake his documentary in fictionalized form.


When someone breaks a world record in Donkey Kong, how long does the game last?


To get to the kill screen [the near-mythological last board where Donkey Kong kills you for no reason], it takes probably two and a half hours of uninterrupted play. You can't stop. You can't go to the bathroom, nothing. It takes quite a bit of commitment and focus.


People talk about how hard Donkey Kong is in the film, but I don't think you realize just how difficult it truly is until you try it. I played it after I watched the doc and I couldn't even get pass the first screen.


It is crazy hard. It's really easy to comprehend, but also almost impossible to play well. And if you're Steve and Billy — I don't come out and say this explicitly in the doc, but they are really the only two people in the world who are anywhere near that level. It's just that hard.


How did you hear about Billy and Steve and what made you decide to make a movie about them?


Well I had been going to Funspot [an arcade and the site of one of Steve's record-breaking attempts] since I was a kid. And I just loved that place; they are family-owned and they give tokens for report cards if you get good grades. So I would save up grades all year and then turn them in. I just thought that place was the best place on earth. When we came across Steve Wiebe through a friend of a friend, I felt like he was a really nice guy but not necessarily good as a subject of a film, because he didn't seem remarkable to me at first. But I knew the video game world was kind of extraordinary because of my experience at Funspot. And I knew those competitions were still happening.


As we researched, we realized that all roads led to Billy Mitchell, who I'd never met and who, from what I could tell, was an interesting guy. So we went to meet him and he was like an encyclopedia of information. He knew everything about everything. But the one thing that he left out was Steve Wiebe's name. He avoided it like a landmine. Steve was the nicest guy in the world as far as I could tell, but he was like Voldemort to Billy Mitchell, like the name that shall not be spoken.


Has Billy seen the film and reacted to it yet?


Curiously, he has reacted to it, although he hasn't seen it. [laughs] He's read reviews online and he's got a general sense of what's in the movie and he really doesn't like what he's heard. I think he feels like we captured a moment of his life that isn't representative of him in general and for that reason he's frustrated by the whole affair. But from our perspective, we were there for two years, we had the cameras rolling and we represented what we saw. It's not like we put words in anybody's mouth.


Billy's an incredibly manipulative guy; he's constantly playing mind games with the people around him. Did you ever feel like he was manipulating you?


Totally. We came to realize that if you're Billy and you're a master gamer, once you're done mastering the game you start playing games with people and we were definitely part of that.


He led us to believe he was going to go [to Funspot] and then he didn't. We had arranged for all these people to be part of production and we flew people in, and then he didn't show up. That was so confusing and so infuriating. As you saw in the film, he sent that tape with Doris so that he was effectively participating in the competition. We felt kind of used. But at the same time that's when the story went from being about the competition to being a portrait of these two competitors.


He's also got all these lackeys who do his dirty work, spying on Steve, practically breaking into his house, and they seem so loyal to him despite his scheming. Why are they so devoted to him?


Billy's very charming and charismatic. And, to a certain extent, the more important that Billy is — because he is the most visible member of that community — the more credible the whole community is. Most people aren't even aware that this world of classic gamers exists. And for those who are aware, the reason they know about it is Billy. He was on "The Today Show" last week. He's got a huge level of exposure and a persona that's like something from the WWE. I think it's in all the gamers' best interests to keep that alive. That's my only sort of explanation for the crap we saw. [laughs]


I grew up playing video games, and I still do — but I play new games now, not the ones I played when I was 13. Why are these guys still playing these 25-year-old games?


I think there's a level of puzzle-solving to the old games that is very addictive. No one knew these games had an ending before these guys discovered those endings, because they weren't designed into the games; they're just accidents. Each of the games runs out of memory at some point. And you have to be extraordinarily committed to get to that place. You basically exercise the scientific method for so long that you go places that no one's gone before. That's essentially why they love these games so much.


New games aren't as challenging: you can pause the game, you can save your progress, you can enter a cheat code and skip some levels ahead. Those things that make the newer games so much more lush make them less interesting to these guys, and frankly, a lot less pure.


You're making a fictionalized version of "The King of Kong." What can you do in a fictional version of this story that you couldn't do in the documentary? To me, the documentary's almost perfect — and it's crazier than any fiction story.


I've definitely heard that from a number of people. The primary goal of the remake is to get the story out to a wider audience. Plus, some of the things that were just talking heads in the doc we are now going to be able to be see; as opposed to people talking about the break-in, and talking about Roy Awesome's past with Billy. If we can bring that to life I think it will get a lot more interesting.


Okay, so if you had to be one of them, who would rather be: Billy or Steve?


[laughs] That's a totally loaded question!


I know. But it's also kind of the point of the movie.


Yeah. Steve is the hero, but Billy's the star. [laughs] Honestly, probably Steve, even though that means I wouldn't be on a Wheaties box someday.



"The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" is now in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA["Inland Empire," "Puzzlehead"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/inland-empire-puzzlehead.php Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Inland Empire," Absurda / Rhino, 2006]


How lucky are we to have David Lynch? Virtually no other notable filmmaker in these United States can so be designated as a self-directed, independent artist with his/her own unique aesthetic and a happy willingness to eschew trad careerism, and even salary, in pursuit of the eccentric sublime. Set aside the consideration of things "Lynchian" — an art-culture realm that will doubtless survive us all — and you're still faced with perhaps the most defiant and uncompromised voice in modern American cinema. He's so revered and hallowed, if not broadly consumed, that he could at this stage in his game easily round up global funding for a "Mulholland Dr. 2" — but instead, Lynch hunkered down and began making short digital films for his subscription website, and then began shooting disconnected scenes with his already-obsolete digital camera, and then asked Canal+ if they'd mind funding a feature cobbled out of it all, and they said sure. When the result proved to be a three-hour semi-narrative filled with uncorked mayhem from pre-civilized Lynchistan, the man simply distributed it himself. Now, he's releasing "Inland Empire" on DVD, alone again, naturally.


The arguments are still raging among critics on whether or not Lynch's torrential and demanding act of movie-movie provocation was in fact the best American film of 2006. (It had, in any case, little significant competition; if your local critic dished it, you know where you stand in the future in regards to that featherhead.) Trapped in its own bell jar, "Inland Empire" — named after the Southern California region not because it's set there, but because Lynch simply liked the name — summons the likes of Bergman's "Persona" and Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" in its allusive structure and suggestions of a fracturing female psyche, but only because the movie behaves like a narrative deprivation tank, forcing you to scramble for corollaries. There are no visible marks of influence, homage or even traditional psychology. It's one of the rare films that teaches you — obliquely — how to watch it. Summary is predictably impossible. Often the sense of "Inland Empire," as it jaggedly leaps from absurdist non sequitur to psychodramatic set-up to lurching creep-out, is that there's no orthodox there there, just dreams within dreams within movies within nightmares. Laura Dern, stretched on the rack of being a crazy auteur's favorite go-to girl (a scouringly fearless performance, or performances), shows up in a variety of personas; it's symptomatic of Lynch's sensibility that we're never sure how many. (There's a Hollywood actress, a working-class wife, a battered Southern hooker and scores of other glimpses.) Several of these could be contained within the movies-within-the-movie, or not, or both — as a roomful of prostitutes dance to "The Loco Motion," other figures float stories and notions of murder, the rabbit-human family from Lynch's 2002 "Rabbits" shorts endure obscurely menacing domestic moments in their living room, movie sets open onto real homes and mysterious neighborhoods, melodramatic interviews are held with no clear purpose, and so spectacularly on.


Lynch's newfound devotion to primitive digital video reflects his disregard for diegetic cohesion — the uglier and more fractured the film is, the more Lynch regards it as peculiarly beautiful and, vitally, exuding its own logic. It's difficult to deny, after seeing it, that he has a point. Think of "Inland Empire" as an epic version of the radiator scenes from "Eraserhead," or the Tower Theatre scene in "Mulholland Dr.," without those films' already semi-conscious contexts.


It's more of an epic-sized underground montage film than a "movie" as we commonly know it, and endurance of the film's length is pivotal: the free-associative chaos becomes its own context, and as a viewer you're living in a rule-free cinematic space, where film is merely another form of consciousness, not an alternate reality you can forget as you occupy it. Lynch likes to characterize the film as an "experience," not an entertainment product you consume, and though he would never dream of being programmatic, "Inland Empire" is a close cousin to Artaud's concept of a Theater of Cruelty, intended to unravel complacent expectations and create a cathartic crisis in the very fact of spectatorship.


Or Lynch was just playing with the inexpensive technology, unhampered by Hollywood overhead. Either way, the surest way to find disappointment in Lynch's Byzantine, exhaustive howl is to hunt for codes and readings, while ignoring the sensual textures of life in the underlit corridors of his imaginary space. The familiar distance and omniscience of ordinary filmgoing are simply not factors in this hectic equation. If you're "open," as Lynch has said many times in his TM-inflected publicity interviews, it's something like a new frontier. Don't miss the extra disc of superego-less supps, including outtakes (some spectacularly spooky, and none so different from "IE" that the film couldn't've been an hour longer), a behind-the-scenes survey of Lynch's unique methodology on the set, production tale-telling, the man's recipe for cooking quinoa with broccoli, and more.


Occupying other outskirts: James Bai's microcinema genre-riff "Puzzlehead" is so cheap, it has only its ideas and speculative frisson to sell it. It's a post-apocalyptic, A.I. melodrama because the low-budge narration says it is, using, à la "Alphaville," the more barren and anonymous stretches of Brooklyn as a lawless wasteland and focusing on an eccentric scientist (Stephen Galaida) who uses illegal technology and his own "synaptic map" to build an android that looks just like him. Bai's smartest conceptual flourish was giving the retrospective narration over wholly to the robot (Galaida, without a beard & glasses), whose poetic ruminations about human life as he'll never know it neatly support the film's threadbare frame. Like Greg Pak's "Robot Stories" (both of them disarming advances on robo-emotionalism over Spielberg's "A.I."), "Puzzlehead" is actually about love — the crisis between creator and creation begins when the latter takes a bullet for a local shopgirl during a hold-up, inspiring the lonely, meth-spaced doctor to disable the doppelganger, shave and pass himself off as the 'droid. Shot on 16mm and hampered by stiff post-dubbing, Bai's movie deserved a real budget, but the heart and head are working overtime.



"Inland Empire" (Absurda/Rhino) and "Puzzlehead" (Lifesize Ent.) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #41: The Actor-Director]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/ifc-news-podcast-41-the-actord.php Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Mandy Moore in "Dedication," the directorial debut of actor Justin Theroux, First Look International, 2007]


Charlie Chaplin did it. Orson Welles did it. Heck, Emilio Estevez still does it. There are plenty of good reasons for actors to get behind the camera and give directing a whirl (and not a few bad ones). This week on the IFC News podcast, we look over the recent rash of films from actor-directors, salute some of the best work from actor-directors in the past, and pick out some major themes from the films they tend to turn out.


Download now (MP3: 30 minutes, 27.4 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[When B-Listers Go Abroad]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/when-blisters-go-abroad.php Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 What do Robert De Niro and Coolio have in common? First, they've both worked with Michelle Pfeiffer -- De Niro in last week's "Stardust," Coolio in the classic "Gangsta's Paradise" music video from 1995's "Dangerous Minds." Second, they've both starred in a foreign production. Further similarities, however, end there: while De Niro's trip overseas was motivated by a desire to work with Bernardo Bertolucci on 1976's epic "1900," Coolio, like a growing number of struggling B-movie actors and wannabe thespians, was just looking for another opportunity to show off his acting chops. Those chops are, unsurprisingly, pretty meager, but they still have value in the international film marketplace, where the presence of an American -- any American, no matter how dubiously talented -- translates into cachet (or at least novelty value) and, hopefully, extra receipts at the local box office. Thus, movies like this weekend's "Marigold," a joint US-Indian venture headlined by "Heroes"' Ali Larter that actually plays with the idea of unwanted American talent heading to Bollywood. And Russian gangster films featuring Michael Madsen. And Turkish action-comedies starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Herewith, a few choice examples of the budding phenomenon.


Gary Busey in "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq."Billy Zane and Gary Busey in "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq" (2006)

How to revive a flagging career? If you're Zane or Busey, you find an anti-American propaganda film and sign on the dotted line. Zane stars as a U.S. military monster (and Christian zealot) who subscribes to a personal kill-'em-all Middle East policy, and Busey -- in a role seemingly designed to once and for all ruin his credibility -- lends minor support as a Jewish-American doctor with a fondness for carving up Iraqi corpses and selling their organs on the international black market. Based on a popular Turkish television show of the same name, and using a real-life event as its narrative foundation, the film is little more than a shoddily constructed exploitation film that mixes references to Abu Ghraib with the occasional sight of Zane wearing a safari hat and brightly colored scarf. Given the wholly predictable backlash that greeted news of the film in the States, one can't help but wonder why either actor wanted to court such notoriety, especially in the case of Busey, whose subplot is so meager and tacked-on that his minimal employment (and, one must assume, minimal paycheck) couldn't have been worth the negative press.


Michael Madsen in "Velvet Revolution."Michael Madsen in "Jacked$" (2004) and "Velvet Revolution" (2005)

"Reservoir Dogs" set Michael Madsen up for life, providing him with an unending stream of jobs playing tough guys, menacing criminals and/or homicidal maniacs. Given his flourishing career as the lead in direct-to-video clunkers, however, it's hard to imagine Madsen's motivation for traveling to Russia for by-the-books gangster comedy "Jacked$" -- perhaps it was because the role of an underworld kingpin offered him the chance to act pissed off while obsessing over Elvis Presley? Regardless, his experience making Russian music video director Oleg Stepchenko's feature debut must have been a happy one, since he re-teamed with the filmmaker one year later for "Velvet Revolution," another derivative piece of crime cinema crap that opens with Madsen blatantly rehashing his "Dogs" glory by chatting it up in a diner and, shortly thereafter, torturing a man to death. After those two introductory scenes, he basically disappears from the film. Which, even in light of the ensuing lameness, isn't all that disappointing.


Malcolm McDowell in "Mirror Wars: Reflection One."Malcolm McDowell, Armand Assante and Rutger Hauer in "Mirror Wars: Reflection One" (2005)

"Mirror Wars" is, in essence, a 116-minute commercial for a Russian fighter jet. And what better filmic way to sell a fighter jet than to enlist the services of Malcolm McDowell and Armand Assante, two actors intimately familiar with the art of crashing and burning. Still, it's hard to fault the two for seeming lost and bewildered throughout this incomprehensible political-espionage adventure, which involves McDowell's terrorist's plans to steal a super jet so he can then shoot down Air Force One and, consequently, initiate a new Cold War. Scenery-chewing is apparently de rigueur, and both Americans are up to the task, albeit not enough to prevent every instance of human speech from making one crave more aerial plane footage. At least they're given something to do, which is more than can be said about Rutger Hauer, who for reasons unknown decided to fly all the way to Russia to film a one-minute cameo.


Jean-Claude Van Damme in "Sinav."Jean-Claude Van Damme in "Sinav" (2006)

The Muscles From Brussels has never gotten much stateside respect, but Van Damme-it, anyone who can do splits on a kitchen countertop in his underwear and maintain a straight face is okay in my book. Having been consigned to direct-to-video purgatory for years, the former action star has recently begun peddling his brawny wares on international shores, and this recent Turkish film -- about a group of teens determined to steal a university entrance exam, "Mission Impossible"-style -- finds Van Damme in all his suave glory. Or at least, that's what I can glean from the trailer (watch it on YouTube), as I was unfortunately unable to procure a copy of the film for full analysis. Van Damme reportedly so loved the script that he worked for free as "The Thief." And, from the sight of him roundhouse kicking a young boy while decked out in designer duds, I'd recommend that Turkish audiences prepare to have their hearts stolen.


Coolio in "China Strike Force."Coolio in "China Strike Force" (2000)

"A Lam-Bo-Geeni! It's Eye-talian!" With those initial lines in Stanley Tong's 2000 Chinese crime film, Coolio makes a bid for international cinematic superstardom. And fails. Hilariously, and often. Starring as a gangster named Coolio (presumably to keep confusion to a bare minimum) who's in China for a big drug deal, Coolio delivers plenty of cheesy gangster boasts while seizing every opportunity to engage B-movie staple Mark Dacascos in playfully racist banter. His perpetual bug-eyes and exaggerated movements seem perfectly at home amidst the rest of the cast's similarly cartoonish expressions. Nonetheless, it's his penchant for yelling dialogue like the type of knucklehead who thinks foreigners will better understand him if he dials up the volume -- a habit made funnier by the fact that his co-stars all speak English -- that truly catapults his performance into the loony stratosphere. Well, that and his reference to "Chairman Mayo."

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<![CDATA[When B-Listers Go Abroad (photo)]]> Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008569 2007-08-13 00:00:00 closed closed when_blisters_go_abroad_photo inherit 8569 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Delirious"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/delirious.php Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Michael Pitt and Steve Buscemi in "Delirious," Peace Arch Releasing, 2007]


In "Delirious," stars Michael Pitt and Steve Buscemi explore the mystique of the pop culture icon. It's a subject both actors have tackled before: Pitt as Gus Van Sant's version of Kurt Cobain in his beautiful "Last Days," and Buscemi very recently in his film "Interview" with Sienna Miller. These talented men are well within their comfort zone and, working from a script from director Tom DiCillo, they don't give us a great deal we haven't seen from them before.


Buscemi plays Les Galantine, a slimy, low-level paparazzi eking out a paltry existence shooting pictures of celebrities like K'Harma (Alison Lohman). Les, in other words, is a bottom-feeder, and the secret to living with yourself when you are a bottom-feeder is convincing yourself you're not one. To do that, Les needs to find someone even worse off than he is, which is where Pitt comes in. Recycling his air of druggy confusion and seemingly his entire wardrobe from "Last Days," he plays Toby, a homeless New Yorker, who hooks up with Les and becomes his assistant.


In exchange for his unpaid services, Les shows Toby the ropes of the publicity game. The funniest material comes from these scenes, one of which features Les giving a contact free shots at their charity ("Soap Stars Against STDs") benefit in order to get all the free food and goodie bags he can carry.


DiCillo's movie is stridently anti celebrity culture but it's a bit too broad; Les and Toby spend a lot of time following around one star getting cosmetic surgery on his wang, while Lohman's Britney Hilton, who spends almost all of her screen time wearing nothing but a bra, makes airheaded proclamations like "I want to make a fragrance." It's worth a couple smirks but not many laughs. You can find more insightful swipes and bigger chuckles at idiot stars' expense every week on "The Soup."


The "shocking" twist that kicks off the third act is certainly unexpected, but it's also totally unbelievable. Pitt's a convincing hobo, but maybe too convincing; he dumpster dives with such incredible conviction that you can't help but become concerned for his mental and physical health. And Buscemi's attempts to turn Les into Travis Bickle (he even arms himself with a metaphorical camera gun) look like just that: one actor borrowing another's shtick.



"Delirious" opens in limited release on August 15th (official site).

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<![CDATA["The King of Kong"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/the-king-of-kong.php Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Steve Wiebe in "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," Picturehouse, 2007]


"Video games aren't meant to be fun," intones one of the subjects of the riveting new documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters." This is utter nonsense, but not to the man speaking it, who believe it completely. To these guys who devote their lives to classic arcade games, the pursuit isn't recreation; it's validation. Their self-images are wrapped up in these oversized cabinets, and they take them very seriously. Which, of course, makes what they do and the extreme lengths they will go to to protect their records and discourage others from surpassing them, completely fascinating and altogether hilarious.


Though "The King of Kong" gives a nice portrait of the entire classic gaming subculture, the movie is primarily a battle of wits, smarts and nerve between two fundamentally different men: Billy Mitchell, the so-called "gamer of the century," and Steve Wiebe, an average joe living in the 'burbs. Back in the early '80s when being a great gamer was like being a rock star, Billy was gaming's Mick Jagger: frontman and spokesperson with the big hair and a bigger attitude. He made a lot of money playing games, with which he started a profitable hot sauce empire. Billy reasons that he's been so lucky in life that there has to be somebody out there who's got it as bad as he's got it good.


Cut to Steve. Back in the early '80s, Steve was a nobody. He certainly wasn't Mick Jagger — hell, he wasn't even Ron Wood — despite the fact that Steve actually played music in bands around Seattle for years. But they never really went anywhere, and he floundered from job to job. One of his good buddies notes that he's never seen anyone cry quite as much as Steve.


The two couldn't be more different. Their only common ground is the old arcade game Donkey Kong; the two are, without question, the best players in the entire world. What is in doubt is who is better than the other. "The King of Kong" watches Steve's assault on Billy's record and Billy's extensive attempts to stack the deck against his opponent. When Steve tapes his record-breaking round, Billy, who sits on the governing board of the organization that officiates classic arcade games, sends some of his cronies to take the machine apart and examine it for inconsistencies. Though they find none, he still refuses to acknowledge Steve's score until he does it in a public arcade on an officially recognized machine. So Steve travels across the country, beats the record again, only to see the spotlight yanked away once again when a tape suddenly surfaces from Billy setting an even higher score. And so on.


Billy Mitchell — who, by the way, is almost exclusively referred to by both his first and last names, even by his parents! — is one of the great villains of the movies. Totally full of himself and draped in the colors of the American flag, this phantom menace never engages his enemy directly, playing long-distance head games with Steve from his home in the meaning-soaked town of Hollywood, Florida. The tension surrounding whether Billy and Steve will finally actually face-off against one another becomes so great that I audibly gasped the first time the two appeared in the same room.


Director Seth Gordon had no choice about the subject of his characters' obsessions, but he couldn't have picked a more perfect metaphor for Steve's quest to defeat Billy than Donkey Kong. In Kong, you play as Mario as he tries to rescue his girlfriend from the clutches of a giant ape by scaling a construction site while the gorilla showers you with barrels and fire and other pitfalls. If you do manage to reach the top of the screen (a feat I was unable to accomplish even once when I played the game recently), Kong grabs the girl and climbs to the next level; cruelly, no matter how many boards you clear, you will never rescue your lady. The ultimate success in "Kong" comes by reaching "The Kill Screen," so named because the game literally murders you for no reason at all. Without spoiling too much, "The King of Kong" is much the same, an endless chase for an unattainable goal. Steve and Mario think they've reached the end, but Billy and Kong yank the prize just a little bit further out of reach.


Gordon has stumbled onto one of the most compelling nonfiction stories I have ever seen, and he has captured it beautifully. This movie has just about everything you could conceivably want: outrageous characters (and an amazing villain, of course), big conflict and an endless supply of plot twists. The epilogue of "The King of Kong" brings of flurry of updates that have happened since the movie ended, and I suspect there are more developments to come in time for the DVD. There is no end to Donkey Kong and there isn't one yet for this battle. I can't wait to see what happens next.



"The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" opens in limited release on August 17th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Tom DiCillo on "Delirious"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/tom-dicillo-on-delirious.php Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Left, Michael Pitt in "Delirious"; below, Tom DiCillo on set, Peace Arch Releasing, 2007]


Tom DiCillo comes to the table with a truckload of indie cred, from his early-career cinematographer gigs on Jim Jarmusch's "Permanent Vacation" and "Stranger Than Paradise," to his leap into writing and directing with 1991's "Johnny Suede" (starring a relatively unknown Brad Pitt, long-rumored to be the inspiration for the self-absorbed Hollywood actor slumming it in DiCillo's 1995 hit "Living in Oblivion"). That DiCillo isn't more famous after premiering his sixth feature at Sundance this year is particularly ironic, considering the premise of his latest: "Delirious" takes a satirical bite out of celebrity-worship culture and pathetic, petty behavior displayed by those who want to be a part of it. Steve Buscemi stars as a deluded, sad-sack NYC paparazzo who reluctantly takes a wide-eyed homeless kid (Michael Pitt) under his wing, until their relationship becomes strained — comically so — after Pitt's puppy-dog crush on a pop diva (Alison Lohman) somehow springboards him into celebrity status. DiCillo, who has recently started blogging on the film's website, sat down with me to discuss fame in the digital age.


What is becoming of our society? Is this our downfall, worshipping the Paris Hiltons of the world?


I've put a lot of thought into it. Now, just because I think of these things doesn't make them valid; they're just my theories. But certainly, if you have eyeballs, you look around and see what appears to be this fungus that's growing. What do you call it when something keeps doubling on itself? It's a bizarre focus of attention on something that I find both fascinating and terrifying. I did a lot of research about this. Neil Gabler wrote a great book about celebrity [entitled "Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity"], in which he detailed some of mankind's development of fame. It used to be that people were famous for doing something. In the earliest times, if a bear attacked a village, and a guy went out with his spear and killed the bear by himself, that became a real thing that was perpetuated, sometimes for centuries. But it's only been in the last five or ten years, this idea of being famous for doing nothing.


What event do you think instigated this change?


The explosion of the information age. Any piece of information, whether it's visual, verbal or whatever, gets spewed out into the world instantaneously. Anybody can do it, so that means anybody can be famous. I mean, look at all the people who want to be on YouTube: "Look at me! Look at me!" Why should we look at you? Why do you feel someone should look at you? I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be sanctimonious, I'm just saying. One of the things Gabler talks about is people being satisfied with what they do. That, whatever your job, whatever that thing you do, it satisfies you. You shouldn't feel the need to have the entire world not only know who you are, but to give you validation. That's something I'm really interested in, this sense of worth and worthlessness. That's more prevalent today than I've ever seen before. People are feeling that, my god, if Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan get this much attention for doing nothing, what am I? How can I be valued? That's one thing it does, and the other is: "Well, let me have that, too! I want that." People don't really feel comfortable today; I don't think people have a sense of what their place is in the world. For a lot of people, the world has become a place with no value on it. That's a tough thing for any human being to deal with.


Tom DiCillo on the set of "Delirious."Could a backlash divert this trend to any extent? Like, now that all these party girls are getting busted and going to jail regularly, will people ever wise up and realize fame for fame's sake is a silly goal?


That's a good question, I don't know. Even now, with Lindsay going back into rehab — she just got out, for chrissakes, and people are fascinated to hear about it! I think the entire world, not just America, is fixated on some idea of fame or celebrity. If the entire world tells you that you're an incredible person, you never have to think about it: "I don't have to go to a shrink! The world tells me I'm great, so I'm great." I think it solves a lot of problems for people, or they think that it will.


So how do you deal with this belief? Where do you find your own values and aspirations?


It places them in a very precarious situation. Sometimes I feel like I'm on an alien planet. The only thing I can fall back on, with this movie in particular, is that people really respond to its emotional resonance, and that's assuring to me. It makes me feel like I'm not alone and that there are people out there who recognize it's the human element that matters. That's what keeps me going.


Well, having seen all or most of your work, I respect that, for better or worse, you don't compromise your independent status to make the films you want to make. Maybe it's come at the expense of being less famous, but your films never feel like they exist to please the mainstream indie masses.


I have to tell you, I really appreciate that comment because it's taken me quite a while to actually understand why I do what I do. It came to me about a year or two ago, when I saw one of my films, and my name came up, and I thought, "You know what? I'm proud of that movie." I made it the way I wanted to, it's my film. Not in an ownership [way], but I made what I felt was important, what had value to me. If I can continue doing that, seeing my name come up on a film and not cringing, that's what it's about. The whole independent business today — and again, I don't want to sound like sour grapes, because I'm not — these are facts. The independent business is driven by the exact same priorities as Hollywood right now. This film opens [on August 15th], and I guarantee the first thing that's going to happen: "How'd the box office do? How are the reviews?" It's going to depend on the exact same things that Hollywood films survive on: star power and box office. I think this is affecting the kinds of films that are being made because even an independent film needs to survive opening weekend. How do you do that?


How do you feel about having your passion projects commodified like this to judge their success?


There's no question about it, you feel a tremendous sense of vulnerability. It's hard, and the real challenge is to have the faith and confidence that you made what you made. On the other hand, you can't deny that reaction to the film is going to affect how you'll proceed. It's either going to make the next film easier or harder. Certainly, everyone would opt for easier, but you also hope the things you feel are important and vital are recognized, and that other people respond the same way. No one wants to feel that they're operating in a vacuum, that's a terrifying feeling.


On top of that, how do you attract people's attention when there's so much out there to watch, read, listen to, etc.? Do you think about this when you're making a movie, or do you block that out until the production's finished?


I'm of two minds about that. If you think about it, it could be terrifying because it's like looking up and seeing a tidal wave, and trying to run as fast as you can to stay ahead. If you're running, then you're not concentrating on what you're doing. You have to be aware of it, you can't be blind to it. But I believe that if I continue trying to make the films the best that I can, people will respond to them. You can't even comprehend how dense the marketplace is. And where it's going, the idea of showing films on iPods? That's the most depressing thing I've heard in the last ten years. What kind of movie would sustain itself on an iPod? I guess I'm just a purist. The idea of sitting at home and watching movies, it's convenient, but it's not the [theatrical] experience where something sparks to life.


Alright, I'll stop depressing you here. How did Elvis Costello end up in the celebrity cameo role?


That was a great happy accident. I wanted someone in that scene who would motivate Steve Buscemi's character to be speechless in the presence of a star. Originally, I had gone to Paul McCartney, but that didn't work out. Then David Bowie didn't work out. We were a week before shooting, and one of the people on our list was Elvis. Steve said he knew him, he called him, and the next thing you know I'm in a location van, the phone rings, and it was Elvis Costello. I was as speechless as Steve's character in the movie. He said, "Sure, let's do it." I met him the next day, we sketched out that scene, and he was fantastic. He's a real artist and generous as hell. He gave us the song at the end of the movie for free. He's just a great guy, I had to keep pinching myself.


Because he's one of the deservedly famous, like your villager who kills the bear.


Yes, exactly! That's a very good analogy. [laughs]


"Delirious" opens in limited release on August 15th (official site).

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #40: Vacation Time]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/ifc-news-podcast-40-vacation-t.php Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "The Beach," Twentieth Century Fox, 2000]


Summer's winding down, but there's still time to squeeze in one last getaway before fall rolls in. This week on the IFC News podcast, we discuss some decent films about traveling and some others you definitely don't want to watch right before you head out on vacation.


Download now (MP3: 35:12 minutes, 32.2 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: August 17th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/opening-this-week-august-17th.php Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Nicole Kidman in "The Invasion," Warner Bros. Pictures, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Death at a Funeral"

While his "The Stepford Wives" remake was a pretty terrible film, we always knew that director Frank Oz could do better. His new film is a (thankfully) low-budget comedy about two brothers attempting to stop a blackmailer from exposing their recently deceased father's secret as their family grieves. The casting of Alan Tudyk and Peter Dinklage alone in supporting roles is enough for us.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Delirious"

"Living in Oblivion" director Tom DiCillo returns with his first film in six years, an offbeat drama about a homeless youth (Michael Pitt), a pop music siren (Alison Lohman) and a member of the paparazzi (Steve Buscemi) who become entangled in each other's lives. Elvis Costello cameos as himself — yes! The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Love for Sale"

Karim Ainouz directs this Brazilian film about a young woman who decides to raffle off her own body in order to earn a living. The film picked up the Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress prizes at the 2006 Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Manda Bala"

Newcomer Jason Kohn directs this doc examining corruption and class warfare in Brazil as told through the eyes of a wealthy businessman, a plastic surgeon who assists kidnapping victims and a politician who owns a frog farm. The film premiered earlier this year to much acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Superbad"

Yes, we love the subtly awkward poster, the hilarious uncut trailer, the brilliant casting of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera as two socially inept friends, and... well, what isn't there to love? The brilliant minds behind this summer's "Knocked Up" bring this Seth Rogen-penned script to the screen in a tale of two friends who try to score alcohol for one last party before they graduate from high school. What can we say, we're suckers for some McLovin'.

Opens wide (official site).


"The 11th Hour"

Leonardo DiCaprio gets all vice presidential on us with this environmental documentary taking a look at the state of the global environment while providing visionary and practical solutions for restoring our nature's ecosystems.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Invasion"

German filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel (of 2005's "The Downfall") originally received credit for this science fiction update of the classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" story in which a psychiatrist (Nicole Kidman) unearths the origins of an alien epidemic and learns that her son may be the only way to stop it. Talk is that studio heads were dissatisfied with Hirschbiegel's cut of the film and enlisted the help of Wachowski brothers disciple James McTeigue (of "V for Vendetta") to oversee a rehaul. This is the fourth adaptation of the classic "Body Snatchers" magazine serial, and while we love the thought of Nicole Kidman fighting off brain-sucking aliens, we still prefer the 1956 Cold War original.

Opens wide (official site).


"The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters"

Don't mind us if we get a little nostalgic over director Seth Gordon's documentary about two diehard video game fans who compete to break the world record on the classic arcade game Donkey Kong. The film made quite the impression at Slamdance earlier this year, and New Line has attached Gordon to direct a feature film version of his own doc. Now that's a pretty good start.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Last Legion"

Director Doug Lefler helms this swords-and-sandals epic about a soldier who escapes the crumbling Roman Empire as barbarians descend upon his land, and who must embark on a dangerous adventure in order to save his emperor. Colin Firth, Ben Kingsley and Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai provide supporting roles.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA["They Live By Night" and fellow noirs, "Zodiac"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/they-live-by-night-and-fellow.php Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Farley Granger in "They Live By Night," RKO Radio Pictures, 1948]


To sing the song of noir — it's not as easy as it once was, when critics like Raymond Durgnat and Paul Schrader were busy cataloging and specimen-boxing the genre as if it were a breed of black butterfly that had long lived on our streets and yet escaped our notice. In terms of utilizing the genre ourselves, nowadays we're somewhere near post-retro-neo-meta-noir; the original tropes are no longer recyclable even as TV commercials, and the Jim Thompson-rediscovery school is garnering yawns on the straight-to-video indie shelf. "Sin City" — please. But the original noirs remain, despite formidable culture-rehash odds, the coolest and most resonant school of movie to have ever emerged in America — a half-century or more after the fact, the then-disregarded classics of the genre sit high on our trophy shelf while the huge hits of the '45-'60 period — think "Forever Amber" (1947), "Jolson Sings Again" (1949), "The Robe" (1953), "White Christmas" (1954), "Guys and Dolls" (1955), "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956), etc. — are forgotten like the blundering, uninsightful trash they were. Further proof arrives almost monthly in the form of high-profile, reverent DVDs — noirs represent a huge, profitable percentage of today's archive releases, while the expensive films listed above and dozens like them lay dormant in the vault.


The new Warner megabox — including no less than ten films on five discs, from RKO, MGM and Monogram in addition to Warner — is a bustin' example, a veritable Belgian block of postwar alienation and all-American hardcore doom. The predominant world-beater in the mix is undoubtedly auteur-god Nicholas Ray's disquieting debut "They Live by Night" (1948); it's DVDization is an event. Not so well remembered today, Ray was once the "Cahiers du cinéma" crowd's most sanctifiable discovery, Godard's personal Star of Bethlehem ("Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray."), and the auteur theory's prototype: the irascible Hollywood pro who turned studio formula into quizzical masterpieces of pain, rue and struggle. "They Live by Night," adapted from Edward Anderson's "Thieves Like Us," is prototypical noir: a decent-hearted but despairing portrait of the American ideal gone sour, with central characters (luckless crook-on-the-lam Farley Granger, his hapless girl Cathy O'Donnell) driven toward one dead end after another by impulse and fate.


Moody, subtle and emotional vulnerable, it's one of the greatest debuts in film history, and you'd think the film would overshadow the rest of the set. But there are key works of powerful mistrust here, especially Anthony Mann's Manhattan-tale thumper "Side Street" (1950), also with Granger and O'Donnell; Don Siegel's flirtatious hoot "The Big Steal" (1949); John Farrow's remarkable, long-take-beautiful "Where Danger Lives" (1950), in which a concussion-plagued Robert Mitchum finds himself woozily on the run for the border with bipolar slut Faith Domergue; and Fred Zinnemann's thorny "Act of Violence" (1948), in which a vengeful Robert Ryan is, astonishingly, upstaged by Van Heflin's meltdown suburban dad (discovered to be a POW camp informant), and Mary Astor, just seven years after "The Maltese Falcon," appears as noir's most convincing barroom whore. Each and every movie comes with audio commentaries (noir scholars, James Ellroy, aging stars) and exegetical featurettes.


If noir has a future and not merely a vivid, unforgettable past, it might lie with frustrating, cold-eyed, inconclusive docudrama epics like David Fincher's "Zodiac," a rangy historical tapestry, shot in the thoughtful-yet-overwrought way that Fincher has made his own, about an unsolved serial killer case that remains, guess what, unsolved. So the film isn't about the crime or the criminal so much as society as it is ill-equipped to confront, not a genius mastermind, but simply a homicidal nobody who refuses to play by social rules and also refuses to leave himself obviously vulnerable the way psychopaths ordinarily do in films and in reality. In other words, it's a careful, astute portrait of postwar America attempting to control the uncontrollable, a mere single individual who will not behave according to established norms. An anxious sense of reverse vulnerability is palpable — giving me plenty of good cause to think of 9/11 as well, another not terribly brilliant criminal scenario that succeeded merely because we never guessed anyone would ever do such a thing. Fincher's film focuses on four investigators (cops Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards, journalist Robert Downey Jr., obsessed cartoonist Jake Gyllenhaal), all of whom get waylaid along the way by other social demands. And the killer skates. Tragic conclusion? Not really — the film makes no final statement, save perhaps this: we may smugly, nervously construct our civilization around control, safety and security. But there'll always be ghosts in the machine.



"Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4" (Warner Home Video) and "Zodiac" (Paramount) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Ten Pop Culture References to Antonioni and Bergman]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/10-pop-culture-references-to-a.php Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey," Orion Pictures, 1991]


The world lost two of its greatest filmmakers on July 30th, when Ingmar Bergman and then Michelangelo Antonioni passed away. The directors defined a type of serious arthouse film, and both have had immeasurable impact on cinema and on pop culture... but, like many artists whose work can be described as challenging, more people know of their work than actually know it. Then again, even the most subtitle-adverse person has had unintentional brushes with Bergman and Antonioni — their films have seeped inexorably into the popular consciousness. Below are ten (and more) songs, shorts, movies, shows and novels that pay tribute to the pair's work.



Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)


One would think that the last place you'd find a Bergman reference would be in the mostly inferior sequel to a classic, spectacularly stupid '80s comedy. And yet, right there in the middle of "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey" is a shining spoof of the Swede's lugubrious "The Seventh Seal." Having perished, our titular heroes elude the pallid, accented — it'd be generous to place it as Scandinavian — Grim Reaper (William Sadler) with the help of a crippling schoolyard maneuver ("I can't believe we just melvined Death!" they note afterward), only to be caught eventually and tossed into Hell. The pair grasps at their one chance of escape, and challenge Death to a contest. Cut to Bill saying "J-7" and Death admitting from across the table "you haf sank my battleship," before insisting "best two out of three!" The trio moves on to progressively more ludicrous games, finally settling things after a climactic Twister victory. Chess, it ain't, but it's a bit more fun to watch. —Alison Willmore



Caetano Veloso's Michelangelo Antonioni (2000)


Towards the tail end of 2000, Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso released "Noites Do Norte," an album heavily influenced by Afro-Cuban drumming and haunted by Brazil's history of slavery. But incongruously sneaking in at track number six is "Michelangelo Antonioni," a minimalist evocation of the director's films achieved through Veloso's shimmering falsetto and the use of a gentle pulse of violins, arranged by producer Jacques Morelenbaum. No stranger to movie homages, the previous year Veloso had released an album length tribute to another Italian Art film titan, Federico Fellini, with "Omaggio a Federico e Giulietta." But in order to reflect Antonioni's austere style, Veloso limits himself to a one verse song that elegantly encapsulates the alienated iconography of the director's work. It's short enough to quote the translation (Veloso sings it in Italian) in its entirety: "Vision of silence/Empty street corner/Page with no sentence/Letter written on a face/In stone and mist/Love/A useless window." As with Antonioni, what may read as cliché when put on paper murmurs with life when experienced. Antonioni admired the song enough to use it in his final film, a section of the omnibus work "Eros" (2004). —R. Emmet Sweeney



Interiors (1978)


Woody Allen's official statement on Bergman's death announced that the late master was "certainly the greatest film artist of [his] lifetime." No shock there: few filmmakers have ever loved other filmmakers with the fervor with which Allen loved Bergman. Though Allen drew inspiration from many great foreign directors, he borrowed the most from good ol' Ingmar. In 1978, Allen was at the very heights of his power in Hollywood. The most beloved and critically respected comic director of the decade, he'd just won two Oscars for writing and directing the seminal "Annie Hall" (the film itself won Best Picture over "Star Wars") and could probably do just about anything he wanted. And what he wanted was the chance to prove that despite that New York Jewish exterior and the library of brilliant comedies, that he was, at heart, a dour Swede. 1978's "Interiors" is an intensely serious portrait of a disintegrating family, and was so thoroughly influenced by Bergman that Vincent Canby wrote that it was "almost as if Mr. Allen had set out to make someone else's movie." Of course, this seeming dalliance into contemplative European art cinema became a career-long obsession, one that Allen chased for most of the 1980s, starting with "Stardust Memories," which appropriates Bergman's "Wild Strawberries," and into the 1990s, as in the similarly themed "Deconstructing Harry." —Matt Singer



Blow Out (1981)


Brian De Palma is known for his cinematic recombinants, mostly Hitchcockian concoctions like "Dressed to Kill" ("Psycho," "Vertigo") and "Body Double" ("Rear Window," "Vertigo"). Ironically, his finest film lift is actually "Blow Out," an ingenious reinvention of Antonioni's "Blowup." In the original film, a photographer unwittingly stumbles on evidence of a murder in his pictures; in De Palma's version, the hero, played by John Travolta, is a soundman working in sleazy horror pictures. Out recording natural sounds for his latest project, Travolta witnesses a car accident he comes to realize is far more sinister than it first appeared to be. Befitting his interests, Antonioni's version was a philosophical exploration into the nature of perception; De Palma's (which, I must admit, I'm partial to) is more paranoid, and more focused on the nature of moviemaking itself; as in the scene where Travolta's character combines his audio track of the accident with a flipbook of pictures of the crash to create a primitive and exhilarating film of the event. "Blow Out" is a great movie specifically because it doesn't feel derivative like some of De Palma's other homage-heavy films. Both versions are completely distinct takes on one source material by two very different filmmakers. —M.S.



The Last House on the Left (1972)


Fair enough, Bergman's first collaboration with cinematographer extraordinaire Sven Nykvist nabbed a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but who could've guessed back in 1960 that "The Virgin Spring" (in turn based on a 13th century ballad) would eventually be reconfigured as one of the most notorious grindhouse flicks of all time? Bergman's distressing original stars loyal regular Max von Sydow as a medieval peasant farmer whose flaxen-haired and, yes, virginal daughter is raped and murdered by mouth harp-playing herdsman on her way to church. Oppressive spiritual guilt is then felt by everyone, from the victim's half-sister who prayed for her demise to a self-flagellating von Sydow after exacting his bloody revenge on all three baddies, including a sickly child. A dozen years later (but before introducing us to Freddy Krueger or the slasher-deconstructing "Scream" trilogy), a young filmmaker named Wes Craven used his documentary background to grant "The Last House on the Left" a sickening realism, easily the most visceral of his career. On their way to a Bloodlust concert, two teenage girls try to score pot and find themselves in the clutches of an escaped criminal and his gang, who far more brutally rape, torture, humiliate through forced urination, and finally disembowel them, all before one girl's papa goes (appropriately) medieval on their asses with chainsaws, rifles, and a wicked idea for electrocution. Rather than guilt, Craven's Vietnam-era parable eulogizes '60s idealism while setting a path for the breed of torture porn we now see at multiplexes instead of the seedy, edge-of-town theaters they once inhabited. Could an argument be made that Bergman is indirectly to blame for "Captivity," "Hostel: Part II," or at least, 2008's Craven-produced "Last House" remake? —Aaron Hillis



Sputnik Sweetheart (1999)


A young woman vanishes while visiting a small island in the Mediterranean, and both her closest friend and the person she loves drift about hopelessly searching for her. Strange that the closest successor to the elliptical Antonioni of the famous trilogy of "L'Avventura" (1960), "La Notte" (1961) and "L'Eclisse" (1962) is both a novelist and Japanese. Critical darling Haruki Murakami often explores a minor key world of social alienation and subtle surrealism not unlike that of Antonioni, but his 1999 novel "Sputnik Sweetheart," published in the U.S. in 2001, is a direct and unmistakable salute to "L'Avventura" — it follows the schoolteacher narrator K as he befriends and pines for the bedraggled writer Sumire, only to watch her fall in love with another woman, the sophisticated, distant Miu. While the two are on vacation together on a small Greek island, Sumire essentially evaporates, having impossibly crossed through some veil of reality. But while Sumire's disappearance remains at least as inexplicable as Anna's in "L'Avventura," she and her companions are neither shallow nor plagued with the terrible burden of constant ennui. Instead, they are all fumblingly human, and what haunts them s their failure, despite this, to connect with one another. —A.W.



De Düva: The Dove (1968)


[Watch this on AlterTube.] In 1968, Ingmar Bergman released "Hour of the Wolf" and "Shame," and both were ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. However, a short film entitled "De Düva" (The Dove) was nominated for an Oscar as Best Short Film. A sign of the flood of Bergman parodies to come (and of the subsequent dive in his reputation), it's a mildly amusing exaggeration of the Swede's style. The film is subtitled, but speaks in English with a slew of ska's and nsk's appended. Its main target is "Wild Strawberries," with this Professor taking his nature wanderings to a port-a-potty rather than a verdant field. The requisite "Seventh Seal" gag has the Prof's sister play badminton with Death, after which they run off for some incestuous fun in a lake. It's mostly forgettable except for the brief appearance of spoof-queen Madeline Kahn, making her film debut. She portrays Sigfrid, the Professor's cousin, a haughty gal making a play for his sister. Offering her a cigar in a thick Nordic accent she asks, "Phallikin symbol?" —R.E.S.



Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Money Programme (1972)


[Watch this on YouTube.] Antonioni's cinematic genius wasn't lost upon even Brits working within the populist medium of TV sketch comedy. In the final three minutes of "The Money Programme" episode, a band of imperial explorers begin to lose hope after getting lost in the jungle. "All that'll be left of us is a map, a compass, and a few feet of film recording our last moments," whines Graham Chapman, until they all realize that that logic means someone is indeed filming them. Walking towards the camera, another angle reveals the adventurers shaking hands with a three-man crew. John Cleese speaks up: "If this is the crew who were filming us, who's filming us now?" A third angle exposes another director, in blackface, who cuts the take and complains in a badly inflected African accent: "How we going to get that feeling of personal alienation of self from society with this load of 'Bulldog Drummond' crap? When I was doing 'La Notte' with that Monica Vitti gal, she didn't give me none of this empire-building shit, man." Soon enough, Inspector Baboon of Scotland Yard's Special Fraud Film Director's Squad (Cleese again) enters through a randomly placed door in the greenery: "Not so fast, Akarumba!" The man who is so obviously not Michelangelo Antonioni is arrested for impersonating him, and Baboon begins a lecture on the late master's oeuvre, from his "largely jettisoning narrative in favor of vague incident and relentless character study" to works like "Cronaca di un amore," "Le Amiche" and "L'Avventura." But which film does he rant about most as the credits roll? That would be "L'Cleese"... er, I mean "L'Eclisse." —A.H.



The Persona Profile Shot


Bergman's signature shot, with the women of "Persona" poised, one facing forward, the other in profile, their faces melding, may well be "one of the most famous images of the cinema," as speculated by Roger Ebert. It's also one of the most copied and referenced, sometimes for fun and sometimes as shorthand for all of "Persona"'s themes of fragmentation, transference and the blurring of personalities and characters. See the end of Woody Allen's "Love and Death" (1975) for one; then look to David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr.", which echoes "Persona" thematically until it very deliberately echoes the film in look as well. Catherine Breillat's "Fat Girl" (2001) wanders into "Persona"'s territory and imagery as it barrels toward its shock ending, while Almodóvar cribs from Bergman's shot in "Talk to Her." And, lest you think this is all and always in seriousness, track down the "Meatballs or Consequences" of mid-'90s cartoon "Animaniacs," which not only features a checkers duel with Death but also a scene in which Yakko faces the camera while Dot speaks in profile. Welcome to Sweden, land of meatballs and Volvos. —A.W.



Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)


I didn't even realize that "Austin Powers" included an homage to Antonioni's "Blowup" until years after I saw the film for the first time in 1997. But to creator and star Mike Myers and director Jay Roach's credit, their numerous references to Antonioni's most famous work (particularly in the sexy end credits of the first "Powers," and in a hilarious photo shoot sequence in the sequel, "The Spy Who Shagged Me") was, in a funny way, my first introduction to "Blowup," much as it was my gateway to loads of '60s cultural landmarks (like "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" or "The Ipcress File"). And if you are going to send up the '60s, "Blowup," which practically defined swinging mod culture for a generation, absolutely has to be included. The film is dated now, but in a good way, it feels like a document of a very specific time and place, and an attitude as well. Austin, the ultimate man out of time, is equally dated. —M.S.

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<![CDATA[Julie Delpy on "2 Days in Paris"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/julie-delpy-on-2-days-in-paris.php Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 French writer-actress-songbird Julie Delpy has probably been associated most with American film, and not only for her "Before Sunset" Oscar nomination in 2005 (for co-screenwriting!). Still, she is French, so it could be argued that having a bicultural identity has allowed her a more objective view of how both countries and their citizens can misbehave and act cruel. Adding to her list of hyphenates, Delpy the feature director and editor also co-stars in "2 Days in Paris," a self-described "mean-spirited" relationship comedy that addresses said observations on modern-day culture clashes of the social, political, age and gender varieties. Adam Goldberg ever-neurotically stars as jaded New York designer Jack, who has just had a lousy Venice getaway with his photog girlfriend Marion (Delpy). On the way home, they're stopping off in the titular city for said duration, an attempted vacation corrective and couples rekindling that invariably makes them crazier, crankier and more jealous. It's not as "Before Sunset" as the title might seem, since language barriers, overbearing folks, flirty ex-beaus and other annoyances turn what might've been "Meet the Fockers" into a biting bicker-fest of the Woody Allen variety. And of course, it's political. Considering that two of Delpy's early screen roles were in Jean-Luc Godard's "Détective" and "King Lear," it's not surprising that her first narrative feature would be filled with thinly disguised references to her personal beliefs.

Before the interview, you seemed surprised that all of your film's publicists were women. Are there major differences in how a film is promoted in America compared to Europe?

It's actually quite similar in France, though when you do a TV show, you're terrified because the host might insult you. It's in fashion right now that the host, to make the show cool, will trash you to the ground. I go to shows in France literally shaking in terror, and I'm never scared of anything like that because people are usually civilized, even if they don't like the film. I'm not even scared of criticism, but when they lash at you, it's terrifying. I'm always lucky somehow, but it's happened to a lot of other artists. It's publicity for their work, so I guess it's worth it. But if I knew someone was going to say horrible things to me, I wouldn't go. I have to say that in America, journalists are nicer and more respectful. They can be in France, but some are not always nice. Like the French, they're not very nice people in general. [laughs] I actually love France. It is my country of birth, it's a lot of fun, and even when people are grumpy, it makes me laugh.

Certainly nobody is safe from being ridiculed in your film.

No! Men, women, Americans, French -- they all get it. I don't hate the French or Americans or men or women. I'm not really angry at people, but I think it's funny when people are mean to one another. [laughs] I think the beginning of the film sets the tone. [Jack is] an American sending other Americans to the suburbs just to get ahead of the taxi line. It doesn't mean they're bad because, in the end, I still like the people that I'm describing, even though they're not very nice. Marion is crazy, hysterical, lashing at people. And Jack is neurotic and obnoxious in so many ways. The parents are obnoxious, too. The sister is a bitch, but I love her. I'm just describing them in all their flaws.

Where were you living when anti-French sentiments were in the air, circa 2003?

I was in California, so "freedom fries" were not a big hit. California has a lot of liberal people and most Americans I knew were embarrassed: "Oh my god, this is horrifying!" But it's not one America or France. It's important to be reminded of that all the time. I wasn't embarrassed or shocked, more amused.

You express some of that amusement by making political jabs throughout the film. Not to oversimplify, but is it twice as hard to get your film out there in a polarized sociopolitical climate?

I can't help it. For me, it's important because I have [personal beliefs] in my life. So why not put them in the movie? Right away, I'm pretty clear where I stand. I face the same problems in France. The French distributors were horrified by the racist taxi driver scene and the ex-boyfriend pedophile; [it was] ex-colonial mentality. They wanted me to cut it out because it's too offensive to the French, "it'll never work here," people will get upset, blah blah. Some journalists were offended, but most people didn't mind because it's a reality. It's not a lie. If you don't want to show the truth, that's problematic if you can't express that in movies.

For a lot of films here, you have to respect all demographics and you don't want to offend anyone. You just want to get as many people as you can to go to the movies, but I think that's bullshit. For example, 9/11 movies. Some people will not like those films and will not go see them. So what? 50 million people could still potentially see these films. Mine is the same. It's liberal-friendly, though I know Republicans who saw the film and liked it. They're conservative, but they think Bush has made huge mistakes throughout his entire time in power. So it depends, but I don't think it's [for] hardcore Bush supporters. And it's not even a liberal movie because it makes fun of everyone, you know what I mean? I tried to make a movie [in which] I was free to express whatever I wanted. Because it was such a small budget, I was allowed to talk about subject matters that I don't see in other films. I want to say things in a way that can be kind of crude. "It is a blowjob that brought down America's last chance at a healthy democracy" is a crude line, but it might be true.

And more importantly for a comedy, it's funny.

Exactly. I love to mix politics, sex and comedy together. Throughout the film, that's what I tried to do. A lot of people would say, "Why do you speak about politics in the film? It has no place in a romantic comedy." No, why not? Why not take romantic comedy as a genre and twist it into something else? For me, it's more interesting. Otherwise, it's another formula [film], always the same.

It's a worthy goal. Besides, who needs "safe" art?

Especially if you make a movie for such little money. What's the point? Then I would write something like "Sleepless in Seattle," and I could do that, too. I'm not saying it's easy to write that kind of script, that would be pretentious. But if I'm writing this, it's because I feel [strongly about it]. There was even more political stuff in the film that I cut out because I was convinced that it went a little too far. After Marion has a fight near the canal, she makes a reference to the Algerian War in France. She threatens to throw him in, and says, "Do you know how many corpses they found [thrown] in the canal when they cleaned up [after the war]?" It made the scene too long, so sometimes when it's jeopardizing the energy of the scene, you have to let things go.

But I liked the reference to the Algerian War because I have a feeling the French never blame themselves enough for what they did during the colonies. Just like the Americans did in Vietnam. In every war, horrible things happen. It's like the Stanford experiment about the jailers [and inmates]. There aren't bad eggs, just bad situations that bring everyone to become a bad person. It was pretty bad what the French Army did, and I wanted to talk about it. I criticize America, but the worst side of France is their [inability to handle] other criticism. That's a real problem. They don't want to hear about the Algerian War. Only now do they talk about it a little. "The Battle of Algiers" was damned for a while, "Paths of Glory" was not shown in France for 15 years because it criticized the French during the First World War. It's the strength of America to always criticize what they do wrong. People are criticizing the war in Iraq right now, which is great, and they should because it's wrong.

So maybe there's something in common between the French not willing to apologize and the Bush Administration?

Yeah, maybe they're very French, actually. [laughs] No, I think it's the strongest sign of stupidity that you don't recognize how you've been wrong. It shows what has always been clear to me, that this government is greedy but it's also not very smart. They don't see how their greediness will eventually hurt everyone and everything. So much pride, so much bullshit, it's pathetic. Don't take me wrong, I hate the French government right now. Sarkozy is one of the worst human beings ever. He's actually a big supporter of Bush.

I'm not sure this is true, but I heard you wanted to make movies after working with Jean-Luc Godard. What was it about his films or your experience with him that led you towards filmmaking?

Actually, I always wanted to be a director and I met Godard because I wanted to direct. He cast me in his film, and I wasn't sure he was going to. I said, "I'd rather work with you as an assistant or something so I can learn the craft of moviemaking." Then he hired me as an actress because he was looking for someone who played an instrument, and I played the clarinet badly. I still play it pretty badly. So he basically hired me and said, "You can look at [how the film is made], and at the same time get paid." I was a big fan of Godard growing up. My dad showed me "Contempt" and "Breathless," the more playful films that were easier for a young person to watch. It's funny because I saw them recently, and I still really love his films, but I think my adolescent mind was more in tune with his films than it is now. Maybe I've also become more practical, and I don't look at movies with big, open eyes like I used to. When I see a movie now, I study everything.


"2 Days in Paris" opens in limited release on August 10th (official site).

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8561 2007-08-06 00:00:00 closed closed julie_delpy_on_2_days_in_paris publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008561 _entry_pullquote
<![CDATA[Julie Delpy on "2 Days in Paris" (photo)]]> Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008561 2007-08-06 00:00:00 closed closed julie_delpy_on_2_days_in_paris_photo inherit 8561 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Rocket Science"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/rocket-science.php Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Rocket Science," Picturehouse Entertainment, 2007]


"Rocket Science," like director Jeffrey Blitz's first non-fiction debut "Spellbound," creeps up on you, getting more and more effective as it goes along. In both films, Blitz has a knack for creating (or in the case of his documentary, finding and presenting) young characters we really care for, and then sending them, and us, into desperate, gripping situations. These are movies you feel, right down to your toes.


"Spellbound" followed several finalists in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee; "Rocket Science" is about a bunch of high school debaters, but mostly Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson), who grapples with a stutter so crippling he can't even order a school lunch without hours of preparation. Despite his speech impediment, Hal's handpicked by master debater Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) to be her new partner. Ginny is serious about everything, but particularly debate. "Debate is life," she solemnly informs Hal. "You shouldn't think of it in any other context."


Ginny sees some potential in him, and she's undeterred by his awkward demeanor and lack of social skills. (Hal pointedly eschews a school bookbag for a piece of luggage with wheels, so he's literally dragging his baggage around wherever he goes.) She claims, somewhat illogically, that damaged people often make excellent policy debaters. In truth, she might just be caught up in the fact that Hal bears a passing, slightly nerdier resemblance to her former partner Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D'Agosto), who she had a massive, unrequited crush on.


Armed with a passing familiarity with inspirational movies about withdrawn high school students overcoming adversity, you might think you can predict where "Rocket Science" will go — a professional relationship between Hal and Ginny that blossoms into young love, a variety of pitfalls followed by a grand resolution and a policy debate championship. But Blitz's tartly humorous screenplay (which, impressively, is his first) pushes itself in unexpected directions; no less than three crucial moments in the film send Hal's life in refreshingly shocking directions. To say more about those moments or the plot would spoil the sheer pleasure of their surprise, so let's turn our attention elsewhere.


As young Hal Hefner — the name, I suspect, is a cruel joke at this poor playboy's expense — Thompson gives one of the best performances of the year. He's like Harry Altman, the fast-talking, bad-joke-cracking kid in "Spellbound" pulled inside out: all the awkwardness, none of the showmanship. His uncanny stuttering is at times too convincing — we empathize with the underqualified psychiatrist who has long since exhausted every workable option for curing his pathology and whose half-hearted suggestions now amount to him encouraging Hal to speak like he's from another country. That leads to a hysterical sequence where our inept hero stammers through his first policy debate in a hapless Asian accent.


Comparisons to Wes Anderson, and particularly to "Rushmore," are inevitable but, for my money, Anderson hasn't made a movie this trenchantly funny since that very one, nearly a decade ago. "Rocket Science" is full of wonderful moments, like a sequence that imagines what the classic boombox scene from Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything" would look like with a cello (as it turns out, there is a great deal more broken glass involved). And even if I liked Max Fischer, I didn't root for him the way I did for Hal Hefner.



"Rocket Science" opens in limited release on August 10th (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Most Disturbing Sex Scenes of All Time ]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/ifc-news-podcast-39-the-most-d.php Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 As a sidebar to last week's list of the 50 greatest sex scenes in cinema, we're taking a moment to turn to the unsexy side of things. This week on the IFC News podcast, we discuss the 15 most disturbing (either intentionally or unintentionally) sex scenes in cinema. Hott.

Download now (MP3: 30:58 minutes, 28.3 MB)

Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20781 2007-08-06 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_39_the_most_d publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020781 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Most Disturbing Sex Scenes of All Time (photo)]]> Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10020781 2007-08-06 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_39_the_most_d_photo inherit 20781 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Two from Raymond Bernard, "Popeye the Sailor"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/two-from-raymond-bernard-popey.php Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Little Swee' Pea" (1936), from Warner Home Video's "Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938, Vol. 1"]


Even the most seasoned filmhead must acknowledge, if only to him or herself, that there are helpless gaps in his or her education, that cinema, being a tumultuous, chaotic, century-long business-culture circus-with-a-million-rings, has encouraged much of what's sublime to rise to the canonical surface but has left much scattered by the wayside. Historical excavations, performed for the most part by archival restorationers to some degree funded by the cinephiles' DVD market, is the real entertainment news for our tribe, and thus it has been with Criterion's release of two films by forgotten man Raymond Bernard. A leading figure in French cinema in the late '20s and early '30s, Bernard eventually fell victim to the vagaries of economics and French taste — the epic, big-budget, big-message French film he represented soon fell victim during the '30s to the far less expensive "poetic realism" trend, exemplified by Renoir, Carné, Pagnol, and Julien Duvivier. Truth be told, there isn't an enormous difference between Bernard's achingly lyrical, visually effulgent films and the works that supplanted them; French culture, as always, thrived on divisive perceptions and progressive aesthetics. Bernard's two films here, "Wooden Crosses" (1932) and "Les Misérables" (1934) seem to form a kind of bridge between the gargantuan expressionism of Abel Gance and the more intimate verities of Renoir, displaying virtues from both camps. Of course, today the categories are more or less meaningless, and Bernard emerges like Lazarus from the cave.


"Wooden Crosses" turns out to be the greatest of the early talkie WWI anti-war sagas, beating out, to my mind, Milestone's revered "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Gance's "J'Accuse" (partly because the film is peerlessly cynical about military life and its purpose). The thrust is simple, taken from Roland Dorgelès' novel: a ramshackle regiment of French trench soldiers are ordered from rueful leave time to front-line hellfire and back again and again, in a seemingly pointless undulation between irreverent downtime camaraderie and combat experiences that are tantamount to running into a plane propeller. Not very dramatic, technically (compared to something like Kubrick's "Paths of Glory," which directed its outrage at a single war crime, not war itself), Bernard's film is all about the accumulated moments of human poetry lost in the mayhem. After one sudden night battle, Bernard cuts back to the sole casualty's body, lying face down in the dirt, as yet another flare in the sky makes his shadow grow out like a spreading lake of blood. When the soldiers have their flashbacks, they imagine them (and we see them) in silence. A letter comes for a dead man, and another soldier launches out on a trek to shred it over the dead man's impromptu hand-dug grave. The irony of a climactic siege in a corpse-littered cemetery is lost on no one; when they are sent marching yet again at film's end, the men end up parroting the same dialogue they had in the beginning. Bernard's thematic agenda, so soon after that war's end left the French countryside scorched and littered with bones, is shoot-the-wounded: the war-dead ghosts walk in endless queues, and infinite fields of crosses act as a motif. (Samuel Fuller's description of war as "body parts everywhere" graphically evokes "Wooden Crosses" more than any Western film of the pre-'Nam period.) Throughout, Bernard's camera is on a restless walkabout years ahead of its time — there're even chaotic battle scenes filmed from a handheld perspective, making this closeted relic feel utterly new. Bernard's treatment of his character's depths and breadths doesn't impinge on Renoir's '30s war films, but the spirit and sympathy of its visual ideas definitely does.


"Les Misérables" uses Hugo's novel to rectify that shortcoming — in no other dramatized version, and that counts the wretched Broadway musical version, do Hugo's characters establish such weight and presence. It helps that Bernard is faithful to the book — hugely, meticulously so, to the tune of 281 minutes, providing Valjean, Javert, Cosette, et al. the patience and time to inhabit their grand story and make it leave a footprint on your brain, not simply a fleeting, abridged Classics Illustrated impression. Bernard's visual palette became even nervier, evoking his character's turmoil with a lurking, rocking, swiveling camera style the likes of which no one saw at large until the '60s. As Valjean, mountain-faced Harry Baur is 100% downtrodden prison issue and zero slumming movie star; as Javert, a young Charles Vanel is icy and convincing without being villainous. But, as Hugo intended, the two men are just solitary figures lost in the bloody fog of French history, and this is what Bernard painstakingly evokes, with details and potent poetry — an entire pre-industrial culture on the edge of collapse, progress and war. (Bernard was also obviously a fierce advocate for society's exploited and neglected, which puts him in rare company in that glamour-struck era.) Bernard's "Les Misérables" is a Gibraltar of a movie, and it's difficult to believe that it was ever forgotten.


In other archival news, Warner has finally, finally packaged up what remains, next to Warner's 40s-50s Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes tsunami, American animation's most inspired and wildly imagined geyser of film: the Fleischer studio's "Popeye the Sailor" cartoons, reaching from the forearm-distended barnacle bill's debut in 1933 until 1938, when the comic's original artist, Elzie Crisler Segar, died. This was not Disney's brand of cute, anthropomorphic pratfall: this was animation unfettered by logic or even easily readable humor, an activating volcanic id of Surrealistic connections and bizarre transformations, inappropriate musical numbers and racist ker-splats, hyperbolic dream visions and often startling brutality. Sixty cartoons in all (including the two wannabe-"Snow White" epics redoing the Sinbad and Ali Baba tales), plus a surplus of nostalgic making-of docs, audio commentaries (welcome back, John Kricfalusi), and a brace of extras silent 'toons, from studios Bray (from whence came Krazy Kat), and Sullivan (including a few with Felix the Cat), and from the "Out of the Inkwell" series.


"Raymond Bernard - Eclipse Series 4" (Criterion) and "Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938, Vol. 1" (Warner Home Video) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: August 10th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/08/opening-this-week-august-10th.php Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Louis Garrel and Romain Duris in "Dans Paris," IFC Films, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"2 Days in Paris"

Julie Delpy's directorial follow-up to 2002's "Looking for Jimmy" finds Delpy and Adam Goldberg playing a New York couple vacationing in Europe and trying to reignite the passion in their relationship. As non-English speaking French parents, flirtatious ex-boyfriends and constant insecurities test their relationship, the couple must find out if they are able to salvage what they have left. Kudos to Delpy for getting Goldberg to play her neurotic New York boyfriend — we couldn't think of anyone better.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Crossing the Line"

This British documentary, directed by Daniel Gordon, follows James Dresnok, a US Army defector currently living in North Korean after having defected to in 1962.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Cut Sleeve Boys"

Director Ray Yeung directs this import about an aging British Chinese gay man who undergoes a midlife crisis and decides to begin life as a drag queen.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Daddy Day Camp"

We think it's safe to say that Cuba Gooding Jr. can't sink any lower. In this unnecessary sequel to the 2003 comedy "Daddy Day Care," the former Oscar winner takes over for Eddie Murphy as a father who expands his day care business into a camp for kids. And why exactly is Kevin Arnold from "The Wonder Years" directing this?

Opens wide (official site).


"Dans Paris"

While director Christophe Honoré's 2004 "Ma Mère" may have received a less-than-favorable reception from critics, reviews for his latest film claim the director presents an honest and well-studied take on depression. "The Beat That My Heart Skipped"'s Romain Duris stars as a depressed man devastated by the erosion of his relationship who must move in with his divorced father and younger brother in order to overcome the pain. The film premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Descent"

Rosario Dawson plays a promising college student whose life devolves after she's raped by a fellow classmate. Director Talia Lugacy makes her feature film debut.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Rocket Science"

The film's trailer reminds us a bit of Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," though Reece Thompson's Hal Hefner seems a lot less confident than Max Fischer as a high school student with a stuttering problem who joins his school debate team to try to win the heart of the girl of his dreams. The film is the first narrative feature from Oscar-nominated director Jeffrey Blitz, who previously directed the documentary "Spellbound."

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Rush Hour 3"

Yeah, we're just as put off as you are by the thought of sitting through a third "Rush Hour" movie, yet alone another Brett Ratner film. This time, fast-talking detective (and $20 million dollar man) Chris Tucker must once again team up with Hong Kong cop Jackie Chan to face off against Chinese gangsters in Paris. Roman Polanski makes a cameo as a French policeman.

Opens wide (official site).


"Skinwalkers"

Pushed back from earlier this summer, this supernatural thriller finds a 13-year-old boy targeted by two werewolf packs caught amidst a brutal civil war — the only one able to protect him is the boy's mother. "Jason X" director (and David Cronenberg enthusiast) James Isaac directs.

Opens wide (official site).


"Stardust"

Cult graphic novelist Neil Gaiman's previous cinematic adaptations been less than successful (2005's snoozer "Mirrormask," anyone?). While we're willing to give his latest a shot, we have no idea what the hell the movie is about: something with a young man living in a countryside town making a promise to his beloved that he'll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm on the outskirts of town. The film has an all-star cast, with Robert De Niro, Peter O'Toole, Ricky Gervais, Claire Danes and an evil Michelle Pfeiffer. "Layer Cake" director Matthew Vaughn opted out of the third "X-Men" film so that he could film "Stardust," so that's something.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[When Singers Play Singers]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/ifc-news-podcast-38-when-singe.php Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 So you can sing. So you can dance. So you look rockin' on stage. But if want to successfully cross over into film, you're going to have to do more than purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. You're going to have to find a project that highlights your strong points (see above) and downplays your weaker ones (like your untried acting ability). This week on the IFC News podcast, we survey singers playing singers on films.


Download: MP3, 28:57 minutes, 26.5 MB

Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28380 2007-07-30 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_38_when_singe publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028380 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[When Singers Play Singers (photo)]]> Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028380 2007-07-30 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_38_when_singe_photo inherit 28380 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Factory Girl," "20 Million Miles to Earth"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/factory-girl-20-million-miles.php Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Sienna Miller and Guy Pearce in "Factory Girl," Weinstein Company, 2006]


There's a certain kind of human being who, however ordinary or perhaps merely beautiful in real life, acquires the halo of mesmerizing superhumanity when seen on celluloid — we cannot takes our eyes off them, even if we know in our forebrains that there's really not much there to see. It's one of cinema's unquantifiable mysteries, and Edie Sedgwick, short-lived queen of Andy Warhol's mid-60s Factory, personified it — she never did anything, couldn't act or even tell a story well. But everyone, Warhol in particular, had to watch. This is just one of the bizarre, extra-textual things about George Hickenlooper's biopic "Factory Girl" — Sienna Miller, playing Edie, is a solid, sympathetic actress, but does she have that same unworldly magnetism on film? How could she? If she doesn't, how does that make sense of why Edie, within the movie's world, got famous in the first place?


The fact that Sedgwick only occupied the underground art-scene spotlight for a little over a year before getting lost on dope and falling out of Warhol's favor makes her an even more unlikely biopic topic — but there's no denying that she has, somehow, proven to be a deathless, Marilyn-style icon of counterculture cool, a reputation built by word of mouth, not by exposure to her nearly impossible to see films. So, Hickenlooper's film was inevitable, and inevitably devoted to the biopic template. The film does, in any event, a smash-up job freezing a retro-goofy sense of the New York '60s in amber, and it gives us the most interesting on-screen Andy Warhol yet — personified by Guy Pearce, Warhol is a grandly passive-aggressive faerie queen with a penchant for deflective press-interview ironies and inappropriate confessional booth announcements ("Why do you come here?" the priest asks; "Because it's a sin not to," Andy innocently answers).


He's not just a wig-&-whimper joke here; we get a vivid sense of how his Factory worked, how he retained power over it, how he used people like Edie by simply, martial artist-like, bending with the breeze and letting things spiral out of control away from him. Expect not a grimly realistic portrait of the Warhol scene (much less an analysis of the man's aesthetics and motivations), and get past the foolishly tall and hunky Bob Dylan simulacrum (Hayden Christensen), and the film does a smooth and sympathetic job at memorializing one of the 20th century's oddest cultural totems, the only nobody that Warhol did in fact manage to turn into an authentic "superstar," her cult of vacuity growing larger and more worshipful as the decades pass, while the other Factory workers vanish from memory.


Another nostalgic couch-idyll: Nathan Juran and Ray Harryhausen's "20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957), not an auteurist relic full of rich subtextual ore, God knows, but best remembered by an entire generation of postwar psychotronic-movie geeks (like me, and like Tim Burton, here gushingly interviewing stop-motion pope Harryhausen in a DVD supp) as one of the preeminent moments in American pop culture when frame-by-frame F/X — so simple and manual in process, so damnably magical in the viewing — rejiggered one's burgeoning view of the world. Harryhausen's reptilian-humanoid creature rampaging around Rome still glues your eyeballs; the fantastic tangibility of his creations (from, also notably, "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad," "Jason and the Argonauts," "Mysterious Island" and "It Came from Beneath the Sea") is their lynchpin — unlike CG images, Harryhausen's homely behemoths obey the same laws of movement that constrain the actors, and inhabit the same space, turf, gravity and sunlight. Their three-dimensionality is not illusory, and their hesitant, unblurred motions remain strangely poignant. But for a certain age of cinephile, this lavish DVD package — 50th anniversaried up, with a second disc of interviews and memories and storyboards — is also a ticket to the B-movie gray heaven of the '50s, down to the way suited men sit on desks, and the stolid hero (William Hopper) lights up after electrocuting the alien from Venus. (Warhol could've air-written the moments when an American says "Venus!" and an Italian peasant replies, "Venice?") You also have the opportunity to toggle between the original b/w and a moldy-beige Colorized version, but who among us would do such a thing?


"Factory Girl" (Weinstein Company) is now available on DVD; "20 Million Miles to Earth" (Sony Pictures) will be available on DVD on July 31st.

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<![CDATA["El Cantante"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/el-cantante.php Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Marc Anthony in "El Cantante," Picturehouse Entertainment, 2007]


"El Cantante" is a love letter from its stars, Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, to themselves. Though it is a biopic about a talented singer, salsa pioneer Hector Lavoe, celebrating his life, his music and his fans takes a backseat to celebrating the great off-screen romance between Mr. and Mrs. J.Lo. Their love will last a lifetime, or at least as long as it takes you to sit through this muddled vanity project.


Lavoe (Anthony), who was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York City in the 1960s, was a crucial member of the early salsa scene. His loyal wife Puchi (Lopez) was always by his side. In classic biopic storytelling fashion, we get only the most crucial information about these two people and we get it delivered in the most economical, least dramatic way possible. For instance, we meet Lavoe in Puerto Rico, where he is a street performer. Cut to Lavoe and his father, begging his son not to go to America. Cut to Lavoe in America. Cut to "Four Months Later" and Lavoe is already an emerging talent on the club scene. Soon Hector is an enormous star, and later he will get washed away in a sea of druggy excess, but the life lived between these moments is never present. The film is a series of actions without motivations.


What, after all, do we know about Hector? We know he's Puerto Rican, that he has a "one-in-a-million voice" — and he does, or at least Anthony does — and that he loves to smoke crack, especially before a big performance. Director Leon Ichaso and writers David Darmstaeder and Todd Bello never address Hector's desires or goals, at least those beyond drink and drugs. They make shockingly quick work of what is typically the most interesting part of this kind of story, the subject's meteoric rise, and make frustratingly slow work of the least interesting part, his inevitable fall. Everyone tells Lavoe that he's so talented that his success is guaranteed, and that could very well be accurate. But accurate or not, guaranteed success is also guaranteed lack of drama.


For sure, the soundtrack (along with Anthony's musical performance) is terrific, but the songs feel disconnected from the narrative they support with their infectious energy. Music is performed but it is never created. Montages show us concert posters and album covers, but we don't see most of the concerts and we see none of the albums being written, recorded or discussed. "El Cantante" credits Lavoe and his trumpeter, Willie Colón (John Ortiz) as the originators of salsa music but the two spend remarkably little time actually developing their sound. Naming the genre they create is as easy as Willie saying "Call it salsa — it's a musical sauce!"


No matter how badly Hector behaves, Puchi's there to clean him up and shove him out on stage, where he can perform and she can dance and sing along from the wings. "El Cantante" is, as much as anything, about the sheer thrill Lopez gets out of watching Anthony on stage — the accumulated adoring imagery of her gazing appreciatively at her man reminded me of Amber Waves' documentary about Dirk Diggler in "Boogie Nights." The co-stars passion for one another is always evident. Their passion for their audience, a great deal less so.


A note: Though the film spans decades in the characters' lives, Lopez and Anthony never seem to age physically outside of "El Cantante"'s framing story epilogue. Their child grows in front of our eyes from infant to toddler to troubled teenager but his parents stay a well-preserved 35. Could these two simply not bear the thought of looking old on camera?



"El Cantante" opens in wide release on August 3rd (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: August 3rd, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/opening-this-week-august-3rd-2.php Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Anne Hathaway in "Becoming Jane," Miramax Films, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Becoming Jane"

Anne Hathaway gets all period piece on us and tries out her best British accent in this biographical tale of a pre-fame Jane Austen's romance with a young Irishman, played by the ubiquitous James McAvoy (seriously, what hasn't he been in recently?). "Kinky Boots" director Julian Jarrold helms the film; fellow Brits Julie Walters and Maggie Smith step in for supporting roles.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Bourne Ultimatum"

Three films in, our favorite amnesiac spy finally discovers the origins of his identity (and then some!) in the third (and final?) installment of the Jason Bourne trilogy. While "Ultimatum" is the final Bourne novel written by the late Robert Ludlum, a fourth and fifth entry were written by Eric Van Lustbader, continuing the Bourne storyline. We'll see if "Ultimatum" remains Jason Bourne's last film or whether he's due for a return. "Supremacy"'s Paul Greengrass is back to direct.

Opens wide (official site).


"Bratz"

After recently watching the trailer for this new teen film based on... dolls, we can only presume one thing: "Mean Girls" did it better. Much, much better. While we may not be in this film's key demographic, we don't think we can forgive the director (frequent Disney Channeler Sean McNamara) for including the word "Brattitude."

Opens wide (official site).


"Cash"

Indian director Anubhav Sinha directs this Bollywood thriller about an ace con artist who hires a set of top notch robbers to steal some priceless diamonds in South Africa.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"El Cantante"

J.Lo hubby Marc Anthony portrays the enigmatic performer Hector Lavoe, the man who's credited with introducing salsa music to the U.S. in the 1970s, in this biopic told mostly from the perspective of his wife Puchi (played by Lopez). Early reviews claim that the film suffers from music biopic clichés and poor directional decisions, but, seriously, what did everyone expect?

Opens wide (official site).


"Hot Rod"

Internet sensation and SNLer Andy Samberg stars as a self-proclaimed stuntman who plans to jump 50 school buses on a moped in order to win over his emotionally distant stepfather. While we have nothing against Samberg (we adored "Lazy Sunday"), "Hot Rod" does look like one of the weaker comedies of the summer. But, hey, we're always ready to watch menacing character actor Ian McShane play for yuks.

Opens wide (official site).


"If I Didn't Care"

Benjamin and Orson Cummings' Hitchcockian thriller is set in the resort community of the Hamptons as a trophy husband's attempts to produce an heir lead to infidelity, murder and tragic consequences. The film channels the noir style of the '40s and '50s and stars Bill Sage and Roy Scheider.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Ten"

A morally flawed narrator oversees ten stories based on the Ten Commandments in this comedy from former "The State" member David Wain. Critics may complain that the film's uneven narrative structure hurts the overall feel of the film, but that's not going to stop diehard "The State" fans from seeing this. Plus, Winona Ryder has sex with a ventriloquist's dummy. Who doesn't want to see that?

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA[The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema: #1-5]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-50-greatest-sex-scenes-in.php Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:08:45 -0500
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07302007_sexscenes_05.jpg5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
Dir: Philip Kaufman

Though it's less overtly sexual than the famous scene involving mirrors and a bowler hat between free lovin' Sabina (Lena Olin) and physician Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis), there's a strong argument to be made for the superior, complex sensuality of the encounter shared by Sabina and Tomas' timid wife Tereza (Juliette Binoche). Fascinated and wounded by the idea of her husband's lover, Tereza is drawn to Sabina as image and then as woman. Their meeting is a gorgeously conceived and shot sequence in which the photographer Tereza takes some nude photos of Sabina, Binoche's eyes welling with a mix of emotions that defy description, before Sabina takes the camera herself. In almost complete silence, the women negotiate each other as women, then as subjects, and objects, the camera a sort of stand-in for the absent Tomas. The sequence of Olin tugging down the failingly reluctant (and topless) Binoche's underwear for her own nude photo session is a marvel of direction, tone and performance. --Michelle Orange


07302007_sexscenes_04.jpg4. Risky Business (1983)
Dir: Paul Brickman

If you've never seen "Risky Business" and all you know about it is the oft-clipped bit where Tom Cruise dances in his briefs to the sounds of Bob Seger, you're in for a shock. This movie is as explicit and downright sexy as any in Hollywood history; no scene more so than the first encounter between Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay's Lana, a classic Hollywood prostitute (i.e. she's gorgeous, aroused, in no way afflicted by STDs). The sex is intentionally dreamlike: Cruise's Joel calls Lana and passes out on the couch while waiting for her to arrive. He awakes to find her slinking into his living room. Before you can say "Hey, she forgot her underwear!" the two are going at it in front of a pair of glass doors that open ever so suggestively in time with their lovemaking. As legend has it, Cruise and De Mornay were in the midst of becoming a real life couple during shooting, and the chemistry comes across big time. It's a shockingly hot moment, especially for a guy wearing tighty whiteys. --Matt Singer

07302007_sexscenes_03a.jpg3. Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Dir: David Lynch

Highly unscientific research polls were conducted amongst friends, colleagues and strangers to clarify which sapphic showdown is "the greatest" from David Lynch's noir-subverting, latter-day masterpiece. For some, it's the tender first time between Hollywood amnesia victim Laura Elena Harring and the fresh-off-the-plane actress helping to solve her mystery (Naomi Watts), as they share a bed after a traumatic afternoon. Harring slips off her new blonde wig, then her robe, and just the lingering stillness of her twin peaks feels like a tease. Half-under the sheets, a kiss on the forehead goodnight becomes a pause of knowing lust, lez-be-friends soon tonguing and grabbing at each other for dear life. Watts is wide-eyed: "Have you ever done this before?" "I don't know," replies an honest Harring, "have you?"

Definitely hot, but points lost for the digital blurring out of Harring's genitals, even if to appease censors. The film's real blood-racer is such a left-field eruption of pure, palpable sex that it's as potent as the first time: Watts, her life now a dingy-bathrobed failure, makes a depressing cup of coffee (certainly not Lynch's new blend!). She strolls to the sofa, revealing a topless Harring -- what the fuck? In the reverse shot, Watts has on only denim cut-offs, her coffee mug now a cocktail. "You drive me wild," purrs Harring, before telling her straddling partner that they "shouldn't do this anymore." Watts stares her down and fingers her inland empire violently until Harring pushes her away. But what does it all mean, Mr. Lynch? --Aaron Hillis


07302007_sexscenes_02.jpg2. A History of Violence (2005)
Dir: David Cronenberg

By the time humble, happy marrieds Tom (Viggo Mortensen) and Edie (Maria Bello) have violent sex on the stairs of their house, we've already seen them do it once. Earlier in the film, they'd acted out a few teenage fantasies while Edie wore a cheerleader outfit. Even though the scene contains what director David Cronenberg's been told is the first onscreen instance of 69 in an American film, the exchange is sweet and innocent, almost virginal. When they hook up again, the couple's veneer of wholesome Americana has been shattered and Edie's learned that Tom is really a mobster-in-hiding named Joey. She slaps him and he grabs her and the two begin to fight on the stairs (a locale loaded with symbolic meaning for a couple in transition). Very quickly, the wrestling turns to brutal, combative sex. In his DVD commentary, Cronenberg notes, "It was a physically difficult scene to shoot and an emotionally very difficult scene to shoot. We wanted to suggest that she's attracted and repelled by Joey, and she's still looking for the Tom that's in this creature." It's a credit to Cronenberg's direction and his actors' talents that all of that comes across in their impassioned faces and moans of ecstasy and screams of pain. It's a sex scene that's erotic and disturbing and it actually tells us something about the characters in it. In other words, it is perfect. --MS


07302007_sexscenes_01.jpg1. Don't Look Now (1973)
Dir: Nicolas Roeg

The love scene in "Don't Look Now" was a late addition, conceived of when director Nicolas Roeg decided that something was needed to balance out all of the fighting between the couple played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Allan Scott's screenplay. And so he added what turned out to be the most tender, most emotionally complex, and yes, hottest sex scene on celluloid. Not the first thing you'd expect from a horror film, or, for that matter, from Sutherland, but the scene, which represents a kind of détente in a marriage strained by the recent loss of a child, is justifiably famous -- a portrait of a couple both intimately familiar with and in the process of rediscovering each other.

Christie and Sutherland start out in the bathroom -- she's in the bath, teasing him about encroaching love handles as he dawdles around in the buff. Later, lounging on the bed, they exchange kisses that lead to poignant, unplanned lovemaking, the scene intercut with shots of the two dressing for dinner afterward. In an interview with the Guardian, Sutherland suggested that the editing relieved any confrontational sense of scopophilia: "The audience never ended up being a voyeur, they watched a cinematic collage and were reminded of themselves." But more than that, it all serves as a compelling rebuke of that old Hollywood standard for love scenes: the clinch that leads to the fade to black. "Don't Look Now" is a reminder that everything that's commonly omitted in movies and represented by a quick cut or a flash of darkness is just as much a part of the story, and of life, as the conversations and confrontations that follow. --Alison Willmore


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For all of the great sex out there, there's twice as much bad.
Check out our companion list of The 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema.

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<![CDATA[The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema: #11-15]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-50-greatest-sex-scenes-in-1.php Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:08:40 -0500
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15. Get Carter (1971)
Dir: Mike Hodges

Phone sex is rarely played for anything more than laughs on film -- it's hard to make something so based on solitude and the thrill of the moment look less silly when presented for all to see. But when Michael Caine's titular gangster dials up his London-based mistress (a lingerie-clad Britt Ekland) in Mike Hodges' nihilistic 1971 crime drama, the two generate plenty of long-distance heat and nary a giggle. Maybe it's that Caine seems remains so unruffled as he gets Ekland all worked up with a gravelly monologue. Maybe it's that we know from the get-go that Ekland's the property of his boss, played by Terence Rigby, who interrupts the conversation by barging in at the end, prompting Ekland to breathlessly inform him that she's "just doing her exercises." Or maybe it's that Caine does his end of the talking by way of the only phone in the house in which he's rented a room -- in the parlour, with his landlady sitting a few feet away in a rocking chair, turned away but obviously listening in. —Alison Willmore


14. Team America: World Police (2004)
Dir: Trey Parker

Even with the cuts Trey Parker and Matt Stone had to make in order to secure an R-rating (the unrated DVD restores the sorely missed puppet defecation money shot), the infamous marionette sex scene in "Team America: World Police" is easily one of the most graphic in movie history. The sequence serves two purposes in the film: to mock the fact that these puppets can do all kinds of stuff the MPAA would never let humans do onscreen; and to pad the film with material so obviously and childishly filthy (like, oh, I don't know, puppets pooping on each other, for example), that the aforementioned censors would be so focused on removing it that they wouldn't notice the other, more subversive material slipping right under their noses. Despite all their positions and thrusting and mouth-to-ass action and such, the puppets still don't have any genitals to speak of -- no doubt Parker and Stone's ultimate commentary on the pathetic state of the Hollywood sex scene. —Matt Singer

13. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
Dir: Alfonso Cuarón

In between tequila shots on the beach, Luisa (Maribel Verdú) critiques Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch's (Diego Luna) lackluster skill in the bedroom. (The culprit? Too much jacking off.) Intending to set them right as a favor to their future fucks, she induces them back to their cabin with a knee-bendingly erotic dance by the jukebox, Cuaron's camera tracking her as if hypnotized. Back inside, the two teens throw off her dress and plant sloppy kisses. Ever the teacher, Luisa calms them, and then goes down on them, her head sliding just out of frame. Julio and Tenoch's faces turn to rictuses of pleasure, so much so that they turn to each other, and kiss. There's no intent to prove that they're gay, just that they love each other, and that a good blowjob dissolves all arbitrary prejudices. —R. Emmet Sweeney


12. The Night Porter (1974)
Dir: Liliana Cavani

Vienna, 1957. Said night porter (Dick Bogarde) and a married hotel guest (Charlotte Rampling) are damned (see them also in: "The Damned") to repeat their past after locking eyes for the first time in years. You see, he's an ex-Nazi torturer and she's a concentration camp inmate who survived by becoming his sex slave; the lovebirds have reunited. Apparently, the couple that steps in glass together, stays together, as the two are soon compulsively playing out roles in a depraved S&M romance/codependency that reaches its most memorably primal state near the end of the film. Finally too dangerous to leave Bogarde's apartment (war criminals trying to kill them and all), the two have both become victims of isolation and hunger. In bed, Rampling eyes their last jar of strawberry marmalade on the nightstand, grabs it, and gobbles by the handful. Bogarde restrains her arm, the glass falls and breaks, and Rampling dives for the food like a wildebeast. She eats teasingly, they grapple, he cuts her face with the broken jar, they lick each other clean, and then she rides him while manhandling her. Can't you see why they're made for each other? Jawohl. —Aaron Hillis


11. Ecstasy (1933)
Dir: Gustav Machatý

Child bride Eva is married off to an older man who turns out to be uninterested in her physical charms — a fell blow indeed, when the charms in question are those of Hedwig Kiesler, just a few years shy of being rechristened Hedy Lamarr and finding her place as one of Hollywood's great beauties. Fortunately, an impulsive skinny dip in the lake one day has her meeting cute with virile laborer Adam (Aribert Mog), who she later can't get off her mind. Having paced away half the night, she eventually goes off to find him, and the two come together for what is likely the first sex scene in non-pornographic film — his head slides out of the screen, and the camera closes in on Lamarr's face as it trembles in the passions of the film's title (an expression that director Gustav Machatý apparently provoked by poking Lamarr in the ass with a safety pin). All this, in 1933! "Ecstasy" was considered such a transgressive commodity that when the film was first imported to the U.S., customs agents burned it. —A.W.


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<![CDATA[The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema: #21-25]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-50-greatest-sex-scenes-in-2.php Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:04:13 -0500
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25. Female Trouble (1974)
Dir: John Waters

In "Pink Flamingos," drag queen extraordinaire Divine had sex with her son, so when John Waters prepped his follow-up, 1974's "Female Trouble," he knew he'd have to come up with something really disturbing to top himself. And thus Divine does the impossible: she has sex with herself, as both halves of a typically Watersian tryst: female teen runaway Dawn Davenport and male sleazebag Earl Peterson. Earl picks up Dawn on the side of the road and forces her to have sex on a soiled mattress in a dump. Somewhere between the start of the sexual assault and the start of her pregnancy, Dawn begins to enjoy it. You can just imagine the delight Divine must have taken in informing anyone who told him to go fuck himself that he'd already tried that so they'd have to come up with something better. —Matt Singer


24. The Cooler (2003)
Dir: Wayne Kramer

Bad luck magnet Bernie (William H. Macy) dusts off a Sinatra LP to set the mood. "Luck Be a Lady" slinks out of the speakers until Bernie shuts the dresser drawer too hard, scratching up Frank's velvety pipes. This doesn't faze Natalie (Maria Bello) one bit, because she's the beautiful cocktail waitress who's going to turn nervous Bernie's life
around. And what better way to start than with a striptease! She shifts her hips, drops her shorts, and shakes the dice tattoo on her right ass cheek. Bernie's the winner. The scene works by highlighting the nervous fumbling and resultant humor that arises with first-time lovers. Bernie has trouble undoing her singlet, but after he succeeds, he climaxes in the blink of an eye. Natalie offers him forgiveness with ineffable grace, whispering those magical words, "You've got a great cock." That's what I call love. —R. Emmet Sweeney

23. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Dir: Ang Lee

Sleeping bag sex is awkward in the best of times, so having your first homosexual experience in a two-man tent is really stacking the deck. But the thing that makes "Brokeback Mountain"'s key sex scene so effective is its utter lack of planning. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) wind up huddled together for warmth -- the gold standard of come-ons -- and when Jack makes an awkward pass an angry, heated struggle ensues that morphs into some rough and urgent sex. Shot in almost complete darkness and lasting under a minute (!), the scene manages to subvert the tittering expectations of the viewing public and also offer a credibly awkward and confused rendering of how such a scenario might play out. Almost entirely dependent on sound, Ledger and Gyllenhaal make more of a couple of gasps and growls (along with a jangling belt buckle and twin zipper zips) than many sex scenes can do with mood music and the fully monty. —Michelle Orange


22. The Wayward Cloud (2005)
Dir: Tsai Ming-liang

The very first shot of Tsai Ming-liang's avant-musical pornocopia is a wide-lensed still of a sickly lit hallway; there's no music, no dialogue, and only two women passing each other over the span of a couple minutes. Yes, adventurous cinephiles often get gushy for this slow-burning Taiwanese talent, but his film's second shot could titillate and/or scandalize just about everyone: A nubile nurse (played by real-life Japanese sex starlet Sumomo Yozakura) lies spread-eagle on a white bed, naked from the waist down. It's a gorgeous but ridiculous image, as the only vibrant color is emanating from between her legs: a juicy, half-carved watermelon. Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), last seen selling watches on the streets in Tsai's pseudo-prequel "What Time Is It There?", would seem to have become Taipei's love doctor. He crawls toward the nurse's fruit, his tongue lapping at her seed, his prodding fingers getting stickier, the room filling with squishy noises -- wait, is there or isn't there a melon? After she comes, Hsiao-Kang sticks a vagina-sized chunk of drippy pulp in her mouth, a bright-pink money shot to the safest sex known to man... or horticulture. —Aaron Hillis


21. The Kiss (1896)
Dir: William Heise

The listing in the Edison films catalog reads "They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time." Boy, do they ever. When May Irwin and John Rice reenacted an 18-second kiss (and kiss and kiss and kiss) from the end of the play "The Widow Jones" in early 1896, it hit the early film world with the force of a bomb. The popularity of the serial smooches (to say nothing of the ensuing scandal) ensured that the development of movies would forever be linked with the development of people getting it on in the movies. In some ways, these are the most important 50 feet of film ever printed. —M.S.


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<![CDATA[The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema: #31-35]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-50-greatest-sex-scenes-in-3.php Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:01:35 -0500
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35. Network (1976)
Dir: Sidney Lumet

Work-obsessed TV exec Diana Christensen (Best Actress Oscar winner Faye Dunaway) begins an affair with aging news-division prez Max Schumacher (William Holden), who learns that all she wants out of life "is a 30 share and a 20 rating." En route to their weekend romp in the Hamptons, Diana gets excitable over her scheduling problems for "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour" while simultaneously making out with Max. Her manic, non-stop rant outlasts their softly lit dinner, a swoony beach run back to their room and their passionate disrobing, kissing, and rolling around on the bed. On top, Diana breathily brags about getting press if the government sues her station, making her climax quicker than a 15-year-old boy. Not missing a post-coital beat, Diana launches into a soap opera pitch: "'The Dykes,' the heartrending saga about a woman hopelessly in love with her husband's mistress. What do you think?" Having never said a word and already half-asleep, Max lazily opens his eyes as if he's long been thinking: I'm as horny as hell, and I'm not going to listen to this anymore! —Aaron Hillis


34. The End of the Affair (1999)
Dir: Neil Jordan

Ralph Fiennes puts his clammy appeal to its best use in Neil Jordan's 1999 hot-to-the-touch take on Graham Greene's novel. As spurned lover Maurice Bendrix, he seethes and broods over recollections of his finished affair with the married Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), including a sequence in which the two, all but pushed together by her oblivious spouse, hurry back to her house to consummate their rapidly escalating relationship. They clutch at each other on the stairs and fall into furtive, urgent lovemaking that reaches its climax just as Sarah's husband comes home. "What if he heard?" Bendrix whispers of Sarah's unblushing orgasmic cry. Not a woman to be caught short of a quip, she replies "He wouldn't recognize the sound." —Alison Willmore

33. The Last Seduction (1994)
Dir: John Dahl

A woman after my own heart, Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino, possibly at her hotness apex here in 1994), can patter with the best, and never lets common sense get in the way of her raging libido. Zeroing in on a doofy local named Mike (Peter Berg) upon blowing into small-town upstate New York with scads of stolen money, Bridget sizes him up right there under the bar. Retiring to the more roomy, romantic locale of the alley out back, there ensues a scene of ghetto debauchery that — even while clinging to a chain-link fence with her legs hooked around Berg's bare bum — the slinky Fiorentino pulls off as just another night on the femme fatale clock. —Michelle Orange


32. Being John Malkovich (1999)
Dir: Spike Jonze

A randy John Malkovich greets Maxine (Catherine Keener) at his apartment door with an urbane "Shall we to the boudoir?" But alas, such sweet nothings are nothing to Maxine, who is withholding her body until her wild-haired admirer, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), slips down a portal into Malkovich's brainpan. The dead time is passed with awkward couch sitting and a dry "So...do you enjoy being an actor?" The answer is moot, as Lotte slides in, and Maxine mounts. The supreme example of fantasizing about another while screwing your boring beau, it's also a hilarious and celebratory depiction of a lesbian awakening. Maxine impulsively shouts, "I love you, Lotte!" and Lotte reciprocates with a booming declaration of her own, inside Malkovich's prominent brow. Oblivious to the blooming romance, John asks "Did you call me Lotte?", but ends up preferring climax to interrogation, while Lotte is dropped onto the side of the New Jersey turnpike. —R. Emmet Sweeney


31. Storytelling (2001)
Dir: Todd Solondz

If nothing else, Todd Solondz's "Storytelling" made me proud to be a Canadian. Seeing it in theatres in 2001, Canadian viewers were aware of the fact that the highly publicized sex scene between a bread-white creative writing student named Vi (Selma Blair) and her black power professor (Robert Wisdom) would not be marred by the red box that covered most of the action in the U.S. release. In fact, the scene is actually dirtier with the box. Vi ends up at the home of her stridently anti-white professor, and tells herself "Don't be racist" after finding a stash of white girl porn in his bathroom. What follows is a hideously funny/awful scene between Blair and Wisdom, where the professor forces his "spoiled, suburban white girl with a Benetton rainbow complex" to say "Fuck me, nigger," while he rams her from behind. About as erotic as a soggy sneaker, the scene nevertheless effectively exploits its perverse combination of deep discomfort, porny parallels, Selma Blair highly compromised, laughable subversion, and — with the red box — the guiding hypocrisy of the Hollywood ratings system. —M.O.


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<![CDATA[The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema: #41-45]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-50-greatest-sex-scenes-in-4.php Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:00:18 -0500 Go to: [Home] [#50-46] [#45-41] [#40-36] [#35-31] [#30-26] [#25-21] [#20-16] [#15-11] [#10-6] [#5-1]


45. Breaking The Waves (1996)
Dir: Lars von Trier

"Have me now." Child-like, sweet-faced and perhaps a bit touched in the head, Scottish highlander Bess MacNeill (Emily Watson, in her Oscar-nominated screen debut) has just married oil-rig worker Jan Nyman (Stellan Skarsgård), much to the dismay of her repressed 70s-era Calvinist community. But where lies repression hides a longing for deep dickin', as Jan smirkingly discovers when his new bride leads him away from the reception, then slides off her panties from under a virginal white dress: "What do I do?" Jan's first lesson in marital duties is missionary against a restroom wall, maybe not-so-romantically perched next to the paper towel dispenser, as he then zips and leaves. In Bess' face, however, those two minutes were nothing less than a religious epiphany, her eyes sometimes locking with ours to intensify how intimately we're experiencing both her first fuck and her first of many spiritual falls from innocence. Somewhere behind a camera, Danish auteur Lars von Trier puckishly smiles at one of his more poignant provocations. —Aaron Hillis


44. Poison (1991)
Dir: Todd Haynes

Lying awake in a prison cell next to the object of his growing sexual
obsession, John Broom (Scott Renderer) tentatively runs his hand over the sleeping Jack Bolton's (James Lyons) chest. Caught between fear and desire, Broom's hand tests Bolton's boundaries, tremblingly grazing his body until he receives a startling jolt of reciprocation. Shot in low light and lingering close-ups, this tender and complex evocation of homosexual lust caused a furor when Christian right group the American Family Association attacked the NEA for contributing to the film's completion, mainly due to the scene just described, another of rape, and the 15 frames of an erect penis. Thankfully the film survived intact, and it remains a striking homage to Jean Genet's "Un Chant d'Amour," the great French writer's only film, a more poetic vision of male sexuality in prison. —R. Emmet Sweeney

43. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)
Dir: Pedro Almodóvar

After Antonio Banderas gets smacked around on a dope deal gone bad, his kidnap victim/love interest Victoria Abril soothes his hurt with the most erotic example of Stockholm Syndrome in film history. Won over by his "troubled childhood turned me into a lovable psychotic" routine, she kisses away his bruises until the pair carefully tumble into the sack. His wounds are still fresh; Abril goes hands free, wriggling underneath him until Banderas valiantly utters, "The only thing the bastards left alone was my cock." A point they go on to prove for three solid minutes: up, down, and helpfully reflected in the skylight mirror. —R.E.S.




42. High Art (1998)
Dir: Lisa Cholodenko

After an hour of build-up between gay artsy burnout Lucy (Ally Sheedy) and straight editorial striver Syd (Radha Mitchell), including a couple of druggy kisses, their trip together to upstate New York is clearly tryst-oriented. In addition to kicking off a jag of lesbian chic in 1998 that is still going fairly strong today, Lisa Chodolenko's "High Art," rather than open itself up to titillation, plays its pivotal sex scene for low-key authenticity. Retiring to bed after a night of talking until what looks from the blue light coating the room to be close to dawn, Lucy and Syd lay themselves down with a ritualistic air that continues through the slow and uncertain but tender scene that follows. Syd's self-consciousness is touching and raw, while Lucy is patient and methodical; there are questions, tears, coaxing, confession and not much actual sex. In other words, something almost sexier than sex: intimacy. —Michelle Orange


41. High Fidelity (2000)
Dir: Stephen Frears

"We used to listen to him having sex upstairs," mutters a cowering John Cusack, huddled beneath the covers, as he conjures up an imagined scene of his ex Laura (Iben Hjejle) and their ponytailed, world music-loving former neighbor Ian (Tim Robbins) engaging in hilariously flailing, extremely moist lovemaking. Ian pulls aside fantasy Laura's lacy black underthings to reveal a heart tattoo inscribed with his name, and the two gasp and groan through different positions to a soundtrack of Barry White in what seems to be a red satin-lined boudoir. It's silly and amazingly unsexy, and yet it tortures Cusack's Rob to sleeplessness, and it's impossible not to sympathize at least a little — the scene is an exaggerated and cartoonish vision of the better, hotter sex we've all at times suspected others are managing to have, particularly when those others include someone you used to date. —Alison Willmore


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<![CDATA[The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-50-greatest-sex-scenes-in-5.php Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:40:43 -0500 There's a reason that any talk of sex in film comes back around to certain titles again and again. Getting two (or more) attractive actors to mash their faces together and huff and puff for the camera is relatively easy. Shooting a memorable sex scene is hard.

We here at IFC News and Nerve.com sat through a lot of movie sex to make this list -- oh, we suffered through it somehow. But even after all that ranking, weighing and debating, we'd be hard pressed to define exactly what it is that makes a sex scene great -- in true Justice Potter Stewart fashion, we just know it when we see it, whether it shocks us, titillates us, turns us on, breaks our hearts or confounds our expectations.

The oldest film on this list is from 1896; the newest is from last year. You'll notice we decided to leave certain standards in the field off. And as always, these lists are a launching point for you to tell us what you think. Are we wrong? Are we right? Did we neglect the sexiest sex scene ever? Weigh in in the comments below.

[Note: Some of the above links will take you to Nerve.com. And as they say on the internet, this list is NSFW.]

For all of the great sex out there, there's twice as much bad.
Check out our companion list of The 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema.
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<![CDATA[The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema (photo)]]> Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:40:43 -0500 1008749 2007-07-25 20:40:43 closed closed the_50_greatest_sex_scenes_in_5_photo inherit 8749 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Attack of the TV Series Movie]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/ifc-news-podcast-37-attack-of.php Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Movies that are born from TV series don't exactly have the best of track records. This week on the IFC News Podcast, we break down the various kinds of TV series adaptations, remakes and inspired-bys that have made their way to the theaters, and point out some of the highlights ("Miami Vice," "Serenity") and lowlights (don't get us started).

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36808 2007-07-23 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_37_attack_of publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10036808 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Attack of the TV Series Movie (photo)]]> Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10036808 2007-07-23 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_37_attack_of_photo inherit 36808 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Ten Great Films You Can Buy For Under Ten Bucks]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/ten-great-films-you-can-buy-fo.php Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "The Color of Money," Buena Vista Pictures, 1986)


We here at IFC News recognize the great contributions companies like The Criterion Collection have made to the fields of film preservation and restoration, and we treasure the DVDs of theirs in our respective collections. But let's be honest. Those suckers are expensive: always at least thirty bucks, and sometimes as much as twice that for the really cool sets.


You might be under the impression that the only movies worth owning are the ones that have been blessed with one of these glitzy DVD treatments, which often act as much as a seal of approval as anything else. And when wading into the murky waters of DVD discount bins, it's easy to get discouraged amidst a sea of low-rent cartoons and minor Elvis movies.


But know this: there are diamonds in the rough out there, only these diamonds don't cost as much as diamonds. These are great movies that are dirt cheap; so great and so cheap, in fact, that there's really no good reason your DVD shelf shouldn't be without them. Here are IFC's guaranteed-to-delight-and-impress-but-not-kill-your-wallet picks.



Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Directed by John Carpenter

List price: $9.98


So you've got this thousand-year-old incorporeal sorcerer who needs to marry a girl with green eyes; a stolen truck named The Pork Chop Express; two rival Chinatown street gangs; Kim Cattrall as a lawyer whose last name is actually Law; a trio of magical weather-monikered henchmen; and Kurt Russell doing what is, apparently, a mulleted John Wayne impression. There's no denying John Carpenter's "Big Trouble in Little China" is trash, but it's great trash, the kind you reach for when you've got a few friends over, a few beers in you and a desire for raucous, campy entertainment. In other words, this DVD is an invaluable purchase.



The Color of Money (1986)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

List price: $9.99


"The Color of Money" has a bad reputation, as a minor film by Martin Scorsese and as the movie for which Paul Newman finally won his Best Actor Oscar, not for his performance, but as a sort of lifetime achievement award. Having "The Color of Money" in your DVD collection, then, sends a statement; that (a) you don't automatically accept the conventional wisdom about any movie and (b) "The Color of Money" is one of the most underrated movies of the 1980s — not to mention one of the most underrated movies by Scorsese and one of the most underrated sequels of all time. Watch it for some of Scorsese's most dynamic camerawork and Richard Price's razor-sharp screenplay, pick up a few talking points about how Newman's Fast Eddie fits in with other Scorsese anti-heroes, and watch your auteur cred grow.



Days of Heaven (1978)

Directed by Terrence Malick

List price: $9.98


In the history of cinema, there have been plenty of films to offer up unforgettable images of loveliness and emotional weight, but it's possible that none can ever match the elegiac beauty of Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven." Cinematographer Néstor Almendros won an Oscar for his work — a lower-billed Haskell Wexler would later write to Roger Ebert that he sat in a theater, timing the scenes he shot with a stopwatch to prove that over half the footage was his. Whoever was responsible, the film's shots of the endless Texas landscape, so often steeped in golden, late day light, are both epic and achingly wistful, a reminder that the happiness recounted by the film's narrator Linda (Linda Manz) was fleeting and is still mourned. One to own on the basis of its sheer greatness.



The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Directed by John Ford

List price: $9.98


John Wayne made a ton of pictures. A lot of them weren't very good, a bunch have fallen out of copyright, and plenty of those are available in poorly transferred discs. But there are significantly less of his truly great films available for the budget-minded DVD consumer — you're really left with John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and Wayne's elegiac final picture "The Shootist" from director Don Siegel. Though I love both films, I'm giving the nod here to "Valance," and really, how could I not? It's one of the most important westerns Ford ever made, particularly in the way it shows the director, nearing the end of his career, coming to grips with the way in which his ideas and art had become accepted as some kind of literal representation of life on the American frontier. No surprise, then, that the film concludes with the classic line "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Plus you get to hear John Wayne call Jimmy Stewart "pilgrim" a whole lot.



The Naked Gun (1988)

Directed by David Zucker

List price: $9.99


Speaking personally, I will say that while I have many better-made, more important, more artistic movies on my own DVD rack, I haven't watched any disc I own more times than my copy of "The Naked Gun," David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker's timeless cop pastiche. Maybe it's not the funniest movie ever made — but maybe it is. And it's definitely one of the most quotable; and ten bucks is a small price to pay to have your own copy to memorize whenever you please. I'd suggest you start with the priceless scene in which Leslie Nielsen's hapless Lt. Drebin gives a rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" that makes Roseanne's look respectful in comparison ("And the rockets red glare! Bunch of bombs in the air!"). You'll never attend a sporting event in quite the same way again.



Nashville (1975)

Directed by Robert Altman

List price: $9.98


"Nashville" requires more from you than you expect — Robert Altman's masterpiece is a film that sprawls, but also one that spins its storylines obliquely, catching people and relationships in medias res. I've tossed it in the DVD player to have on in the background while doing something else, only to find myself unable to not pay attention to it. By the end, always, when Barbara Harris picks up the mic to sing "It Don't Worry Me," I'm enraptured. There's nothing more I need add to the scads of acclaim "Nashville" has built up over the years; the only thing that remains to be written is that, unlike many other critically acclaimed films, "Nashville" is one you may actually reach for to watch for fun.



The Quick and the Dead (1995)

Directed by Sam Raimi

List price: $9.95


Here's a tip for enjoying this film at home: when Sharon Stone is on screen, just put your hand over her. Voilà — suddenly you've got a rollicking western pastiche with a presciently excellent cast that includes a pre-"L.A. Confidential" Russell Crowe and a pre-"Romeo + Juliet" Leonardo DiCaprio. Even with the outrageously miscast Stone left uncovered, Sam Raimi's underrated and over the top homage to Sergio Leone and later, wilder westerns is a jolly good time, and precisely the kind of DVD you'd actually watch instead of just displaying on your shelf as a sign of your impeccable taste. Extra credit must be given to Gene Hackman, whose wicked John Herod rules the town of Redemption with an iron fist, a lightning draw and a heart squishy with unlikely regret.



Targets (1968)

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

List price: $9.98


"Targets" is a great part of a collection as a "lender" — a disc you don't watch too much, but you give out to people who spot it and go "What the hell is this movie?" In this case, it's a remarkable overlooked film from writer/director Peter Bogdanovich. It was produced under remarkable conditions, too: star Boris Karloff was under contract to producer Roger Corman for two shoot days and Corman entrusted Bogdanovich to make a movie — any movie — by recycling footage from the Karloff/Corman film "The Terror" with stuff from the two new days. Bogdanovich's solution was as ingenious as it was economical: in "Targets," "The Terror" material plays itself, as does Karloff (sorta) as an aging horror film star struggling to find relevancy in a darker time with darker movies. In a concurrent story, a young man (played by Tim O'Kelly) with a happy family loses his mind, kills his loved ones and goes on a murder spree. It's a smart, disturbing movie that surprises pretty much everyone who watches it. More of my friends have watched my copy of "Targets" than I have at this point, and a couple of them have even bought the disc themselves.



3 Days of the Condor (1975)

Directed by Sydney Pollack

List price: $9.98


The 1970s were a pretty amazing decade for American film, and any self-respecting DVD collector needs to own at least a few New Hollywood films that demonstratively scream seventies. That means anti-government, anti-corporate and, above all, deeply paranoid. You could go with Alan J. Pakula's "The Parallax View" ($9.98) starring Warren Beatty, but I've always preferred the somewhat less pretentious, somewhat more entertaining "3 Days of the Condor," starring that other left-wing icon, Robert Redford. The Sundance Kid plays low-level CIA operative Joseph Turner (codename: Condor) who returns from his lunch break to find his co-workers dead, which sets off a movie-wide manhunt, a veritable blooming onion of deception, and a love affair with Faye Dunaway, which, come to think of it, is another de rigeur 70s trope.



Vanishing Point (1971)

Directed by Richard C. Sarafian

List price: $9.98


In Quentin Tarantino's half of "Grindhouse," Zoë Bell hops off a plane from New Zealand and has only has one thing on her mind — she wants to drive an Alpine White 1970 Dodge Challenger. While I'd probably be more in line to take a shower and a nap, I can't fault her choice of make and model. It's the same car as the one Barry Newman's Kowalski, loaded up on Bennies, takes from Denver to Cisco, California in "Vanishing Point," one of the great car chase movies of all time, if a particularly existential and shaggily 70s one. Cred alone could justify this purchase — "Vanishing Point" is a solid cult favorite, and one that's always being threatened with remakes. Charles Robert Carner directed one for TV in the late 90s, starring Viggo Mortensen as a kinder, gentler Kowalski; another big screen remake has been kicking around in development. All the more reason to have the original on hand.

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<![CDATA["The Sugar Curtain"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-sugar-curtain.php Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The Sugar Curtain," First Run/Icarus Films, 2007]


"The Sugar Curtain" opens with a shot of a hand holding a photograph of a building. Then the hand lowers and we see the same building behind the photograph, now decades older and in disrepair. This first shot sets the tone for this absorbing documentary, which uses many old photographs and the recollections of the Cuban people to paint a picture of a happier time in the country that exists now only in memory.


Camila Guzmán Urzúa, the film's producer, director, and cinematographer grew up in Cuba during what she calls the "golden years" of the Revolution. She returns to her former homeland after 15 years in Europe and finds a place immeasurably different than the one in her mother's old black and white snapshots. The fall of the Soviet Union devastated Cuba's economy. "We were totally dependent on Russia," one woman tells Urzúa. "That was a mistake." With supplies from the East suddenly cut off, the socialist bounty of Urzúa's youth dried up, and with it, the happy world in her memory.


This intimate cinematic essay finds Urzúa quite literally visiting old haunts; places that once housed camps for children and now sit derelict, rotting in the Caribbean sun. After its prominent cameo in Michael Moore's "Sicko," where it's portrayed as a sort of oasis of amazing healthcare, it's illuminating to see this side of Cuba, the side of crumbling buildings, underfunded public transportation and government pay and food programs so inadequate that people are forced to steal from their employers to survive. No doubt the scenes in Moore's film were accurate, but "The Sugar Curtain" makes it clear that there is more to the story.


Ironically, I found myself wishing Urzúa's film was a bit more like another Moore movie — his 1989 debut, "Roger & Me." Both deal with artists struggling to cope with the decay of their homes and its accompanying way of life. In Moore's film, he is onscreen, and we can see his reaction to the horrors he is recording. Since Urzúa operates her own camera she can't be in front of it as well, which is a shame. Some of these empty spaces cry out for any human presence to grapple with them. Still, there are a few inventive solutions to this problem; the film's very best scene finds Urzúa confronting her mother about their lives in Cuba. The scene is staged in front of a mirror so that we can see both participants and watch as they meet and avoid each other's gaze.


Mostly, I walked away from "The Sugar Curtain" comparing the images from Urzúa's footage — of sad, hungry people who've watched nearly everyone they know and love move away in search of a better standard of living — and those of the old photographs, young people happy and tan, laying on the beach or standing in a field. I suppose everyone looks happy in photographs, but those smiles don't look faked or posed. The saddest part about "The Sugar Curtain" is that Urzúa's interview subjects don't seem fake or posed either.



"The Sugar Curtain" opens in New York on July 25th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Arctic Tale"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/arctic-tale.php Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Arctic Tale," Paramount Vantage, 2007]


"Arctic Tale" sounds an alarm about our society's environmental impact on the Arctic Ocean — an alarm that sounds distinctly like a walrus fart. This mystifying film, equal parts whimsical children's book and apocalyptic nature documentary, oscillates wildly between tones and moods and digestive functions, particularly in one outlandish scene where a pack of walruses eat a hearty meal and let 'em rip. Not since Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" has the silver screen been torn asunder by such a display of cinematic flatulence.


And this is a movie about global warming, although "Arctic Tale" never actually uses that term (the narration, written by Linda Woolverton, Mose Richards and Kristin Gore — daughter of Al Gore — prefers less divisive terminology like "increasing warmth"). The world its intrepid directors, Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, have spent fifteen years recording, a world of polar bears, walruses and ice floes, is being threatened by hotter and hotter weather, and they record it all in devastating detail. But they temper that material with one of the most juvenile narratives imaginable, and they mold their raw footage into a story that is pretty clearly invented by the filmmakers in the editing room rather than captured in the wild.


This story, about a polar bear cub named Nanu and a walrus pup named Seela, sees the natural world as a Disney animator does, precociously and with a rather strange sense of morality. Nanu and Seela are given names, are followed around by a camera crew and survive in the face of increasingly bad odds. In the childhood logic of "Arctic Tale," that makes them heroes, even as they do some horrific, ferocious things. This leads to a truly creepy sequence wherein heartwarming music plays while two of the characters eat the third. Bambi's mom's got nothing on this stuff.


If there was a surer filmmaking hand at the editing bay command, one might suspect that these sequences are intended to give the environmental message a bigger emotional punch. More likely, this "Baby's First Global Warming Lesson" was a bit too horrifying for its young audience to stomach (and maybe for their parents too), and so the powers that be injected levity wherever they could, the more immature and reassuringly cuddly the better.


To a degree, my opinion is irrelevant, since "Arctic Tale" is pitched toward very small kids and I'm not one and don't have any. But I've got to believe this film, however well-intentioned, will leave children unnerved and confused, particularly during those weird closing credits where children tell us how to combat global warming. (I liked the one who told me buying a hybrid would directly help polar bears.) I can just imagine the questions that await parents on their way out of the theater: "Mommy, why are the walrus farts making it hotter?"



"Arctic Tale" opens in limited release on July 25th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Richard Wong on "Colma: The Musical"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/richard-wong-on-colma-the-musi.php Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 With the all-singing, all-dancing reboot of "Hairspray" fresh in theaters and the successes of "Dreamgirls" and "Chicago," it's clear that after a long banishment the movie musical is struggling back into the cineplexes, though not without leaving behind a chunk of its soul -- most of these productions have stunt casting, slickly edited song shoots and melisma galore, but are still playing out more like a string of music videos than a story.

But then there's "Colma: The Musical," a lo-fi indie first feature written by H.P. Mendoza and directed by Richard Wong. The film documents, in song, the post-high school travails of three friends rattling around the fog-shrouded San Francisco suburb of the title, where those interred in the town's massive cemetery outnumber the living a thousand to one. Musical numbers dwell on underage drinking, small-town malaise and hipster posturing, as the characters try to figure out if leaving home is really the solution to their problems. The film was shot on DV for $15,000, and looks and sounds like it -- the music was recorded in Wong's garage -- which is part of its exuberant charm. After all, the musical isn't about showstopper after showstopper (though given its scale, "Colma" has more than its share of those); it's about the effervescent pleasure of watching characters express their thoughts, no matter how mundane, in song. We met up with Wong with New York, where he's finishing up his next project, a feature co-directed with Wayne Wang.

So you didn't actually grow up in Colma, but you went to school in San Francisco?

I went to school there. Then I dropped out of school there. I didn't consciously move to L.A. -- I was hired to do a movie there and right after that a TV show, and the next thing I knew I'd been sleeping on my friend's couch for a year. I ended up getting a place and working in TV for five years, and then decided that I was stuck, so I needed to get out of that. I moved back to San Francisco and didn't know what I was doing with my life... then decided to do "Colma."

There's a lot of that feeling in the film, with these characters fresh out of high school, going through those moments when you have a pause in your life and you wonder what's next.

I've had so many of those pauses -- the last pause before "Colma," I could have done anything. I could have gone off to Paris! I probably should have made the film then. But I went to do this movie [in L.A.] and the next thing you know five years went by and I was an engineer. It was like, wow, that was fast. So I felt what these kids were going through. I think we all kind of experience it on some level.

Were you always a musical fan?

I was always a musical fan. My mom introduced me to musicals when I was young, and I always liked them until I realized that it wasn't cool to like them anymore. When I met H.P. at college, that's what we had in common, and we were really the only ones.

Any in particular? There seems to be some "West Side Story" in "Colma."

Yeah, "West Side Story" really is my favorite one. I don't like all of them -- I don't really like "The King and I" that much. I hadn't seen nearly as many as H.P. The ones that I do love are special -- "West Side Story" changed the way that I watched movies altogether. It wasn't just about music, even though it is brilliantly infused into the story. It's really about characters. That was the first movie in which I realized none of the characters are bad guys. I don't know if it's something about the musical part of it, but "West Side Story" had a huge influence on me.

Musicals have been out of style for such a long time -- what was your approach when you set out to make one? "Colma" isn't an ironic musical, which is what one might have expected from an indie take on the genre.

It's cool that you say that -- some people think that it is, and I'm like "What do you mean?" It's fine if you liked it, but no, it is not ironic. It is because we love [musicals]. It's all loving! Even the subtle jabs at musicals are done lovingly.

I wasn't clinical about it. We shot it just like we would shoot any movie. If there was no music, we would have shot exactly the same way. I think that's what's wrong with today's musicals. Music videos have had a huge influence on music-to-picture -- that's just a reality of the way MTV has affected our culture. You watch "Chicago" or "Dreamgirls," which are valid musicals, right? But the musical numbers are really just ten cameras and edited. And that's not really the way musicals, I think, were before. The main difference between modern musicals and the old musicals is they'd show scenes. And that's how we approached it, as scenes: what's the emotional content, where should the cameras go? I prefer that -- it wasn't just "blast away and find it later."

What was your approach to staging these scenes? You have some ambitious shots and choreography -- in terms of the party scene ["Crash The Party"/"Could We Get Any Older?"], isn't it all one take?

Yeah, it is all one shot. That's something that I wanted to do from the very beginning, conceptually -- this big oner, especially at a party, because it makes you feel like you're a part of the party. Not everyone recognizes it as one shot -- you just feel like you're following these kids around. That was probably the biggest thing we did — it was one whole day of blocking and one whole day of shooting. With everything else, I think we were just really resourceful. Everything looked a lot bigger than it was. That bar scene really wasn't that big -- there were only 15 people there.

How'd you find your cast? Were the actors people you'd known from before?

I didn't know any of them except H.P. We'd never planned for H.P. to play Rodel. We tried to do as much as we could in San Francisco -- we sent out a casting call, but oddly there was another Asian American film casting and shooting at the same time, and there just weren't enough actors to go around, I guess.

It sucked up all of the Asian American actors.

All of the Asian American actors were gone. It was a bigger movie than ours. We just couldn't find anyone for Rodel, so one day H.P. said "I can do it." And once he said it, it made sense. It was small movie syndrome -- whoever can do it, let's just try and make it work.

Was the whole thing self-financed?

I had raised some money at one point -- $50,000 or so, and then I thought to myself, "You don't need $50,000 to make this." Then I thought that if I didn't need that much, I should just pay for it [all] myself. I was always worried about the money part -- having investors decide that the music wasn't a good idea. I really just wanted it to be me and H.P. making the decisions on our own and not having to worry about anything, about making our money back. I would have been worried about making the money back if someone else paid for it. It was a very conscious decision to do it cheaper, so that I could afford it -- although I don't know that it would have been much different. People always ask me what it would have been like if I'd had more money, but I think that it would be pretty close [to what it is now].

Is it true that you recorded all of the music in a garage?

Yeah. Part of my video engineering days... sometimes you get lumped in to do audio, so I had access to a bunch of production sound gear. And I'm also really conscious about audio sounding different when people sing and when they talk. That kind of thing took people out of musicals in the 60s, 70s and 80s, because the singing sounds so different than the talking -- it just comes out of nowhere.

We set up in the garage and did it all on a computer, burned it on a CD, played it on a boom box -- and it sunk. The whole movie is synched that way. It's super low tech. I realize the reviews say how shitty it looks, but this was never intended to be glossy. I never wanted to light it. I shot some super gorgeous stuff, and it just didn't look right. This movie needs to feel real...

...like the suburbs?

Yeah. It's like an Off-Off-Off-Broadway version of a movie. Or a movie of an Off-Off-Off-Broadway show. I kind of like that.


"Colma: The Musical" is now playing in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA[Richard Wong on "Colma: The Musical" (photo)]]> Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025393 2007-07-23 00:00:00 closed closed richard_wong_on_colma_the_musi_photo inherit 25393 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Five," "Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928-1954"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/five-avantgarde-2-experimental.php Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Abbas Kiarostami's "Five Dedicated to Ozu," Kino, 2003]


You can't judge the state of 21st-century "avant-garde" or "underground" or "experimental" cinema (you pick the label, they're all ill-fitting) by looking at Abbas Kiarostami's "Five Dedicated to Ozu" — the actual subterranean, non-mainstream filmmaking going on in this nation alone is such a chaotic culture, undergoing such massive sea changes (aesthetic and technological), that you'd have a better chance at nailing down a blob of mercury. But make no mistake, "Five" is out of the mainstream, far out — and a radical departure for even the ever-reductive Kiarostami, turning out to be the first film of his in 12 years that didn't get a stateside theatrical release. Still, it may be the only completely non-narrative experiment-on-film the average American cinephile might be likely to see now that it's properly DVD'd and, thanks to Kiarostami's celebrity, might be likely to rent.


Perhaps it's best to define "Five" by its essential surface contradictions — on one hand, it is the antithesis of everything we take movies to be: momentum, speed, energy, character, story, glamour, visual saturation. On the other, "Five" is so winnowed down, so pure in its affect, that it comes close to being distilled cinema — the bare-bones relationship between celluloid images, your eyeballs, time and your cerebral cortex acting and reacting, observing the film and itself in the process. What it is in essence is five individual sequences — each one long shot, or in one case an amalgamation of shorts devised to look like one — digitally videoed on the banks of the Caspian Sea. Nothing much, in the absolutely conventional sense, happens: we see a piece of driftwood jockeyed by waves, we see boardwalk strollers, we watch a herd of ducks pass before the camera, we see a pack of wild dogs frolicking by the shoreline, we observe a pond reflecting the moon.


Potentially useful as a mediation video, "Five" is hardly just ultra-minimalism for its own sake. As always with Kiarostami, the film is a result of life-vs.-cinema interaction, and an integral factor in the "life" side of the equation is us; how we react, how our expectations are defied, how our minds may roam, in the viewing. But also, there's Kiarostami's life and the influence of reality around the film. This consideration is something we ordinarily avoid as spectators, which is why Kiarostami's accompanying making-of doc, "Around Five," is essential. We learn that whereas the ducks were orchestrated in a huge flock (though the way we see it, Kiarostami's chief intention was to see what would happen if he brought several hundred ducks to the shores of the Caspian), the dogs appeared magically in front of the running camera after the filmmaker had gone to sleep. Will the wave break the driftwood, and when? Is the night pond a complete illusion? Kiarostami tells a fabulous tale about how an Indian royal proudly sent a Persian prince the newly invented game of chess, and the Persian in reply sent back the new game of backgammon — a wiser game, it is said, because it accepts the role of fate and chance in life where chess purports to control its outcome through human will and logic alone. Which is more real? Which would make better (or more truthful) movies?
Watching "Five" is a lulling, sleepy experience even for those schooled in the derisive irony of Warhol and the structuralist minimalism of Michael Snow. But the aboriginal cinematic action of it — the images, the passage of time, the questions about fact and invention, Kiarostami's ultimate generosity — are impossible to get out of your head.


Avant-gardes are not audience-friendly — which is why you never hear anything about the scores of new experimental films released every year on DVD. This is true except in retrospect; the underground films of yesteryear are helplessly seductive, naive but lovely — inspiring a ripe nostalgia for the life of the fringe aesthetes, who in the 20s through to the 50s always seemed to be having more fun than ordinary, job-holding people. Kino's new "Avant-Garde 2" is their second DVD of multi-decade, multinational avant-garde classics reaped from the private collection of late L.A. programmer Raymond Rohauer, and can be thus attacked from a number of postures: as more hard-to-find landmark works by seminal artists, as an infinitely ponderable showcase of extinct cultural history (artists can't afford sets, so real homes and neighborhoods are captured in amber), or as a time capsule of charming aesthetic innocence. You get no less than four out of Stan Brakhage's first five shorts, complete with narratives, music and comedy (!); two early films by Sidney Peterson, an ignored giant in the American avant-garde; James Watson and Melville Webber's must-have "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1928), made the same year as Jean Epstein's); Joseph Vogel's conspicuously Derenesque "House of Cards" (1947), indulgent hooey from James Broughton and Marie Menken, and scads more.


Something like the collection's centerpiece, Jean Isidore Isou's "Venom and Eternity" (1951) finally emerges into the video-age daylight — a notorious, feature-length anti-film made by the founder of the quasi-anarchic Lettrist International, a short-lived, postwar rebel art movement made famous in Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces." (It's indicative of the movie's rarity that Marcus apparently never saw it and even misreported its running time by over two hours.) Isou's self-advertising, self-exploiting mess is primarily random footage of Isou's coterie roaming around Paris, framed by a furiously egomaniacal narration (by Isou) that never stops telling us, while the movie unfurls, what grand act of defiance it is and how it will change the world. That's when the soundtrack isn't subsumed by fellow Lettrist poets reciting their poems, which consist of abstracted, rhythmic syllables and sounds rather than words. Try as they did, none of the original Dadaists managed to make an unwatchable, self-destructive film, but a few decades later Isou did, laying down a pre-punk gauntlet nine years before Godard's first feature and a full year before Guy Debord finished his first juvenile short. Truly, it makes today's indie rebels and anti-establishment garage banders look like market-obedient sheep by comparison. Part of the movie's myth status is the unverifiable riot it supposedly caused at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. Even if that's an urban legend, those were the days.


"Five Dedicated to Ozu" (Kino) and "Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema From 1928-1954" (Kino) will be available on DVD on July 24th.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: July 27th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/opening-this-week-july-27th-20.php Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Romain Duris in "Molière," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Arctic Tale"

Pretty much exactly like "March of the Penguins", but with a polar bear and a walrus at the film's center instead of our favorite tuxedoed birds. Director Sarah Robertson reportedly spent six years filming in the Arctic, which according to National Geographic will no longer exist by the year 2040. Queen Latifah takes over the narration duties (what, Morgan Freeman was busy?) while the film features music by the Shins, Cat Stevens, and more.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Camden 28"

Director Anthony Giacchino's debut film documents the story of 28 antiwar activists who were arrested for conspiring to remove and destroy files from government agencies located in Camden, NJ. The film features archival footage and current interviews with FBI agents involved in the case.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Devil Came On Horseback"

Filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg follow-up this year's "The Trials of Darryl Hunt" with a documentary that exposes the genocide raging in Darfur through the eyes of a former U.S marine who returns home to make the story public. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"I Know Who Killed Me"

Lindsay "Downward Spiral" Lohan's first post-rehab film (but who can keep track?) finds her playing a girl physically and mentally altered after a brutal attack by an assailant in this thriller directed by "The Lost" director Chris Sivertson. The film promises to be as confusing as its trailer as LiLo plays dual personalities and strips... for some reason. Neal McDonough and Julia Ormond co-star as Lohan's parents (or are they?).

Opens wide (official site).


"Molière"

"The Story of My Life" director Laurent Tirard helms this historical fiction about the "blank" period of French satirist Molière's life when the recently imprisoned young playwright assumes the identity of a priest in order to help a wealthy man stage a play he wrote for his would-be mistress. Hotcha Gallic up-and-comer Romain Duris stars.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"No End in Sight"

Still angry after last month's release of "Sicko"? Then get ready for the Charles Ferguson-directed Iraq War exposé "No End in Sight," which examines the manners in which U.S. policy errors in Iraq created the insurgency and chaos that engulfs the nation today. The film won the Special Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival and features interviews with former White House officials, including Richard Armitage, Barbara Bodine and Colin Powell.

Opens in New York and Washington D.C. (official site).


"No Reservations"

While there's no surprise that Hollywood would remake the excellent German film "Mostly Martha," we're hoping this Catherine Zeta-Jones vehicle will be able to match up to its source material. Mrs. Michael Douglas plays a neurotic, tightly wound chef whose life changes when she unexpectedly becomes the guardian of her young niece. The film sounds like it would've been stronger in the hands of Diane Keaton 20 years ago, but here's hoping supporting cast members Abigail Breslin and Aaron Eckhart are the icing on the cake.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Simpsons Movie"

Hooray, it's the film everybody was looking forward to about ten years ago. While recent seasons "The Simpsons" haven't equaled what the show used to be, we still can't hide our excitement over this much talked about film, courtesy of show creator Matt Groening. While we're glad to hear many former writers from "The Simpsons"' golden years returned for this film (no Conan?), there's still little news about its mysterious plot (Terrorists? Global warming? Green Day?).

Opens wide (official site).


"This Is England"

Indie director Shane Meadows, previously known for "Dead Man's Shoes" and "Once Upon a Time in the Midlands," delivers another film about a troubled time in English history in this semi-autobiographical tale about the director's own experiences in a skinhead gang. The film made a splash at film festivals last year following its premiere at Toronto. Plus, the film offers music from Toots and The Maytals, Dexys Midnight Runners and The Specials. Best soundtrack of the year, perhaps?

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["Cashback"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/cashback.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 "Cashback" ends with its hero, a dreamy art school student named Ben, telling the audience in voiceover, "Once upon a time, I wanted to know what love was. You just have to see that it's wrapped in beauty and hidden away in between the seconds of your life. If you don't stop for a minute, you might miss it." Ben — and maybe "Cashback" writer/director Sean Ellis — has seen "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" so many times he's begun claiming its insights as his own.

There are a few moments of truth in "Cashback," but those, like that final farewell, are all cribbed from other movies and television shows. Ben's idealized erotic fantasies, and its gallery finale, come straight out of Terry Zwigoff's superior "Art School Confidential." His time-wasting tomfoolery at his dead-end job reeks of Kevin Smith's "Clerks." Even his ability to stop time and rearrange the details of his life while everyone around him remains frozen isn't original: anyone else remember Zack Morris' use of the phrase "Time out!" on "Saved by the Bell"? Maybe Ellis didn't mean to take these elements. Maybe he's never seen "Art School Confidential" or "Clerks." But that doesn't make it any less unoriginal.

The one truly unique wrinkle on all this stuff isn't something to be proud of either. A bad break-up leaves Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) crippled by unconquerable insomnia, leading him to start taking nightshifts at a local supermarket, where he passes the time, somewhat counter-intuitively, by literally stopping it for hours on end. Then he undresses the helpless female shoppers and sketches their naked bodies. Ellis presents this violation as the height of artistic beauty, with slow, graceful pans across the women's bare breasts (though rarely over their blank, mannequin faces) and twinkling music that implies that Ben's peeping is something pure rather than something skeezy. "Cashback" actually plays sexual assault for romance (it plays it for comedy later, too).

Do college students fantasize about women? Of course. Is that wrong? Not necessarily, though Ben's might be, particularly if, as Ellis emphasizes throughout, he isn't really fantasizing about undressing women but actually doing it, without their consent. That's not beautiful — that's demeaning, not to mention illegal.

Ben is never presented as a sleazebag (not to mention a philosophical plagiarist). If Ellis disagrees with Ben, or finds his actions unsavory in any way, he never shows it. Instead he uses all of the technical skills at his command — and this young filmmaker has plenty of them — to valorize his behavior. Ben stole Ferris Bueller's philosophy, but not his sense of humor or honor. Without those traits, he's just a jerk and a perv.


"Cashback" opens in limited release on July 20th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Cashback" (photo)]]> Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008545 2007-07-16 00:00:00 closed closed cashback_photo inherit 8545 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Sunshine"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/sunshine.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Cillian Murphy in "Sunshine," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


Their first mistake was naming their ship the Icarus. Icarus, a character from Greek mythology, was able to fly on artificial wings, but grew too enamored with his power, flew too close to the sun, melted his wings and fell to his death. I certainly get the symbolism, but if you were on a last-ditch mission to save all of humanity by delivering a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan to the heart of the sun, wouldn't you name the rocket you were traveling in something a bit more optimistic?


Their second mistake was in embarking on this mission during a Danny Boyle thriller. The talented director of brutal films like "Shallow Grave" and "28 Days Later" has no compunction about putting his casts, and his audience, through emotional roller coasters. If you were headed to the sun in a Spielberg film, you probably stand a better-than-even shot of coming home alive. In Boyle's version, the crew of the Icarus is looking down the wrong end of some seriously long odds. Boyle's films aren't "feel-good" entertainment — but they are feel-something entertainment, which should count for something nowadays.


Their third mistake is a well-intentioned bad decision. Technically, the eight heroes looking to save mankind are aboard the Icarus II — Icarus I was lost before it could deliver its payload — and when the crew orbits Mercury, the planet's iron content acts as a huge antennae. Harvey, the communications officer (Troy Garity), picks up the Icarus I's distress signal and Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) puts it to the man in charge of their stellar bomb, Capa (Cillian Murphy): investigate the Icarus I, and potentially acquire another payload and another change to reignite the sun, or maintain their course and their mission. Capa reasons that two bombs and two chances are better than one and one, so the crew intercepts their drifting predecessor. And then things go horribly wrong.


"Sunshine" has been marketed as a cerebral science-fiction film (it even prompted us to discuss that very topic on this week's IFC News Podcast) but it's much more visceral than that. To be sure, there are plenty of "big ideas" — mostly about the morality of mankind intervening in God's plan for the Earth, and whether such a God or a plan even exists at all — but at times, especially near the end, this is more "Jason X" than "2001: A Space Odyssey," if only "Jason X" were a good film with characters we cared about.


Once the Icarus II heads to Icarus I, the entire movie is like a giant cinematic sweat box, and that's meant as a compliment. The crew members are closer than anyone has ever been to the source of all life, and imminent death hangs around every corner. "Sunshine"'s trailer employed the score from "Requiem For a Dream," and that's a fitting choice — I walked out of both films with a similar feeling of exhaustion, like I'd run a marathon without the requisite training.


Boyle's grip on our emotions is so precise it's nearly as frightening as the film itself: few filmmakers are as adept at wringing terror out of an empty room or a simple pile of dust. He's such a capable filmmaker, he gets us so wrapped up in the Icarus' plight that we don't have time to notice just how silly some of the film is. In someone else's hands, the idea of a crispy naked guy shouting philosophical gibberish while breathing heavily would be absolutely laughable. At moments like that, Boyle flies pretty close to the sun. But his wings are made of stronger stuff than wax.



"Sunshine" opens in wide release on July 20th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Javier Bardem on "Goya's Ghosts"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/javier-bardem-on-goyas-ghosts.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: Javier Bardem in "Goya's Ghosts," Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2007]


It's a good year for bad deeds, particularly if you're Javier Bardem. Not only is he receiving praise for his portrayal of Anton Chigurh, a near-mythic hit man in the upcoming Coen brothers film "No Country for Old Men," he also takes center stage as an Inquisition-era priest who doesn't mind shifting convictions to accommodate the prevailing winds in Milos Forman's historical epic, "Goya's Ghosts," opening this week.


When you're approached by American producers, are there any special criteria you use in evaluating those roles?


I think it's that same as I do in Spain: Would I be interested in watching this story as an audience [member]? If I'm touched by the story — because I think the most important thing is the storytelling — then I do it. I don't really pay too much attention to who's behind it. Of course, if who's behind it is Milos Forman or the Coens, that helps. But at the end, when we have movies that we like so much, we remember the stories.


Is there an aspect of exploration that you need as well?


Once you get there, if the author of that story is telling you something you want to explore, then you take a good look at the role and see if the role helps you to explore that situation, or if it's a passive character that doesn't do that much. The insight, for example, in "Goya's Ghosts" helps you to say, "Okay, I want to take the journey to see what's behind those lines, what's behind that man." And maybe I'm lucky to find something for myself.


The character you play in "Goya's Ghosts," Brother Lorenzo, is quite the opportunist, isn't he?


Yeah, totally. I saw him as a victim. I saw him as a victim of the totalitarian regimes that happened in that moment in history, — Inquisition or French revolution, whether it's in the name of God or in the name of human civil rights — what [the regimes] were doing was trying to gather power, power through fear. In those moments, I think those regimes create people like Brother Lorenzo, who go so radical because they need to make [others] believe that they are true believers.


Are his actions out of desperation?


Not desperation, but fear. Fear of losing what he has become, fear of losing what he dreams of being in the future, which is being on the top, being close to the high priest or the king. It's like he thinks of himself as being a grandiose person, and everything that [stands] in the middle of that journey, that achievement, has to be destroyed.


In fact, the overarching theme of "Goya's Ghosts" is how people trim their moralities to fit the temper of their times.


I think the ethical point of this movie is that ethics are something that people hold inside, they're not something you can be taught by any statement or any system. You either have it, or you don't. It appears that my character is the most ethical of all, but in reality he's the opposite. While Goya, who is just a witness and cannot step forward because then he would be punished, is the most ethical of all. His ethics are his paintings — that's where he really makes justice. He's fair with the human race, putting what he sees in there for people not to forget, ever.


What connected you to this story?


The history. The fact that Milos Forman came to Spain and wanted to portray a time when beautiful Spain was like a raped country, where everybody was coming in and abusing [it]. I liked the idea... and also I have this relationship with the Catholic Church that I want to explore. I was raised in the Catholic Church and I have my problems with it. That's how I chose [Brother Lorenzo's] voice — it's a risky voice, but I saw, when I was little, when the Franco regime was coming to an end, I was five, I was six — I saw many of these people speaking with this beautiful voice about being at peace, while acting exactly the opposite. Those things were engraved in my mind: How can you say one thing and do the opposite?


In a number of your roles, you've come to explore many gradations of evil. Have you come to understand it any better?


Maybe with the Coens. There was a moment where I felt numb. It's not that I was overtaken by the role, but I felt numb. When I was doing the role, I had a lot of free time, and I remember watching the news and seeing the horror that is going on out there, and I felt numb. And I said to myself, "Well, now I am dangerous." I guess that has to do with the evil-minded — they feel numb, they don't feel emotionally attached to others. That's why they can make these decisions of killing.


Wanna go back there again?


No. No, no, no, no. I was so happy when I left those characters, especially Anton.



"Goya's Ghosts" opens in New York, Los Angeles and other cities on July 20, expanding on August 3 (official site).



Other recent interviews on IFC News: Danny Boyle talks "Sunshine," sex in space and sci-fi fundamentalism here; Steve Buscemi discusses directing and starring in "Interview" here.

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<![CDATA[Cerebral Science Fiction]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/ifc-news-podcast-36-cerebral-s.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Science fiction wasn't always the exclusive domain of noisily physics-defying space explosions and furry aliens -- this week on the IFC News podcast, we look at some of the films that have used the sci-fi genre to convey big ideas.


Download: MP3, 29:28 minutes, 26.9 MB

Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28381 2007-07-16 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_36_cerebral_s publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028381 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Cerebral Science Fiction (photo)]]> Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028381 2007-07-16 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_36_cerebral_s_photo inherit 28381 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Danny Boyle on "Sunshine"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/danny-boyle-on-sunshine.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 It may seem peculiar that Danny Boyle would fancy himself an optimist, considering his films cover unsettling topics like heroin addiction ("Trainspotting"), screwing over friends ("Shallow Grave"), and a flat-out, zombie-like apocalypse ("28 Days Later"). "The scenarios pick themselves," claims the beloved British director, who strives with each new film to make "the biggest challenge possible to that human spirit." That's clearly the case in the bleak future portrayed in "Sunshine," Boyle's foray into the intelligent, philosophically curious realm of classic science fiction. Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne and Chris Evans star as crew members of the spaceship Icarus II, who are on the ultimate suicide mission to save planet Earth in 2057: to reignite our dying sun, they must drop a bomb the size of Manhattan onto its surface. Getting there is easy, but coming back? Well, let's just say the Icarus I never made it home, and if you studied your Greek mythology, things aren't faring well for the wings of its successor. When talking with Boyle about his latest film, the topic of science makes him wild-eyed and giddy, making it hard to believe he didn't try out the sci-fi genre sooner. [WARNING: Minor spoilers follow!]


Some of the early "Sunshine" reviews use a descriptor that I'm not sure I agree with: "metaphysical." The film melds science, spirituality and existentialism, but would you call it that? Or are the so-called metaphysics found only in the inexplicable, third-act reappearance of Icarus I's Captain Pinbacker?


People think Pinbacker is a figure from horror, like a cinematic figure. What we were trying to do was make something that... like, when you get to the surface of the sun, it's not a tea party. Nobody's going to sit down, have a debate, and politely serve tea. Anything goes because nobody knows the rules. Nobody knows whether we'd freeze in time, or stretch, or bend. So we thought, what would happen if you exposed yourself to this energy like he's done? What makes him up? You're space, basically. Everybody says you're water, but you're not. You're basically empty space held together, so you're solid to me. What if Pinbacker had been exposed, so that all his protons and neutrons had been reorganized? He was literally shifting in front of you. It would be a challenge to the mission in political terms, because he's a fundamentalist and believes science is wrong now; we must bow down to God's will, and nature must take its pitiless course. He's not only a challenge to that, but to Cillian's sanity about what is possible, whether he can keep his sanity and do his job: deliver the science.


Do you see Pinbacker as a tangible, or are we just experiencing him through the panicked perspective of crew members who can't get a grasp on who or what he is?


Exactly, they can't. I don't know if you can define that, whether it's him or that whole Wittgenstein thing: do you exist when you go out of the room, or do you only exist when I see you — and the same for you to me? [laughs] That's how Cillian and Rose see him, but they're the only ones that actually see him. In their minds, that's how he exists, certainly. So, in a way, he is metaphysical. His voice is real, he speaks as a human, and his fundamentalism is representative of something on Earth that we understand now: there are people who regard our attempts at science as being futile, that we should actually go back to the villages and wait for God. [laughs] And, you know, that is a human voice. It's a contradiction to the science, but physically, what he represents is something meta.


You've said that science is arrogant. I presume you mean scientists, specifically?


They're extraordinary. We had this one guy who was the sweetest man, but fuck me, arrogant? You think you get arrogant people in the movie world? [laughs] It's just extraordinary, I love it. That is science, really. It has to have this incredible idea that you can travel to the sun — this thing indescribably greater than anything we can imagine — and they don't just think they can change it, they will it. That's the level of arrogance they have. You can also read it as audacious, if you want to be more positive about it. And you want science to be audacious because that's how we find a vaccine for malaria, y'know? That's precisely why we progress, because we won't go back to villages. For whatever reason, whether good or bad in the short-term, our dedication to cities, progress and science in the long-term is astonishing. That's the path we're all on together, apart from the Taliban. It will enhance and maintain life given us by the start. That's a good thing, I think.


Speaking of progress, why aren't there more sci-fi films today that are actual science fiction, rather than just action movies set against futuristic backdrops?


Interesting, I sort of know why there isn't. It's precisely because — like "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" — fantasy is free. You can think of anything, but this kind of sci-fi is very restricted. Because we've only been up in steel tubes, these films tend to boil down to the same three ingredients: a ship, a crew and a signal. Until we colonize, there will always be that restriction on the amount of stories you can tell about it. In fact, it's very difficult to make one that isn't reminiscent of another one. They're really closely bound together, and I learned making ["Sunshine"] how narrow a corridor it was that you're moving in.


There may be some overlapping ideas with "Solaris" or "2001," but it's still more thought-provoking than some intergalactic shoot-em-up.


They're a bit more serious. That was something that was extraordinary, was how difficult it is to get humor in them. Chris Evans got some in for us because he's very deft at that, but it's fucking difficult. [laughs] When you look back at those other ones, they're very serious. The whole film passes without a laugh, some of them. You can't have romance in them, either. We had obvious candidate roles; Cillian's could easily have gone romantic, or Chris' relationship. And we tried that at script stage, it didn't work. Just laughable. They kiss, and you think "Fuck off, that's nonsense!" They tried it in "2010," and it didn't work there. You watch it, and it's slightly embarrassing and weird. We had an amazing sex scene worked out, but we didn't shoot it [because] it was inappropriate.


But they are doing research into sex. We heard that they'd taken pig semen up into the space station to impregnate in weightless conditions, then presumably bring it back to see whether exposure to weightlessness has an effect on procreation. If they're planning long-term space travel, that's obviously one of the things they've got to know about. Do they sterilize people before they go? It's astonishing. They're working 50 or 100 years ahead. They have to. That's where a lot of our information came from, like the oxygen garden. They won't store oxygen because it's impossible on the levels that they need; they'll have to create it. We had a lot of exotic plants for visual reasons, but theirs will just be fern gardens because ferns are really good producers of oxygen.


[As for] the cooking thing, "2001" is nonsense: packaged bits of cellophane food and microwaves, they won't do that. The cycle of nurturing and growing your food — gathering it, cooking it, eating it, washing up — that cycle, and the smell of cooking, is crucial to people's sanity far away from home. Once they solve the weightless problem, which they may never do, they're really concerned about the psychology of deep space travel. We read this really interesting book [called "Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth"] by a journalist named Andrew Smith, who had this clever idea. He tried to talk to all the people who had been to the moon. Two of them are dead now, and there are only about 12 left. They talked about going around the dark side of the moon because they're the only representatives of our species who have ever been out of contact with the earth, and it marked them all. The 45 minutes when there was no radio contact with NASA, and all they see is eternity out there...


I had no idea what a science nut you truly are. Would you want to travel the cosmos?


Oh yeah! I've done weightlessness up in that plane. I've never done anything like it, I've gotta tell you. Initially, [the sensation] is just terror. Your body kicks in and goes mad. They warn you about this, because everybody's the same. Your reaction is to start swimming like you've been thrown into a deep pool. Your mind and body don't understand what's going on, so you start kicking to get back to the surface. The first three or four times you do it, you can't stop yourself. They warn you not to do it, but everybody's doing it because your body's saying, "I'm falling, I'm out of control." Then gradually, the mind begins to understand it. Each block is 30 seconds long, we did it about 25 times, and by the end, it's very mellow: whooooa.


If technology caught up tomorrow, and the government was ready for the first 10,000 guinea pigs to colonize Mars, would you leave this planet behind?


Wouldn't you? The other thing they talked about in this [Andrew Smith] book was when the astronauts went to the moon, the scientists were very confident they could get them safely to the moon. But they were less than 50% sure they could get them back, yet none of them dropped out. They all wanted to go. I think, given we all have unresolved issues on Earth with people, you'd want to go. One of the pleasures of doing a film like this is that you get a perspective on your life that's different than the everyday thing. You think, "Wow, that is really bigger than all of my obsessions and concerns." To feel so small, it gives you a modesty. You feel like you slot in somewhere, part of a pattern. We're all so obsessed with individualism and success, and you're just a tiny little moment in this huge thing, y'know? To see a bit more of that would be extraordinary.

"Sunshine" opens in wide release on July 20th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Danny Boyle on "Sunshine" (photo)]]> Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008541 2007-07-16 00:00:00 closed closed danny_boyle_on_sunshine_photo inherit 8541 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[The 2007 New York Asian Film Festival]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/the-2007-new-york-asian-film-f.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Over the six years that the New York Asian Film Festival has been bringing Japanese horror, extreme Korean cinema, Malaysian action flicks, Chinese epics and more to appreciative fans, the face of Asian cinema has changed significantly. I caught up with one of the festival directors, Grady Hendrix, to find out his thoughts on what's next, and interviewed filmmaker Sion Sono, in town to promote the U.S. premiere of his film "Exte," starring Chiaki Kuriyama of "Kill Bill" fame and concerned with the horror of haunted hair extensions.




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<![CDATA[The 2007 New York Asian Film Festival (photo)]]> Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025395 2007-07-16 00:00:00 closed closed the_2007_new_york_asian_film_f_photo inherit 25395 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: July 20th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/opening-this-week-july-20th-20.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Jay Jonroy's "David & Layla," Jeff Lipsky, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Cashback"

Expanding his original short film into a full-length feature, director Sean Ellis offers up a comedy featuring an English art student whose insomnia inspires him to begin working nights at a local supermarket. As he befriends the colorful characters who work the graveyard shift there, he slowly develops a crush on the quiet checkout girl who may be able to solve his sleeping problem. The film is getting a limited release, but will be out on DVD shortly after.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"David & Layla"

Suggested alternate title: "My Big Fat Judeo-Arabic Wedding." Jay Jonroy directs this romantic comedy based on the true story of a Muslim woman and a Jewish man who fall in love in New York City against the wishes of their culturally divisive families. The film received the Best Feature award at the Washington DC Independent Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Goya's Ghosts"

We're glad to finally see Milos Forman return to the cinema after an eight year absence, we just wish it weren't with... this. "Goya's Ghosts" is an 18th century period piece set in Inquisition-era Spain, where painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) finds his muse (Natalie Portman) accused of atheism and tortured by her accuser (Javier Bardem). Forman seems perfect for period pictures, but while we love the film's cast, early reviews claim that the film's all style with no substance.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Hairspray"

A film based on the Broadway musical based on the 1988 John Waters film about how pleasantly plump star-struck teenager Tracy Turnblad makes waves on a local TV dance show amidst social unrest in 1962 Baltimore. Boo to casting a seriously creepy looking John Travolta, yay to casting everyone else (Michelle Pfeiffer as Velma Von Tussle, Christopher Walken as Walter Turnblad and newcomer Nikki Blonsky as Tracy). Early reviews generally find that the film captures the lighthearted tone of the Broadway musical; good thing, because we don't think we can stomach another heavy summer movie.

Opens wide (official site).


"I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry"

Another summer, another Adam Sandler comedy. Sandler and "The King of Queens" star Kevin James play straight Brooklyn firefighters who pretend to be a gay couple in order to receive domestic partner benefits. We long for the days of more sensitive gay-themed comedies like "In & Out," but we really weren't expecting much from a Happy Madison production.

Opens wide (official site).


"Live-In Maid"

A wealthy woman and her live-in housekeeper must adjust their routine and relationship when Buenos Aires is plunged into an economic crisis in this drama from "The Secret Sea" director Jorge Gaggero. The film won the Special Jury Prize for dramatic World Cinema at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Sunshine"

British director Danny Boyle, last seen with 2005's winning children's film "Millions," returns with a science fiction (!) film about a team of eight astronauts who must re-ignite the dying sun in order to save the earth.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Your Mommy Kills Animals"

Director Curt Johnson takes an in-depth look at the behind-the-scenes workings of the animal rights movement and the FBI's declaration that extreme animal rights groups represent the most dangerous homegrown threat to the United States.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["Malpertuis," "Tideland"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/malpertuis-tideland.php Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Malpertuis," Barrel Entertainment, Inc.]


A peculiar side effect of 125+ years of mass entertainment culture has been the snark hunt: the desire for the maudit, music or books or films that have been largely scorned or misunderstood or forgotten or all three, but which, it is held by the lone, courageous voice crying in the wilderness, are in fact sublime and subversive and ultracool. We all know of movies like this ("cult" is the too-often applied term in the U.S.), and we all also nurse ardor for some unique examples ourselves (OK, me: Kalatozov's "The Letter Never Sent" (1959), Fassbinder's "Whity" (1970), Buñuel's lowliest Mexican films, Friedkin's "Sorcerer" (1977), Jean Rollin's "The Living Dead Girl" (1982), the Bill Murray version of "The Razor's Edge" (1984), Alex Cox's "Walker" (1987), and so on).


Harry Kümel's "Malpertuis" (1971) is a prime and much mooned-over example — ambitious and crazy, rarely seen, butchered by its producers, mocked at Cannes, and, up to now, a stranger to home video. (It's never even been shown on American TV.) Truth be told, no film could quite live up to the decades of subterranean fanboy hype it's inadvertently produced. As it stands — in the new DVD, in a director's cut version 19 minutes longer than the truncated original — Kümel's loopy Belgian launch of surrealism (adapted from a novel by prolific pulpmeister Jean Ray) is vintage, post-New Wave Euro-nonsense, with an international cast (led by a bedridden Orson Welles) all broadly dubbed into Flemish and all embodying their roles as if they're in a Halloween pageant. The story is appropriately dream-like: on shore leave, a callow sailor (Mathieu Carrière) visits a cartoonish brothel/nightclub, is knocked out and wakes up where he presumably started: back in the huge, labyrinthine family mansion of the title, where the leering, grinning, moping family members, servants and hangers-on wait impatiently for Welles' sweaty patriarch to die. This "house of the damned" is never seen from the outside — concrete reality of all sorts is not a factor. Naturally, there's a secret to be revealed, and it has something to with why Euryale (Susan Hampshire) cannot look at someone without turning them to stone...


Kümel's first feature, "Les Lèvres Rouges" (Daughters of Darkness), released earlier the same year, is a widely appreciated elegant-decadent rejigger of vampire lore set in a bedazzlingly barren off-season seaside hotel. "Malpertuis" is as inelegant a movie as you can imagine, in your face, lit like a carnival and entranced with its own grotesqueries. Hampshire deserves an award of some kind for playing four distinct roles and only conjuring the vague sense that Kümel hired a number of somewhat similar-looking actresses to fill up his cluttered rooms. But, frankly, the phantasmagoric allure of Kümel's most notorious film flew right by me (though not past David Del Valle, the starry-eyed Malpertuisian who wrote the copious liner notes), as much as its expression of a kind of 1960s-70s lawless filmmaking — well-funded and targeting a large counter-culture audience, but still often outrageously ridiculous — made it a sweet place to visit. You have to see it, of course, and I'm glad I did, finally, after all these years.


Almost that film's 21st century counterpart, Terry Gilliam's "Tideland" — which has been out on DVD for a while, following its panicked micro-release earlier this year, but which I just caught up with — is a snark-hunted freak just waiting for its historical moment, decades from now, when someone makes a case for it as a neglected masterpiece. It's certainly been treated like boot-stuck dog crap for now — which, given Gilliam's unpredictable nose for audience-pleasing, can make any hardy cinephile predisposed to love it. I can't say I fall into that camp entirely — it may be one of those films that require a distanced cultural context, not the demands of the marketplace now, to frame it — but it is certainly a strange, slouching beast of a film, whose slouching is a ferocious effort to, as Gilliam says in his pleading DVD intro, capture the world through the imagination-fogged eyes of a child. It certainly does that — "Tideland" lurches and lopes around its lone prairie farmhouse, its rotting corpses and its defiantly self-preservative heroine (Jodelle Ferland, capable of unearthly rapport with the camera) as if lost in the skull of a daydreaming trauma victim. Other filmmakers have put their viewers through ordeals, aiming for a cathartic final stage, but usually rigor, depletion and shocking violence are the tools in use. Gilliam's familiar, post-Python visual style reads instead like a cinematic code for pop-fantasy fun and games — did he realize we might misread his intentions, that his style was in conflict with his material? Or do they seem in conflict only because we've been preconditioned to think that Gilliam's emphatic, fish-eyed palette and the cinema-of-cruelty art film are mutually exclusive? This may not be the right question to ask, but we may not figure out what the right questions are for years to come.



"Malpertuis" (Barrel Entertainment) will be available on DVD on July 24th; "Tideland" (Velocity/Thinkfilm) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Patrice Leconte on "My Best Friend"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/patrice-leconte-on-my-best-fri.php Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 On American shores, Patrice Leconte is known for sumptuous period films like the Oscar-nominated "Ridicule" (2004) or sophisticated, talky arthouse dramas like "Intimate Strangers" (2004). In his native France, however, the director has moved fluidly between serious fare and crowd-pleasers like his beloved 70s "Les Bronzés" vacation comedies, which he recently revisited with a third installment, "Friends Forever." His latest film, "My Best Friend," isn't such a change of pace, then — the lighthearted comedy finds gratingly self-centered Parisian antiques dealer François (Daniel Auteuil) challenged by his exasperated business partner to produce a best friend by the end of the month. François accepts the bet, only to discover that not only does he not have friends, but most of his day-to-day acquaintances barely tolerate him. It's not until he stumbles upon a cheery, trivia-loving cab driver named Bruno (Dany Boon) that he begins to comprehend what friendship actually is.


In the press notes you say that you are no longer interested in making serious films. What brought that about?


I have never taken myself very seriously, but I have always taken my work seriously. And more and more I have come to believe that it's possible to tell profound and serious things with an appearance of lightness. Lightness is always or often considered a defect — we say this person is light or this work is light. As far as I'm concerned, I'd really like people to refer to my body of work as light. I think that would be a compliment, because the time we are living in is quite heavy. It's weighing on us so we might as well create light works. I just prefer uplifting people rather than weighing them down.


You've been a proponent of films being enjoyable as well as having artistic weight. Have you ever come up against resistance to that? As you say, it can be looked down upon when a film is entertaining.


You know, a few years ago, I did have a little tug of war with the critics who said my work was light, but I don't want to go there anymore. It's true that having the ambition of being popular or an artist that has a wide audience appeal is a very bad position from the point of view of criticism, but I really don't care. My sole ambition, and it is an ambitious one, is to make films that I like and that I am proud of and that fill the cinema up and that people enjoy. It's impossible to have any more satisfying ambition than this, in my opinion.


With this film and your last two you've focused on the idea of two strangers meeting by chance and making a deep connection. Why does this scenario hold such an appeal to you?


I don't do it on purpose, but I do really love the notion of meeting and the word "meeting." It's really something that's close to me. It's a magical word because to be open to meeting someone and interested in them and so forth means that you're open to the world, and that is something that is very common to all three of these films.


There's a sense in the film that you surround yourself with a circle of acquaintances, and it becomes very difficult to break out and meet someone new. Do you see that a particular aspect of modern living?


Yes, it is a characteristic of modern life, but it's also a characteristic of living in an urban setting. I think that more and more in this time we are living in, people are communicating with each other in all forms and possible ways, but are really falling back on themselves and in the end care only about themselves — it's really terrible. And I think this factor of no longer having or creating basic communication in our daily activities is something that's picking up speed and it really frightens me — it chills me. So I try to communicate ideas, emotions, notions that are simple but try to uplift towards the positive rather than the negative.


You've set this search for a best friend in very sophisticated urban crowd — it's a source of the comedy that someone in this very Parisian circle is on the lookout for a best friend. One rarely talks about having a best friend as an adult.


When I was writing the script I was afraid that the notion of Paris might not work because it sort of seemed almost absurd. I was afraid, for such a realistic film as this, that François' naiveté when he says "I am going to find a best friend in ten days" wouldn't work. We couldn't say that to one another — "I am going to show you my best friend in ten days" — it wouldn't work, in the same way you can't say "How much do you bet that I will fall in love by the end of the day?" I think it works because of Daniel Auteuil's talent, this teetering on the limits of credibility, [in portraying] François' as convinced that he has so many friends, that he takes this crazy bet.


In the film you play with the conventions of a romance in portraying the friendship of Bruno and François. Was that your inspiration, a platonic romance between these two men?


I have thought for a long time that friendships and love stories have a lot of common points. It's true that their discovery of this friendship which they have between them goes through all these different emotions and does come close to feelings of love. [laughs] But I don't think they get together.



"My Best Friend" opens in limited release on July 13th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Patrice Leconte on "My Best Friend" (photo)]]> Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025394 2007-07-09 00:00:00 closed closed patrice_leconte_on_my_best_fri_photo inherit 25394 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #35: Trailer Daze]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/ifc-news-podcast-35-trailer-da.php Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: The film formerly known as "Untitled J.J. Abrams Project" — "Cloverfield," Paramount Pictures, 2008]


This week on the IFC News podcast: Inspired by the recently released trailer for a film that's still shooting that nevertheless managed to set the web a-buzz, we take a look over a few trailers for upcoming films to see if there's an actual finished film worthy of such excitement.


Download now (MP3: 26:56 minutes, 24.6 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["Interview"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/interview.php Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Interview," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


A good interview should be insightful and revealing. To be sure, the interview in "Interview" isn't a good one, but it would be nice if the film had a little of those qualities. It does not. The film places us in a room with two characters and their accumulated mishegas but it doesn't have enough intellectual curiosity about them to keep our attention.


The two characters are Pierre, played by Steve Buscemi, and Katya, played by Sienna Miller. He is a political journalist who has roiled his editor and gotten, in his estimation, a punishment assignment: a profile on an actress of schlocky horror and TV shows. He shows up to the Meatpacking District restaurant where they're meeting in a surly mood, not caring even to feign interest in her or her work. She reacts, appropriately, with disgust, and so the interview ends before it has begun. The screenplay by Buscemi (who is also the film's director) and David Schecter, from an original film directed by the late Theo van Gogh and writer Theodor Holman, is particularly effective in this scene, pointing out the sheer size of the divide between our protagonists: Pierre is scolded for daring to use his cell phone while waiting for Katya; Katya uses hers and the maître d' gives her a better table.


So far, so good — but only so far. A more interesting and honest movie may have followed Buscemi's character as he tries to write something based on the non-interview. I was reminded of a recent episode of "This American Life" that told the story of a young journalist thrust into an assignment for which she was unprepared, and the international uproar her article — which she invented after her interview went awry — sparked. But here a contrivance pushes Pierre and Katya back together, and then one after another keeps them that way. The two adjourn to her beautiful loft where they continue their arguments, get drunk, get high, reveal dark secrets about themselves and, most unbelievably, nearly have sex. Good or bad, it is in an interview, and it should feel at least a little spontaneous. Unfortunately, once the action shifts to Katya's turf, "Interview" feels predetermined by its writers rather than by the actions or feelings of the characters.


The film has several points to make, about the media's self-fulfilling poor opinion of young starlets and the inherent untrustworthiness of anything you might read in a newspaper or magazine. To the degree that they come across loud and clear, it is successful. But the two people used by Buscemi and Schecter to make those points aren't particularly watchable, and neither is the no-frills way in which Buscemi stages the action. We're left, then, to focus on what Pierre and Katya say and do, and that too feels forced by an unseen hand. Through the final act the two compete in a weird form of tragedy oneupsmanship ("My father's dead!" "Oh yeah? Well, I am diseased!"), while the writing gets even more ungainly. "I want to know what's haunting you!" Buscemi pleads, "Because I'm haunted too." With that sort of material, no wonder Pierre got stuck with this gig.


With just two actors onscreen for most of the runtime, there is plenty of time to ponder their impact, particularly Miller, who continues to get cast in big parts and continues to fail to deliver in them. She's a master of accents, but not of acting. As her slinky turns in "Layer Cake" and "Alfie" attest; the camera loves her. But her performances are all waterworks and screaming without the underlying emotional core, flashy but empty. We see her going through these personal upheavals but we don't believe they're actually happening to her.


Ultimately, "Interview" comes down to this: it is a movie about two people in a room. The people aren't terribly interesting, but, boy, what a room. Under other circumstances, I could see a great movie taking place there.



"Interview" opens in limited release on July 13th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Hiroshi Teshigahara, "Missing Victor Pellerin"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/hiroshi-teshigahara-missing-vi.php Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Woman in the Dunes," part of the Criterion Collection's Three Films From Hiroshi Teshigahara]


Call it art film nostalgia, but every newly forgotten, newly resurrected "classic" from the post-Truman era of international cinema still looks as bold, brave and original as the next, and is often more telling and pertinent than the frequently lugubrious art films of today. The new Criterion box of films by Japanese modernist Hiroshi Teshigahara proves the point, and not just with the justly hallowed, yet today mostly forgotten "Woman in the Dunes" (1964). Exactly the sort of confrontationally metaphoric movie that got heads buzzing in the day, "Woman" is both fearsomely tactile and abstract, with an ideogram for a plot: an unsuspecting entomologist (Eiji Okada) becomes trapped in an enormous dune pit and is kept there by a pack of mysterious villagers. In the pit with him, dumbly going about the Sisyphean task of shoveling away the sand that perpetually threatens to engulf them both, is a servile woman living in a driftwood shack; she is essentially the perpetual-motion device that prevents the villagers' home from being buried, and he is her designated helpmate.


The harrowing dead-end existentialism belonged to avant-garde novelist/scripter Kobo Abe, who played Emeric Pressburger to Teshigahara's Michael Powell with three more outlandish concepts/storylines, two included here. "Pitfall" (1962), never released in this country, was Teshigahara's feature debut after a decade of short documentaries, and it's just as startling in its concept and its priorities as the film that famously followed. A miner and his son, escaping from slave-like employment, wander into the remains of a deunionized coal-mining town, followed by a company assassin and soon faced with the town's population of company-murdered ghosts. The melodrama that plays out is strictly pro-labor and anti-corporate in ways with which any nation's history — including ours — can sympathize, but with the extra added frisson provided by angry, meddling ghosts and more than a few puzzling doppelgangers. By itself, the ghost town and the surrounding mountainsides offer existentialist fuel aplenty, all of it restlessly, inventively shot by Teshigahara as if this were his first film and last — it is by a substantial nose the most impressive film debut of 1962, beating out, I dare say, even Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood."


The third film is the intensely futurist "The Face of Another" (1966), in which Japanese New Wave icon Tatsuya Nakadai plays a burned man with psychotic issues who, once he's given a temporary prosthetic face, constructs a new identity and suspiciously sets about seducing his own wife. Gimmickry and gadgetry are all but subsumed by Teshigahara and Abe's philosophical concerns about identity, individualism and perception, as well as by a monstrous cataract of modernist design (authored by architect Arata Isozaki and Masao Yamazaki). The film is a gender-protagonist spin-around from Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face" two years earlier — Teshigahara views obsession from the inside out, and the results are discomfiting and, as always, masterfully photographed by DP Hiroshi Segawa. The DVD box set comes with a thick battery of critical readings (mostly from Canadian crit James Quandt, in essay form and in a video piece), interviews, analytical docs and four of Teshigahara's gorgeous early shorts, starting with 1953's "Hokusai."


Critics and artists are the merest puppets in the new Canadian meta-feature "Missing Victor Pellerin," manufactured by (and featuring) a luscious rookie named Sophie Deraspe, though given the film itself we can't be faulted for being suspicious of her identity and of whom the filmmaker(s) really is/are. First, the film appears to be a documentary about a 1990s Quebec art world phenomenon: a mysterious painter self-named Victor Pellerin appeared on the scene, got famous and wealthy, and then suddenly recalled all of his pictures, burned them and disappeared. Alright, but the film follows Pellerin's fading circle — theater director/nicotine glutton Eudore Belzile, Pellerin's sister and ex-girlfriend, various gallery owners, writers and naysaying painter compatriots — with such intimacy and sometimes shocking frankness that soon you suspect what Deraspe (or whomever) admits in the end credits: that although Pellerin is real, the entire film was scripted.


Maybe: you can't find any mention of Pellerin on the Net that doesn't involve the film, and even the dope escapade in which his circle of ex-friends, and Deraspe, indulge on camera — a "submarine" syringe application of belladonna to the back of the neck — has been wholly unheard of elsewhere. (And of course we never see any of Pellerin's art — ostensibly, it's all gone.) As the narrative progresses and Pellerin is revealed to be wanted for forgery by the Canadian authorities (the supercilious art detective makes ridiculous goo-goo eyes at Deraspe during his interview), the entire cast undergoes a kind of psychological striptease, and we end up in Colombia, no closer to knowing Pellerin's whereabouts than when we began. What the hell happened? The film is apparently fiction, but it's part of the point that we'll never know how much, or what kind, or whether any of our categories matter — all questions that control the house of cards that is the international art sphere. "Missing Victor Pellerin" isn't a hoax, or a documentary, or a mockumentary — it's something for which we have no proper name, a kind of speculative tale told in non-fiction form, like a Borges story. Maybe.



Three Films From Hiroshi Teshigahara (Criterion) will be available on DVD on July 10th; "Missing Victor Pellerin" (Atopia) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: July 13th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/opening-this-week-july-13th-20.php Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Captivity," Lionsgate, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Captivity"

The last we saw of director Roland Joffé was the 2000 period piece "Vatel." Now the two-time Oscar-nominee is behind the wheel of controversy-magnet "Captivity," the latest entry in the "torture porn" genre fronted by the "Hostel"s and "Saw"s. "Captivity" generated plenty of talk due to a scandalous and soon pulled marketing campaign featuring a bound and gagged Elisha Cuthbert — it remains to be seen if the film will be able to capitalize on the publicity.

Opens wide (official site).


"Drama/Mex"

Taking a page out of the Alejandro González Iñárritu handbook, Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo interlaces three separate stories — one following a suicidal old man, another a 15-year-old runaway girl, the third a young couple after their tragic breakup — all set against the Acapulco sunset. The film premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"

This July is set to be a big Harry Potter month, as everyone's favorite Hogwarts student (depending on who you ask...) returns both in the series' fifth film iteration and its seventh and final book. New and relatively unknown director David Yates helms the arguably darkest "Harry Potter" film to date. Ace casting of Imelda Staunton as the deliciously evil Umbridge makes us have high hopes for this one.

Opens wide (official site).


"Hula Girls"

A group of young women in a Japanese coal-mining town look to save their home from an economic and moral depression by building a Hawaiian village tourist attraction, despite knowing little about the culture. Korean-Japanese director Lee Sang-il's film won the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards at this year's Japanese Academy Awards.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Interview"

Steve Buscemi riffs on the cinema of murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in this American remake of van Gogh's 2003 film of the same name. Buscemi stars as a faded political journalist forced to interview a shallow soap opera star — the two are seemingly from entirely different worlds, but each begin to reveal their true selves to the other. We've been generally unimpressed with Sienna Miller since "Layer Cake," but early reviews claim that Miller holds up her own against Buscemi.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"My Best Friend"

Arthouse fave Patrice Leconte directs this situation comedy about an unlikable man (an irascible Daniel Auteuil) who enlists the help of a charming taxi driver (Dany Boon) to prove to his business partner (Julie Gayet) that he has a best friend.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Shortcut to Happiness"

We remember hearing about this film way back before star Jennifer Love Hewitt became a ghost whisperer — Alec Baldwin's troubled directorial debut faced financial ruin until the Yari Film Group picked up the film for distribution in 2006. Previously titled "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and based on the short story by Stephen Vincent Benét, it seems ripe for... going straight to DVD. When a film's trailer reminds one of 2000's "Bedazzled," that's not a good sign.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Talk to Me"

While most filmgoers this summer seem to be busy living free or dying hard, we hope that Kasi Lemmon's latest feature, which may be one of the strongest films of the season, won't be overlooked. Don Cheadle stars as Ralph "Petey" Greene, an ex-con turned radio DJ with the help of program director Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor). We can't wait for the pairing of Cheadle and Ejiofor; here's hoping Academy voters remember that come the end of the year.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Tekkonkinkreet"

Director Michael Arias, one of the creative forces behind the "Animatrix" series, makes history as the first non-Japanese filmmaker to helm a major anime film with "Tekkonkinkreet." The film follows two orphans with completely opposite personalities who must team up to prevent the destruction of Treasure Town. The film's plot may seem a little silly, but the film itself is purported to be a visual delight.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Time"

A woman puts herself through extensive plastic surgery in order to save her failing relationship in this drama directed by "3-Iron"'s Kim Ki-duk. The film won the Plaque for International Film at last year's Chicago International Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[Steve Buscemi on "Interview"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/steve-buscemi-on-interview.php Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller in "Interview," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


Perennial character actor Steve Buscemi is instantly recognizable for his roles in films like "Reservoir Dogs," "Ghost World" and "The Big Lebowski," and his indie cred has only been bolstered in the years since his filmmaking debut "Trees Lounge." Even being in the spotlight, however, Buscemi pretty much loathes being interviewed, which couldn't be more ironic, considering his fourth directorial feature is the 2007 Sundance drama "Interview." The former Mr. Pink stars as political journalist Pierre Peters, a curmudgeonly egomaniac who can't stomach that his editor has put him on the show-biz beat by assigning him to interview self-absorbed soap star Katya (Sienna Miller). Though they predictably clash from the get-go, circumstances force them to spend an evening together in her Manhattan loft, leading to a complex, often antagonistic, and ultimately revealing back-and-forth that leaves them both with their scars exposed... or does it? Based on the 2003 film of the same name by the late Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (who was murdered a year later for his political beliefs), "Interview" is the first installment of what's intended to be a "Triple Theo" trilogy, a series of New York-based remakes that Van Gogh had planned to direct himself. Buscemi, who will hand off the project's baton to actor-directors John Turturro and Stanley Tucci, was polite enough to grant an interview, but prefers to let the work speak for itself.


What do you think Van Gogh's intentions were in remaking his own films?


Well, he loved American films and New York, and he wanted to work there — I think that was the simplest reason. All three films deal primarily with a relationship between a man and woman, essentially two-character pieces, and I think he felt that that would translate well. I don't know specifically how he talked to actors, but I know he devised this system of shooting with three cameras so that they would always be on camera. He shot the films in sequence so there'd be that continuity, and he did these really long takes so that the actors could develop a rhythm with each other. He was also fond of shooting close-ups first. Typically, the close-ups are the last things that are shot, but by then, the actors are pretty well rehearsed. He was more interested in those unrehearsed performances.


You implement some of these techniques, but the two films still have distinctive tones.


I think it's partly stylistic, and also a cultural thing. For me, the original is a little bit more intense, which I really loved. Theo's version had more of a Buñuel quality to it; just the fact that they start dancing without any music, and then music comes in. It's certainly more apparent in his film "Blind Date." I'm probably more of a realist, and I like to justify everything. But I didn't want to, nor could I make the same film that Theo made. That was understood from the beginning, that his film was just a starting point and the inspiration.


So reverence was never your intention?


When I watched the original, I felt like I was witnessing the break-up of a long-standing couple. I wanted to stay true to that, and I was less concerned about getting the details and plot points [accurate]. So we changed some of that, opened it up a bit. We added the restaurant scene; that location is not in the original. We changed the age of Pierre's daughter and the nature of how she died, and his confession about the wife is different. The beginning scene with Pierre and his brother — who is really my brother, Michael Buscemi — they were not brothers in the original, just friends. There were little things like that, and we tailored the film more towards Sienna and I, our personalities or whatever we felt we could bring to it.


Having not been familiar with Van Gogh's films prior, what motivated you to take on this project?


I love the performances that he got out of his actors, especially in "Interview." I was drawn to the story and these characters that are seemingly from different worlds. There's an age difference, and they both go into [the interview] with apprehension, or even disdain. But there's a real connection made, and I was interested in what happens to that connection once it's made. You know, why the need to sabotage it; what is in their personalities that drives the evening the way it does. It's very much like a play, but I didn't want it to look like a filmed play. Judging by the original, which was cinematically and visually interesting, I wasn't too concerned. It was daunting as actors to start with those close-ups, and sometimes it gets exhausting doing long takes. But, by and large, I really enjoyed working that way.


How do you direct when you're constantly in front of the camera?


It's just a feeling that you get. I mean, what better way to observe than being right in the middle of it? Nowadays, with the advent of the video playback, you can always watch what you've done. Sometimes we would do three or four takes in a row, and then I would check the last one. Sometimes we'd just videotape the rehearsals; it was a little different each day. If I thought something was amiss during a take, I'd watch the playback to see what didn't feel right. Other times, I didn't need to. I could just tell where to make an adjustment in my performance or Sienna's. By the nature in which it was shot, with all the handheld and [multiple cameras], I was pretty comfortable that we were getting a lot of interesting angles. I had a lot of trust in Thomas Kist, the DP. But it really makes me admire what Buster Keaton and Chaplin did, all those guys who directed themselves in the days before the video playback.


Do you think it's necessary to like a movie's characters to appreciate them?


Yeah, I would say so. I think characters can do unlikable things, but if you don't care about them, it can get difficult to watch. It was important for this film that both characters be intriguing and likeable on some level. But what I like about people are sometimes their unlikable traits. I like complicated, complex people who have a past.


What question do you hate most in interviews?


It used to be when people would ask me to explain my whole life. [laughs] That gets tiring after a while. There's a line in the film where I ask Katja, "Were you always interested in acting?" and she just bangs her head on the table. That one gets kind of old.



"Interview" opens in limited release on July 13th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Suggested Toy Lines In Need of a Movie Franchise]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/suggested-toy-lines-in-need-of.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Michael Bay's "Transformers," Paramount Pictures, 2007]


When working on what would be his last movie, an ailing Orson Welles told his biographer that he had spent the day "playing a toy" in a movie about toys who "do horrible things to each other." He couldn't remember the name of the film, but trivia-loving cinephiles and 80s babies likely do — it was the 1986 animated epic "The Transformers: The Movie," which promised to go beyond good, beyond evil, and beyond your wildest imagination. Can the most bloated, CG-heavy Michael Bay production ever live up to the fuzzily remembered heartbreak of Optimus Prime's shocking deathbed scene?


It was in the glorious decade of the 80s that, however incongruously, toy lines came first. In a strange twist of priorities, a franchise's television shows and films became mere auxiliary advertising to bolster the sales of action figures and their wide range of accessories. With "Transformers" opening this week, "Thundercats" being developed as a computer animated event, and "Masters of the Universe" occasionally attached to none other than John Woo, it seems that what was once the stuff of nostalgia-fueled eBay scrounging is now prime potential blockbuster ammunition.


We scouted through our own memories and parents' attics and found there are plenty of other toys from the 70s and 80s just crying out to be adapted into films. Here are our proposals for a future toy franchise adaptations — call us, Hollywood!



G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero


The original concept of this classic toy line (itself an update of an even older line from the 1960s) — a group of freedom-loving soldiers fighting a group of evil-loving terrorists — is still viable. Which is why if anyone else made this movie they'd screw it up, by getting rid of Cobra, dressing the Joes like regular soldiers, or making Cobra Commander a giant snake (oops — they actually did do that, in the animated "G.I. Joe: The Movie").


That's why Hasbro should hire us. We'd set the movie in the 1980s and cast Clint Eastwood as the President of the United States (look, if you're gonna dream, might as well dream big) who receives a message from Cobra Commander (bodied by Silver Surfer Doug Jones, voiced by the best approximation of original CC, Christopher Collins, we can find): Fork over a billion dollars or he turns the world's populace into snakes. President Eastwood restarts an old never-declassified government initiative from the 1960s called Operation: G.I. Joe and recruits his best friend from the Vietnam War, General Hawk (Bruce Willis), to lead the crew. He puts together a new breed of Joes including field leader Duke (Matt Damon), obligatory female Scarlett (Scarlett Johansson — the press will eat that up!!) and, of course, martial arts expert Snake Eyes (somebody from that UFC that the kids love so much these days). In the final battle with Cobra Commander, Snake Eyes puts him in the "kung fu grip." The parents will love that.


As for the tone, we're thinking "Armageddon" with a dash of "The Right Stuff" patriotism and some "Stripes"-style comedy from the Shipwreck character — is Ryan Reynolds available? We've already got the new version of the classic song written; we're eyeing Linkin Park to record "Yo Joe! (2K7 Remix)."



Stretch Armstrong


The way we see it, this rubbery toy line is really due for a hearty injection of angst — Stretch has to go around wearing a speedo, for chrissakes! So we'll start off the story with Joe "Stretch" Armstrong (Hugh Jackman), a hugely popular double-jointed pro wrestler whose signature move is "The Dislocator." Little does our hapless hero know that the right-wing media conglomerate that owns his wrestling federation has decided that all of its contracted wrestling personalities will be given injections of a lab-concocted human growth hormone alternative to keep them looking young and smooth in the age of HDTV. Little does the right-wing media conglomerate know that a disaffected employee has sabotaged the formula in a desperate bid to expose corporate corruption. Most of the wrestlers die as a result of the injection, but two survive — Armstrong, who's now gifted with a body that can miraculously stretch for yards, only to effortlessly return to normal size; and his old friend and wrestling nemesis, the Green Monster (Michael Clarke Duncan), who has developed the same stretch powers as Armstrong, but has also been driven mad when his costume fused permanently to his body (somehow). He is reborn as the supervillainous Stretch Monster!


There's no better director to handle this project than Darren Aronofsky, who proved with last year's "The Fountain" that he can approach any set-up, no matter how ludicrous, with a straight face, and who's worked with Jackman before. Plus, we think he'd appreciate Stretch's inherent tragedy, as our malleable hero discovers his powers aren't limitless — over time, his limbs start to harden, his skin cracks, and he begins leak red goo from wounds bandages can only temporarily rectify.



Strawberry Shortcake


You may recall that Strawberry Shortcake and her scented friends lived in odoriferous bliss in Strawberryland, where their day-to-day concerns included pet care, birthday parties, funny-smelling clouds and baking. Tough sell! But we think that this franchise is the perfect candidate for a radical, even foolhardy reinvention — and it's clearly a job for Todd Solondz, who's perfected chillingly creepy, cruel and bleakly funny films about children, and who anyway doesn't seem to be doing much right now.


Just imagine — Miss Shortcake and company dwell in a figurative, candy-colored, preemergent childhood universe, at the fringes of which lurks the Peculiar Purple Pieman, a coded pedophile if there ever was one. A Danny Elfman-composed soundtrack will be simultaneously twinkly and ominous. The film will in no way be enjoyable to watch, but a small but vocal minority will insist it's the best thing to come out all year.



Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future


This one's not quite as well-remembered as some of our other properties, but it has the edge of being well-remembered as unusually smart by Internet nerds. So we sell it to older fans that way, and we'll bring in original story editor J. Michael Straczynski ("Babylon 5") to write the first draft and executive produce. Also, we have to make sure the DVD of the original series is out well in advance of the movie, and that the toys are re-released in "commemorative editions" too.


And this time they'll work! The hook of the original "Captain Power" was that kids who owned the toy space ships could interact with the television series but, speaking from experience, they never really worked. The idea, however, was sound — and when we sell it this time, we call it "ahead of its time." 20 years later, we update the technology and we add a killer hook: this time, you use them with the movie.


We'll recruit a couple of "Galactica" cast members to help bring in the Sci-Fi audience, and we won't make the mistake the original show did by pitching our tone over our toy-buying audiences' heads. (The live-action "Power" featured such adult storylines as suicide.) The core idea: robot soldiers in the future, humans with "power suits" and space ships sounds great — if we can afford it, we'd love to shoot it in the same digital 3-D James Cameron's using on his next project.



Rainbow Brite


Hallmark's billion dollar girl-centric toy line and television series featured a cheery blonde lass who rode around on a flying, talking horse (who in any film adaptation would have to be voiced by Eddie Murphy) and fearlessly sported unflattering multicolored ringed sleeves. In order to refresh the character and also bring the boys in, we'd up Brite's age a bit, slim down that Michelin Man get-up and cast someone tween and up-and-coming — say, oh, Emily Osment. And she would need to fight — hand-to-hand, no blood, as it's best to keep things PG-13. And maybe the whole "protector of all the colors of the world" thing could be a secret identity? And, hell, why not just get Joss Whedon to direct the thing, since he's no longer attached to "Wonder Woman"?


Rainbow Brite had the Color Kids as back-up in her battles with Murky (Danny DeVito), and in the film they'll be played by an assortment of multi-ethnic, sassy child actors who'll both act as comic relief and as a key source of pathos — Rainbow Brite may be brave, beautiful and bearing the weight of the world on her shoulders (or at least its color palette), but the only people she can be herself around are a group of monochromatic children. Well, them, and each of their adorable, furry, computer-generated Sprites, naturally.



Teddy Ruxpin


Every child of moderate financial security in the 1980s remembers Teddy Ruxpin, the adorable yet slightly creepy talking teddy bear who would read you stories, move his mouth and arms, and blink his dead, lifeless eyes. Like every toy of the 1980s, Teddy had his own animated series, "The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin," but we want to go in a different direction.


Instead, let's play up exactly what everyone remembers about Teddy Ruxpin: the fact that he was supposed to be cute but always came off a little... off (if you let the original Teddy's batteries run low, his voice got slow, deep, and incredibly disturbing). So it's a wild adventure about a Teddy Ruxpin that doesn't read adventures, he lives adventures. A little girl (Abigail Breslin, so long as she can still play young enough) discovers what life really means when her Teddy Ruxpin (voiced by Steve Carrell, smart but silly) starts doing all kinds of stuff after he runs out of power; leading to that classic scene where she opens up the compartment to change his batteries and finds — there are no batteries!


It'll be "E.T." for girls, with plenty of "Toy Story" in there. The only guy to direct it is Joe Dante who, after two "Gremlins" and a "Small Soldiers" pretty much has the toys-run-amok genre in his pocket. We'll get a Martin Short type to play the wacky toy inventor who accidentally gave Teddy life and now wants to take it back. Parents will detect a subtle Jesus metaphor but kids will be none the wiser and enjoy the part where Teddy sings classic rock tunes in his underwear when no one's around to see.

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #34: The Crimes of Robin Williams]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/ifc-news-podcast-34-the-crimes.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Williams as Reverend Frank in "License to Wed," Warner Bros. Pictures, 2007]


He may be a great comic talent, but Robin Williams has committed far more transgressions against cinema (cough "Patch Adams" cough) than he has added anything worthwhile. This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a long hard look at the crimes of Robin Williams.


Download now (MP3: 22:38 minutes, 20.7 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["Rescue Dawn"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/rescue-dawn.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Rescue Dawn," MGM, 2007]


If Dieter Dengler didn't exist, Werner Herzog would have had to invent him. As it is, he has reinvented him, in a way, in his new film "Rescue Dawn." Dengler was a German-American who dreamed of becoming a pilot ever since the day Allied aircraft buzzed his home and destroyed the little village in which he grew up. He emigrated to the US and joined the Navy just in time to serve in the Vietnam War. On his very first mission into Asia, he was shot down, captured and imprisoned in a Laotian P.O.W. camp. As a man who found his purpose in life in the face of death and who tested his mettle against the raw destructive fury of nature, Dengler fits in seamlessly with the subjects of classic Herzog creations like "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and the director's most recent hit, the documentary "Grizzly Man."


Dengler's story began as a documentary too; the 1997's film "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." But according to the story Herzog recounts in "Rescue Dawn"'s press notes, Dengler had not been completely candid with Herzog when telling him the stories that formed the basis for "Little Dieter," particularly about the conflicts that existed in the prison camp between the P.O.W.s. Though Dengler passed away in 2001, Herzog resolved to retell his great adventure. In a strange way, the added information Dengler provided Herzog before his death might make the fictional "Rescue Dawn" more truthful than the non-fiction "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," a very Herzogian notion indeed.


This time, Dengler is played by Christian Bale, perhaps the greatest acting chameleon of his generation. Though most of Bale's best turns in the past came as very dark characters — Borden in "The Prestige" or Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho" — his greatest asset as Little Dieter is the mischievous smile and the relentless optimism he flashes whenever hatching another escape plan. In other words, he's a totally unique creation, separate from everything Bale's done before. These are the skills that make him a great Batman: you believe this guy could slip into a role so completely that even his closest friends wouldn't recognize him — he does it in movie after movie.


Bale's matched step for step by his ensemble, particularly Jeremy Davies as Gene from Eugene, Oregon and Steve Zahn as Duane, who becomes Dieter's best friend and closest ally. We've come to expect performances of this caliber from Davies, who is something of a chameleon himself, but Zahn's performance, wounded and sad with barely a hint of the scruffy humor he typically brings to his roles, is the true revelation. Dieter intends to escape from the first day he lands at the camp in Laos, but his fellow inmates, whose souls have been crushed by years of harsh treatment, persuade him to stay, at least until the monsoon season. Without water, they warn, he'd die in two days wandering through the brush. "The jungle," Duane warns, "is the prison." So, we slowly realize, are the minds of men who have become resigned to their fate.


I'd never seen "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," which worried me before I saw the film but now strikes me as a blessing in disguise. Not knowing the details of Dengler's capture and escape meant I didn't feel the urge to constantly compare documentary to fiction; it also meant that his struggle for freedom felt a good deal more suspenseful (despite knowing the ultimate outcome). Dieter's story reminds me a bit of one of those horror movies where a bunch of people are supposed to die and don't, and then God spends the rest of the movie trying to even the scales. By the end of "Rescue Dawn," Dengler should be dead, many times over. And yet the determined bastard simply refuses to accept defeat. For everything else he sees in Dengler, maybe Herzog ultimately admires this quality the most.



"Rescue Dawn" opens in New York and L.A. on July 4th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Joshua"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/joshua.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Joshua," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


Last week, I reviewed the Swiss film "Vitus," about a child born with extraordinary intelligence and parents he cannot relate to. This week's "Joshua" is about a very similar child with a very dissimilar temperament. And so "Vitus" is a light-hearted drama and this year's Sundance hit "Joshua" is a black-hearted comedy. It is one of the enduring miracles of the movies that two can be made about much the same thing in totally different ways and both can be totally worthwhile.


Joshua (Jacob Kogan) is the older son of posh Manhattan couple Brad (Sam Rockwell) and Abby (Vera Farmiga). We don't know what he was like before Brad and Abby had their second child, but since his little sister Lily was born, Joshua has been acting strangely. He never seems to sleep, wanders his parents' gorgeous uptown apartment at all hours, and plays baroque music on the piano for hours on end (another amusing parallel with his phantom brother Vitus). The addition of a sibling is always a distressing time in a young child's life. When my brother was born I got a "Knight Rider" pedal car to keep me happy and occupied while my parents took care of the baby. Unfortunately for Brad and Abby, New York City is no place for a pedal car.


At first, the only problem Brad sees with his strange little son is one of relatability. How, he wonders, did he produce a child like this, one so utterly different from him in so many ways? This is surely a thought that has crossed the minds of many parents (Lord only knows what Papa Singer thought of me growing up). But as little Lily spends night after night distressed, and Abby slowly unravels, Brad begins to fear there's something seriously wrong with his firstborn.


The movie traffics in many clichés — like the one that demands all wealthy families look absolutely perfect in the first act and downright monstrous by the end credits — and it owes more than Farmiga's haircut to Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." But director George Ratliff manages to put a fresh spin on the material with a unique perspective and a wicked sense of humor. We've seen plenty of evil children in movies before, but probably not one as mysterious and passive aggressive as Joshua. Youthful villains like these always look sweet on the outside, but they usually reveal their true colors to the audience, if not the characters around them, early on. Kogan, with Ratliff's help, no doubt, plays most of the movie a bit closer to the vest. We don't always know how much is Joshua's doing and how much is in the minds of his disturbed parents. Was he the one who did that to his sister? Did he push that person down the stairs or did that person merely fall?


Ratliff's best choice may have been casting Rockwell as Brad, and allowing the actor to push the material from more naturalistic horror into surreal dark comedy in the final act. So many of those devil spawn films devolve into outlandish, unintentional humor when their furious little tykes go off the deep end. When Brad finally realizes the depths of Joshua's madness he doesn't react with fear but with disgust; treating his child like a leper he has to care for, but doesn't have to like. One sequence, in which he adds an extra lock to his door to keep Joshua at bay, is laugh out loud funny, something no movie like this has ever really been (at least, not on purpose). Though Rockwell doesn't strike us as the high-flying investment banker Brad's supposed to be early in the picture, he is very much the sort of guy who would lock his son out of his bedroom (interestingly, Rockwell's other film at Sundance this year, David Gordon Greene's "Snow Angels," also cast him as the patriarch of a deeply troubled family, though, in that case, it was his character that caused its fractures).


The scary scenes could be a little scarier (except for that one game of hide-and-seek, which is terrifying) and Vera Farmiga could stand to be a little less Farmiga-ish (i.e. she needn't act quite so loudly in every scene), but why quibble over a few minor flaws in one of the most effectively paranoid visions of New York City parenthood, well, ever?



"Joshua" opens in limited release on July 6th (official site).

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<![CDATA[George Ratliff on "Joshua"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/george-ratliff-on-joshua.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Jacob Kogan in "Joshua," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


As fact and fiction have become ever more manipulated and merged in our daily lives, it probably wasn't too shocking that three of the programming slots in this year's Sundance dramatic competition were filled by former documentary filmmakers. One of them was George Ratliff, whose 2001 doc feature "Hell House" chronicled the terrifyingly true tale of Texas zealots who put on a haunted house to, well, scare the be-Jesus into people. Keeping with that theme of fear, Ratliff's transition to the realm of fiction is "Joshua," a familial suspense thriller (or is it a pitch-black comedy?) that centers around a nine-year-old piano prodigy who may or may not be exhibiting sociopathic tendencies. Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga star as Upper East Side parents who suspect that their ultra-precocious son Joshua (Jacob Kogan) is subtly tormenting them to spite their incessant doting on their newborn daughter. The premise certainly falls in line with bad-seed horrors like "The Omen" and "Rosemary's Baby," though the menace is icily psychological and far more naturalistic in tone. Co-writer/director Ratliff himself says he was sooner inspired by the recent wave of domestic French thrillers like "Read My Lips," "With a Friend Like Harry," and "Caché," his reasoning discussed during our brief conversation in New York.


What prompted you to make the leap from documentary to narrative filmmaking?


I always wanted to do narratives. I mean, I aspire to be able to do both. But no, I secretly studied acting in New York, which was one of the reasons I came here, so I could feel comfortable working with actors. I studied with Uta Hagen and Austin Pendleton for a couple of years, posing as an actor. [laughs] I ended up telling Austin, who's been letting me keep sitting in on classes. It's great, I learned so much about the process. It really helped me in "Joshua" to be able to deal with actors and realize when it's appropriate to talk to them about things.


How different are your working methods in each format?


In some ways, docs are more exciting, because you never know what's going to happen until it happens, and you're figuring it out as it's happening. A lot of times, people actually write documentaries before they shoot, and they get financed by writing out the beginning, middle and end. I think that's bullshit, because in a real documentary, you're there finding and capturing the best things that happen, then building on that. In "Hell House," we'd go into a morning routine at the household with no idea what was going to happen that day. So we're building a scene, these characters need an arc, you have to establish a sense of geography, of where they are, and you have to do all that on the fly. And then the ambulance comes in, the kid has a seizure, the daughter's upstairs blow-drying her hair... we have to get a shot of her while she's still doing that! I covered the ambulance guys dealing with the kid on the bed, then we ran upstairs to get a shot of the blow dryer, then ran back down and got the [ambulance's] exit. You have to map out, storyboard and edit this in your head, it's very exciting. But then you're in the edit room, agonizing: "I wish I just got that one other shot!"


So the jump from that to narrative was a luxury because I could storyboard and know every shot. Still, Joshua was a fairly complex movie that we did on a short schedule, and in order to do that, I needed to average 20 setups a day. So we moved quickly, we had very long days, and we had to keep energy up. Somehow, miraculously, everyone really stayed excited about it. I sound like a cheerleader, but you hear so many horror stories, and I don't regret anything. It's really the movie we set out to make, and I would've been happy with a lot less because I was expecting to make so many compromises.


I laughed a lot in the film's second half, when Rockwell begins passive-aggressively accusing his son of various misdeeds that we've never actually seen him do. At times, I wasn't sure if I was watching a thriller with moments of levity, or a dark, dark comedy. Was this tonal ambiguity intentional?


That's really what we wanted to do, and what I find interesting. For example, I think "Hell House" is a very, very funny movie. Sometimes I'd be in a screening, and I'm laughing the whole way, and people think I'm just a sick bastard. And "Joshua" was funny to begin with. I mean, for God's sakes, we cast Sam Rockwell and Michael McKean in it. I don't think that's a conflict because I think there's a deep connection between anxiety and laughter that goes way back in human development. I think laughter meant something different before it meant being happy. It was a nervous reaction first. "Hell House" exploits that, and I feel like this is taking it a step further.


You elude to, but never pose a direct psychological reasoning as to how this young piano prodigy from a good home could become psychotic. The film aside, do you think this kind of phenomenon is possible?


There's the "nature vs. nurture" argument, and I was always the nurture guy, that we really are influenced by our surroundings and become the people we are based on those influences. Now that I'm a parent, I don't think that at all anymore. The day my oldest son was born, I felt like I knew who he was, and I feel like he's become that person. All I can really do is screw that up. [laughs] It's very scary that genes have so much to do with who we are — that's a good and bad thing. It's a stretch of the imagination and a primal fear that your kid is going to be a Joshua and associated with you whether it's your fault or not, but I think it's totally possible.


What did you find so influential about modern French thrillers?


Those films find horror in the mundane of everyday life, and that's something I can relate to. It's much scarier because it can really happen to you, or be happening around you. There's something to be said for the supernatural movies, but I just don't buy it anymore. Just like I don't buy into religion, I don't believe in ghosts and all that stuff. "With a Friend Like Harry" was scary because it was steeped in a reality that affected me more deeply than, say, "Hostel." There's also a naturalism to those films that grounds them, and a coldness to their look.


That's why we wanted ["Day Night Day Night" and "Irreversible" cinematographer] Benoît Debie; he's amazing, he really captured what we wanted. This movie starts kind of happy and [spirals downward], and the look of the film follows that. The beginning of the movie uses longer lenses, which makes everyone look a little nicer. It's more handheld, which is kind of a living frame. As the movie progresses, the lenses become wider, which is a little starker. And the angle gets lower as Joshua takes over, coming down to his POV, and the movements become very precise or locked down. As you're watching the film, it's visually taking you through the same path the characters are going through emotionally. We did the same thing with the music and sound, too. There's a slow transition on all possible fronts of the movie. Everyone just thinks it's the performances, but there's more to it.


I especially loved Joshua's avant-garde deconstruction of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."


That's right, the music he's playing begins quite beautifully, then devolves into single notes. That was the first bit of music that Nico Muhly did for the movie. He's the most accomplished 25-year-old you've ever met. He's worked for Philip Glass for the last seven years, orchestrating. He's written loads of symphonies and things in his own right. But he's still 25, so to sell him to the producers, he did that "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" first, and everyone became obsessed because it became this microcosm of the movie — it starts out as one thing, and devolves into chaos so wonderfully. He had to write a lot ahead of time because Jacob had to learn to play it.


Was it tough for Jacob to learn complicated piano compositions?


Yeah, Jacob didn't play piano when we cast him. I think he had taken lessons when he was six or seven. But he plays guitar, so that really helped. Secretly, we were auditioning hand doubles. [laughs] But we found a Juilliard teacher for him for piano. I presented them with the Beethoven sonata he plays at the beginning of the movie, and she's like, "This is one of the most difficult pieces on piano. Beethoven had huge hands, there's no way he can play this." Two weeks later, he learned it cold. Then he had to learn six more songs for the movie. Some of them were just single notes, but it's quite a talent.


Do you still have any childhood phobias, like heights or snakes?


Well, I grew up catching snakes, and I'm not afraid of heights. I think I had no fears, but I was surrounded by end-time thinkers and apocalyptic talk. I [was raised] in Amarillo, Texas, where the number one industry was nuclear weapons, so we grew up thinking that when that bomb hit, it would hit us first. We walked a little taller when we thought about that. I made a movie about the nuclear bomb plant called "Plutonium Circus." It was pretty funny, too. I'm kind of obsessed with that thing, and there's clearly a theme going on with these underlying-fear movies I'm making, so there has to be some fear that I'm not admitting to.



"Joshua" opens in limited release on July 6th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: July 6th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/opening-this-week-july-6th-200.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Brenda Blethyn in "Introducing the Dwights," Warner Independent, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Dynamite Warrior"

With the long-delayed release of "Tears of the Black Tiger," the rising popularity of actioner Tony Jaa, and the arthouse appreciation of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, we say it's about time Thai cinema found some respect on American shores. This latest Thai action film comes courtesy of "The Protector" camera operator Chalerm Wongpim, and finds "Born to Fight" star Dan Chupong kicking some serious ass in 1920s Thailand as he sets out to avenge the death of his parents. The trailer makes the film look like a Muay Thai Western, but c'mon, just check out this dude riding a missile.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Introducing the Dwights"

While this Aussie rom-com features all too familiar "Meet the Parents"-esque wackiness, early reviews state the film exudes a warmth that is nothing but charming. A shy 20-year-old brings his new girlfriend home to meet his aging comedienne mother, who, in a bit of ace casting, is played by Brenda Blethyn in full-on "Little Voice" mode. We would've loved to see her paired with Geoffrey Rush as the Neil Diamond-esque Dwight patriarch.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Joshua"

From "The Omen" to "The Shining," from "The Sixth Sense" to "The Ring," that whole "creepy little kid" thing seems ready to be put to rest, but then along comes "Hell House" director George Ratliff's debut, featuring an adorable little tyke bent on familial destruction. Indie darlings Vera Farmiga and Sam Rockwell star as the parents of newborn daughter Lily and nine-year-old prodigy son Joshua, who begins to display a dark side after the arrival of his new sister. We'll watch this for Rockwell, who was recently cast as Victor Mancini in the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke" (squeal!).

Opens in limited release (official site).


"License to Wed"

We look forward to a new Robin Williams movie about as much as a root canal, so it's no surprise that our hopes for this movie are pretty slim. Williams stars as a preacher who does annoying things to newlyweds-to-be Mandy Moore and John Krasinski (yes!) for some reason or another. The poster itself suggests the film has way too much Robin Williams, but, hey, at least several cast members of "The Office" will also make appearances. That's good enough to last us until September.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Method"

This film looks a little like "The Apprentice" meets "Battle Royale," but, you know, tolerable. "The Sea Inside" screenwriter Mateo Gil wrote this Spanish film about seven eager businessmen who are called upon to interview for a position with a mysterious company, and are enlisted to participate in a bizarre test known only as the Grönholm Method. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Rescue Dawn"

Werner Herzog's latest feature may find him with the largest budget he's had to date (a whopping $10 mil!) and may seem a bit more mainstream than his usual fare, but that doesn't stop us from being excited over his first fiction film since 2005's "The Wild Blue Yonder." Christian Bale stars as a German-American fighter pilot who ends up in a Vietcong prison camp shortly after his plane is shot down over Laos, and who must organize an escape with a small band of captives. Steve Zahn co-stars, and is surprisingly good.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Transformers"

Michael Bay sets out to destroy our collective childhoods with this live-action take on this popular 80s cartoon franchise. Our gripes: Megatron isn't a giant gun that resembles an NES Zapper (he's a jet), Bumblebee is a Chevy Camaro instead of a VW Beetle (damn you, product placement!), and Optimus Prime has lips (nipples on the Batsuit, anyone?). What we're looking forward to: Peter Cullen returns as the original voice of Prime (yay nostalgia!), Hugo Weaving voices Megatron, and lots of stuff blows up.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Werner Herzog on "Rescue Dawn"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/werner-herzog-on-rescue-dawn.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Anthony Kaufman

IFC News


[Photo: Left, Steve Zahn and Christian Bale in "Rescue Dawn"; below, Werner Herzog, MGM 2007]


Werner Herzog: True American patriot? Fans of the New German Cinema maverick may not associate the man behind "Aguirre, Wrath of God," "Fitzcarraldo" and "Nosferatu" with tales of U.S. military heroism overseas, but "Rescue Dawn," Herzog's latest film, is a fitting (and undoubtedly strategically scheduled) release for this Fourth of July weekend.


Based on Herzog's 1997 documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," which told the story of Dieter Dengler, a German-American pilot who was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and held captive in a prison camp, "Rescue Dawn" reimagines Dengler's tale as a strange, survivalist adventure, replete with wondrous shots of nature and weird, mystical diversions that are best described as "Herzogian." But it's also, perhaps above all, a tribute to American perseverance and ingenuity. As memorably played by Christian ("Batman") Bale, Dengler is a wide-eyed, smiling optimist who's undeterred by torture, maggots, shackles and the unforgiving Southeast Asian jungle, and a loyal friend to the end to another captive soldier named Duane (the equally excellent Steve Zahn).


Beset by production problems, as chronicled by The New Yorker's Daniel Zalweski ("The Ecstatic Truth," April 24, 2006) and delayed from release several times due to disputes with financiers, "Rescue Dawn" finally comes to U.S. theaters either as Herzog's most accessible movie or his most confused. However it's interpreted, the film offers yet another fascinating glimpse into the German director's many obsessions, from man's easy slide into madness to the forbidding turmoil that underlies our world.


Why go back and tell little Dieter's story through a fictional film?


When we finished "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," Dieter came to me and said, "This is unfinished business," and I knew exactly what he meant. Sometimes, in the documentary, he bypasses major things. In a very casual manner he says that there were conflicts among the prisoners about whether we should escape or not. The truth is they threatened each other almost with murder. So, of course, I knew much more than I could show in the documentary. It's one of those stories that needs the approach of fiction, even though all the major events in "Rescue Dawn" are based on real events that happened to Dieter Dengler. But I like to have the approach of fiction, of myth.


What does fiction give you that documentary doesn't?


What it does, as defined in literature by Hemingway or the short stories of Joseph Conrad, is the test and trial of men, something that goes beyond the sheer factual elements.


Some of your documentaries, of course, reach this level, too.


From a different angle, yes. Many of them are not real documentaries — I would be careful to call them that. Let's put "documentary" in quotes.


This return to nature makes me think of "Grizzly Man." Nature is a powerful force in both films, but man is victorious in "Rescue Dawn" where in "Grizzly Man," he is not.


For obvious reasons. Yes, I'm fascinated with that, because we constitute part of nature and we overlook it. And it doesn't do good for us to be confined to huge cities and never see a real forest or know what an animal looks like or how it behaves. Simple things.


Is there anything going on in the world today on a political level that you think may resonate with Dieter's story?


We should be cautious, because there are an abundance of films that are anti-American or at least question American's attitude in the world. Strangely enough, this is a film that praises the real qualities of America. In Dieter Dengler, you had the best you can find in America: courage, frontier spirit, loyalty, the joy of life. He's the quintessential immigrant. He wanted to fly and America gave him wings. As you may know, I live in America, and it's not for no reason. I like America, even though I see there's trouble at the moment and turmoil. But in my opinion, America always has a kind of resilience and youthfulness to overcome all these things. Everyone is desperate about the situation right now and I keep saying, "Look back 50 years ago, how America overcame the McCarthy witchhunts." There is something I like about America, it's dear to my heart and I'm a guest in your country. It's not that I don't have some ambivalent feelings, but strangely enough, the film is against the trend.


One of the main things I came away from Rescue Dawn with is Dieter's unflagging good-spiritness. It's almost naive.


It is. When you see Christian Bale at the beginning of the film, you have the feeling that there are these very naive American boys and they are very enthusiastic about something that may come along like this little war in Vietnam. And they're only interested in the go-go girls in Saigon (laughs). And 40 minutes into the first mission, he's shot down and finds himself in a situation that's completely unexpected.


This was a difficult shoot, in terms of time, budget, money?


Yes, it was. I have to point out that every single film you will find that there was struggle here, there was struggle there, there was struggle with a star, there was struggle with money, there was struggle with torrential rains, and on and on. It is the very nature of filmmaking. I am not in the culture of content. And we have to look at what do we have here? I managed to keep the integrity of the film intact. That's an achievement that I need to point out, even though it sounds self-flattering. But it is a fact. There's a natural concomitant of trouble in films' geneses, but we have a film completely intact. I am proud of the film. I wish it will find its audience.


Is there anything that you would have changed?


My only regret is that in a few moments, it should have been three seconds longer. For example, I could bite my hand when I saw it: a very strange, pivotal scene where things all of a sudden move from action, action, action, event, event, event to a more interior film. 20 or 25 minutes into the film, Dieter having been tortured and hung upside down and had an ant's nest hung over his head, sits on a strange rock and there's fish, which looks like specters, and the camera pans up to his face, and he says, "The quick have their sleepwalkers and so do the dead." Two seconds, and a quick fade. But I need five seconds! But since it's a fade out, I think you accept it as something that is lingering on. But I have never made a film that was perfect.


This line of dialogue; where did this come from? Is it a quote?


It is one of those peculiar lines that you have sometimes. Like in "Aguirre: Wrath of God," the Spanish expedition are shot at with little blowpipe tarts. And then all of a sudden, one of the soldiers gets shot by an arrow as huge as a javelin through the chest. And he grabs the javelin, and says, "The long arrows are coming into fashion," and drops dead on the floor. And this is a pivotal moment, where it's very, very strange, but from this moment on, which is kind of odd, as an audience, you accept virtually everything: the Spanish ship in the treetop 120 feet high; an arrow that hits a man in his thigh and he doesn't even flinch, and says, "We only think these are arrows because we are afraid of them." Everything is acceptable from that moment on. And this is a similar moment: "The quick have their sleepwalkers and so the dead." From this moment on, the story turns into something more interior. And it shifts, and you, as an audience, are prepared for the shift. It's very mysterious how it functions. But as a storyteller, you have to understand moments like that. And audiences understand it, not in a logical, analytical, intellectual level... It's a beautiful, mysterious thing to tell a story right.


And visually, too?


Of course, it looks almost like a medieval painting with the sleeping guards under the cross of the crucifixion.


When we first see the prisoners, they're also posed very gracefully in tableau. It also looks like a painting.


It comes naturally to me. When you're in the environment and you're physically working in there, the sitting arrangements, the poses, the distribution in space comes very naturally to me. And it takes me 20 seconds to place them right. And it is right. But it only comes because of my own physical engagement in these scenes. It struck the team as something very odd that I spent nine hours in the water up to my armpits on one day. That I would not ask Christian Bale to eat maggots unless I would do it myself. So I'm always physically in there and standing in for them, because I start to understand the scenes from the inside. And then I step behind the camera and the arrangements come absolutely without aesthetic deliberations, and come very organically. And this is very odd for technical crews that have not worked with me before — how much, physically, I'm into this. I do the slate, for example. I would never allow anyone else to do the slate. I want to be the last one between the actors on one side and the camera and technical on the other side. I'm the last one to pull out...


What is it about these physical environments — like shooting in the jungle — that you enjoy?


I think I'm better at that than filming in an artificial environment like a studio. When it cuts to the jungle, it's almost some sort of inner landscape, as well, like a human quality. You don't get it in the studio, and you don't get it from films that are normally shot in the jungle. The jungle is often just a scenic backdrop, and in my case, it is something that eventually turns into some fever dream, with some human qualities, and towards the end, you get the sense that fever dreams are almost a normal occurrence.


[Spoilers follow] So the ending of the film I find somewhat confounding. Can you talk about the patriotic finale with the announcer, and the huge crowds?


What would normally happen in a mainstream studio film is you would have this shallow pathos of the hero returning, and here, of course, you have a grand event, a couple of thousand people are greeting him and are hidden in the cargo bay, all of which happened to Dieter Dengler. And he has this unbelievable reception. In the documentary, he talks about it. But what I wanted to avoid was this kind of heroic pathos, of a triumphant return like "Rocky."


But that's what it seems like.


That's what's on the surface. But he's being asked, "What carried you through? Was it your belief in God or country?" And he can't answer. And the disc jockey asks him, "Well, you must believe in something?" And he says, "I believe I need a steak." And then the last lines of dialogue, the disc jockey asks him, "Can you say something to the boys to carry them through, no matter how bad it gets? Do you have a message for them?" And he says, "Yes, I do. Empty what is full; fill what is empty; scratch where it itches." It's much more uplifting than hollow pathos. It plays against the pathos for a heroic, triumphant return. And it has its humor. The whole story has a lot of humor. And that a man who has been through an ordeal like that has that amount of humor left — that's what interests me.



"Rescue Dawn" opens in New York and L.A. on July 4th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Climates," "Isolation"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/07/climates-isolation.php Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's "Climates," Zeitgeist Films, 2007]


I love ultra-minimalist international art films, the kind heralded at global film festivals and most famously exemplified by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, Carlos Reygadas, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Šarūnas Bartas, Bruno Dumont, Nuri Bilge Ceylan — you know the drill, the long static shots, the non-communicative acting, the oblique narratives, the attention to passing time and natural phenomena and what exactly we don't know about what's going on. But I sometimes grow suspicious; it seems so easy, doesn't it? Do we respect these movies merely for what they aren't? Personally, I'd make a pulpitarian's full-throated case for the filmmakers listed above, but when watching films by pretenders to this bandwagon (for instance, Vimukthi Jayasundara's "The Forsaken Land," from Sri Lanka, and Portugese ennui-specialist Pedro Costa's "Colossal Youth"), I grow to sympathize with the ticket-buying hoi polloi who generally demand a little clarity and propulsion along with their cinematographic visual blitz.


On the other hand, of course, we all hope in our hearts that if we plopped our middlebrow parents or neighbors or hockey-fan pals down in front of the right art film (someone, please, muster a better meta-genre title than this one), they'd see the truthfulness and wisdom and hidden beauty as we do. Ceylan's newest film, "Climates," is a good choice for the experiment — it couldn't be clearer in its essaying the ordinary collapse of a long-term relationship, and yet the film communicates its emotional weather to us in ways that shock us with its secrets. A couple — an older but worldly architecture professor and his younger designer mate, played by Ceylan and his real wife, Ebru Ceylan — are vacationing in Greece, photographing the ruins. We don't know what's going to happen, but then we discover it's already happening: the camera unceremoniously lingers, and lingers, on a closeup of the woman's face as she watches her man, and we see her forget her life, and then remember it, and then mourn it, crying.


From there, sorrow comes to town. The relationship dissolves the way they do in reality, and in Raymond Carver stories — with a derisive chuckle, with an unanswered question, with a secret nobody knows who knows. Because the characters behave like real people, we participate emotionally in their scenes as if we were present, exploring on our own what may've happened in the past and what's going on behind their eyes now. Ceylan's camera favors observant angles, but it's mostly a character study of the man, a charming, sophisticated academic lost in his own life. Shot, rapturously, on digital video, "Climates" limns palpable human territory, but it's a great film because of Ceylan's subtle and restrained eloquence — eloquence? Can you name a recent American film that could be lauded for its visual eloquence? Rather than a one-man Turkish new wave, Ceylan seems to be the Turkish representative in a global trend, inspired by Antonioni and guided by Kiarostami and Hou, and meant not just for local audiences but for the Earthly citizens of Cannes-istan. It's a demographic that could grow — sit your "Knocked-Up"-focused friends down to Ceylan's portrait of discontent, and see if they don't catch their breaths.


Or show them the newest, or rather, only Irish cow farm horror movie, Billy O'Brien's minimalist-in-its-own-way film "Isolation," which stands as some kind of crafty demonstration that with effective filmmaking and a headful of uncomfortable ideas, a delirious horror experience can be built from any locale, and with any amount of money. (Actually, the film cost around $5 million, but it looks like it could've been made for a fraction of that.) Suffice it to say that the cows on star John Lynch's remote County Wicklow farm have been test-subjected to a little genetic engineering, which only appears to be a potential problem when a lovely bovine vet (Ruth Negga) routinely slides her entire arm into a pregnant cow's uterus and gets bitten for her troubles. It's a slow burn to major yuck from there, with low-budget (and non-digital) effects having to do little of the genre work because O'Brien's moviemaking by itself so expertly creates a sense of natural menace. The DVD's extras include O'Brien's fabulous award-winning short, "The Tale of the Rat that Wrote" (1999), which also eschews CGIs for puppetry and a winning way with antiquated-storybook raw materials.



"Climates" (Zeitgeist) and "Isolation" (First Look) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA["Vitus"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/vitus.php Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Vitus," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


The movies are filled with adolescent fantasies — sometimes, particularly during the summer, it seems the movies are only adolescent fantasies — but rarely with pre-pubescent ones, particularly those that do not involve animated talking animals. The reason, I suspect, is as much biological as anything else. It is much easier to remember yourself at age 18 than at age 12. The creators of the marvelous little film "Vitus" are as in touch with this inner tween as any filmmakers have ever been. If I'm as in touch with my inner tween as they are with theirs, I think I can say that children of that age would adore this movie, if only they'd get the opportunity to see it. I regret that many will not.


The official Swiss selection for the 2006 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, and the winner of that country's top cinematic prize, "Vitus" concerns a remarkably gifted young boy blessed with an incredible intellect and a preternatural ability for the piano. We first see him as a precocious six-year-old (played with a maturity beyond his years by Fabrizio Borsani), then later as that crucial 12-year old (an even better Teo Gheorghiu). Young Vitus is so smart he can't really be taught, by teachers or by anyone else, and his parents, feeling the weight of responsibility that comes with having a "gifted" child, yank him out of school and let him concentrate on becoming a great piano virtuoso.


Vitus doesn't dislike playing piano — who would, if they were that good at it? — but he also yearns for something resembling a normal childhood. At age 12, Vitus has surpassed his older high school classmates and his parents are pressuring him to decide what to do with the rest of his life. It is here that director Fredi M. Murer and his co-writers Peter Luisi and Lukas B. Suter begin to display their innate knowledge of childhood psychology: of those twin desires to both belong and to stand out; of the fascination with women without the accompanying physical capability to act upon it; of the desire to do all of those things you're "not old enough" for without losing those things that make being a kid great.


"Vitus" has all of this in a package that is funny and sweet but never maudlin. Gheorghiu is not only a gifted child actor but a piano player in his own right, and the movie puts his talents to great use in several astounding sequences. Children would love his performance, along with pretty much everything else about this movie, but getting them to actually see it seems a difficult proposition. Aside from the obvious language barrier (let's face it — even adults with reasonable attention spans complain about subtitled movies), movies like "Vitus," European productions with arty pedigrees, get small releases and are marketed to and seen by a much older audience. Let us hope that audiences can still connect with their inner 12-year-old, and then bring the real 12-year-olds they know to see "Vitus" for themselves.



"Vitus" opens in limited release on June 29th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Sicko"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/sicko.php Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Sicko," Weinstein Company/Lionsgate, 2007]


Provocative, entertaining, educational and utterly infuriating, Michael Moore's "Sicko" exposes a deeply ingrained illness in the American healthcare system. Symptoms include indifference to suffering and bloating of stockholders' wallets. According to Moore's frank diagnosis, the insurance companies care too much about their profits and not enough about their customers. One former insurance company staffer who had a crisis of conscience explains how things worked in her office. A denial rate was tabulated based on the number of claims each caseworker rejected. Whoever denied the most treatment (or, in the industry's terminology, the most "payment") received a bonus. In some instances, she is quite certain that her denial of payment lead to someone's death.


Moore examines our system and also puts it in relief, by traveling abroad and seeing how others in the Western world manage their own healthcare industries. He finds, to his great shock (some of which seems a bit too staged for the camera), that you can get good care without paying a dime beyond your tax dollars in Canada, England, France and elsewhere. In contrast to what we've been taught for decades by the insurance industry and helpful materials like the classic record "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine" (!), these systems are thriving, and doctors can still make a good salary and live in good homes, patients can still make choices about what doctors to visit, and taxpayers can still afford to go on vacation even when they have to help pay for a nation's clinics.


Though he has increasingly become the single most polarizing filmmaker (if not public figure of any arena) in the entire country, Michael Moore has made a film that could probably convince any relatively open-minded citizen of its basic arguments, regardless of their political affiliation. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple cheap shots. Even though Moore explains that his movie is not about the 50 million Americans who have no health coverage, he spends the first twenty minutes or so of the film chronicling some of their worst horror stories. His mock-soothing narration is often so naively earnest it's borderline painful. And, of course, he can't resist the occasional Bush joke, as when the Commander in Chief hilariously bemoans that OB/GYNs can "no longer practice their love" with women across the country.


But there are also no scenes of CEOs squirming on-camera and Moore himself doesn't appear in the flesh until nearly halfway through the film. The focus, instead, rests on regular people with regular, frequent problems, all caused by our healthcare system. The most notorious, and perhaps the most moving, are those of 9/11 rescue workers who, essentially left for dead by the insurance companies, are taken by Moore to Cuba for what was surely a scrupulously controlled tour of the island's hospital facilities, apparently amongst the best in the world. One volunteer paramedic whose lungs were devastated by the toxic dust she breathed in for weeks at Ground Zero finds her $100 inhaler — she goes through about two a month — cost just five cents each at a Cuban pharmacy.


"Sicko" might not be Moore's best film (I'd still vote for "Roger and Me") or his most impassioned ("Fahrenheit 9/11"). But it's undeniably his most persuasive. It might not change the American healthcare system, but, then again, it might. If it is one-sided — and it most certainly is — then let the insurance companies make their own movie. If it moves audiences as much as Moore's, we'll call it a draw.



"Sicko" is now playing in New York, and will open nationwide on June 29th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Plotting King: An Infographic]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/plotting-king-an-infographic.php Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Stephen King — bestseller list mainstay, horror icon, fierce Mainer, sporadic EW columnist — has provided the genesis of so many films that, sorting through the list of direct adaptations of his work and looser "based on characters created by"s, you're bound to come across some surprises and oddities, like, say, this Russian animated short, adapted from "Battleground." "1408," which opened on Friday, is the latest in a less-than-valiant line of titles that have attempted to stretch a King short story into a feature-length film. For all that King has made his name in horror, the highest profile film adaptations of his work are spread evenly between that genre and his excursions into Serious Fiction. The current winner: four novella collection "Different Seasons," which has yielded "Stand By Me," "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Apt Pupil."

Below, with apologies to New York magazine's Approval Matrix, is our graphic representation of the highs, the lows, and the in-betweens of the oeuvre that is the Stephen King adaptation. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Click to see full size.


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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: June 29th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/opening-this-week-june-29th-20.php Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Evening," Focus Features, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox"

Documentarian Sara Lamm's debut feature follows the story of Dr. Emanuel Bronner, a master soapmaker, mental institution escapee and self-proclaimed rabbi who preached an ever-evolving set of teachings set on each bottle of his popular peppermint soap, which you can still find in health food stores today. Lamm's film follows the story of an incredibly complicated family legacy behind the counterculture's most popular cleaning product.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Evening"

While this film sounds a little like "Fried Green Tomatoes" meets "The Notebook" (but with more dying!), it may be the ideal movie if you want to escape the usual summer flick explosions. Director Lajos Koltai previously served up some heavy drama with 2005's "Fateless" and here employs Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson to get all weepy as they play the daughters of dying matriarch Vanessa Redgrave. To further improve its pedigree, we should point out that the film is based on a novel by Susan Minot and is adapted by "The Hours" writer Michael Cunningham.

Opens wide (official site).


"Falling"

Four high school friends get together at a funeral and decide to make the best of it by traversing the local countryside in search of parties, alcohol and men in this black comedy from "Free Radicals" director Barbara Albert. The film premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Ghosts of Cité Soleil"

Like a true life "City of God," Asger Leth's documentary follows the lives of rival gang leaders in the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil, deemed by the United Nations the most dangerous place on earth. Leth's documentary (executive produced and with music by Wyclef Jean) was filmed prior to the overthrow of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who is said to have employed the gang members to silence his opponents.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"In Between Days"

A lonely and isolated Korean teenage, new to America, falls in love with her only friend in So Yong Kim's debut film, which finally arrives in theaters after attracting acclaim on the festival circuit.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Live Free or Die Hard"

Considering we're in the Season of Revisited 80s Action Franchises (Michael Bay's "Transformers" is being released next month and Stallone's bloodthirsty "John Rambo" will drop next summer), it's no surprise that this long-rumored, then long-anticipated fourth entry in the John McClane series finally finds its release this week. With a storyline pretty much lifted from a, well, Bruce Willis thriller, the film finds McClane tackling an internet-based terrorist organization planning on shutting down the country. Car into helicopter = badass. CGI car wrecks = lame. "Deadwood"'s Sheriff Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) as the baddie = awesome. The Mac Guy (Justin Long) as comic relief = seriously lame.

Opens wide (official site).


"One to Another"

Jean-Marc Barr and Pascal Arnold's drama follows a 20-year-old brother and sister who share an intimate relationship with each other and a group of friends until the brother is found brutally murdered (with sexy results!). The sister then goes in search of finding out who her brother's real killer is (with sexy results!). The film premiered at last year's Toronto Film Festival (with sexy results!).

Opens in New York and San Francisco (official site).


"Ratatouille"

We may be a little bothered by the fact that the Parisian rodent of Pixar's latest feature doesn't sound like he's French, but we're willing to bite the bullet for anything directed by Brad Bird ("The Incredibles" and "The Iron Giant"). Comedian Patton Oswalt voices Remy, the Parisian rat who dreams of becoming a great chef. The buzz on this seems pretty high — here's hoping it's better than "Cars."

Opens wide (official site).


"Sicko"

High five for controversy! Nearly three years after the monumental success that was "Fahrenheit 9/11," award-winning "documentarian"/essayist Michael Moore returns with a scathing look at the health care system in a nation in which Moore claims nearly 45 million people are left without health care — ours. The usual criticism is already abounding, with conservative political commentator Sean Hannity claiming Moore is "anti-American" and the American government investigating Moore as a communist sympathizer, but reviews since "Sicko"'s standing ovation at its Cannes premiere have been solid. Red states vs. blue states again? It's on!

Opens wide (official site).


"Vitus"

Director Fredi M. Murer's latest drama finds a young, gifted boy rebelling against his controlling parents, preferring to neglect his pianist skills in favor of flying lessons from his grandfather, played by Hitler himself, "Downfall"'s Bruno Ganz.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[Zoe Cassavetes on "Broken English"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/zoe-cassavetes-on-broken-engli.php Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Left, Parker Posey in "Broken English"; below, Zoe Cassavetes, Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


It seems inevitable that Zoe Cassavetes would write and direct her own feature, considering her family is a bona fide cinema dynasty. She's the daughter of legendary indie pioneer John Cassavetes and twice Oscar-nominated actress Gena Rowlands, not to mention the sister to filmmakers Nick ("Alpha Dog") and Xan ("Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession"). Even her friends are film royalty, like Sofia Coppola, who was also her co-host on the short-lived 1994 Comedy Central show "Hi-Octane," a proto-"The Simple Life" reality show in which the two tooled around L.A. interviewing celebs like Martin Scorsese and Johnny Ramone (a note to fans: they're working on a DVD release).


"Broken English," which had its premiere at Sundance this year, is certainly a Cassavetes film, but when you discover it's an edgy sort of rom-com, you'll realize it's distinctively Zoe. Parker Posey stars as Nora, a Manhattan hotel liaison to VIP guests who is perpetually unhappy with the dead fish in her dating pool, time and again making stupid choices and sleeping with the wrong guys. Inspired by her friend Audrey's (Drea de Matteo) seemingly happy marriage and her own griping mother (Rowlands), Posey winds up in Paris in search of the lovely Frenchman named Julien (Melvil Poupaud) who got away.


I sat in the Lower East Side's swanky Mercer Hotel café for a quick chat with the director that features a guest appearance from Posey, who managed to tease me in the middle of her own interview one booth over.


You say you're feeling "heebie-jeebied" for the theatrical premiere this week. Haven't you shown the film to tons of people already?


No, no. I went to the gym, I worked out all the excess energies. I'm not, actually. It's just one of those surreal days where everything starts, "Oh, okay. Guess we made a movie, guess it's out there."


Were you nervous at Sundance?


Yeah, it was terrifying. We finished the movie two days before we got in, [still working on] sound mix, color timing, all that stuff. It was kind of great because I didn't have time to get nervous before Sundance. I was just putting things in a bag: "Okay, let's go!" But it's nerve-wracking, speaking in front of a lot of people, being judged by any crowd for something you worked so hard on. And it was fine. We had a good time, and now I'm used to talking to people. I'm not really the shyest person in the world, either.


Not to say there was any family pressure, but why did it take so long to get a feature made?


Nobody wanted to give me money. [laughs.] It was really hard to get financing.


[Parker Posey interrupts, in a sarcastic deadpan: "Why didn't anyone want to give you money?"]


This is still the mystery question. But we're not questioning it now that we've made the movie. Yeah, it took about three and a half years. Talking to other people who make low-budget movies, everyone kind of has the same struggle. I know people who [tell me], "It took me ten years to make my movie." But once we got our money, it went really fast. We started shooting last May, so we finished the movie very quickly.


As an auteur's daughter, would you be willing to work from somebody else's script?


I want to write my own stuff, [but] I would never say never. I'm very interested in all the things I learned about making this movie, and putting them in the writing. I think the biggest thing I learned was being able to trust my own instincts — that I wrote the right thing, cast the right people. I'm writing again, and I'm happy with it. It's kind of a murder mystery, but also about what that mystery does to the relationships and people in the movie. I can't wait to dig in.


How autobiographical was "Broken English"?


Well, I think partly. I wouldn't know how to write something that didn't somehow touch me or issues in my life. I got some issues. [laughs] When I started thinking about the movie, everyone was like, "What are you doing?" Not "What are you doing with your life?" because I had a job and was doing well, but "Where's your boyfriend?" Or, "Where's your husband?" Are you kidding? I felt fine about it until people started asking me that, and then it became the snowball effect. Is there something wrong with me? I was talking with my friends about it because we're all the same age, and they say, "That happens to me all the time." So, it was kind of a mix of personal stuff with a kind of social commentary.


Was any of Gena's on-screen bellyaching similar to her actual relationship with you?


No, it's funny, my mom is kind of the anti-that: "Do what you want. If you're going to get married, elope. Trust me." Not that she did, but she's very cool about that stuff, so when I was writing the part for her, she said "well, make it funny." She read it and [said], "I don't know if that's funny." I'm like, "It's gonna be funny... for me, at least." She definitely would [tell me to] put some eyeshadow on and stuff like that, but only in a helpful way.


How hypersensitive were you to working with "Mom" on-set?


Strangely, not at all. We shot the movie in 20 days, so there wasn't really time to panic. You know, panic takes a lot of time and energy out of you. She lives in L.A., and so we talked on the phone a lot about it before we started, and she's just so intuitive and has so much experience — it was nice to be able to trust someone that deeply. It's funny because everyone was like, "It's Gena Rowlands on the set. She's on the set!" So everyone else is a-twitter, and I was like, "Gena." She was so respectful of me, and it was so nice to have Gena Rowlands in the movie, but it was also nice to share that experience with my mom. I talked to my brother a lot, and he said "You gotta call her Gena. It's not going to go down well if you call her Mom."


Most of the guys in the film are, as you called them, "shits." Is this from your own dating woes?


It was a conscious choice, but not so much in that way. You know how they say the people you date are reflections of where you are at the moment? So, even if it seems that I'm sticking the knife to the guys, I think it's more a reflection of where Nora is and what she's attracting to herself, as opposed to her unbelievable bad luck meeting all these jerks. Because if any of those guys had turned around at that moment in her life and said "Yeah, be my girlfriend," she wouldn't have been able to handle it.


It's funny, I'm marrying a French guy, but I met him after I wrote my movie, which is weird and kind of great. My dad always said, "Write where you want to be." I guess I wanted to go to Paris. I think it's a magical place where you can go out and do things by yourself and feel fulfilled. You can go to the movies by yourself, or a museum, or just walk around and absorb. The city is your friend, where New York can be a harsh place if you're alone. It was really important for Nora to be by herself.


Not that their similarities stretch past this, but I was thinking "Broken English" could also have been titled "Lost in Translation." Do you think your friendship with Sofia carries over to a kinship between your films, especially since they're both loosely autobiographical?


On certain levels, because of the obvious. We both have father directors, and we both grew up in film families. It's funny because I think I was writing my movie while Sofia was writing "Lost in Translation." As women, we're probably very in tune with what's going on [with ourselves] emotionally, and I think that interests both of us. I don't think it's limited to female directors, or that male directors don't care about emotion, but women feel with their gut. [Sofia's] so into detail and the look of things, and she's so talented at what she does. It's nice to have a friend so close to you that does what you do, so you can kind of gripe about it or say, "Can you read my script for the 80th time right now?"


Are there any male filmmakers today who know anything about women?


Pedro Almodóvar really seems to understand women, but [they're otherwise] very few and far between. The thing is, people don't make movies about women anymore. They make movies about men where women get to be the sidekick, or the girlfriend, the wife, the token kind of part. So, it's always great, even like "La Vie en Rose," just to see a movie that's purely about a woman and what happens around her life. I grew up watching all those movies in the 1930s and 40s, Bette Davis and Carole Lombard. There are strong women who are doing these great things, and it seemed very interesting to have that complexity in life.


What was your first job in New York?


I actually worked here [at the Mercer Hotel]. That was the autobiographical part. [laughs] I really wanted to move to New York, but you can't move here without a job, because it's really expensive. When the hotel opened, I came and worked for a couple of years, and had a great time. I learned that I could do something else with my life and make my own money, and be financially secure. While I did that I made my short, [2000's "Men Make Women Crazy Theory"], and I knew that I was going to move on at a certain point. You know, I ate out of the quarter jar for a few months here and there while I was trying to make the movie, but having no money, and being incredibly destitute was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. eBay was huge for me at that moment. We come from [a well-known] family, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a giant inheritance behind my back. I work hard and support myself.


Is that a misconception you think you're being judged for?


I think people think I have it easier than I probably [do]. I'm not complaining about my life, every moment of it has been fantastic and I'm so lucky. But when people think you come from celebrity, even though my parents were like the anti-celebrities of all time, you must have some sort of money tree in your backyard. I'm happy to be 36 and making my first film. I know myself really well, and I don't feel trapped by what this [or that] person thinks about me. I have my own life, you know?



"Broken English" is now playing in select theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA[Dusan Makavejev, "Heavy Petting"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/dusan-makavejev-heavy-petting.php Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Sex and politics -- today these two great tastes smush uneasily together, usually only when a middle-aged white powerbroker gets caught with his dick swinging, or when we joke about how Hillary Clinton has seemed to abandon one flavor entirely for the other. God, piety, fear and malevolence have made the stew of politics bitter, unironic and pleasureless, in government and in the cultural crockpot. It was not always so -- Criterion's completely uncalled-for double-trouble DVD release of Serbian barn-burner Dušan Makavejev's two most notorious films, "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" (1971) and "Sweet Movie" (1974), reminds us how the lava-hot mid-Cold War years fueled an almost limitless variety of untamable flames.

The chemicals between us burst the seams of the twin repression systems of American power and Communism, and along with free love, Woodstock and the pill, we got Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, Linda Lovelace, Godard & Karina, May '68, public porn, revolutionary communes, "Midnight Cowboy," Milan Kundera, Erica Jong, "Loves of a Blonde," "Last Tango in Paris," literary obscenity trials, suburban roulette, Anne Sexton, Jane Fonda, Playboy clubs, Eric Rohmer and Makavejev.

Yugoslavia in the day was noted as the only European Communist country stubbornly unaligned with the Soviet Union, but in Makavejev's gestalty vision Marxism, sex, capitalism, history, repression, freedom and social inhibitions are all crispy kindling for crazed dialectical bonfires. Makavejev's signature mode is the confrontational shtick-documentary-surrealism- found-footage collage, and "WR" established this wacky arthouse minigenre in the forebrains of 'Nam-era college students all over the industrialized globe. (But not, unsurprisingly, in Yugoslavia, where it was banned for years.) It began as a Ford Foundation grant-subsidized documentary on Wilhelm Reich, the post-Freudian psychologist and culty sex theorist who was persecuted for his teachings in both Nazi-era Germany and in the U.S.; he died in an American prison, a victim of law-enforcement witchhunting and his own refusal to defend himself in court.

Shooting in New York and Belgrade, mixing in copious Reichian footage, hunks of Communist propaganda films and talking-heads interviews (sex-obsessed artists, Warhol factory star Jackie Curtis, surviving Reich disciples), Makavejev concocts a heady, self-contradicting, irreverent cocktail of collision, a messy paste-it essay on repression and liberation, as the two oppositive quantities are both represented by political power, by Communism, by sexual relations and by history itself. "Mysteries" is right — Makavejev is no Communist, nor is he fond of American values; two polar ideologies are never enough for him, and "WR," in his nation's proudest manner, is a thoroughly unaligned movie. Everybody gets slammed and celebrated (well, Stalin just gets slammed), and every dogmatic idea of the era is flipped to its B-side.

It's only occasionally funny, for what that's worth (I prefer two earlier, slightly saner D.M. features, overdue for DVD: 1967's "Love Affair; or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator," and 1968's "Innocence Unprotected"). But Makavejev's graduation to "Sweet Movie" isn't as concerned with humor as transformative assault. Or something — from Reich's orgasmic "orgone therapy" to, in "Sweet Movie," Otto Muehl's regression therapy (in which members of Muehl's commune vomit and pee all over each other), Makavejev was for a time vulnerable to the idea of being systematically delivered from modern civilization to a state of primal, carefree innocence. "Sweet Movie" -- a blitz of outrageous and nearly criminal offenses, cobbled onto a handful of silly dream-plots that include a global beauty pageant for virgins and a ship bearing a huge Karl Marx figurehead (and a single plastic-bag teardrop, with a goldfish inside) carrying preadolescent boys, sugar, candy and semi-nude women down an Amsterdam canal -- is nothing if not struggling toward consequence-free innocence. But of course it's not merely a liberating gob in society's eye -- although the brutal élan that emits from this often wildly unpleasant movie is unforgettable. Makavejev was a conflicted anti-ideologue, and the mating between his cackling affronts (dinner plates of fresh shit, a castration in a vat of sugar, uncomfortable sexual intimidations, star Carole Laure's climactic pornographic bath in chocolate) and his stabs at Soviet legacy and Yankee imperialism (John Vernon as a Texan gazillionaire with a gold-plated penis) are uncomfortable at best. But discomfort is the crazy Serb's base position, and it may be in the end exactly how we should feel about social power as it inflicts itself upon our lives and our sexual desires. (The Criterion discs come laden with typical supplemental goodness: related audio, essays by Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Sterritt and Stanley Cavell, Makavejev shorts and interviews, et al.)

A far less dangerous non-fiction look at sexual history, Obie Benz's "Heavy Petting" (1989) is a fond look back at the American mid-century's teen and his/her discovery of sex in the postwar years. Benz sticks to two strategies: interviews with the loquacious likes of Allen Ginsberg, David Byrne, Abbie Hoffman, Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, William S. Burroughs, and so on, and archival footage, some from movies and TV, most from PSA shorts made as anti-sex propaganda. It's the chilling gray heaven of the archival screeds that rules the film — so naive, so filled with terror (fear of a rampagingly erect teen planet, indeed), so fraught with neurotic lies and conservative anxiety. The new two-disc Docurama set, in fact, overshadows Benz's quaint nostalgia trip with ten sex-scare shorts included in their entirety, with titles like "As Boys Grow" and "Perversion for Profit." They're meant to be a campy-kitschy riot, but they're a fascinating window on the '50s and '60s no historical film or memoir can match.

"WR: Mysteries of the Organism" and "Sweet Movie" (Criterion) and "Heavy Petting" (Docurama) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Dusan Makavejev, "Heavy Petting" (photo)]]> Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008518 2007-06-25 00:00:00 closed closed dusan_makavejev_heavy_petting_photo inherit 8518 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #33: Bruce Willis, Movie Star]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/ifc-news-podcast-33-bruce-will.php Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Future indie classic "Live Free or Die Hard," 20th Century Fox, 2007]


Whether he's playing a world-weary cop, a world-weary detective, a world-weary ghost or a world-weary baby, Bruce Willis is always secure and even invaluable in the iconic screen niche he's carved out for himself. This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look at Bruce Willis, movie star.


Download now (MP3: 25:16 minutes, 23.1 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA[IFC News Podcast #32: Halftime Survey]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/ifc-news-podcast-32-halftime-s.php Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


We're halfway through June, which means we're almost halfway through the year. This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look back at the first half of 2007 and list some of the films we've liked.


Download now (MP3: 27:09 minutes, 24.8 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["Manufactured Landscapes"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/manufactured-landscapes.php Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Manufactured Landscapes," Zeitgeist Films, 2007]


Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky likes to capture scenes of "environment without nature," places that have been stripped of their beauty and resources by man. He prefers to shoot things in their endless middles, grand vistas with no beginnings or endings, no edges whatsoever. In his eye, his subjects, from decay, to waste, to humanity (or an industrialized approximation), stretch on seemingly to infinity. Documentarian Jennifer Baichwal filmed Burtynsky on a trip to China; that footage forms the basis for this feature-length documentary on the man and the drastic environmental changes that are happening to the place he visited.


Burtynsky has an amazing inquisitiveness about him, something "Manufactured Landscapes" imparts on the viewer to great effect. I learned about things during this film I'd never even heard of before, like the massive danger to the environment posed by "e-waste," which is what your computer and its affiliated parts become after you junk it. 50% of the world's e-waste winds up in China, where tiny little villages strip mine these iHusks for whatever valuable materials can be yanked out of them and leave the rest to basically rot in massive piles of circuit boards and plastic. Burtynsky visits places where the mounds of e-waste threaten to contaminate the water supply and wipe out small pockets of humanity.


The film spends a great deal of time at China's Three Gorges Dam, where somewhere in the neighborhood of one million people have been displaced from their homes and 13 cities and towns have been demolished in order to make way for the largest engineering project in the entire world. This sequence illustrates better than any other the true scope of the way mankind is "manufacturing" landscapes as well as the devastating toll that process has on the natural world.


In another sequence, Burtynsky and Baichwal show the way Chinese industry is transforming its workforce into a featureless mass not unlike the land that had to be cleared to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. The documentary opens with a shot down the length of a factory and it goes on and on forever — you could take a cat nap and wake up and this shot would still be trucking past worker after anonymous worker. Often clothed in identical jumpsuits and masks, these laborers work with a robotic efficiency, assembling complex electronic equipment by hand in a few well-practiced seconds. The analogy is clear: the industrial revolution that's hit China has transformed these workers as much as it has revamped the places they live.


Baichwal does a fine job of reminding us conspicuous consumers of our impact on our environment, but she goes on about a half hour longer than she needs to in order to make her point, and a sequence about the real estate business in Shanghai's poorer communities is thematically irrelevant to the rest of the film. The initial shock and horror begins to fade with repetition and she threatens to leave the audience with a sense of exhaustion at the scope of problems rather than with a resolve to fix them. At its best and its worst, "Manufactured Landscapes" is a bit like a photograph itself: a beautiful, clear representation of something, but a representation frozen. By its nature, nothing can happen or change. Not until we see the photograph ourselves and do something about it.



"Manufactured Landscapes" opens in New York on June 20th (official site).

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<![CDATA["A Mighty Heart"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/a-mighty-heart.php Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "A Mighty Heart," Paramount Vantage, 2007]


"A Mighty Heart"'s opening titles alternate black words on a white background with white words on a black background. Black and white obviously imply opposites; their juxtaposition with white on black suggests something further. From either side of the divide, each faction sees itself as wholly in the right and the other as wholly in the wrong, not unlike how the United States views Islamic terrorists and vice versa.


This is the sort of political landscape in which Michael Winterbottom's new film is set and in which Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl worked. Pearl (played in the film by Dan Futterman) was in Karachi, Pakistan investigating a lead on a story about shoe bomber Richard Reid when he was kidnapped, held hostage and ultimately murdered. Though his captors claimed Pearl was a spy working for the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, Pearl was guilty only of a determination to uncover the truth past the point others might stop out of concern for their own safety.


"A Mighty Heart" never represents Pearl's captivity, and only includes the briefest and most discrete excerpt of a recreation of the infamous video of the journalist's murder. Instead, the film follows Daniel's wife Mariane, played in the film by Angelina Jolie, as she struggles with her husband's disappearance and, later, his death. Her perspective is one of waiting and hoping, and also of investigating, as officials from both the United States and Pakistan relentlessly scour Karachi for any trace of Daniel.


Despite the fact that anyone who pays even a whiff of attention to current events knows the outcome of the film's story before they step foot in the theater, "A Mighty Heart" plays like a breathless thriller. Winterbottom digs into the smallest details of Daniel's search, from shaking down informants to building suspect charts. Though he's working with a big name movie star, his preferred style here, as in many of his films, is quick and dirty: DV cameras, non-professional actors and real locations. Even the acting is low-key; the dialogue is peppered with pauses and other traces of the heavy improvisation that went into making the film. It's hard to remember at times not only that this is not a documentary, but that the outcome is already predetermined — you become so invested in Mariane's journey that you find yourself hoping and praying for Daniel's safe return right alongside her. Given Jolie's famous looks and lips, it's remarkable how invisible she becomes in the lightly-accented, heavily hair-curled role.


Though "A Mighty Heart" is never less than utterly engrossing, Winterbottom wouldn't be Winterbottom if he didn't also include plenty of moral and ethical questions. After all, the heroes of this story include men like American Randall Bennett (Will Patton) and a Pakistani referred to only as "The Captain" (Irfan Khan) who, in the interest of saving a man they can only assume is being brutally tortured, resort to torturing suspects themselves to more quickly obtain information. When one lead results in a dead-end, the Captain decides to try a different tactic. "We will fight kidnappers with kidnapping," he says.


Though both Bennett and the Captain remain nothing less than entirely supportive to and sympathetic of Mariane, they do things when she is not around that she would probably be hard-pressed to rationalize or approve of. Winterbottom — who has questioned the morality of torture before in "The Road to Guantanamo" — dramatizes this divide by occasionally flashing to news clips of the detainees in Gitmo and by refusing to sugar coat or shy away from the Captain's and Bennett's actions. Winterbottom seems to remain neutral on the issue beyond its representation, though one could argue that "A Mighty Heart"'s inevitable conclusion is a doubly effective statement against torture of any and all kinds.


Still, this is not a story about what went wrong, or what could have been done differently. Nor is it really about the terrible effect of a tragedy, because the real-life Mariane has refused to allow herself to sink to the level of her husband's killers, or to allow herself to become embittered by the sadness she has endured. Rather, the story's ultimate message is one of survival and hope, and Winterbottom portrays this as he does all of "A Mighty Heart"'s themes, simply, and effectively, and, in a strange way, beautifully.



"A Mighty Heart" opens in limited release on June 22nd (official site).

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<![CDATA[Not Just For Fanboys: The 2007 New York Asian Film Festival]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/not-just-for-fanboys-the-2007.php Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Park Chan-wook's "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay," Moho Films, 2006]


Roaring into town to punish evil-doers and please all lovers of the esoteric, the weird and the wonderful, the New York Asian Film Festival returns with a line-up of films from Korea, Japan, China, Pakistan, Thailand and Hong Kong. Now in its sixth year, the NYAFF remains a reliable touchstone for what's going on in Asian cinema, skipping the usual festival fare for pop and fringe films that push the limits of what you've seen before on screen (take scatological Korean animated sci-fi film "Aachi & Ssipak") or what you'd consider a mainstream blockbuster (see Japanese haunted hair extension flick "Exte"). As always, familiar names like "Oldboy" director Park Chan-wook are mixed in with lesser known festival favorites like Tetsuya Nakashima, and "extreme" films are mixed in with sentimental heartwarmers. The festival runs from June 22 to July 8, and below are initial reviews of select films, with more to come as it goes on. For more on the festival (including ticket-buying info), visit the official site.



The Banquet (2006)

Directed by Feng Xiaogang


Somehow, the historical martial arts epic has become the Chinese answer to the Merchant Ivory film, steeped in prestige, crafted for international consumption, and skipping over complicated contemporary issues to revel in an earlier time period when people wore prettier, more complicated clothing. "The Banquet," directed by Feng Xiaogang, is a Gertrude-centric "Hamlet" transposed to tumultuous 10th century China and cut through with generous dollops of balletic, wired-assisted fight scenes. It's a categorically sumptuous film — from cavernous palace halls to the elegant unfurling of blood in forest stream, there's no chance at visual extravagance passed up. It's not enough to make up for the film's almost complete lack of vitality, but it sure is nice to look at.


"The Banquet" has more than a little in common with Zhang Yimou's "Curse of the Golden Flower" — both are focused on women furiously manuevering for their own survival in the viperous, gilded courts of ancient China, and both were supposed to star Gong Li, who passed on "The Banquet" due to scheduling conflicts. In her place is Zhang Ziyi, who seems more like a kitten playing at being a big cat as Empress Wan, once a court maiden in love with Prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu), but chosen as a bride to the emperor instead, causing the unhappy Wu Luan to leave the court to immerse himself in theater and music. At the film's open, the former emperor has been murdered with the "Hamlet" poison of choice (ear!), and Wan has taken up with his murderer, the new emperor (Ge You), in order to protect herself and Wu Luan. Various machinations and assassination attempts follow as the prince arrives at court, culminating in a midnight banquet at which everyone's agendas are bloodily revealed.


The famous choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (the man behind "The Matrix" films as well as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and dozens of others) put together the action sequences, which director Feng shoots in slow motion so luxuriant it's hard not to giggle. Poetic? Sure. Silly? Totally. When a genre is shoulder to shoulder with self-parody, it might be time to give it a rest. Nevertheless, Zhang and Wu have excellent thwarted chemistry, even expressed via a loving swordfight. Zhou Xun (of "Suzhou River") gets the best (if also, in retrospect, most foolish) death scene in a film heavy with them as the Ophelia character. —AW



I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay (2006)

Directed by Park Chan-wook


Park Chan-wook (mostly) trades in the vengeance for offbeat romance in "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK," a love story set in the most adorable mental institution in all of Korea. Lim Su-jeong plays Young-goon, who's committed following a possible suicide attempt after she's convinced herself that she's actually a cyborg and therefore does not need to eat. Pop star Rain is Il-sun, who suffers from the delusion that he's disappearing and that he also has the ability to steal aspects of people's personalities. It's meant to be fanciful, but Park both engages the fact that little sympathy or understanding is given to those suffering from mental illness in many parts of Asia — Young-goon's mother doesn't understand why her daughter can't just act normal enough to not disturb the customers at their family-owned restaurant — while displaying no particular understanding of mental illness himself. The craziness of everyone in the asylum has a direct cause, whether it be parental abandonment, societal pressure or just a particularly traumatic event (however you choose to define that — in one case, it's failing an audition for the Edelweiss Boys and Girls Choir, which would be a dire blow to us as well).


Park is a prodigious pop filmmaker, and while "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" doesn't zip along like his earlier work, it offers a snappy, sun-soaked view of the shelter from an unkind world that group delusions have provided the institution's residents. The film would be slight even without the failings mentioned above, but Lim, wafer thin and capable of producing some decidedly uncutesy rictus expressions, does manage to find flashes of genuine sadness in her character's suffering. Park, meanwhile, having gotten his chirpy jollies out, will next move on to vampire movie "Evil Live." —AW



Hula Girls (2006)

Directed by Lee Sang-il


It's hard to imagine something as quaint as hula dancing being seen as a scandalous act, but that's exactly what it was in 1960s northern Japan, when a bunch of woman in the mining village of Iwaki became hula dancers as part of a Hawaiian theme park designed to help the town's flagging economy. I associate hula dancing with kid-friendly tourist attractions, but to the elders of Iwaki it's a dead serious offense; Elvis on Sullivan multiplied by a thousand.


"Hula Girls," directed by Lee Sang-Il, depicts this true story of lovable losers with heart and humor and with plenty of inspiration from other films about lovable losers with heart and humor. The film is more than a little like "The Full Monty" (with more than a little "A League of Their Own" sprinkled in). Still, it would take an even more jaded critic than me to resist the film's heart-warming charms. The dancing's great too, and I've got to admit: some of those hip-shaking moves are saucy enough to make me think those 1960s Japanese parents may have been right. —MS



Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (2006)

Directed by Takashi Miike


You hear "Takashi Miike made a gay prison love story" and you think... well, we're not sure what you think, but we imagine it's probably blood splattered, sexually incomprehensible, and includes someone cackling maniacally in the background. Of course, the only thing you can really generalize about Miike's films is that he sure makes a lot of them; "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" (more literally translated as "4.6 Billion Years of Love") comes on the tail of "violence across the ages" epic "Izo," an episode of "Ultraman Max" and fabulous, traumatic children's film "The Great Yokai War," which screened at last year's NYAFF. "Big Bang Love" is, unlikely enough, a pensive, symbolism-laden art film that regards its delinquent protagonist pair with rueful tenderness and bemused sorrow.


Shiro (Masanobu Ando) is, at the film's outset, dead — strangled — and Jun (Ryuhei Matsuda), who was found with him, immediately confesses to the crime. From there the film stutters back to when the two arrived at the prison, blood-splattered from the respective murders they've each committed and eyeing each other as they're stripped and processed. Shiro is all rage and violence, while Jun is remote and affectless, and Shiro falls into protecting Jun from the other inmates. It's no "Oz"-style relationship, though, and it's not, despite the heated pans down Shiro's tattooed form, physical; the two have an immediate and unspoken understanding of each other expressed through the sweetly vulnerable conversations they have in their few moments alone. The world of "Big Bang Love" is otherwise cold and methodical, from the sparse, abstract sets that recall Lars von Trier to the circling investigation into Shiro's death that shapes the film.


Looming outside the prison are a rocket ship and an ancient pyramid. One is a way to space and the other supposedly leads to heaven, we're told — they're the most overt instances of the film's reoccuring application of astral imagery to emotion. It's as if in "Big Bang Love"'s desolate setting science is the inadequate sole language available to describe human connection, and the damaged young men experiencing such things are as foreign and incomprehensible as alien beings. —AW



Aachi & Ssipak (2006)

Directed by Jo Beom-jin


You know where you stand with this movie from the first two lines of narration. "The world has run out of all forms of energy," a solemn voice intones. Okay, with you so far. "People built a new city," it continues, "by making a new energy with their excrements." All right, I — wait, wha habba?


Yes, in this truly demented piece of Korean animation, the world of the future is shit out of luck. The populace must now crap into special toilets to fuel their society, and they are rewarded for their obedient deposits with a highly addictive laxative called a juicybar. Our amoral heroes Aachi and Ssipak are involved in the juicybars black market for these and become mixed up in a wild misadventure that involves a cyborg supercop, a crew of blue-skinned, juicybar-craving mutants called The Diaper Gang, and a woman with a magical anus.


The tone is crude, the jokes unforgivably infantile, and the idea downright disgusting. But damn if the visuals aren't sublime, running the gamut from silly to truly, fluidly exciting. All the best and most exciting moments involve Geko, the government's unstoppable enforcer, who flies through the air, dual handguns blazing, like the unholy love child of Chow Yun-Fat and RoboCop.


I've basically never seen anything like this, even though "Aachi & Ssipak" has one of the longest and weirdest lists of pop (or is that poop?) culture references of any movie in history; I mean, "Temple of Doom," sure, but "Hard-Boiled," "The Matrix" and "Battleship Potempkin" all in a single scene? And did I really see an "Ishtar" shout-out?


"Aachi & Ssipak" is animation at its most pointedly unDisney-like — offensive, frenetic, and absolutely NOT kid-friendly — which can be a lot of fun if you're in the right mood. This thing is so aggressively lewd (magical anus, anyone?) that it will almost certainly never see any sort of release in the States, so kudos to the NYAFF for sharing it with us. —MS



Exte (2007)

Directed by Sion Sono


So, Sion Sono's "Exte" is a film about haunted hair extensions, but it isn't a parody of the declining J-horror trend and its nonstop parade of droopy-locked ghost girls. With its hirsute spectral source taking a back seat to a vampishly cruel older sister and a goofy hair fetishist, it's not exactly a serious endeavor either. Like Takashi Miike's less successful supernatural cell phone horror pastiche "One Missed Call," "Exte" keeps a straight face through a wacky set-up, and comes up with, if not quite scares, at least imaginative and impressive death-by-tress sequences, including one in which a victim gets up close and literal with the expression "being given the hairy eyeball."


Sono made a name for himself among the fanboys both here and in Japan with 2002's "Suicide Circle" (semi-sequel "Noriko's Dinner Table" is currently playing at the Pioneer Theater in New York), a film that used horror conventions to explore the country's high suicide rate. "Exte" doesn't have such social satire in mind — central character Yuko (played by Chiaki Kuriyama, best known as Gogo Yubari) is an apprentice at a salon and approaches her chosen career with all of the ganbatte spirit a plucky drama heroine can be expected to muster. The town's police force has discovered a dead girl secreted in a shipping crate filled with hair extensions. They speculate that she was killed so that her organs could be sold on the black market, but before they can investigate further, her corpse is stolen by a morgue worker who's enchanted by the way her hair continues growing even in death. He pawns her postmortem locks off on Yuko's salon, and customers start finding out the hard way that they're infused with the dead girl's vengeful spirit.


The ghost may do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to killings, but its Yuko's slatternly bully of a sister Kiyomi (Tsugumi) who's the more frightening figure. Striding into Yuko's nascent independent life unannounced to paw through her things and drop off her unfortunate, abused daughter for a few days while she goes out to party, she carries with her an implicit history of Yuko's dismal family life. Kiyomi's power to harm may not be otherworldly, but it's considerable — Yuko scrambles in her wake while her salon coworkers look on, unsympathetic. —AW



Death Note, Death Note: The Last Name (2006)

Directed by Shusuke Kaneko


This series of authentic Japanese blockbusters (the first film knocked "The Da Vinci Code" out of the top spot at the box office charts back in 2006; the second was the number one grosser in Japan for a month straight), features teen hunks with boy band good looks battling over a powerful book in a none-too-subtle debate over the morality of the death penalty. Based on a 108-chapter manga series by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, "Death Note" and "Death Note: The Last Name" — it's really a two-part mini-series rather than a movie and a sequel — examines Japan's generational divide, the nature of justice, and the importance of fine, manly hair care over the course of four and a half hours.


A law student named Light Yagami (Tetsuya Fujiwara) finds a magical notebook that lets you kill a person simply by writing his or her name within its pages, just as he's become fed up with the inadequacies of the Japanese judicial system. Soon he sets out on a one-man war against crime under the pseudonym "Kira." His extra-curricular activities excite Japanese youths and infuriate the older establishment, including his police chief father (played by "Chairman" Takeshi Kaga from "Iron Chef"), who is forced to team up with a mysterious young detective named L (Kenichi Matsuyama) to discover who is behind the mass killings.


Light and L are equally brilliant, and the first "Death Note" is a snappy and well-paced cat-and-mouse thriller with a Sherlock Holmes vs. Moriarty in the Internet age vibe. That leaves you hyped to watch "The Last Name," where Light infiltrates L and the police chief's elite Kira crackdown unit, but part two languishes through some endlessly drawn-out subplots (taken directly from the manga, as I understand it) and gets bogged down in at least half a dozen too many rules from the Death Note's user's manual. A promising first half and a disappointing second equals, at best, a qualified recommendation. Also, what's up with the totally inappropriate Chili Peppers song over the closing credits? —MS



Memories of Matsuko (2006)

Directed by Tetsuya Nakashima


A middle-aged woman is murdered by the river. There's no one to mourn her — she lived alone in squalor, barely removed from homelessness. Her neighbors knew only that she smelled bad and sometimes screamed to herself at night. Her 20-year-old nephew Sho (Eita), who had no idea she even existed, is enlisted by his father to clear out her apartment, where, sorting through the remnants of her life, he learns that the woman, Matsuko (Miki Nakatani), bounced from terrible relationship to terrible relationship, was disowned by their family, worked as a prostitute and served time for murder. All in all a pretty wretched life, but what makes the self-proclaimed "fairy tale tragedy" "Memories of Matsuko" so good, even a little great, is that Matsuko refused to accept so, and accordingly, the film is both a musical and a brilliant whirl of stylized, candy-colored visuals, "The Life of Oharu" by way of a neon "Amelie."


Like Mizoguchi's miserable heroine, Matsuko was once ensconced in a respectable life. In flashbacks, we see her first in her early twenties, working as a middle-school teacher and being wooed by a handsome coworker. She's thrilled by the promise of romance, but the love she really yearns for is paternal — her solemn father has always favored her sweet, invalid sister and scarcely given Matsuko any attention. When she's forced to quit her job after a misunderstanding when one of her students steals some money on a field trip, her troubles at home come to a head, and in shame and rage she leaves, forever, as it turns out.


From there, she falls into a relationship with an abusive, alcoholic writer, and then on to one with his married rival, whose attacks turn out to be emotional. Then on to a soapland, and, more degradingly, out of the soapland, no longer in fashion and unwanted, and into the arms of a pimp, and onwards toward an ending we already know. This is, under its giddy appearance, unrelentingly grim melodrama — every fresh start arrives hand in hand with dread at what will come next. Matsuko's no martyr; she has no sense of self-worth, she makes awful decisions, is more than a bit pathetic, and embraces her role as a human punching bag, but she maintains an unwavering faith in the belief that happiness can and must lie only in other people, and when each tragedy has her declaring her life is surely at an end, each new man has her singing again. She's a holy fool — she can't not love completely and selflessly without judgment or discrimination. Her devotion is so total that it's frightening, even ultimately repellent to the men she's involved with, and it leads her to believe that no one will ever love her back, because no one is willing to love with her reckless total commitment.


Director Tetsuya Nakashima last chronicled suburban subculture malaise in the enjoyable trifle "Kamikaze Girls," and here that fanciful visual style kaleidoscopes out to encompass an entire world of magic in the mundane and the woeful. The film's most indelible image is one of an amusement park on the roof of a city department store, a setting of impossible wonder when first glimpsed in a childhood memory, and later the more prosaic, bittersweet backdrop to a grown-up confrontation framed by a Greek chorus of stage performers. Almost as memorable is the dreamlike, starlit grassy field in which Matsuko meets her end, and in which the film finds in its foreordained tragedy an unexpected and well-earned moment of grace. —AW

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: June 22nd, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/opening-this-week-june-22nd-20.php Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Black Sheep," IFC First Take, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"1408"

Swedish director Mikael Håfström's first incursion into American filmmaking was the not-so-memorable Aniston-Clive O. thriller "Derailed." Here's hoping that the director's previous foray into horror (2004's "Drowning Ghost") will be good background for "1408," an adaptation of a Stephen King short story. John Cusack stars as a writer whose specialty is debunking paranormal myths, and who insists on staying in The Dolphin Hotel's notorious room 1408 against the warnings of hotel manager Samuel L. Jackson. We prefer hotel rooms that start with either 2046 or 237, but we're open to any Stephen King film that, shockingly, looks scary.

Opens wide (official site).


"Black Sheep"

A genetic engineering experiment at a family farm goes horribly wrong, turning hundreds of sheep into "Cujo"-like killers in this New Zealand horror-comedy import from director Jonathan King. "Silence of the Lambs," indeed.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Broken English"

Parker Posey and Drea de Matteo star in the very indie-friendly debut from director Zoe (daughter of John) Cassavetes about a single woman in New York who impulsively flies to Paris to see if her initial connection with a French man (Melvil Poupaud) might be more than just another failed romance. The film premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Evan Almighty"

Tom Shadyac is back to helm the sequel to his 2003 "Bruce Almighty," which finds supporting actor Steve Carell stepping up into the lead role as a U.S. congressman commanded by God (Morgan Freeman) to build an ark before an impending flood destroys Earth. The film was billed as the most expensive comedy made to date (with a reported whopping $250 million budget). We hate to see our favorite television office manager in a flop, but it seems there's little chance for anything but.

Opens wide (official site).


"Klimt"

John Malkovich stars as Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, known for his lavish sexual paintings that came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century and that became standard selections for dormroom posters. Chilean director Raoul Ruiz helms this biopic and Saffron Burrows co-stars.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Lady Chatterley"

A French adaptation of the erotically charged novel by D.H. Lawrence (the sixth to screen) finds "Tell No One" actress Marina Hands in the title role. The film won a slew of awards at this year's Césars (French Oscars), including Best Film and Best Actress.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Manufactured Landscapes"

Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal follows photographer Edward Burtynsky as he travels the world observing changes in landscape due to industrial work and manufacturing, focusing on his path through modern China.

Opens in New York (official site).


"A Mighty Heart"

After wasting several years in studio schlock and tepid "Lara Croft" movies, Angelina Jolie reminds us that she can act. She steps into the role of Mariane Pearl, the widow of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi by the supporters of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Early reviews for the film are strong, and we're glad to see director Michael Winterbottom aim for a guerrilla-style approach to filming rather than sensationalizing a truly tragic event.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"You Kill Me"

Picture Ben Kingsley's Don Logan from "Sexy Beast" as an alcoholic struggling with his career as a hit-man and you get the gist of this new gangster comedy from director John Dahl. While the film's supporting cast (Luke Wilson, Tea Leoni and Bill Pullman) are veteran comedic actors, the film sounds suspiciously like "The Whole Nine Yards." Still, Kingsley plus comedy equals too good to miss.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA["Raining Stones," "The Call of Cthulhu"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/raining-stones-the-call-of-cth.php Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Raining Stones," Koch Lorber]


It has been easy to underestimate and underappreciate Ken Loach, by far the most distinctive, profound and consistent filmmaker to work in Great Britain in the last 40 years. Being British has been something of a twin-edged fighting blade for Loach — just as his films routinely get distributed here (though, due to the muddy brogues and burrs, they do sometimes bear subtitles), it seems that Loach has been largely taken for granted. No one conjures his name when global filmmaking heavyweights are enumerated, even though on the European festival circuit a Loach film is considered a privileged annual event. A hard-bitten ultra-realist, and a Socialist provocateur for whom social activism is more important than cinema, Loach may well be too good at his game for his own good. This year, with his (roughly) 25th feature ("The Wind That Shakes the Barley"), Loach again emerged on our shores, displayed his newest prizes from Cannes (he has won more major fest laurels than any other filmmaker alive), got his honorable reviews, and then went home, making precious little dent in the skull of American cinephilia.


We, it could be said, simply do not appreciate realism, when it's so convincing you can smell the low-rent rooms the actors inhabit, any more than we care for narratives focused morally on the plight of the real working class. Have we been trained thus, by a media industry built upon distracting us from how much we spend on entertainment? Whatever: You survey Loach's career, and the ambitions and priorities of most American filmmakers look gauche by comparison. It's also a matter of style: ultra-realism is the most difficult special effect of all, and Loach has unparalleled deftness with naturally lit docudrama veracity, objective camera manner and the expressive grasp of off-frame space. Due to its palm-sized story, "Raining Stones" (1993) might be one of his more overlooked films — despite an almost obligatory Jury Award from Cannes — but it's paradigmatically Loachian. Set in scrubby Greater Manchester, the movie trails after the hob-kneed efforts of one Bob (Bruce Jones) to earn a buck any way he knows how on the bottom rungs of the capitalist ladder. This starts, for us, as an episode of pratfall-packed sheep rustling with Bob's rotund, worse-off buddy Tommy (Loach comrade Ricky Tomlinson, who before acting was one of the infamous Shrewsbury Three union members who were jailed in 1972 during a national building strike). Of course, nobody wants to buy the single sheep's meat once the guys manage to slaughter it. Bob's troubles earning a living accumulate, but for him a single issue rises above the rest: the absolute need, in his eyes, for his young daughter to wear a new, expensive white dress for her First Communion. To make this happen, Bob scrounges for work, scouts for scams and, eventually, makes the bad mistake of borrowing the money from a loan shark.


"Raining Stones" could be about virtually any mishap, incident or even utterly passive moment in this man's life — or in the life of his community — and we'd still buy it whole hog, because it looks and feels as real as the tenth worst day of your year. (Still, the bump-&-grind of colloquialism-saturated North English accents makes "Raining Stones," like "Riff-Raff" and other Loaches, splenetically funny.) Loach tolerates no movie-movie bullshit like American indie-makers often claim to do; if only we had even one lone ranger in our midst to fight so well the good fight.


However undisciplined, our own indies come in all shapes and sizes, including "micro" — as in microcinema, currently the name of a distribution company selling underground cinema on DVD, but also the label given to the new digital DIY independent film, rarely available to a wide audience but thriving nonetheless, making films that cost less than a good car. The lovely, innocent pro-am aura surrounding these films can be bewitching (or, perhaps, it can be to me particularly), especially if it strives to evoke antique form and a sense of primal matinee naiveté. Andrew Leman's "The Call of Cthulhu" (2005) answers the siren: a "new silent" film, scrupulously faithful to H.P. Lovecraft's seminal Cthulhu tale (first published in 1928), that runs only 47 minutes but packs enough storytelling and energetic incident to fill out a miniseries. (The film, and its publicity ephemera, is also superbly designed to fit into its period.) Leman and his H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society cohorts cut every corner and freely employ obvious miniatures to tell the tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale, from the Providence streets all the way to the mid-Pacific night (a blanket, scant nods toward a ship set, digitized perspective), the unmapped atoll covered with enigmatic ruins (cardboard, mostly), and the stop-motion appearance of the Old God himself. Call it pulp-geek nostalgia — which by itself seems hardly a dress-down to me — but the movie also actually manages to be creepy, in a cheap, unstable, kids-pretending-in-the-woods kind of way. It is innocent, and that alone makes it special.



"Raining Stones" (Koch Lorber) and "The Call of Cthulhu" (Microcinema) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Foreign Borne Identities: The 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/foreign-borne-identities-the-2.php Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: Left, Miroslaw Dembinski's "A Lesson of Belarusian"; below, Shimon Dotan's "Hot House"]


Conspicuously absent at this year's Cannes Film Festival, the subject of the Iraq War has slowly receded as the flashpoint topic of political filmmaking. Whether a matter of over-saturation or simply fatigue at the implacable pace of the ongoing tragedy in the Middle East, the war no longer dominates documentary film discourse. And such is the case with the 18th Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, being held at New York's Walter Reade Theater from June 15th to the 28th. Of the 21 films and three shorts being screened, only one takes Iraq as its subject (James Longley's short "Sari's Mother"). While it's not central to the program, the U.S. policies adopted because of the war (and 9/11) haunt the edges of a number of entries, including one of the opening night films, Lynn Hershman Leeson's formally adventurous "Strange Culture."


Documenting one of the most egregious breaches of civil liberties in post 9/11 America, Leeson tells the story of University at Buffalo art professor Steve Kurtz, suspected bio-terrorist. During one horrific night in 2004, Kurtz's wife died unexpectedly from heart failure. When the medics arrived, they noticed (legal) bacteria cultures that Kurtz was to use for an art exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. They called the FBI, Kurtz was held, and he entered a legal nightmare he hasn't fully escaped from. With the case still ongoing, Kurtz isn't allowed to speak on certain issues, so Leeson hired Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan for re-enactments of that material. Eventually the two actors break character, inserting their own commentary and joking with their real life models. There's a looseness to this structure that allows Kurtz's nerdy humor and
relentless optimism to shine through, making the film the story of an individual, not merely a trembling victim of incompetent government forces.


While President Bush's domestic policies failed Kurtz, his broad foreign policy to democratize the Middle East offered a hope to many that has yet to be realized. Two elections fully backed by the U.S., in Afghanistan and Palestine, are investigated in "Enemies of Happiness" and "Hot House," respectively. In the former, Danish filmmaker Eva Mulvad follows Afghani parliamentary candidate Malalai Joya in the run up to the 2005 vote, the first in 35 years. Joya is an extraordinary figure, a 28-year-old firebrand who had gained notoriety for being tossed out of the Grand Council of tribal elders for railing against corrupt warlords. In a country in which women's rights is a new concept, Joya is hugely divisive, and has to employ a security team to escort her to nearby villages (outlying towns are too dangerous). She had already survived four attempts on her life by the time film picks up her story. As she urges rural women to vote, rescues a teen from marrying an 80-year old opium dealer, and shares tears with a 100-year old (female) veteran of the mujahedeen against the Russians, it seems like grassroots democracy has a chance to succeed. With the recent resurgence of the Taliban and the increasing weakness of the Karzai government, this hopeful sketch now looks like a mirage.


"Hot House" documents the 2006 Palestinian elections from a unique perspective — the inside of Israeli prisons. Fourteen Palestinian prisoners were elected to parliament, nine of which were members of Hamas. Director Shimon Dotan gained an incredible level of access to the inmates in the weeks before the election, eavesdropping on their discussions while outlining the martial discipline with which each subgroup runs their lives behind bars. Dotan's basic premise is that the Israeli prison system politicizes extremists. The prisoners are given a free education from the Hebrew or Open Universities, and since two-thirds of the Palestinian population has been to jail, there's a tightly knit network of support for any former or current inmate who runs for office. This is the network that helped thrust Hamas into a commanding majority in parliament, and forced the U.S. to withdraw all aid to the territory.


A country where free elections won't occur anytime soon is Belarus, one of the most repressive governments in the world. "A Lesson of Belarusian" is a shot-on-the-fly account of the elections of March 2006, widely criticized by the U.S. and E.U. as unfair. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka changed the constitution so he could run for a third time — and used brutal strong-arm tactics to silence the opposition. The film follows the student movement centered around an outlawed school, the Lyceum. Banned for teaching the Belarusian language and its history (instead of the dominant Russian), the institution goes underground to agitate for the opposition leader Alyaksandr Milinkevich. A stunning indictment of Lukashenka's regime, "A Lesson of Belarusian"'s nervous cameras catch the pervasive fear and resentment of the populace, culminating in the massive demonstrations on Election Day and the ruthless beatings that followed. As with Joya, all the buoyant optimism of Election Day has come to naught. Lukashenka's grip on power is as tight as ever, and the opposition is splintering. Just last month Milinkevich was voted out as leader, to be replaced by a rotating group of four that advocates engaging with the authoritarian government.


The most rigorous film in the series is "Manufactured Landscapes" (opening June 20th at Film Forum in NYC), directed by Jennifer Baichwal. It examines the effect China's rapid industrialization is having on its landscape, seen through the eyes of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Graced by luminous photography of gutted ships, mountains of recyclable waste, and strip-mined valleys, it forces the viewer to confront the contradictions of globalization: these images of uncanny beauty, the result of great leaps in human intelligence, are also polluting the world that nurtures that same intelligence. The gargantuan scale of China's modernization is embodied by the Three Gorges Dam, the largest ever planned, which has flooded numerous towns (one of which, Fengjie, is the subject of Jia Zhangke's latest film, "Still Life"). With its energy needs outpacing its supply, China will do anything for help, including importing oil from the Sudan.


The closing night film, "The Devil Came on Horseback," focuses on the genocide in Darfur as viewed by Brian Steidle, a Marine who took a job as cease-fire monitor with the African Union. Sadly, the film is in love with souped-up zoom-ins on maps and obviously staged scenes of Steidle popping off rounds. The basics of the conflict are covered adequately, with terrifying footage of a Janjaweed fighter reciting their slogan before an attack: "Kill the slaves." Steidle became an impassioned advocate of U.S. intervention, and the film threatens to turn him into a hero, with far too much footage of him giving speeches and interviews stateside. When the Sudanese are finally allowed to speak for themselves, their eloquence erases any memory of the previous self-congratulation. For Steidle it's the Iraq War that keeps the U.S. from stopping the slaughter. That's a questionable proposition, but one indicative of the symbolic power the war still retains. It's the open wound that bleeds through all current events.

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<![CDATA[If We Ruled The Movie Studios]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/ifc-news-podcast-31-if-we-rule.php Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we imagine ourselves into a place of great power, great responsibility and ever-so-great perks -- as the heads of movie studios. Take a listen to what we'd do, what we wouldn't do, and who we'd give money to for a project (here's looking at you, "Hot Fuzz" team!).

Download: MP3, 24:38 minutes, 22.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28147 2007-06-11 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_31_if_we_rule publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028147 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[If We Ruled The Movie Studios (photo)]]> Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028147 2007-06-11 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_31_if_we_rule_photo inherit 28147 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Fido"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/fido.php Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Fido," Roadside Attractions, 2007]


You really want to like "Fido," but boy does the movie makes it difficult. It presents a smart premise and then squanders it. It has a great cast but doesn't take advantage of their talents. It tries to send up Sirkian melodrama and the old "Lassie" TV show and winds up looking like a Sci Fi Channel movie: professional, competent with a clever genre hook, but lacking in style and artistry.


Zombies always lend themselves to social or cultural metaphors (see this week's feature for further evidence). Co-writer/director Andrew Currie uses them to examine a dependable horror trope; namely, the dangers of suburban conformity. The picture is set in an alternate version of Eisenhower's America, after a brutal war between man and zombies. Humanity survived, thanks to the help of an oh-so-benevolent corporation called ZomCom, and it is they who now provide this world with all its goods and services, from the cars they drive right down to the milk they drink. They've also tamed many of the zombies. Some are even used as servants.


The film follows the Robinson family, who buy a zombie butler (It's Mr. Belvedead!). Dad (Dylan Baker) is frightened of it because he's pretty much frightened of everything. Mom (Carrie-Anne Moss) sees it as a status symbol at first, but then grows to like and even perhaps love the creature. Their bullied son Timmy (K'Sun Ray) is so desperate for companionship that he begins to treat it like a pet; he calls the zombie (played by Billy Connolly) Fido and says things like "You're not so bad, are ya boy? Why'd you have to go and eat Mrs. Henderson?"


It's an appealing idea for a zombedy, even if the sight of Timmy treating his zombie like an animal is actually more pathetic than humorous, but there are some flaws in the execution. Because Currie's undead are zombies in the classic Romero mould — i.e. pale gray skin, grunting and a complete lack of fine motor skills — he is able to make a lot of jokes at their expense. Fido can't serve the family dinner, he can't play catch with Timmy, he can't go, shall we say, "off leash" without trying to eat the neighbors. But if zombies are so uncoordinated and flat-out dangerous, why would anyone keep them in their home? Well, obviously, so Currie can make a movie about it.


The concept only starts to pay real dividends in an uproarious sequence that takes the otherwise subtle "Lassie" overtones and brings them to the fore. Timmy gets himself into trouble, so Fido runs off and finds Mom, who asks, with deadpan sincerity, "What's wrong? Where's Timmy?" Connolly plays the scene beautifully, slowly transforming his zombie's usual growl into an adorable, concerned whimper.


If only the rest of "Fido" had as much, ahem, bite. Ray certainly looks every bit the wide-eyed innocent but his performance is flat; as if he's never seen any of the stuff he satirizing. Baker and Moss give inappropriately subdued performances; the only true standout aside from Connolly is character actor Henry Czerny, who digs into his role as ZomCom's chief of security.


The period atmosphere is on target, but not particularly original: some of the soundtrack is cribbed from "L.A. Confidential" and the overall tone of familial disarray in the face of supernatural '50s shenanigans seems lifted from "The Iron Giant." And, really, there are only so many films you can "homage" before you need to bring a little to the table yourself. Currie just doesn't bring enough. "Fido"'s like a bad pet: you disapprove of what it does on the rug, but you still kind of like it anyway.



"Fido" opens in limited release on June 15th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Zombie Metaphors: An Incomplete History]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/zombie-metaphors-an-incomplete.php Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 05072007_28weekslater_article.jpgBy Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

Vampires have become sexy, mummies CG, monsters sympathetic, but no horror baddie remains as au courant as the lowly, lurching zombie. The reanimated undead continue to be the indie subject of choice for highbrow horror and lowbrow schlock, in part because they're the cheapest to whip up — slather some grayish make-up and fake blood on a few extras, and voilà! — but also because they're the most mutable stand-in for the less tangible things that plague us. It's this symbolic potential that seems to be behind the recent zombie film resurgence: beside this week's '50s conformity spoof "Fido," there's festival mockumentary "American Zombie," which purports to investigate L.A.'s "non-living community"; the brutal and epic sequel "28 Weeks Later"; Glasgow Phillips' zombie western "Undead or Alive" and others. Below, we take a wander through some of milestones of zombie symbolism.


Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)
Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.

Widely ridiculed for decades as one of the worst movies ever made (and not entirely without justification, either), Edward D. Wood Jr.'s "Plan 9 From Outer Space," made nearly a decade before Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," hides a poignant allegorical critique beneath its pie tin flying saucers and bad Bela Lugosi stand-ins. Wood's zombies are brought back to life by well-meaning (but also kinda dickish) aliens, who come to Earth with a warning: our constant desire to create bigger and more powerful weapons will eventually result in weapons so dangerous they will threaten the safety of the entire universe. Why the aliens thought that bringing a Swedish professional wrestler back to life in a small Southern California community would somehow alter the course of the military-industrial complex is largely left to the imagination, but that doesn't change the fact that Wood's zombies, like so many later ones, come to serve as a symbol of mankind's self-destructive nature.


Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero

The seminal zombie movie from the genre's undisputed master isn't as explicit in its messages as some its sequels, but its openness makes it even more interesting. In the forty years since its release, George Romero's no-budget landmark has been discussed as everything from a critique of the Vietnam War to a reaction to the civil rights movement (its hero, an African-American, survives the zombie onslaught only to be murdered by the redneck-ridden cavalry). The text is so rich the interpretations are endless: the last time I saw it, "Night" struck me as an indictment of human indecisiveness — while Rome (or, in this case, rural Pennsylvania) burns, the survivors can't decide whether to flee or to hide, whether to stay in the living room, or hunker down in the basement. Meanwhile, scientists bicker over whether some space probe from Venus is causing the dead's reanimation. Like it matters! As that great Serlingian ending proves, we're all screwed either way.


Dead of Night (1974)
Directed by Bob Clark

Almost a decade before Clark made a mainstream name for himself with "Porky's" and "A Christmas Story," he turned out this rough but wickedly effective indie horror film equating zombism with Vietnam vet trauma. The Brooks family hasn't heard from soldier son Andy for long enough that his father and sister suspect the worst; it's only his devoted mother who keeps the faith with a fervor that borders on madness. Her conviction that her son is alive seems to actually pull him from the grave — he arrives in the dead of night, having hitchhiked to the house, and, given that we witnessed Andy's death in the jungle before the opening credits, it's clear nothing good is in store. Andy's changed — he's monotone, unresponsive and spends most of his time staring at nothing from a rocking chair on the porch. Oh, and he's picked up an addiction — he needs injections of fresh blood to keep himself from rotting. Dread builds over the course of the film, but so does a sense of tragedy; everyone is unable to understand that Andy has been (literally, in his case) to hell, and can only respond with frustration that he's not the same.


Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Directed by George A. Romero

Ten years and three movies after the success of "Night of the Living Dead," George Romero refined and expanded his vision of an undead apocalypse. Working with five times his original budget (a still shockingly paltry $500,000), Romero managed to top himself and make one of the best sequels of all time. This "Dead" installment critiques American consumer culture: four refugees from the zombie onslaught stumble on an abandoned shopping mall and lock themselves inside to ride out the storm. At first, the mood is euphoric, as they live out all their wildest shopping spree fantasies. But the fun doesn't last. Even before their muzak-tinged utopia gets overrun by unruly bikers and hordes of flesh-eaters, they're as depressed as a lottery winner who realizes his money can't buy him happiness. There's no defeating the darkness, but Romero's uncharacteristically upbeat ending suggests you can escape it, especially if you leave the mall and vow never to return.

[Photos: "28 Weeks Later," Fox Atomic, 2007; "Plan 9 From Outer Space," DCA, 1959; "Night of the Living Dead," Continental Motion Pictures Corporation, 1968; "Dead of Night," Entertainment International Pictures, 1974; "Dawn of the Dead," United Film Distribution Company, 1978]

[On to Part 2]
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<![CDATA["Lights in the Dusk"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/lights-in-the-dusk.php Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 The protagonists in thrillers are often referred to as coiled springs because they, like coiled springs, are always ready for trouble and are poised to strike at any moment. Koistinen, the lead of Aki Kaurismäki's new film "Lights in the Dusk," is like an old Slinky, played with so long it's bent out of shape and lost all elasticity. It's only good for sitting around and getting tossed around by cruel people, which is essentially what poor Koistinen does for 80 minutes. But then, "Lights in the Dusk" has all the requisite elements of a thriller, except the actual thrills. Kaurismäki plays the story for pathetic tragedy rather than excitement.

Kaurismäki name-checks Chaplin in the press notes, and Koistinen, played by Janne Hyytiäinen, brings a hint of the Little Tramp's sadder side to his performance, the way his searching eyes gaze longingly at a good-looking woman or a juicy steak. He's dropped into the middle of a classic film noir set-up, replete with femme fatales, spiked drinks and the form's three "L"'s: larceny, loneliness and lust.

Koistinen works as a late-night security guard and spends almost all of his time on this earth alone. He's one of the most miserable characters you'll ever meet in a movie theater. His search for companionship leads him to Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi), a blonde temptress in the employ of some gangsters in need of a patsy. Koistinen allows himself to fall for Mirja and then allows her to frame him for her bosses' crimes even after he gets wise to her scheme. It's a little off-putting to see a person -- even one as defeated by life as Koistinen -- march into his own demise, but it makes a little more sense once he actually gets thrown in jail and we see Koistinen, happy for the companionship of his fellow inmates, smile and laugh for the first time in the picture. You know your life's a mess when incarceration's actually a step up.

Apathy and resignation don't translate to grand drama particularly well, and "Lights in the Dusk" isn't really all that dramatic. But that wasn't Kaurismäki's intention. He set out to complete a trilogy about losers -- the first two installments were 1996's "Drifting Clouds" and 2002's "The Man Without a Past" -- with a story of loneliness, and no one could fault his execution in that regard.


"Lights in the Dusk" opens in New York on June 13th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Lights in the Dusk" (photo)]]> Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008506 2007-06-11 00:00:00 closed closed lights_in_the_dusk_photo inherit 8506 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: June 15th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/opening-this-week-june-15th-20.php Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Eagle vs. Shark," Miramax Films, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Beyond Hatred"

Olivier Meyrou's probing documentary tracks the events following the murder of François Chenu, the victim of a deadly gay bashing incident in Paris, as Chenu's family searches for understanding in the wake of his death, and attempts to forgive his killers. The film won the Best Documentary award at Berlin last year.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"DOA: Dead or Alive"

Perhaps the most derided sub-genre in all of cinema, the video game movie strikes (and strikes out?) yet again in this dire-looking adaptation of the popular fighting game "Dead or Alive". The film is (shockingly) not directed by Uwe Boll; instead, it offers fight choreographer and "The Transporter" director Corey Yuen cashing in on whatever credibility he had for what was hopefully a big fat paycheck. The film? Is about some sort of fighting tournament that attracts a bunch of hot women who also play volleyball in bikinis for some reason. Pre-pubescent boys everywhere are salivating.

Opens in wide release (official site).


"Eagle vs. Shark"

This year's offbeat summer comedy for the hipster set is a New Zealand flick from Taika Waititi that follows two awkward strangers in a quirky romance. Though it looks a little "Napoleon Dynamite"-lite, the film has been attracting lots of buzz bouncing around the film festival circuit after its Sundance premiere. Jemaine Clement of new HBO series "Flight of the Conchords" stars.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer"

The Fantastic Four return with new villains, a bloated budget and huge paychecks for the returning cast. Though the film may serve as one big springboard for a long-rumored Silver Surfer spin-off, we gotta admit... the Surfer does look pretty cool. Early rumors of Galactus being little more than a "cloud," however, have us less than intrigued. (Er, smoke monster from "Lost," anyone?)

Opens wide (official site).


"Fido"

So, in brief, this film is a lot like "Lassie," only instead of a friendly dog, Timmy has a flesh-eating zombie as his best friend and faithful pet. While Canadian director Andrew Currie's "zom-com" sounds a bit like "Shaun of the Dead" set in Lynchian America, we're just delighted by the casting of Billy Connolly as Timmy's undead best friend.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Jhoom Barabar Jhoom"

Two strangers, engaged to different people, arrive in Europe to get married but fall in love with each other instead in Shaad Ali's Indian romantic musical comedy.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Lights in the Dusk"

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki concludes his "Finland" trilogy with this film about a lonely night watchman in Helsinki who gets caught up in a series of criminal misdeeds. The film premiered at Cannes last year.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Macbeth"

Promising Australian director Geoffrey Wright may have fallen on hard times after 1992's skinhead flick "Romper Stomper" (straight-to-DVD slasher "Cherry Falls" comes to mind), but we're glad to see him return to his roots in this contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" set in the Melbourne ganglands.

Opens in Seattle (official site).


"Nancy Drew"

We'd prefer a feature film with TV's "Veronica Mars" over this adaptation of the popular kid lit series originated by Edward Stratemayer, but it looks like we'll have to wait a while longer. Nickelodeon staple Emma Roberts plays the teenage detective who tries to solve the murder of a beautiful movie star with the help of her father (Tate Donovan).

Opens wide (official site).


"Strike"

"The Tin Drum"'s Volker Schlõndorff directs this film based on the true story of a nearly illiterate woman who became one of the founders of Poland's Solidarity union, which would eventually lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The film premiered at last year's Toronto Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Trials of Darryl Hunt"

This documentary from filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg chronicles the appeals process of a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder, and who served 19 1/2 years before being exonerated thanks to DNA evidence.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion"

Filmmakers Stephen Fell and Will Thompson document the history of the pro-life movement following 1973's Supreme Court decision affirming a woman's constitutional right to privacy.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Sweet Land"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari-swe.php Sun, 10 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," Image Entertainment, 2007]


As we saw a few weeks back looking at Graham Robertson's greenscreen daydream "Able Edwards," the lovable neo-form of the all-digital movie comes, at present, with a few inherent handicaps. They may well be temporary, surmountable hurtles on our way — blech, gak, ptooey — toward a wholly and purely 100% digital future. First, the compositional fauxness flattens the film's environments into unnatural tableaux not entirely unlike those in pioneering turn-of-the-century film, which took its first formal cues from theater. Second, there's something fundamentally strange about computer-mustered milieus (think "300" or "Sin City" or "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"), something that leads the filmmakers to comic books — no surprise — but also to the deep, stylized past. Nostalgia, ironic genrefication, Frazetta-esque pre-civilized history — wherever these movies lead us, it's usually some version of long ago.


So, in terms of both problems, David Lee Fisher's new, low-budget "remix" of the seminal, all-fake 1920 German Expressionist classic "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" makes perfect sense. The original Robert Wiene film is a still-hypnotizing antique that knocked its contemporaneous audiences' eyes out, and it remains the most famous and culturally eloquent set design flourish in the history of cinema: lurid, patently fake, illogically abstruse sets full of acute angles, painted shadows and disquieting perspectives. (This was post-WWI Germany, humiliated, bankrupt, indebted, crushed and ready for a lunatic vision of a Godless world.) Fisher's strategy was simple: scan the film's sets (digitally cleaned up) onto a hard drive, and then recreate the foreground story with actors in front of a greenscreen. Add ripe dialogue, earnest acting, music and adroit narrative backstory.


Although the new "Caligari" (there have been two other riffs on this gout of artifice, a TV studio modernization in 1962 and a punked-out fantasy edition in 1990) is inherently ironic — how could it not be, given the technology? — Fisher never camps it up. The movie is both a respectful and insightful homage to a film history monument and a darkling nightmare all its own, abetted to no small degree by a fiercely convincing cast that includes, as Cesare the somnambulist, mime/actor Doug Jones, late of "Hellboy," "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer." Unlike the bigger budgeted films using this filmmaking template, Fisher's throwback makes a kind of analytical sense as well — if greenscreening for the moment is all about appropriating the contextual imagery of the past, then you should begin with Caligari, the movie with which modern movies began, shouldn't you? If you're smart about taking the first baby steps into what may become a new frontier, then, like Joyce returning to "The Odyssey," you return to the source-well of your medium's ideas, right?


There's plenty of looking-backward, too, as well as old-fashioned ambition and heart, bristling in Ali Selim's ultra-indie "Sweet Land," particularly compared to most other American indies — it's a period film spending serious amounts of time with the Lutheran farm folk of 1920 Minnesota, for one thing. It's also a parable about ethnocentrism, and a magnificently crafted piece of landscape portraiture, for two others. If that weren't enough, Selim, in his first feature after decades as one of the country's most successful commercial directors, ruefully frames the story with contemporary action, looking mournfully back — "Sweet Land" almost never stops eulogizing its characters and their agrarian society. The story is familiar in its essentials — a stranger arrives in town, upsetting its social equilibrium — but the particulars are distinctive: the wild card is a German mail-order bride with no English (Elizabeth Reaser), summoned to the home of a shy Norwegian bachelor (Tim Guinee) only to discover that postwar prejudices prevent her from getting documented and therefore from marrying. With nowhere else to go, she settles in anyway, one way or the other, as the community is rocked by hard times and farm foreclosures.


If the film soothes a largely neglected lobe on your moviegoing forebrain, it's because Selim cares about his cast (which includes John Heard, Ned Beatty and Lois Smith) enough to let them breathe in their parts, which are generous and fastidiously 3D. Alan Cumming, as a guileless family friend, is finally endurable, while Guinee (an underused and riveting member of the post-Brat Pack generation of the '90s) is never less than wholly convincing. Reaser is compelled to carry the film with her eyes and smile, and that she manages it without showboating is some kind of triumph. "Sweet Land" is super-sweet and, in the end, dramatically thin, but any film that showers this much visual love on the hard life of preindustrialized farming — hardly a sell-out topic — demands respect.



"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (Image Entertainment) is now available on DVD; "Sweet Land" (20th Century Fox) will be released July 10th.

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<![CDATA[Twilight of the Gods: Late Career Films From Some of Our Favorite Directors]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/twilight-of-the-gods-late-care.php Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "Belle Toujours," New Yorker Films, 2007]


We here at IFC News doubt we'll live long enough to see 99 years old in a way that doesn't involve adult diapers and drool. Yet, the great Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira will turn 99 this December and he's still making movies on the cusp of the century club. He had a segment in the anthology "To Each His Own Cinema" at last month's Cannes Film Festival, and his last feature, "Belle Toujours" comes to American theaters this week. What's more, de Oliveira's recent work, in the years since he became the oldest active director on the planet in 2001, has brought him increasing acclaim and attention. His twilight years have been anything but, in terms of critical appreciation and popularity.


De Oliveira's impressive late career output got us thinking about how other directors fared in the autumn of their years. Here's a look at some of his peers past, what they did and, in many cases, did not do, keeping in mind we chose to save those aging directors still alive and working (Godard, Rohmer, Lumet, etc.) for a future column.



Robert Altman

Final Film Made: "A Prairie Home Companion" (2006)


When the world mourned Altman's death late last year, it's hard to imagine that there weren't more than a few people who also shrugged and allowed that going out on the high note that was "A Prairie Home Companion" was a pretty sweet way to end a career.


Altman's hot-blooded heyday was in the 70s, when he made his two most acclaimed films, 1970's stealthily subversive "M.A.S.H." and 1975's uber-Altman effort "Nashville," along with other critical favorites like "The Long Goodbye" (1973) and "3 Women" (1977). In the 80s he hit a slump of sorts, but Altman was a prolific director who was never out of work — even in the best of times he had a contentious relationship with Hollywood, and when the industry wasn't working well with him, he just headed back into television, where he got his start and where he later picked up an Emmy for the Gary Trudeau-written miniseries "Tanner '88." He leapt back into the film forefront in the 90s with Tinseltown satire "The Player" in 1992 and "Short Cuts" in 1993, his later career high water mark. Well into his 70s, Altman produced the splendid "Gosford Park" and revisited the character Jack Tanner before turning in his last work, the humbly elegiac "A Prairie Home Companion," based on Garrison Keillor's beloved radio show.


As warm and fond (and staunchly dry-eyed) as ever a meditation on death there was, "A Prairie Home Companion" is an ideal coda to an uncompromising oeuvre, one that featured Altman's signature rambling multi-track narratives and overlapping dialogue and that reunited the director with actress Lily Tomlin, who'd starred in two of his most significant films. The film's setting, at the last performance of a live radio show, may have seemed mournful, but it turned out to be anything but — a reminder that, like those performers, Altman never gave in to pressure to change to suit the times. He remained staunchly himself, which may be why the biggest regret one should feel while watching the film is that he never had a chance to work on his next planned project, which sounds like it would have suited him perfectly: a narrative adaptation of the documentary "Hands on a Hard Body."



Luis Buñuel

Final Film Made: "That Obscure Object of Desire" (1977)


It's no wonder Luis Buñuel is such an important director: he had three careers, any of which taken by itself would have been significant. In his early Spanish days he followed up his groundbreaking and still shocking Dalí-collaboration "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) with the even more scandalous "L'Âge d'Or" (1930), and then managed to pioneer the mockumentary before there were much by way of documentaries with 1933's "Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan." Exiled from Spain, he headed to Mexico to turn out "Los Olvidados" (1950), "The Exterminating Angel" (1962) and others. And then, in the mid 60s, he headed to France, where he produced his best-known films: "Belle de jour" (1967), "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) and "That Obscure Object of Desire," his final project, in 1977.


Buñuel retired from filmmaking after "That Obscure Object of Desire," but the film feels in no way like a final one other than that it returns to the field of sexual politics that Buñuel frequently explored throughout his career, and that it finds the old Surrealist choosing, fittingly, to go out in a ball of flame. "That Obscure Object of Desire" follows Mathieu (Fernando Rey), a wealthy, older French businessman, as he pursues the object of his lust, an 18-year-old Spanish girl named Conchita, famously played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina. The film is a wise and cuttingly funny battle between the two that combines Buñuel's wry, Surrealist eye — the constant bombings that plague the cities don't seem to register with Mathieu any more than the fact that the woman he's chasing is in fact two — with the narrative facility the director learned over his career, and that's best put to use in his later work.



Samuel Fuller

Last Film Made: "Street of No Return" (1989)


Though he'd had a long and busy career as a writer, director and producer of war pictures ("Fixed Bayonets"), westerns ("Forty Guns") and crime thrillers ("Pickup on South Street"), Samuel Fuller couldn't catch many breaks when it came to filmmaking, particularly in his later years. His directorial career was pretty much kaput by the late-1960s, when he made schlock like the Burt Reynolds programmer "Shark!" He barely worked at all for a dozen years.


Fuller had dreamed of documenting his experiences in World War II as part of the United States' Army's First Infantry Division, and he finally got the chance when a new independent production company named Lorimar Pictures gave him a miniscule $4 million to make his WWII epic. He shot it guerilla style in a couple weeks in Israel with Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine, but the studio didn't exactly go ga-ga over his four-and-a-half hour director's cut.


Though "The Big Red One" was hacked down to just 113 minutes, this version got a release and even played the Cannes Film Festival in 1980. Things went far worse for Fuller's next project, "White Dog" the story of a German Shepherd who has been trained to attack African-Americans, and the man who tries to cure him. After protests from the NAACP, Paramount Pictures shelved the film completely. No one saw the movie for a decade. Fuller was devastated. In his autobiography, "A Third Face," Fuller described the experience of losing his film. "It's like someone putting your newborn baby in a goddamned maximum-security prison forever," he wrote.


Reeling from the creative defeat, Fuller accepted an offer to work in Europe and pretty much left the country for good. He made a few films in Europe, including his last theatrical feature, "Street of No Return" in 1989, and kept busy making TV movies and writing "A Third Face." After his death in 1997, Fuller's work returned to the spotlight. In 2004, film critic Richard Schickel oversaw a restoration of "The Big Red One" that included over a half-hour of new footage, and came, in Schieckel's words, as close to recapturing Fuller's original vision as was humanly possible. "The Big Red One" played Cannes again, to even greater acclaim.



Alfred Hitchcock

Final Film Made: "Family Plot" (1976)


Alfred Hitchcock wasn't exactly a spring chicken when he made "Psycho" in 1960. He was 60 himself, and he was finishing a dizzying run as one of the most beloved and acclaimed popular filmmakers in movie history. But the remaining 20 years of Hitchcock's life would prove spotty, notable as much for their failures and missteps as for their smashes.


Despite his ever-growing fame and success Hitchcock found his hands increasingly tied: by audiences' one-dimensional expectations of what a "Hitchcock movie" entailed; by the studio's increasing reliance on smaller pictures in styles that didn't suit his talents; by a world that didn't provide simple, colorful villains like Nazis to inspire his work. François Truffaut's book-length interview with Hitchcock concludes with an epilogue that features excerpts from letters Hitch wrote the author, and they paint a sad portrait of a man trapped by his own success. "I am looking for a film project," he wrote Truffaut, "but it is very difficult... I can only make what is expected of me; that is, a thriller, or a suspense story, and that I find hard to do... In the film industry here, there are so many taboos: we have to avoid elderly persons and limit ourselves to youthful characters; a film must contain some anti-establishment elements; no picture can cost more than two or three million dollars."


Those final 20 years showcase a few highlights: the terrifying "The Birds" (1962) and the eternally debated "Marnie" (1964). But they also feature some of the most poorly regarded films of his career: the mediocre-at-best "Torn Curtain" (1966) and the roundly despised "Topaz," which Hitchcock didn't even really want to make. But Hitch rebounded, and proved his versatility and vitality with his penultimate film "Frenzy" (1972), an underappreciated classic about a serial killer and the man accused of his crimes that also serves as Hitchcock's most complete valedictory on his own career.


He finished "Family Plot" in 1976 and lived another four years but he never directed again. Before he finally resigned himself to retirement, Hitchcock prepared one last project called "The Short Night," a reworking of "Notorious" about an American spy who falls in love with the wife of his intended target. The screenplay was never fully completed and no one has attempted to make the film "as he would have wanted" in the years since.



Stanley Kubrick

Final Film Made: "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999)


As Stanley Kubrick grew older, the spaces between his films grew greater and greater. Never the most forthcoming of directors, he all but dropped off the Hollywood radar for almost a decade after his 1987 Vietnam saga "Full Metal Jacket." Rumors had him attached to various projects during the time, most prominently "A.I.," which went to Steven Spielberg after Kubrick's death in 1999. When he did resurface, it was with a film that featured an extraordinarily loaded high-profile pairing: the then-married and not yet tabloid-targeted superstar couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.


"Eyes Wide Shut" was greeted with mixed reviews, as was much of Kubrick's work, but the film itself was almost obscured from view by its own baggage. Kubrick presented it to Warner Brothers only a few days before his death; it was presumably finished, though plenty insisted that he would have made further changes had he been able to. It featured Cruise and Kidman, who would separate a year after its premiere, engaging in the kind of flesh-baring eroticism and soul-baring raw interactions neither had really attempted before. And it was tampered with to secure an R rating, the central orgy scenes digitally altered to obscure the most explicit action.


Looking at "Eyes Wide Shut" a few years past all the fervor of its initial opening, the film seems ever more a moodily appropriate capper to a strikingly innovative career. After all, the biggest complaint lodged against Kubrick, particularly by one of his main detractors, critic Pauline Kael, was his supposed coldness; in "Eyes Wide Shut" he ventures with aplomb into the battlefields of the bedroom, territory that would be inaccessible to any truly unempathic filmmaker. The film, despite it welcomingly Christmas colored interiors, is no genial experience, but rather runs as vividly hot and cold as any vital relationship, and has, tucked away inside, glancing references to "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Fear and Desire," "Full Metal Jacket" and other Kubrick works. It's not a retrospective, but then, who would want that? As Sydney Pollack's character Victor Ziegler observes, "Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn't."



Orson Welles

Final Film Completed: "Filming 'Othello'" (1978)


The only thing Orson Welles was better at than making movies was starting movies and never finishing them. Welles never stopped acting in Hollywood movies, but after his second go-round directing American movies (when he made "Touch of Evil"), Welles generally worked outside of the studio system. He adapted Kafka's "The Trial" and the Shakespearian "Chimes at Midnight" on his own. But the financial foundations upon which many of Welles' projects were based were so shaky, often films went months or years without being completed, if at all.


The Criterion Collection DVD for "F For Fake" (1974), Welles' last great completed picture, includes a feature length documentary called "Orson Welles: One Man Band," by Vassili Silovic and Welles' partner Oja Kodar, that explores all of the projects the restless and impoverished genius began and never completed. The Holy Grail of these is "The Other Side of the Wind," which Welles actually shot before "F For Fake" but never edited or released. The film stars John Huston as an aging director with a flagging career; no doubt, a fascinating quasiautobiographical work. Sadly for Welles, the movie had been funded with money from the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, who was later deposed. The rights to the material were litigated for decades and are only now getting a final sorting out. Peter Bogdanovich, Welles' biographer and friend, and a star of "The Other Side of the Wind," is supposedly editing the film for a potential release next year.


If it happens, it wouldn't be the first time that someone carried on in Welles' place after his death. Welles' unfinished South American documentary "It's All True" and his version of "Don Quijote" were both compiled and released posthumously by other filmmakers. And "Touch of Evil," the straw that broke the camel's back in the first place, was eventually restored and re-released in a version more in line with Welles' tastes, based on a 58-page memo Welles had written after seeing the studio's cut.


After the unequivocal triumph of "Citizen Kane," not much in Welles' career went according to plan. He had very little creative control over his work and limited authority over final cuts. But according to Kodar in "One Man Band" he wasn't terrible upset about his failures and he didn't dwell on the past. "He had enormous courage," she says, "Nothing was going to stop him from making movies." Nothing did; well, nothing did from starting them, at least.



[Additional images: "Prairie Home Companion," Picturehouse, 2006; "That Obscure Object of Desire," First Artists, 1977; "Street of No Return," Jacques Brel, 1989; "Family Plot," Universal Pictures, 1976; "Eyes Wide Shut," Warner Bros, 1999; "Filming 'Othello'," Independent Images, 1979]

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<![CDATA["Ocean's Thirteen"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/oceans-thirteen.php Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Ocean's Thirteen" Warner Bros., 2007]


The number one and essentially only question asked of this writer upon the mention that he'd seen the new "Ocean's Thirteen" is "Is it better than 'Ocean's Twelve'?" Not "How is it?" or "How does it compare to the first one?" Just "Is it better than 'Ocean's Twelve'?" occasionally followed by "'Ocean's Twelve' stunk."


Where does the animosity for "Ocean's Twelve" come from? Critics largely dismissed the 2004 sequel to the vastly more popular 2001 film "Ocean's Eleven" (itself a remake to the most famous movie from Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack), and audiences didn't respond as enthusiastically as they had to the original (with a corresponding dip in box office receipts). Even the guys who made the freaking movie have spoken out against it, describing this year's "Ocean's" as "the one we should have made last time."


Is "Ocean's Twelve" as good as "Ocean's Eleven?" Of course not. Did you really expect it to be? If so, that's your fault, not director Steven Soderbergh's. Watch the movie again, as I did last week, and reconsider it as an exceedingly stylish, beautifully paced, and sometimes shockingly romantic caper movie. While conceding that the plot is a tad on the convoluted side and that the ultimate explanation seems anti-climactic, look again. There's an added layer to that ending, one that's never explicitly stated but hanging just below the surface. And, like the first "Ocean's," it's just a whole mess of fun.


Same goes for this latest installment, which once again reteams George Clooney's dashing Danny Ocean with his ten roguish rogues, including Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac and the rest. The only no-shows from the previous crew are Julia Roberts (Danny's long-suffering wife Tess) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Pitt's love interest from "Twelve"). Their absence is explained away quickly with a few lines of dialogue and they're supplanted by Al Pacino as evil casino owner Willy Bank and Ellen Barkin as his right-hand woman. Frankly, they're not terribly missed.


Bank double-crosses Elliott Gould's Reuben, which sends the rest of the Eleven off on an elaborate revenge plot called a "reverse big store." Without revealing much (because the core of the pleasure in any "Ocean's" is the way in which Soderbergh reveals his plot twists), they must jury rig every game in Bank's brand new casino simultaneously so that it makes all of its customers rich and bankrupts him. Easier said than done — or rather it would be if not for the air of insouciance Soderbergh and company leaven into each of these pictures, whereby the most impossible tasks are made to look utterly effortless by Ocean's impossibly well-styled posse. Things here are easily said and easily done.


A couple of the items in this reverse big store don't really sell and Soderbergh cheats a bit when he employs a nearly identical twist from "Twelve" in a nearly identical way here (it involves Damon's character). And it's hard to argue that "Ocean's Thirteen" isn't more clever than smart. But that doesn't really get in the way of the entertainment value, which is still high.


Even though "Thirteen" is, of course, a large money-making operation &151; one that Warner Brothers hopes will clear more money than even the most lucrative Danny Ocean heist — it doesn't feel nearly as desperately cash-grabby as a lot of the other sequels in this crowded summer marketplace. No sense of sequel fatigue — where the characters appear more motivated by the actor's contractual obligations than by story concerns — has crept into any of the performances and Soderbergh continues to use the series as an outlet for his playful side, which tends to make these movies a lot more engrossing than the "important" pictures he makes in between them.


Which is a long prelude to explaining that while "Ocean's Thirteen" is better than "Ocean's Twelve," that's not necessarily damning with faint praise. This "Thirteen" is better than "Twelve" sentiment is coming from an unabashed fan of "Twelve." But does the fact that I enjoyed "Twelve" where others didn't therefore mean that those who didn't won't like "Thirteen"? Perhaps that's best left to the audience to decide for themselves.



"Ocean's Thirteen" opens wide June 8th (official site).

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<![CDATA["La Vie En Rose"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/la-vie-en-rose.php Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Marion Cotillard in "La Vie en Rose," Picturehouse Entertainment, 2007]


A confused and awkward movie gets in the way of its own remarkable lead performance in "La Vie en Rose," the story of famous French songbird Edith Piaf. Though writer/director Olivier Dahan claims in "La Vie"'s press notes that he "didn't want to make a biopic," he has done exactly that. Burdened by the overwhelming weight of its subject's endless tragedies, its running time and narrative are as bloated as its star performance, by Marion Cotillard, is refined to precision.


Piaf was one of the most popular French singers of the 20th century and before, during, and after her ascent to superstardom, her life was packed with enough personal horror to fill a particularly juicy very special episode of "Behind the Music." Abandoned by her parents, cared for her brothel madam of a grandmother, Edith was blind by age three, and begging for pocket change by 13. A few strokes of good luck transformed the street performer into a popular nightclub singer, but her career was nearly derailed when the man who discovered and nurtured her talent (played here by Gérard Depardieu) winds up murdered. Edith overcomes that obstacle and many more along the way to becoming a French icon, but not before she has torrid affairs with married men, loses a loved one to a plane crash and is sent to an early grave by morphine addiction and cancer. Like most biopics of this ilk — those about tremendously famous individuals who did great things — the focus remains on big dramatic story beats rather than a coherent narrative as a whole.


Cotillard plays Piaf almost entirely herself, from the gutter to the grave. Thanks in part to a remarkable makeup job, she is tremendously convincing, even as Piaf grows so sickly that she comes to more closely resemble Nosferatu than her younger vivacious incarnations. Cotillard seems to age, not just physically, but emotionally as well: her voice, her eyes, everything changes about her over the course of Piaf's deterioration.


Dahan shows us all of the "important" moments but follows the flow of Piaf's life very loosely, juxtaposing images of the old Piaf with those of the young. What's missing, unfortunately, is any sense of the transformation between these women: the one who had to sing on the street to avoid prostitution; the one who was a national treasure and the one who, just a few years later, could barely feed herself. The lack of any connective tissue between these eras undermines Cotillard's performance because it removes a sense of coherence from her work. The transitions are at times so jarring they hurt the otherwise seamless illusion that Cotillard creates in the role.


Dahan makes other strange choices. At Piaf's greatest moment of onstage triumph he removes her voice from the soundtrack so we can't hear it and, in general, he doesn't bring any sense of magic or power to Edith's theatrical exploits and, say what you will about "Ray" or "Walk the Line" they at least gave those musical numbers a buzz of excitement. Dahan also seems to have no interest in the part of Piaf's life that might be the single most fascinating — the period where she went from a woman of no money and zero self-confidence to a massive egomaniacal diva — and spends at least ten minutes of an already distended narrative turning a largely inconsequential boxing match into his very own "Raging Bull." And by bringing in the decrepit Piaf so early, and by returning to her over and over during the nearly two-and-a-half hour movie, he creates the impression that "The Little Sparrow," as she was known, spent most of her life dying rather than living.


The ending, where Piaf comes to grips with her own mortality, is effectively sad; the rest is just sadly ineffective, and "La Vie en Rose" never justifies a full third of its running time. When you don't particularly care about the person at the heart of a movie this jumbled, it's more difficult to look past the flaws to enjoy its star. "La Vie en Rose" treats Cotillard almost as shabbily as life treated Piaf.



"La Vie en Rose" opens in limited release June 8th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Cures for the Summertime Blues]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/ifc-news-podcast-30-cures-for.php Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Summer of the threequels got you down? Never fear --this week on the IFC News podcast, we offer up some fine alternative viewing suggests for this summer less that promising-looking blockbusters.

Download: MP3, 28:26 minutes, 26 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28146 2007-06-04 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_30_cures_for publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028146 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Cures for the Summertime Blues (photo)]]> Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028146 2007-06-04 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_30_cures_for_photo inherit 28146 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: June 8th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/opening-this-week-june-8th-200.php Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Hostel 2," Lionsgate, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"12:08 East of Bucharest"

If you kept up with this just past Cannes, you know that Romania is the current hotspot for arthouse film. The film, the debut of director Corneliu Porumboiu, won the Camera D'Or award at last year's Cannes. It tracks a group of citizens in a small Romanian town who tell their stories of the revolution and the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu 16 years earlier at a local television station while answering questions from dubious viewers who do not believe the revolution ever existed.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Belle Toujours"

98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira pays homage to the Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière classic "Belle de Jour" as Michel Piccoli's Henri Husson thinks he sees his former lover Séverine (Bulle Ogier, in the role previously played by Catherine Deneuve) at a concert and takes a slow and sadistic painful revenge on her for her troublesome past nearly 38 years after the events of Bunuel's film.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Hostel: Part II"

Eli Roth returns to scare/torture the living bejesus out of us with a sequel to his surprise 2006 hit "Hostel." On board for the latest gorefest are "Welcome to the Dollhouse"'s Heather Matarazzo, Bijou Phillips and returning "Hostel" star (spoiler alert!) Jay Hernandez. We like that poster with the big pile of entrails. Ooh and the other poster with the naked woman holding her own decapitated head. Classy!

Opens wide (official site).


"La Vie en Rose"

Olivier Dahan's biopic of French singer Edith Piaf garnered raves for a strong performance from Marion Cotillard as France's Little Sparrow, but early reviews indicate the direction is awkward. Ah, as the French say, c'est la vie!

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Ocean's Thirteen"

While there's really no point in discussing the film's plot (George Clooney and co. need to rig another casino heist for some reason or other), it's still going to score a huge hunk of change at the box office. Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones are out while newcomers Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin join the mix for this final "Ocean's" film (at least until the next one). Here's hoping Soderbergh will finally move on to that Che Guevara biopic he's been working on for, like, ever.

Opens wide (official site).


"Surf's Up"

While "Surf's Up" may be the first animated mockumentary film (like "The Office" but with talking penguins), we're still getting a feeling of "been there, done that" after the nauseatingly annoying hit that was "Happy Feet". The film pays homage to surfing documentaries, but we'd recommend just renting "Riding Giants" instead. Or maybe even "Point Break."

Opens wide (official site).


"You're Gonna Miss Me"

Kevin McAlester's documentary charts the rise and fall of rock 'n roll legend Roky Erickson, formerly of the band The 13th Floor Elevators, known for creating psychedelic rock and heavily influencing Janis Joplin. The film chronicles Roky's descent into madness following a 1969 marijuana arrest, institutionalization at an insane asylum, and life of poverty before his youngest brother Sumner tries to help him pick up the pieces and get back on track. The film was nominated for a Spirit Award for Best Documentary earlier this year.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["Tears of the Black Tiger," Fernando Arrabal]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/06/tears-of-the-black-tiger-ferna.php Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Tears of the Black Tiger," Magnolia, 2007]


With Abbas Kiarostami's "Through the Oliver Trees" the most notorious prisoner of Miramax's burial chamber for hard-to-market foreign films, Wisit Sasanatieng's "Tears of the Black Tiger" has finally emerged into the light of day — whisked away by Eamonn Bowles' Magnolia Pictures for a very limited run in a few urban theaters a few months ago, almost seven years since Big Harvey bought it up at Cannes, and now climaxing its censored trajectory in uncut, unfucked-with, un-Weinsteined DVD form. All that persecution, secrecy, greedy neglect and mishandling can put a martyred shine on any movie, but "Tears" comes off now as a particularly fascinating victim, a delicate, unclassifiable orchid of a film that Weinstein, and the middle-brow audience he has been so expert in suckering, had no chance in appreciating. As with the Kiarostami movie — which is still officially locked-up for good, and is available only in NTSC on bootleg DVDs from iranianmovies.com — Weinstein responded only to cinephiles' buzz, and opened his checkbook. When he actually saw what he'd paid for, he shook with frustration, and the famous Shelf of Oblivion received another dust-collector.


Picturing Harvey's sputtering horror has inevitably become part of the film's frisson. Not that Wisit's lurid, crazy, campy Thai gorefest/melodrama needs more textual baggage — it intersects with and parodies handfuls of old film genres, including some that were already parodic (namely, cheesy Thai versions of the American western). It's a Thai western, alright, but one set in a Wild West of palm trees, painted fluorescent skyscapes, primary-color lighting, arch theatrical design, a Village People sense of costume design (the muscly gunslingers here all wear color-coordinated tight shirts and immaculate kerchiefs tied around their throats), sub-Herschell Gordon Lewis grue, contemporary combat munitions (rocket launchers, Uzis), and ponds crowded with lotus pads the size of truck tires.


The story is a pretzel of a hundred movies — star-crossed lovers, embittered gunmen, a maiden facing an arranged marriage, tragic misunderstandings, bloodbrother betrayals, shoot-outs and corrupt villains. Frankly, Wisit's cast is rarely up to the screenplay's demands in any serious way, but they're not asked to be: the drama, posed and mannered, is as rabidly earnest and drolly ironic as any film by Douglas Sirk, R.W. Fassbinder or Guy Maddin. (Here, when two gunfighters pledge loyalty to each other, they don't just shake on it — they bleed into each others' glasses of tequila, drink up and then dance.) It's a one-of-a-kind movie, even (reportedly) for Thailand, a freaky gout of self-conscious retro-style. What we would've done to see Harvey's face...


Some would misuse the word "surrealism" in reference to Wisit's Pop Art pulp pie — but for real, raw, hardcore surrealism that hearkens right back to André Breton's rudest drunken daydreams, we now have available to us the primary features made by Fernando Arrabal. Along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, Arrabal was a founding member of the neo-Surrealist "Panic Movement" in 1960s Paris, which manifested, as these kinds of things used to, in theater performances, movies, books and heaps of public outrage. Arrabal's films are even more "Panicky," or subversively profane, than Jodorowsky's much more famous "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain." But these are popular terms that need analysis, since most of what's considered "subversive" in the popular culture plays more accurately as just sophomoric and childish. Arrabal skirts the line in "Viva La Muerte" (1971), an autobiographical sketch about a boy with rampaging Oedipal problems growing up during the Spanish Civil War and after his father was murdered for being a Communist. More to the point, it's a roughshod stew of subjective dream imagery — genital mutilation (fake), slaughtered animals (real), crucifixions, sexual play, random violence, nude children, etc., all solarized with video colors and shot with the bull-headed gracelessness of a mushroom-addled teenager determined to piss off his parents.


"I Walk Like a Crazy Horse" (1973) is a little more coherent, and more didactic — a suave, rich American man (George Shannon) with a good case of Oedipal lust himself flees into the desert after his mother dies and meets a merry midget living with goats in the dunes. In no time at all, they're frolicking, kissing goats, eating sand, crapping with their butts touching, etc., until they decide to head back to civilization. The third film, "The Guernica Tree" (1975), is the most orthodox, detailing the ravages of WWII on a small Spanish village that was already home to lunatic excesses in predatory sadism and primitive madness.


Shot mostly in France, Italy and Tunisia, Arrabal's films are not polished art objects, but, deliberately, anarchic spit-shots in society's eye, chockablock with taboo tableaux and violative juxtapositions. The Panickers, like the Surrealists before them, spoke in terms of liberation, of sundering social restrictions and defying power. It's always been a questionable approach — who's being liberated, from what, exactly? — but Arrabal's films are the closest either movement came to a legitimate political act, confronting as he does again and again police force, military might and capitalist decadence. The problem is, the alternatives he offers are ridiculous, and the pagan vocabulary he uses silly.


But you don't go to Surrealists of any era for answers or solid arguments — you go for the brio of adolescent resistance, the messy nuttiness of life and culture lived (or attempted) outside of civilization's bell jar, whether or not it makes sense, speaks a truth or gets a little too involved with Catholicism, farm animals and feces. Maybe you go, too, for the extra-cinematic thrill of imagining your mother, or teacher, or priest, shook to their self-satisfied socks (just as Big Harvey surely was, in his way) by a Surrealist transgression.



"Tears of the Black Tiger" (Magnolia) is now available on DVD; "Viva La Muerte" and "I Walk Like a Crazy Horse" (Cult Epics) have been recently re-released on DVD, while "The Guernica Tree" is available as part of The Fernando Arrabal Collection, also from Cult Epics.

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<![CDATA[Cannes Dispatch 6: Parsing the Prize Winners]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/cannes-dispatch-6-parsing-the.php Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dennis Lim

Not surprising given his own directorial sensibility, the defining characteristic of Stephen Frears' jury turned out to be eclecticism. Whatever your predilections, there was probably not a lot to complain about, given how this year's awards wealth was distributed between arty young auteurs (Carlos Reygadas, Naomi Kawase) and likely crowd pleasers ("Persepolis," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," "The Edge of Heaven"), even between the critically adored ("Secret Sunshine") and unloved ("The Banishment"). The jury's most defiant statement, in the end, was its evident indifference (or worse) to studio-backed American genre films. While the Coens, Tarantino and Fincher all left empty-handed, Frears and co. found a way to reward Gus Van Sant, presenting the recent laureate with a 60th anniversary prize for the superb "Paranoid Park."

As for the Palme d'Or, there could be no less controversial winner — at least among the critical contingent — than Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days," an overwhelming favorite literally from day one, to the point where its reputation seems to me now in danger of being inflated. Extremely well directed and acted, "4 Months" is a moral tale as suspense movie and it works on the principle of withheld information — those who saw it at its first screening, before it was christened "the Romanian abortion movie," can attest to the improbable, nail-biting effectiveness of the flatly observed opening minutes. Once its subject is clear, and events turn ever grimmer, the movie becomes less urgent and more methodical in depicting the privations of Ceausescu-era Romania, where black-market economics have polluted human interactions and transactions. With its long-take choreography and low-key naturalism, "4 Months" unavoidably evokes "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (both films were shot by Oleg Mutu), but, lacking the universality and metaphysical ambitions of Cristi Puiu's film, can't help suffering in comparison.


Was this, as many commentators have declared, the best Cannes in years? There were relatively few films I whole-heartedly loved (I counted four: "Flight of the Red Balloon," "Secret Sunshine," "Go Go Tales," "Paranoid Park"), but only the crankiest of critics would grumble about the overall quality. It's worth noting, though, that more than half of my dozen or so favorites screened outside the competition. The Quinzaine enjoyed a reasonably strong edition: Besides Anton Corbijn's prize-winning "Control," high points included Serge Bozon's "La France," an almost Bressonian WWI movie with a cross-dressing Sylvie Testud and Belle and Sebastian-ish musical interludes; Nicolas Klotz's "La Question Humaine," a wry, cerebral drama that recalls Arnaud Desplechin's "La Sentinelle" in its view of history as a haunting (substituting the Holocaust for the Cold War); and Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang's erotic unhappy-marriage mood piece (and decisive return to form), "Ploy."

Back in the official selection, the (widely dismissed) "midnight movies" by Abel Ferrara and Olivier Assayas were, for me, superior to almost all of the actual title contenders. And three of my festival favorites came from the Un Certain Regard section: Hou Hsiao-hsien's exquisite "Flight of the Red Balloon"; Diao Yinan's "Night Train," the poised tale of a female Chinese executioner that moves from terse character study to terse existential thriller; and Cristian Nemescu's "California Dreamin' (Endless)," the other Romanian film.

It's a shame that more people didn't get to see Nemescu's movie, which had minimal pre-screening publicity and was the last film to screen in Un Certain Regard, where it promptly won the top prize. Tragically, Nemescu was only 27 when he died in a car crash last summer. His debut feature is billed as unfinished — a producer added the posthumous titular parentheses — and at two and a half hours, could clearly have used some additional sculpting, but its verve and expansiveness more than make up for the ragged edges and occasional slack patch.

In 1999, a convoy of U.S. soldiers, en route to Kosovo, is detained in a Romanian village by a despotic stationmaster (they're missing the necessary paperwork); with most of the locals, from the mayor to the high school's female population, intent on "seducing" the Americans, culture-clash tragicomedy ensues. It's not the most subtle allegory for the American habit of forcibly exporting democracy and turning foreign misadventures into messy conflagrations. But it has energy, wit and heart to spare and, as an anti-American smackdown, even maintains an affection for its ostensible targets. Nemescu's first and last film provided a largely apolitical Cannes edition with its missing Iraq movie and a festival of mostly familiar faces and known quantities with its major discovery.

[Photo: Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winning "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," IFC First Take, 2007]

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<![CDATA["Able Edwards," "Black Test Car "]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/able-edwards-black-test-car.php Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Able Edwards," Heretic Films, 2007]


Once upon a time, cinema was — whatever else it may have been — a factory that manufactured dreams out of the raw materials of reality. 99.99% of the time, the basic lumber for movies consisted of human beings, physical places, physical laws, gravity, weather, real light and shadow, all caught chemically on thermoplastic. The only notable exception — cel animations, or cartoons — were intended largely for children, and have only been very occasionally palatable to adults. On the whole, we've required the form to traffic in the tangible and the earthly, for better or worse, even if the movies in question involve unicorns, ghosts, the Wizard of Oz, Wookies or Stan Brakhage's baby.


That was then: we're on the verge, like it or not, of a new sub-subgenre of techno-movie, and if you've seen "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," "Sin City" or "300," you've done time on Planet Greenscreen, where absolutely everything but the actors is a make-believe, crazed-art-department blitz of pixels and bits. Even if you were thrilled by these films, you have to admit there's something missing in each of them — specifically, a convincing middle ground, a believable relationship between the foreground actors and the lovingly rendered background hijinks. No wonder the movies all retreat into the idealized past for their stories — they already inhabit a disembodied, self-conscious non-world into which viewers have a tough time entering. Which feature film actually hit the starting gate first (all in the spring of 2004) is still subject to debate — some say it was Enki Bilal's Frenchified fantasy "Immortel (ad vitam)," some say it was the Japanese "live anime" "Casshern." (It sure wasn't "Sky Captain.") But most agree it was Graham Robertson's "Able Edwards," a modest, L.A.-shot indie filmed with a mini-DV camera on 12-square-foot patch of studio floor, in front of an optical effects screen. Robertson's movie also has another advantage over the competition: it's a thoughtful, thematically adventurous piece of work, a virtual remake of "Citizen Kane" that scrambles in Walt Disney's bio (the hero is a cartoon tycoon branching out into visionary theme parks) and then launches into a claustrophobic future of cryogenics, orbital colonies, cloning and environmental devastation.


Robertson's movie cost less than a week of catering on "Spider-Man 3," and so you don't get that style orgasm you get in the bigger-budgeted films. (The acting, too, is roundly unaccomplished, but as Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce Willis can attest, fluid performances are not easy under the circumstances.) The weird distance inherent in this kind of movie actually serves "Able Edwards" well: it creates an expressive visual context for the story, which is all about the lost authenticity of the modern human. Tangible sets and locations wouldn't've added nothing.


Then again, the wide-screen cinematography and no-holds-barred ratpit drama of a Yasuzo Masumura movie makes a staunch case for the tangible and the verities of real light and shadow. Running neck and neck with notorious auteur maudit Seijun Suzuki as the most outrageous and breakneck Japanese pulp force of the '60s, Masumura is an all but unknown figure here. The two men, both in their own ways suggesting samurai Samuel Fullers with crank habits, had careers that ran roughly parallel from the mid-'50s; whereas rock 'n roll gangsta Suzuki has survived into eccentric lionhood, nihilistic sex fiend Masumura died, after scrounging for TV work, in 1986. In the DVD epoch, no geyser of movie love is kept secret for long, and cult-specialty house Fantoma has been busy sending Masumura's best films — 1958's "Giants & Toys," 1964's "Manji," 1966's "Red Angel," 1969's "Blind Beast," etc. — out into the hungry void. The newest entry is "Black Test Car" (1962), a ridiculously feverish thriller about industrial espionage — automobile makers trying to fuck each other over in the run up to releasing a new sports car. As cynical as any American noir, the film has nothing nice to say about the ways postwar Japanese culture does business, and it says it in baroque black-&-white compositions that makes the film look like a bastard child of Kurosawa's "High and Low" and Welles's "Touch of Evil." The best of the extras include an essay by — who else? — critic/wordsmith/Asian film maven Chuck Stephens.



"Able Edwards" (Heretic) will be available on DVD May 29th; "Black Test Car" (Fantoma) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: June 1st, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/opening-this-week-june-1st-200.php Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Day Watch," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Crazy Love"

Some couples quite possibly shouldn't be together. When your spouse spends 14 years in the slammer for throwing acid on your face, that's by our indication that it just might be time to, you know, stop responding to phone calls and move very far away. Dan Klores' thrilling documentary charts the turbulent relationship of Burt and Linda Pugach, a love story that begins with an affair, moves on to jealousy and a jail sentence, and turns into a modern-day marriage, offering insight into the human psyche, contemporary relationships, and sheer, perverse stupidity.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Day Watch"

That vague, Russian battle between good and evil continues in this sequel to 2004's surprise hit "Night Watch," based on the science fiction trilogy by Sergei Lukyanenko. The trailer for this one doesn't make a lick of sense, but then neither did the first film. Some pretty impressive action sequences (including a hotrod skidding along the side of a glass-paned building) make us look forward to it anyway.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Gracie"

Disney Channel mainstay Carly Schroeder stars as a teenage girl who fights to play on the boys' varsity soccer team after her brother is killed in a car accident in 1970s New Jersey. This film is based on the life experiences of Elizabeth Shue, who also stars and co-produces, and is directed by her hubby Davis Guggenheim. Andrew "Billy Campbell" Shue and Dermot Mulroney co-star.

Opens wide (official site).


"I'm Reed Fish"

"Million Dollar Baby"'s Jay Baruchel stars in this quirky indie comedy about a small-town radio personality whose life is thrown into chaos after an old flame from high school re-enters his life just days before he is to be married to his longtime girlfriend. The film, which, surprisingly, isn't written by Zach Braff, won the Best Actor award for Baruchel at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. Look for Alexis Bledel and Schuyler Fisk in supporting roles.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Knocked Up"

Girl meets boy. Girl and boy have drunken sex. Girl finds out she's pregnant eight weeks later. That's the gist of Judd Apatow's latest comedy, starring Seth Rogen and Katharine Heigl as a couple whose one night stand results in... well... lasting consequences. Early reviews hint that this may be the funniest film of the summer season, if you're up for raunchy-yet-morally-centered comedies.

Opens wide (offical site).


"Mr. Brooks"

Writer-director Bruce A. Evans, perhaps best known for the easily forgettable Christian Slater-helmed "Kuffs," pretends its still 1992 with this thriller starring Kevin Costner and Demi Moore. A detective (Moore) investigates a serial killer (Costner), a normal successful businessman with a dangerous alter ego (William Hurt). Honestly, this film sounds more like something that would come from Donald Kaufman. And Dane Cook in a drama? We can't even bear to see him attempt comedy.

Opens wide (official site).


"Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman"

British thespian Timothy Spall stars as Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's most prolific hangman who moonlit as a grocery deliveryman while keeping his day job secret from his wife (Juliet Stevenson). The film premiered at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Rise: Blood Hunter"

After she wakes up in a morgue, a journalist (Lucy Liu) realizes she's one of the undead and enlists the aid of a police detective (Michael Chiklis) to hunt for those responsible for her death. It's a lot like "The Crow," only with Lucy Liu kicking ass and possibly playing for both teams. Yeowch.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Ten Canoes"

This acclaimed Australian film tells the story of ten Aboriginal men who go hunting for geese and tell each other tales from their people's pasts. Rolf de Heer's film won the Special Jury Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Trials of Darryl Hunt"

This documentary from filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg chronicles the brutal rape and murder case of a wrongfully convicted black man who was exonerated based on DNA evidence in 2004. The film premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["Crazy Love"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/crazy-love.php Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Crazy Love," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


"Crazy Love" could only work as a documentary. If you tried to pass off this story, about a man and a woman who marry years after he blinded her by dousing her with acid, as an invention, no one would believe it. And yet here it is, complete with old photographs, newsreels and articles ("Acid Thrower Blinds Girl" screams a typical headline). They say it takes all kinds. Well, some of those kinds are severely deranged.


Burt and Linda Pugach met in the Bronx in the 1950s. She was a young girl he spotted one day on a bench; he was an unscrupulous ambulance chaser who would ask all of his female clients a simple question — "Yes or no?" Many said no, but enough said yes to keep him happy until he met Linda. After that, there was only one woman for him. Pity he didn't tell his wife.


Their meeting is as cute as a sitcom but their lives even before their relationship were as stormy as something out of a Douglas Sirk movie (and who's ever accused Sirk of aping reality too closely?). Burt was abused by his mother; Linda never had any positive male role models. And when Linda gets engaged to another man, Burt loses his mind. He hires men to threaten her in the hopes that she'll be so afraid she'll come running back to him. When that doesn't work, he buys a gun and plans to kill her fiancé, but can't bring himself to do it. So he hires someone else to knock on her door, claiming to have an engagement present. He throws lye in her face and blinds her.


Before we go on, a question: who throws acid at someone? This is how supervillains are created in Batman comic books! Actually, comic books might be the only other place where a story as straight-up insane as this one could come across as something approaching believable. It's also the only place you'd expect someone to look like Pugach did during his darkest periods, with a thin moustache and beard and a downright Satanic gleam in his eyes. Even as he discusses those events with the hindsight of decades, Pugach still sounds a little off. Journalist Jimmy Breslin calls him "the most visibly insane man he's ever met that's not institutionalized" and it's easy to see why.


Some have argued that "Crazy Love" tells a great story but that director Dan Klores doesn't necessarily tell it in a great way. There's a fair point to be made there; Klores isn't a particularly revolutionary or formally experimental filmmaker. But consider how easy it would have been to turn "Crazy Love" into a freak show or a circus, the way the media did when Burt and Linda went through all of this the first time. Klores never does; and he gets candid interviews from both that run the gamut from charming to chilling. The portrait that comes out is well-rounded; even if you still can't quite grasp how these two ultimately wound up together. But, really, who could? Even some of their closest relatives couldn't.


Above all, "Crazy Love" shows us a glimpse of unvarnished humanity, where old people use phrases like "handjobs" and where a woman justifies her marriage to a man responsible for her disfigurement by calling herself "damaged goods." Someone in the film suggests that Burt having to care for the woman he harmed was some sort of ironic revenge, and it is. But you couldn't have written that into a script a million years. Not one anyone would buy, anyway.



"Crazy Love" opens in limited release June 1st (official site).

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<![CDATA[Cannes' Lonely Boys]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/cannes-lonely-boys.php Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Even a place as exciting and glamorous as the Cannes Film Festival can feel pretty lonely. You're 4,000 miles from home, you don't speak the language, and there's nothing to eat but dried sausage and gherkins. Which makes it the perfect place to see movies like Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" and Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely," the first in competion and the second in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, and both absolutely steeped in the nature of isolation.

Nearly all of Van Sant's movies examine withdrawn heroes who've dropped out from society. His is a cinema of reclusion right on down the filmmography, which includes the emblematic figure of Norman Bates in his controversial shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho." In recent years, Van Sant's focused more on aloof youth, the killers and victims of the Columbine-like "Elephant," the burned-out rock star of "Last Days." "Paranoid Park" continues Van Sant's streak of movies about adolescent estrangement. It follows Alex (Gabe Nevins), a skater with a blank stare and a guilty conscience. As the time-bending narrative unfolds — mimicking a stream-of-consciousness entry in a frightened teen's journal — Alex is implicated in a train yard murder, one Van Sant recreates onscreen in shockingly graphic detail.


All of Van Sant's recent movies have hinged more on atmosphere than stories. "Elephant" was filled with dread, "Last Days" with grief. "Paranoid Park" puts its theme right there in the title. To capture that feeling, Van Sant goes more subjective this time around: along with Alex's narration, the film is peppered with dreamy skateboarding sequences that exist outside the narrative proper. The grainy Super-8 photography contrasts with the rest of the film's stark imagery (the cinematographer is former Wong Kar-wai collaborator Christopher Doyle, with Rain Kathy Li).

Nevins — who was, maybe, sorta (depends on who you ask) cast through MySpace — is an emotionally distant actor, but emotional distance is practically a prereq for stardom, Van Sant-style. "Paranoid Park" is less immediately shocking than "Elephant" or sorrowful as "Last Days" but in its own quiet way, it surpasses both. Van Sant's technique is incredibly confident and he's increasingly comfortable in this slightly avant-garde mode that's defined his decade of filmmaking. All of his choices, right down to the way he never shows Alex's parents on camera save for one crucial moment, feel right.

During our interview about his "Mister Lonely" at Cannes, Harmony Korine made oblique references to his dark times and the gratitude he feels simply for being able to make another movie, his first in eight years, and being alive to share it with people (he also compared the experience of being at Cannes to smoking crack, but that's probably a story for another time). He sounded like Blake, Michael Pitt's Kurt Cobainish character from "Last Days," if only Blake hadn't succumbed to his demons.

"Mister Lonely" doesn't really address drug abuse, but it does face head-on the solitary lifestyle that might come hand-in-hand with true addiction. It also recreates the feeling of being alone at Cannes in an even more direct way: its subject, a Michael Jackson impersonator (beautifully played by Diego Luna), begins the movie as a friendless street performer, moonwalking for pocket change on the streets of Paris. In his travels, he stumbles upon a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) who invites him to a retreat her husband (a French Charlie Chaplin, played by Denis Lavant) has created as a safe haven for fellow impersonators.

Like "Paranoid Park," "Mister Lonely" is less about the twists and turns of that story than the feelings they evoke. And where Van Sant's movie has its ethereal skating scenes to balance and comment on its main plot, "Mister Lonely" has an entire counter-narrative, one that often dwarfs its main story for humor and memorable imagery. In it, a group of missionary nuns airdrop food and supplies on remote South American villages. On one run, one of the nuns falls out the open door of the plane and falls to the earth below but survives because of her faith. This section has its own misters lonely: the alcoholic priest who flies the nuns' plane (played to the hilarious hilt by Werner Herzog), and a local adulterer who Herzog councils to stunning effect. The nun sequences might sound like an elaborate gag but they take on unexpected spiritual dimensions and the footage of those nuns falling through the air might be the most uplifting of this year's festival.

Without spoiling too much, both "Mister Lonely" and "Paranoid Park" end on similar notes, not of happiness or sadness, per se, but of perseverance. The proper response to Van Sant and Korine's cinematic loneliness isn't to overcome it but to shoulder it and carry on. Watch them yourself — by yourself.

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<![CDATA[Cannes' Lonely Boys (photo)]]> Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028261 2007-05-28 00:00:00 closed closed cannes_lonely_boys_photo inherit 28261 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Reevaluating William Friedkin]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/ifc-news-podcast-29-reevaluati.php Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 In the 70s, William Friedkin made two genre-defining masterpieces, "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection," then went on to turn out a infamous flop, a famously controversial thriller and a series of completely forgettable mainsteam attempts at a blockbuster. With "Bug," his new film starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, Friedkin returns to horror and to critical attention. This week on the IFC News podcast, we revisit Friedkin's career and legacy.

Download: MP3, 24:06 minutes, 22 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28125 2007-05-28 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_29_reevaluati publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028125 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Reevaluating William Friedkin (photo)]]> Mon, 28 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028125 2007-05-28 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_29_reevaluati_photo inherit 28125 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Cannes Dispatch 5: A Critical Favorite from Korea and a Less-Loved American Film]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/cannes-dispatch-5-a-critical-f.php Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dennis Lim

When the prizes are handed out tomorrow, it's almost inconceivable that Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" will not be among the major winners. This superbly controlled melodrama is Lee's return to directing after a four-year stint as the South Korean minister of culture and tourism. Engrossing and unpredictable, his new film is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, so the briefest of synopses will have to suffice. A young widow moves to her late husband's hometown of Miryang (the literal translation provides the English title); about a third of the way in, a catalyzing event propels her character — and the film — into entirely unexpected directions.

Jeon Do-yeon works through a remarkable spectrum of emotions in the lead role, and she has fine comic/empathic support from "The Host" star Song Kang-ho, as a local mechanic who becomes her befuddled suitor. Without getting too much into specifics: It's a film that both acknowledges the absurdity and understands the necessity of its heroine's actions. The idea of religion-as-salvation is handled even-handedly, with crucial skepticism and an absence of condescension.


There are unavoidable shades of "A Woman Under the Influence," but Lee's close study of a female psyche in crisis also recalls the unblinking directness (if not the aesthetic strategies) of two mid-'90s films: "Safe" and "Breaking the Waves." The film's secret weapon is its disarming plainness — a transparency that confers a kind of grace and belies an emotional complexity. It's about as limpid and unexploitative a film as you could imagine on the subject of human suffering.

"Secret Sunshine" is a near unanimous favorite among the critics. James Gray's "We Own the Night," on the other hand, provoked a (wholly unwarranted) chorus of boos at its first press screening. Only Gray's third film in a dozen years, this heartfelt cop movie — set against a late '80s Brooklyn backdrop — finds the talented, underemployed director of "Little Odessa" and "The Yards" still mining the turf he apparently knows best: immigrant, blue-collar, outer-borough New York.

Pitting noble, hard-bitten cops against drug-dealing, club-owning Russian mobsters, "We Own the Night" could be accused of a certain upright conservatism, portraying as it does pre-Giuliani NYC as a crime-infested Gomorrah. (That same critique, substituting Reagan for Giuliani, could also apply to the Coens' "No Country for Old Men," very pointedly set in 1980.) Still, setting aside the sometimes creaky plot machinery, there's plenty to recommend this film: a fine Joaquin Phoenix performance; three brilliant action sequences (including a car chase in a convincing digital downpour); and some potent ideas about class aspiration and immobility. The main complaints have been about the predictability of the plot, but Gray is plainly aiming for the emotional intensity and grand inevitability of Greek tragedy. Grave, earnest, not especially interested in humor or irony, he may not be a fashionable filmmaker, as the critical response has confirmed. In fact, he's something of an anachronism; at his best, though, he's also one of the few true classicists working in American movies.

[Photo: James Gray's "We Own the Night," Columbia Pictures, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Cannes Dispatch 4: Feel-Bad Cinema]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/cannes-dispatch-4-feelbad-cine.php Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dennis Lim

There is without fail an onslaught of entries at any major international film festival that falls under the ever-expanding rubric of feel-bad cinema. In that department, the bar has been set dauntingly high at Cannes this year by Austria's king of pain Ulrich Seidl. "Import/Export," his first Cannes entry and his fiction feature since 2001's "Dog Days," incorporates two of the most distinct characteristics of contemporary Austrian cinema. It emphasizes geographic, if not economic, mobility and it mixes fiction and nonfiction (using non-pros and real locations, including a porn studio and a geriatric ward, in a fictional scenario).

In the "Import" segment, a nurse and single mother journeys from her frigid, dead-end Ukrainian existence to scarcely more hospitable Vienna, where she finds work tending to spoiled brats and cleaning up after the senile and infirm. In "Export" (the stories never dovetail but are evocatively intercut), an Austrian lunkhead and his piggish stepfather venture into the former Soviet bloc, delivering gumball machines and participating in gruesome tableaux of abjection. Unblinkingly photographed by Ed Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler, the film isn't much of an advance for Seidl's bludgeoning, depressive sensibility, but the leavening measures of compassion and absurdist humor are more pronounced than in the past.


Within the context of this festival, the impeccably made "Import/Export" seems a tough-minded rebuke to Fatih Akin's humane but visually flat and overly neat transnational drama "The Edge of Heaven," which hinges on a similar crisscrossing premise — one that it pads out with more pseudo-cosmic coincidences that even Kieslowski would have tolerated. Spiraling out from a pair of mirrored tragedies — the death of a German woman in Turkey and the death of a Turkish woman in Germany — the movie forces its largely believable and sympathetic characters into an increasingly ludicrous web of contrivances.

One of the most intriguing sub-themes of Cannes '07 has been the reformed miserablist. In Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light," to cite the most grandiose example, the Mexican abjection specialist tempers his confrontational aesthetic with an infusion of Dreyer. Set amid an isolated Mennonite community in Mexico, "Silent Light" is a typically bold and even nutty experiment, with many bravura cinematographic feats and tricks (rhymed sunrise/sunset shots, a camera mounted to a corn thrasher, conspicuous lens flares), but I must confess a preference for Reygadas the bad boy — there was more substance in the bile and misanthropy of "Battle in Heaven" than in the new film's ostentatious spirituality.

Like the Reygadas, Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely" could be considered the first self-consciously mature work by a onetime enfant terrible. It's also Korine's first post-rehab effort (after what the press book terms "the dark years") and his first since "Julien Donkey-Boy." "Mister Lonely" has what you might call a mellowed sweetness. The freak show this time is more melancholy than garish: A Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and joins a colony of outcast doppelgangers (including Denis Lavant as Charlie Chaplin and reunited "Performance" stars James Fox and Anita Pallenberg as the Pope and the Queen of England). The film is something of a mess, overlong and unfocused (even by Korine's standards), but it's also vivid, even enchanting, and it contains some of the loveliest images I've seen all week (most of them involving skydiving nuns).

Eagerly anticipated and hugely disappointing, Béla Tarr's "The Man From London" might well be the Hungarian master's attempt to lighten up. There's the relatively compact running time (two and a quarter hours) and a missing-loot premise, adapted from Georges Simenon, that could just as well have worked for the Coen brothers. But the movie, at least after its staggering opening minutes, suggests nothing so much as deep stagnation. Almost every shot calls attention to its own virtuosity (the cinematography is by German director and Tarr acolyte Fred Kelemen). For all the dazzling fluidity of the camerawork, the film itself lumbers along wearily and with a surprising lack of grace.

[Photo: Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely," MK2 Productions, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Cannes Dispatch 3: A Good Year For The Americans]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/cannes-dispatch-3-a-good-year.php Tue, 22 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dennis Lim

One easy conclusion to draw so far: the Americans are having a good year. The films of David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino and the Coens have been among the most warmly received competition entries. Down the Croissette, the Quinzaine is screening two of the best films from Sundance 07 — Robinson Devor's "Zoo" and Gregg Araki's "Smiley Face" — and has world-premiered two more fine American indies: Tom Kalin's unerringly intelligent true-crime provocation "Savage Grace" and Ramin Bahrani's Queens-set street-kid slice of life "Chop Shop."

My favorite film by an American director so far — although it was shot and financed in Italy — is Abel Ferrara's "Go Go Tales," screening out of competition as a midnight selection. A wild and wildly allegorical comedy, it's set in the course of one long, eventful night at the declining Paradise Lounge strip club. Beleagured proprietor-emcee Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe) is behind on the rent (landlady Sylvia Miles is threatening to turn the premises over to Bed Bath & Beyond) and facing a nearly mutinous crew of go-go dancers (among them Asia Argento, who gets to tongue-kiss a dog). But he continues to dream big, holding on with a mix of tenacity, blind optimism and belief in community that are, more than ever, the necessary traits of the struggling artist.


The charmingly sleazy cabaret ambience evokes "Killing of a Chinese Bookie," but with its overt melancholy and warm communal vibe, this could almost be Ferrara's "Prairie Home Companion," ending not with a graceful fade-out but on a note of crazy defiance. Ray's funny, rousing final speech — peppered with heart-on-sleeve avowals ("I love to gamble!" "I played to win!" "What do you want from me? You wanna kill my dream? Take my heart?") — is, of course, Ferrara's own manifesto, a message to audiences and investors who may have lost faith. American distributors take note.

Another film that will hopefully have a U.S. home before the week is out, "Paranoid Park," Gus Van Sant's first film after the Death Trilogy that recharged his creative batteries and relaunched his arthouse career, is both modest and masterful, the work of a wholly relaxed filmmaker in peak form. The formal experiments of "Elephant" and "Last Days" — trippy subjective audio, fractured chronology, obsessive Rashomonic replays — are further refined here and by now seem like second nature.

Based on a novel by Blake Nelson about a teenage skate kid who accidentally kills a security guard, the story would seem to locate Van Sant in predictable territory (not to mention in the vicinity of Larry Clark). But every element of this supremely intuitive film — the credible cast (recruited via MySpace), the lovely, moody cinematography (credited to Rain Kathy Li and Christopher Doyle, who has a brief cameo as "Uncle Tommy"), Leslie Shatz's delicately textured soundscape, the emotive soundtrack (heavy on Nino Rota and Elliott Smith) — is designed to tune you into the wavelength of its young protagonist (Gabe Nevins). Few films have ever conveyed so keenly the panicky dread and numb estrangement of adolescence. As a coming-of-age story, it's at once incredibly specific and cosmic in scope.

A Palme d'Or favorite judging by their past win (for 1991's "Barton Fink") and three director awards, not to mention the critical response, Joel and Ethan Coen's skillfully directed adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel "No Country for Old Men" is, without a doubt, their best since "The Big Lebowski." It's also shaping up as the most overrated film of the festival. The Coens have fully exploited the cinematic potential of McCarthy's tense, tersely described action sequences, but they've also exacerbated the book's tonal problems and questionable politics (i.e., its apparently face-value conservatism). It's hard to give credence to the late bid for seriousness (which takes the form of a few windy philosophical bouts), given the expert flippancy and nastiness of what came before.

Michael Moore's "Sicko," on the other hand, could have done with a little more seriousness. Not that the filmmaker doesn't convey the urgency and gravity of his subject. Moore hammers home his basic, inarugable thesis — that the profit-motivated U.S. health care industry is immoral and inhumane — with a lack of finesse that can be both cathartic and frustrating. Considering what's at stake, you can't help feeling this should have been a less reductive, more scrupulous film.

Strictly in terms of information, "Sicko" does little besides confirm what most reasonably well-informed Americans already know. With its glib, utopian views of foreign health care systems, it's also a feel-good palliative for Moore's overseas fan base. Given that his central argument is pretty much a no-brainer, he tips the balance toward tearjerking manipulations. "Sicko" is sometimes enraging, often upsetting, but as a polemic, it could have used less mawkish sentiment, more lucid outrage.

[Photo: Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park," MK2 Productions, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Because We Cannes]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/ifc-news-podcast-28-because-we.php Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 It turns out the Cannes Film Festival is not just an excuse to hang out in the beautiful Southern France, though that part is awfully nice. This week's IFC News podcast comes to you from on the road, as we discuss our experiences at Cannes and two films: Wong Kar Wai's "My Blueberry Nights" and the Coen brothers' "No Country For Old Men."

Download: MP3, 23:26 minutes, 21.4 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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<![CDATA[Because We Cannes (photo)]]> Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028124 2007-05-21 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_28_because_we_photo inherit 28124 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Hal Hartley on "Fay Grim"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/hal-hartley-on-fay-grim.php Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Left, Hal Hartley; below, "Fay Grim," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


During the '90s-cusp American indie wave (Spikes, Mikes, slackers, et al.), writer-director-composer Hal Hartley became an auteurist staple with films like "Simple Men," "Trust" and "Amateur," known for their erudite and elliptical dialogue, quirky dance sequences, complex blocking and a stellar troupe of regulars like Martin Donovan and the late Adrienne Shelly. 1997's "Henry Fool," however, might just be his masterwork, a darkly prescient and epic satire on politics, literature and society writ large. Thomas Jay Ryan starred as the titular Fool, an ostentatious blowhard and convicted sex offender who moves in with — then helps make a poetry superstar of — factory worker Simon Grim (James Urbaniak). By its end, Simon's brash and promiscuous sister Fay (Parker Posey) has married and had a child with Henry, who is last seen about to flee the country as a fugitive, while Simon's involvement gets him incarcerated. It was a critical peak for Hartley, but his fans have been less than supportive in the decade since, perhaps because his films have abandoned his early trademarks for philosophically heavy ideas that are increasingly more ambitious in scope. Released in theaters last Friday and on DVD this week, "Fay Grim" looks back while pressing forward, as Posey reprises her "Henry Fool" character as the lead in their continuing adventures, this time with FBI agent Jeff Goldblum and a crypto-global-espionage-thriller bent. (Like I said, ambitious!) I spoke with Hartley, who had returned to his native New York from his new home in Berlin for the U.S. premiere.


Were you ever concerned that "Fay Grim" might seem like a creative retread?


No, I knew it wouldn't be old ground. It would be a return to these characters we fell in love with when we were making "Henry Fool." I knew particularly that the Fay character was very rich and that sort of thing makes me curious. What would she be like under different circumstances? Let's investigate her, more than her brother and Henry. The first film is really about Simon and Henry, their relationship. At least at that time, I think that was everything we needed to know. She was kind of a supporting character, but if Henry's the chief catalyst in that story, she also contributes by putting the poem on the Internet. She changes quite a lot in the film. Towards the end, she's already becoming the girl you see at the beginning of "Fay Grim" — more responsible, nervous about her abilities and thinking of herself as a very intelligent person. In fact, she is intelligent, very brave and a decent person. I also just liked her. Sometimes you have a character, and it's like, "Wow, what's she thinking about?"


I'm surprised you've never had this itch before, considering how open-ended your films are.


I agree, my movies often end on a suspension. "Henry Fool," though, left a lot of questions about what would happen to these people. At the end of "Trust," which is not fully resolved, you still know something about these characters. It's gotten to a place, and it's kind of satisfying. Even "Amateur" ends that way. The feeling at the end of "Henry Fool" was always, now what? It took me a number of years to answer that question.


In April of 2002, I called Parker and asked her if she would consider doing it. We had talked about it, half-jokingly, for years. I didn't have the plot points worked out, but I had the general situation, that the world is — actually, it's a quote from one of my earlier short films — the world is a dangerous and insecure place, and the few moments of trust and affection are as good as life gets. Yeah, Fay gets involved in this impossible-to-understand scheme of counter-espionage and stuff like that, but somehow she cuts through the madness and saves Henry through sacrifice. It's really old-fashioned tragedy, in that sense. Then I had to research to make it plausible yet still be ridiculous. It's a careful balance of facts with the spin that facts can be told to you by different personalities, and that took a long time. I wrote from that spring and finished it in the fall of 2004, so it was a good two years.


How do you feel about the way "Fay Grim" changes perceptions about the characters, almost like a revisionist history of the first film?


I'm excited by it. It's a dynamic that could not have been anticipated at the time. I wrote and directed "Henry Fool" so that Henry, as ridiculous as he is, and as much of a bullshit artist as he appears to be, he never lies. Henry doesn't lie. He says exactly what he means all the time. It gets perceived to be one thing or the other, but I just went back to the first film and used it as a text. Henry says he was in South America and Paris. Fay doesn't believe him, you know? Of course, the big conversation I find so interesting in the years after is that people argue about whether he's running to or away from the plane. I knew that was how to start. "Henry Fool" had a life — it still has a life — but the film didn't answer it one way or the other.


I always presumed we weren't supposed to know which direction he was running.


No, we shot it with him as written. If you read the screenplay, he's running to the plane. But there was something about ending the film that way. It didn't have the lift and resolved too neatly. Or, it resolved neatly, but didn't have the requisite pitch of emotional intensity. I like aesthetic resolution, but not necessarily story closure. It's a balance. I think a film could stay more alive when you leave the movie theater or turn off the television set, which happened with "Henry Fool" because people talked about it. That's just the most obvious example of the way I would treat all the scenes. It's a particular type of work; I also enjoy seeing movies that I forget 20 minutes after I've seen them — great entertainment that lightens things up, compels you, makes you forget about time.


Before "Henry Fool," your scoring work was always credited under the pseudonym Ned Rifle. What's the story behind that?


Ned Rifle was the hero of my senior thesis film in college. There was a small group of us, 13 or 14 people, who had lots of writing courses and assignments. We'd try to meet the requirements and entertain each other in class. I was good at coming up with these ridiculous names that sounded like they were from classic films. I used Ned Rifle in almost all my assignments. If there was a young man, it was always about when he would be revealed as Ned Rifle. As it turned out, in my senior thesis film, which was based on this character, I never used his name. I cut out every reference, so it was kind of an in-joke in my earlier feature films.


I also didn't know how I felt about my music. [There was some] shyness. It was almost like sound design, kind of a non-music. Around "Henry Fool," that music I had made under the pseudonym, it was business. Selling CDs, getting royalties, it was getting complicated. I needed to simplify everything.


I'd like to ask you about the unusually high number of Dutch angles in "Fay Grim."


I see it a lot more. It's not as pronounced in films, but then you see something like Rodriguez's "Sin City," based on comic books, which have always given themselves that kind of freedom. I was never a comic aficionado, but I look at anything graphic. I was thinking more German Expressionistic films and James Bond movies. I wanted to let the audience know right away that it's okay to have fun with this; you can laugh. A lot of the people are talking, big ideas, whatever. [laughs.] But don't let it get oppressive.


How do you react to critics who have turned their back on you in the years since "Henry Fool"?


I just let it lie. Sometimes you're popular, sometimes you're not. It's not going to change the nature of the work I do. Those [earlier] movies seem to mean a lot to people of a certain age at that time. And yeah, they don't want you to change. They want The Who to be the old Who. [laughs.] "Please don't change." But you grow older, you have different experiences of life, and you want to address different things. You can't do that by making movies about young boys and girls being in love all the time. It's great to have fans, to know that people are being entertained and compelled to think and re-think by the confrontations of your films. When you're being an independent person, forget about filmmaking, it means independence of flattery. You won't grow as an artist if you're dependent on being loved all the time. You become a whore, if that's all you can live with.


After "Henry Fool," I wanted to work in a different way and not in a commercial mode at all. That manifests itself in an odd way. It was almost as though I didn't realize I was making feature films during those years. Really, "Book of Life," "No Such Thing" and "The Girl From Monday" were all conceived around the same time as an exercise in genre, treating a bigger group of concerns. There are certain kinds of things you do when you're young, and there are other people doing that now and better because they're young. Personally, I'm not sentimental that way.



"Fay Grim" is now in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: May 26th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/opening-this-week-may-26th-200.php Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Paprika," Sony Pictures, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Angel-A"

An inept scam artist on the run from loan sharks opts to end his life by jumping into the Seine, only to be interrupted by a beautiful woman doing the same. Soon after saving her life, the man realizes he may have just met the one person who can save his. It's kinda like an offbeat "It's a Wonderful Life" courtesy of Luc Besson, but French and with no Christmas. Trust us, it's there.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Boss of It All"

An office comedy certainly doesn't sound like something that would come from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, but we'll take anything unpretentious for these long summer months. An IT company hires an actor to serve as president in order to help it get sold to a foreign businessman. Sad to say, however, that the director's recent funk may result in this light comedy being his last film for quite a while...

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Bug"

In a summer awash with tired blockbuster sequels and forgettable films, it's good to hear that William Friedken (yes, William Friedken) has been receiving some of the most positive buzz of his career for his latest film. The "Exorcist" director returns to horror as a Gulf War veteran and a woman in hiding shack up in a seedy motel room that may or may not be suffering from a slight insect infestation.

Opens wide (official site).


"Golden Door"

"Respiro" director Emanuele Crialese dramatizes the immigrant experience in this romance about an Italian widower immigrating to the US who encounters a mysterious Englishwoman who desires to marry him before they reach New York. The film went on to win the Silver Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Paprika"

"Perfect Blue" director Satoshi Kon presents another animated feature that puts its American counterparts to shame. While most American excursions into animation focus on celebrity voices and dancing animals, Kon showcases yet another tale of fractured reality as a psychotherapist and her alter-ego go in search of a machine that allows scientists to enter into patients' dreams.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"

Yes, last year's "Dead Man's Chest" was less funny and less original than the first in this trilogy, but it went and grossed over $400 million at the domestic box office regardless. While we expect the storyline to be as preposterous as ever, we can't help but admit a slight giddiness at the thought of Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush and Chow Yun-Fat all hamming it up for the camera. We're less excited over the Keith Richards cameo — that's soooo 2005.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Cannes Dispatch 2: Olivier Assayas' Hong Kong and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Paris]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/cannes-dispatch-2-olivier-assa.php Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dennis Lim

Continuing the festival's directors-abroad trendlet: Olivier Assayas' Hong Kong and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Paris are, without question, more credible, lived-in locales than, say, Wong Kar-wai's Memphis. (We'll get to Michael Moore's Canada, Britain and France later.)

These relocating directors seem to be operating on a broadly similar midcareer impulse, a desire to snap out of old habits, or wed them to new perspectives. Assayas' lurid, invigorating thriller "Boarding Gate" is less a transition than a stopgap, an attempt (after "Springtime Past," a project about provincial life in France, was put on hold) to take his place in what he terms "the new order of film finance." Accordingly, it's a scaled-back, quick-and-dirty production — the opposite of "Clean" (in several ways), a B-movie mutation of "demonlover" and "Irma Vep" with a few unavoidable nods to "Scarlet Diva," the globe-trotting, ass-kicking calling card of its inimitable star Asia Argento.


Half the film takes place in the anonymous industrial outskirts of Paris, the other amid the distinctive urban chaos of Hong Kong. At the heart of the rote action-plot double-crosses are the Argento character's relationships, rooted in mutual duplicity and power struggles, with two men she has worked for and loved (Michael Madsen and Carl Ng). Much of the first half is given over to two long sequences — all rough sex talk and mindfucking role play — between Madsen's thuggish entrepreneur and Argento's Sandra, an ex he used to pimp out to his clients. Encouraged to improvise, Madsen pushed things in a direction that, per Assayas in the press kit, "scared both of us, Asia and me." ("MAD-sen," Argento said when asked about her co-star at the pre-screening reception.)

The second half, as propulsive as the first is claustrophobic, takes Sandra to Hong Kong, where she must elude a host of obscurely motivated captors (through a food court, a DVD bootlegging office, a karaoke lounge). Kim Gordon, as some kind of crime boss, makes quite an impression, barking out orders in phonetic Cantonese. The finale packs the tough-tender jolt of a first-rate HK genre flick, and Argento's instinctive, force-of-nature performance is worthy of the emerging queen of the festival (she has two more movies yet to screen: Abel Ferrara's "Go Go Tales" and Catherine Breillat's "An Old Mistress").

Assayas filmed in a city he knows well, but before he started work on "Flight of the Red Balloon," Hou had only visited Paris as a tourist. He was commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay to make a film that incorporated the museum, read up on Paris (he says he found Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon," another outsider's take on the city, particularly useful), spent time there and immersed himself in French film. He eventually settled on a curious starting point: Albert Lamorisse's 1956 short "The Red Balloon."

Juliette Binoche, in perhaps the best and certainly the most eccentric performance of her career, plays Suzanne, a frazzled, bottle-blond single mother who puts in long hours rehearsing at her puppet theater company and has just hired Chinese film student Song (Song Fang) as a nanny for her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu). Obvious echoes of "The Puppetmaster" notwithstanding, it more strongly evokes "Café Lumière," Hou's previous foreign film, which likewise dealt with family rupture and had a similarly discreet yet evocative feel for daily, street-level urban existence.

There's a clear parallel here with the Wong Kar-wai — both Hou and Wong are moving on from self-consciously retrospective works ("Three Times" and "2046") — but Hou's sensibility, grounded in concrete specifics of time and place, travels better.

Hou has not adapted "The Red Balloon" so much as borrowed its iconography: boy, balloon, cityscape. The director and his cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing alternate between generally untouristy Paris exteriors and immaculately framed interiors (mostly in Suzanne's cramped apartment). The film is more ambience than plot — set to a constantly tinkling modernist piano score (replaced, amusingly, by actual piano tuning in one long scene) — but there are a number of interpolated narratives, among them the Lamorisse film, which is explicitly referenced (Song is making her own somewhat experimental version).

This is one of Hou's most sublimely bittersweet films — "a bit happy and a bit sad," as a kid at one point remarks of "The Balloon," a Félix Vallotton painting that hangs in the Orsay — and it also happens to be one of his most ambitious and complex. "Flight of the Red Balloon" opened the Un Certain Regard section, but a third of the way into the festival, it eclipses all the competition titles I've seen — further reflection has made the film seem richer, stranger, more indelible. One can imagine what repeat viewings will do.

[Photo: Olivier Assayas' "Boarding Gate," Wild Bunch/Margo Films, 2007]

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<![CDATA["Regular Lovers," "Sansho the Bailiff"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/regular-lovers-sansho-the-bail.php Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Regular Lovers," Zeitgeist Films, 2007]


As much as I would've liked to have been, I wasn't in Paris in May of 1968, when the student strikes broke out and burned all the more brightly the more they were suppressed by police violence, when labor unions joined in and virtually shut the country down, and when Molotov cocktail revolt filled the middle-class streets in a heretofore unprecedented Zeitgeist of resistance to the exploitations of state power. But it's been such a lavishly, lovingly depicted cultural moment in movies that sometimes I feel as if I had indeed been there, manning the barricades. (Call it, in retrospect, the Woodstock of France.) Still, May '68 awaited its definitive film portrait until the arrival of Philippe Garrel's "Regular Lovers" in 2005. (It opened here in January.) The movie is in fact more of an impressionistic personal meditation on the place and time than an outright historical film. But the feeling of the era, the cataclysmic, romantic, liberating and finally tragically disillusioned emotional thrust of resistance, coupled with the electric sense of being 19, sexually alive, responsibility free and ready to dope up and drop out — all of it seeps out of this neglected three-hour epic like fragrance from a valley of lilacs.


Garrel, of course, had been there — having begun as a young experimental filmmaker in the '60s, he rode shotgun along with the New Wavers (literally, in 1968 at the age of 19, shooting scenes in the streets with Godard), never attaining their international profiles but consistently producing challenging, eccentric work at home. ("Regular Lovers" is, as far as I can ascertain, his first film to be distributed in the U.S.) "Regular Lovers" has the burning conviction of firsthand experience, and it's hardly a coincidence that Garrel cast his own son, Louis, as his laconic, lovelorn protagonist. Garrel fils was also the co-star of Bernardo Bertolucci's silly May '68 valentine "The Dreamers" two years earlier — and given Garrel père's history of prickly recalcitrance, it's possible that Bertolucci getting so much wrong in his film largely inspired Garrel to get it right.


The film meanders in the young Garrel's shadow as he wanders through a demimonde of wealthy college kids and, soon enough, the Night of the Barricades, filmed in inky black-and-white by master D.P. William Lubtchansky in a nearly hour-long idyll, as if the revolution was caught in suspended animation. From there, the film evokes the post-revolutionary hangover, as Garrel's François begins a wary romance with Lilie (the radiantly ordinary Clothilde Hesme); together, they are born icons of post-adolescent cool, but just as insurrectionary fervor wanes under the glare of the workaday sun, so does their love. It's a heartbreaking film, but not because it tells you so. Like the best of the French going back to Renoir, the filmmaker locates three-dimensional pathos and beauty in simple images, acts and gestures, captured honestly and without bullshit: a dance party, getting high in a rich family's apartment, wandering through the strangely empty morning streets as if the couple were the survivors of a holocaust. An ambitious, grown-up, old-school art film, "Regular Lovers" (such a humdrum title) may be so far the best film of 2007.


Then there's real old school: Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho the Bailiff" (1954), a must-have, must-see film culture classic that, up to now, had only been available in godawful public domain video copies and war-trodden 16mm prints. If that's how you've seen it — and not, perchance, in the 2005 retro that roamed the country's retro screens — then you haven't seen it at all. The new Criterion edition is jewel-like and breathtaking, which simply makes the classic fable — in warlord-run medieval Japan, a railroaded governor's wife and children are waylaid on a journey and sold into slavery — all the more devastating. No other film so carefully interrogates how tragic injustice plays out over years of life. (It's not a film you should sit down to lightly; keep hankies, oxygen and ice water close at hand.) Mizoguchi, semi-forgotten today and the peer to Ozu if not the superior to Kurosawa as well, is hopefully on his way to being reinstituted as a cultural giant worldwide. Of course, the DVD package is fiercely reverent, buttressed with new interviews, scholarly exegesis, a new essay of things Mizoguchian and two versions of the original narrative: the 1915 short story by author Ogai Mori, and a transcribed version of an earlier version, from when it was merely an oral folktale. All told, it's justice done.



"Regular Lovers" (Zeitgeist) and "Sansho the Bailiff" (Criterion) will be available on DVD May 22nd.

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<![CDATA[Cannes Dispatch 1: "Blueberry Nights" and Ian Curtis]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/cannes-dispatch-1-blueberry-ni.php Fri, 18 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dennis Lim

"My Blueberry Nights" is turning out to be the worst-reviewed film of Wong Kar-wai's career, but Cannes attendees who were counting on an opening-night triumph had better luck last night — at the Directors' Fortnight, which kicked off with Anton Corbijn's "Control," an electrifying biopic of Ian Curtis that delivers everything Wong's film promised and more: pop-star glamour, knockout cinematography, tragic-romantic grandeur.

A tribute to the late Joy Division frontman, the Dutch-born rock photographer's debut feature is as loving as a fan's mash note and as laconic as its doomed hero. (The title of the source book, "Touching From a Distance," by the singer's widow Deborah Curtis, nicely sums up the film's approach.) Curtis's story, briefly outlined in Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People," is well known to many and intimately familiar to Joy Division devotees — he killed himself in 1980, at 23, on the eve of what would have been his band's first U.S. tour. "Control" doesn't exactly shed new light on Curtis' life and death, but it's a dream match of filmmaker and subject. Corbijn got his break working for the NME in the late '70s, shooting Joy Division and other seminal British post-punk acts, and his trademark aesthetic — angsty achromatic chiaroscuro — perfectly fits the band's.


In the central role, Sam Riley nails Curtis's awkward, hostile intensity both off and especially on stage: the possessed messianic figure with the thousand-yard stare and the windmill arms. (Riley played Fall leader Mark E. Smith in "Party People," which occasions a wry in-joke here.) Beginning with his adolescence — as an intense, introverted kid in grim Macclesfield, closely studying David Bowie and Lou Reed in his bedroom — the film ticks off the milestones in Curtis's short life: He marries teen sweetheart Debbie (Samantha Morton) at 19, gets a job at the unemployment office, is diagnosed with epilepsy (which the film implies was psychosomatic), has a baby daughter, grows distant from Debbie, plunges into an affair with Belgian fan Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), and endures the surprisingly rapid and painful ascent of Joy Division (assorted music-biz Mancunians, including the ubiquitous Tony Wilson, played here by Craig Parkinson, provide comic relief).

The film takes pains not to assign blame for the suicide, but without presumptuous psychologizing it gets into Curtis' head. At any rate it conveys the crippling nausea he apparently felt whether on stage before a screaming throng or in the stifling, guilt-inducing domestic nest (you can hear in his baby's gurgling and his wife's gentle offer of a cup of tea the rumblings of a panic attack). Shot by Martin Ruhe in crisp, Corbijn-style black and white, "Control" isn't as adventurous as "Last Days" in attempting to circumvent the limiting conventions of the rock biopic — the rock-suicide biopic at that — but from a fan's point of view, it's more satisfying. For one thing, there are songs: Most of the greatest hits are here, many of them credibly performed by the actors in live or studio settings. For another, it's a bold and touching feat of empathy: without diminishing his mystique, "Control" makes a mythic figure life-sized.

As for "My Blueberry Nights," Wong's first English-language film is — to repeat the consensus — slight to the point of frivolity. English-speaking critics have griped that Wong has a tin-eared grasp of the language; it's perhaps more honest to admit that his dreamy/mundane pop philosophy was more attractive, even exotic, in subtitled Cantonese. (As Norah Jones' character notes, explaining to David Strathairn's why she's writing letters and not calling: "Some things are better on paper.") There's also a problem of repetition and overfamiliarity (which in "2046" registered as self-examination). Wong devotees will be able to trace a web of correspondences that don't always flatter the new film. Jones and Jude Law, for instance, are simply a gender-flipped version of the "Chungking Express" pair: she has Tony Leung's doe-eyed sadness while he's inherited Faye Wong's quirky hyperactivity. Speaking of "Chungking," Cat Power's drowsy "The Greatest" stands in for "California Dreaming," but here the repeated pop song seems less a romantic talisman than a soundtrack cost-cutting measure.

Perversely interior given its cross-country premise, "My Blueberry Nights" is less about the romance of the road than the romance of the countertop: the mythic site, in the diners and bars of Wong's America, of solitary meals and too many drinks, where the kindness of strangers is likely to apply. The New York segments, set largely within a small glass-fronted cafe, are the loveliest. The scenes resolve into a pleasant blur of closing-time conversations and D.P. Darius Khondji, shooting through glass whenever possible (a Windexed pane, a cake dish), cultivates a fishbowl intimacy. Even off his peak, there are things Wong does better than almost any filmmaker on earth: shooting physical intimacy, for instance. The first Jones-Law kiss is simplicity itself — a few extreme close-ups, a lingering overhead shot, total silence — but it's a real time stopper, up there in the swoon pantheon with the taxicab snuggle in "Happy Together" or the back-alley last goodbyes of "In the Mood for Love."

[Photo: "My Blueberry Nights," Weinstein Company, 2007]

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<![CDATA[Shane Meadows and "This Is England"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/shane-meadows-and-this-is-engl.php Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "This Is England," IFC First Take, 2007]


You may remember Shane Meadows from last year's revenge drama "Dead Man's Shoes." No? How about spaghetti western spoof "Once Upon a Time in the Midlands"? Gritty sagas "TwentyFourSeven" and "A Room for Romeo Brass"?


While Meadows may yet to have made his breakthrough in the US, in his native UK the 34-year-old director has cemented his place as the brightest young talent in British cinema. His newest film, "This Is England," is the autobiographically informed story of a fatherless boy who finds companionship and eventual heartbreak when he falls in with a group of skinheads just as the movement becomes aligned with the National Front. We caught up with Meadows at the Tribeca Film Festival, where "This Is England" made its US premiere.


Click the image to play the video.




IFC News' Matt Singer and Alison Willmore sit down with director Shane Meadows to discuss his upcoming film "This Is England."; "This Is England"; IFC News; IFC News' Matt Singer and Alison Willmore sit down with Shane Meadows to talk about his new film "This Is England." http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid894689824http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=2621235




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<![CDATA[On The Shelf]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/ifc-news-podcast-27-on-the-she.php Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 It's generally considered a bad sign when a film like "The Wendell Baker Story," which opens this week, sits around for a few years before getting a theatrical release. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at some of the reasons films are put on the shelf, and some well-known shelved films and shelvees.

Download: MP3, 25:05 minutes, 22.9 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28123 2007-05-14 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_27_on_the_she publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028123 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[On The Shelf (photo)]]> Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028123 2007-05-14 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_27_on_the_she_photo inherit 28123 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Even Money," "Severance"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/even-money-severance.php Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Left, "Even Money," Yari Film Group, 2007; below, "Severance," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


Even Money


Per the opening credits as well as the official poster, "Even Money" is "A Mark Rydell Production" of "A Film by Mark Rydell." So does that mean he's doubly to blame for this overblown mess of ham(my acting) and cheese(y dialogue)?


"Even Money" is a drama in the mould of "Crash," in that it presents a very serious topic — in this case, gambling, in all its addictive and destructive forms — and tries so hard to be important it forgets to be engrossing. It features a lot of good actors, including Kim Basinger, Ray Liotta and Forest Whitaker — but few good characters. The actors do a lot of screaming and cursing and crying and fighting, but the characters just sort of sit there at a remove from all the extravagant performances.


Take the characters played by Basinger and Liotta. They're a married couple, he a professor of literature, she a writer who claims she's working at the local coffee shop when she's really at the casino, blowing the family's life savings. The two have several high-tension on-camera dustups, including one in front of a fireplace where Basinger melodramatically shudders and gasps "I'm an addict!" But they never seem like an actual couple, even one with marital difficulties, except maybe the one scene where Basinger directly addresses Liotta's penis.


Like "Crash," the plot follows several loosely related storylines. Nick Cannon is a basketball star whose older brother (Whitaker) is heavily in debt to his bookies (Jay Mohr and Grant Sullivan), who are feuding with a more powerful bookie played by Tim Roth. Roth's character is being investigated by a crippled cop (Kelsey Grammer in a hideous fake nose), and bothered by a washed-up magician (Danny DeVito). Only Whitaker, appropriately tragic as a born loser, gives something resembling a third dimension to his part.


Even more frustratingly, the narrative hinges on a series of dubious coincidences. Sullivan's character's girlfriend is oblivious to his activities until she bumps into an old friend she hasn't seen in 12 years. The old friend drops a blunt (and incredibly convenient) bombshell on the order of: "Hey, your boyfriend broke my husband's jaw! Nice seeing you again for the first time in over a decade!"


Some elements are totally unbelievable: no police force would let a cop as severely impaired as Grammer's do anything more physically demanding than a desk job. Other times, the characters are just too damn stupid: Liotta's character is shocked to learn that Basinger's has completely drained their finances, after he finally grows suspicious and takes a look their recent bank statements. Doesn't this guy even glance at the screen when he goes to the ATM?


What "Even Money" ultimately needs is someone like Robert Downey Jr., who understands addiction and could bring to the piece a much needed sense of reality. Producer/director Mark Rydell, who has made just six movies since he was nominated for an Oscar for directing "On Golden Pond" in 1981, was so proud of the movie he put his name on it twice, but he should have spent a little less time crafting the film's color palette (the rich cinematography is "Even Money"'s only flawless aspect) and more time crafting the film's emotional one.



Severance


"Severance" is to "Hostel" as "Shaun of the Dead" is to "Night of the Living Dead." As such, it's yet another pun-intended stab at combining scares and laughs with mixed results. I'm always amazed by how often filmmakers try to marry these two antithetical concepts. As genres go, horror and comedy aren't peanut butter and jelly; they're not even peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. Terror and joy are at such odds, they don't make very good bedfellows, even in a movie as good as "Shaun of the Dead," which is funny at first, and scary at the end, but rarely both at the same time. In his recent appearance on KCRW's "The Treatment," "Shaun" director Edgar Wright even admitted that, successful as his film is, it doesn't really mesh the gags (as in laughing) with the gags (as in choking as you gorge yourself on human flesh).


"Severance" doesn't really either, which is not to say that it doesn't have individual moments that are very funny, as well as moments that are very scary. Its quite superb marketing campaign makes it look like a slasher set in a post-Gervais office, but that's not entirely accurate. In fact, it follows a group of co-workers on a team-building weekend at a remote cabin (in horror movies, cabins are always remote) somewhere in the menacingly wooded foothills of Eastern Europe. Unfortunately for the team, which includes Danny Dyer, Laura Harris and Toby Stephens, they find themselves at the mercy of a brutal serial killer who stalks them and murders them one by one.


Your appreciation of the movie will vary based on your tolerance/enjoyment of torture-vacationer-slashers in the "Turistas"-"House of 1,000 Corpses" vein. As with "Shaun," this is more genre reconstruction than deconstruction: you point out some hackneyed scare tactics, then you use them anyway in a particularly aggressive manner. So there is a good deal of gore, killings, mutilations, torture, carnage, explosions, and in at least one case, beheading (to some, I may have just made this film sound a good deal more appealing). While you'll laugh more (at least intentionally) at "Severance" than you would at, say, "Saw," you'll still be rendered plenty disgusted and, depending on your temperament, maybe even a little offended.


The screenplay, by James Moran and director Christopher Smith, has at least two genuinely witty moments that involve bodily dismemberment, but that's still at least a couple short of being a true horror-comedy. This is more "horror, comedy." Not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but rather two different sandwiches, one PB, one J, which you've got to eat all at once.



"Even Money" opens in New York and L.A. May 18th (official site); "Severance" opens in New York May 18th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: May 18th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/opening-this-week-may-18th-200.php Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Once," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Brooklyn Rules"

Michael Corrente's "coming of age" drama finds three Brooklyn friends struggling to live a mafia lifestyle and us somewhat perplexed to see 90s teen heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr. trying to act all tough 'n shit, nawutimsayin? But hey, at least it can't be as bad as "The Black Donnellys."

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Even Money"

Right off the heels of the wildly successful "Lucky You" (yeah, right...) comes this ensemble drama about a group of characters played by slightly faded Hollywood actors — with the exception of that Forest Whitaker guy — struggling with gambling addiction and its disastrous effects on their lives. It's all courtesy of "On Golden Pond"'s Mark Rydell.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Fay Grim"

The sequel to Hal Hartley's beloved 1997 indie "Henry Fool" finds Parker Posey's title character working (and then running from) the CIA in order to locate notebooks belonging to her former husband — ones that may compromise the security of the United States. We're bemused by Hartley's choice to create such an offbeat sequel for what's certainly one of his best movies, but any opportunity to see more Parker Posey is good enough for us.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Flanders"

The latest effort from arty and divisive director Bruno Dumont ("Twentynine Palms") won the Grand Prix at last year's Cannes Film Festival. The film details the unrequited love between a lonely farmer and his childhood friend before they are separated by an impending, unnamed war.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Hollywood Dreams"

A young Iowan girl travels to LA in search of fame and stardom as a Hollywood actress but falls into a complex relationship with an up-and-coming young actor. While the film's plot may sound as if it were lifted straight from a 1940s studio picture, its director, Henry Jaglom, has remained a staple of the independent cinema scene, recently helming "Festival in Cannes" in 2001. In true indie fashion, Justin Kirk plays newcomer Tanna Frederick's love interest.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Memories of Tomorrow"

Ken Watanabe stars as a successful advertising executive whose life starts to unravel due to early onset of Alzheimer's in this drama from Japanese director Yukihiko Tsutsumi.

Opens in New York (IMDb page).


"Once"

Director John Carney's latest film made a splash at this year's Sundance Film Festival, winning the Audience Award for World Cinema and warming the hearts of jaded critics across the spectrum. This modern-day musical follows a busker (Glen Hansard, lead singer of The Frames) and a single mother (newcomer Markéta Irglová) whose shared dream of making music results in a love story with its own soundtrack — Zach Braff, eat your heart out.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Private Property"

Isabelle Huppert provides another strong performance as a divorced woman who dreams of leaving her ex-husband and twin teenage sons to start a life with a new lover and open a bed and breakfast. The film was directed by "Private Madness" director Joachem Lafosse and was nominated for a Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Severance"

"Shaun of the Dead" for the slasher film? Christopher Smith's new horror thriller sounds more like an episode of "The Office" gone horribly, horribly wrong. A team-building weekend for the sales division of a multinational weapons company is sabotaged when a group of maniacal killers starts picking off the company's employees one by one. Early reviews suggest the film is a bloody good time (nyuck nyuck nyuck!).

Opens in New York (official site).


"Shrek the Third"

While the third go-round for the big green ogre offers a tempting supporting cast (Amy Poehler as Snow White? Ian McShane as Captain Hook? John Krasinski as Sir Lancelot?), we're thinking this franchise is starting to feel a bit winded. The film runs a mere 81 minutes, which to us is already too much Mike Myers to handle. And can we really take more Eddie Murphy schtick? Has it really only been three months since we were sick of him in "Norbit"? And Shrek gives up his throne to a character voiced by the guy who introduced us to the term "SexyBack"? Sigh...we'll probably see it anyway.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Wendell Baker Story"

Nearly four years after it wrapped production, Luke Wilson's directorial debut (a credit shared with his brother, the lesser-known Andrew Wilson) finally finds a theatrical release. Wilson plays a goodhearted conman whose latest scam lands him in jail and alienates him from his girlfriend (Eva Mendes), best friend (Jacob Vargas) and even his dog. Upon his release, he gets a job at a retirement home and befriends a group of residents, hoping to win back his girlfriend and battle the retirement home's head nurse (Owen Wilson).

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["Deliver Us from Evil," "David and Lisa"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/deliver-us-from-evil-david-and.php Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Deliver Us from Evil," Lionsgate, 2006]


The decision to make a documentary — which even today is almost always a personal decision, not a corporate one — is contingent on a number of things, but arguably foremost among them is the sense that your subject matter will produce honest-to-God fireworks. Being politically relevant or socially informative is hardly enough; you want human explosions and earthquakes, even if they're the subtle, ironic variety found in politicking docs like Rachel Boynton's "Our Brand Is Crisis" and Laura Poitras's "My Country, My Country," to pick just two recent examples. I'm not talking about psychodramatics in the film itself, but the sense of appalled outrage you as the audience experience when a film explores material ordinary passed over by the mass media, in depth and with attention the media never musters. (That's what non-fiction film is for, no?) Still, no new-ish documentary will set fire to your house quite like Amy Berg's "Deliver Us from Evil." Only one contemporary non-fiction topic will boil the blood faster than pedophilia (as it did in "Capturing the Friedmans"), and that is, in a far-too-fervently Christian nation, pedophilia as it has been perpetrated and enabled by the Catholic Church.


Berg pulls the mother of all documentary tropes — getting the guilty monster at the core of her controversy to not only cooperate with the film but to virtually assist in its making. Gaining the complicity of the morality-challenged makes for jaw-dropping cinema, just as it has since 1975's "The California Reich" and its dumbfounded portrait of all-American neo-Nazis. Why would these people — be they pedophiles, politicians, fascists or just plain assholes — consent to a documentary crew shining a camera light on their actions? Perhaps it's ego, or perhaps they often assume the default power of the Stockholm syndrome, which did in fact muddy the inquisitive waters, for example, of Ellen Perry's "The Fall of Fujimori," enjoying as it did hanging in exiled plutocrat Alberto Fujimori's limo a little too much. But that's the exception, and even Perry's film emerged as something Fujimori, if he didn't already have far larger problems, should have regretted.


In Berg's remarkable film, the still-at-large ex-priest Oliver O'Grady speaks frankly and even engagingly about his sexual hunger for small children, and the literal decades he spent as a working clergyman in California, molesting, raping and sodomizing preadolescents as young as nine months. A kindly, soft-spoken, even leprechaun-ish Irishman, O'Grady is a walking cognitive dissonance — he is in demeanor as far from a sneaky, creepy sex ogre as you could imagine. But there's no getting around his relaxed shamelessness, or his actions, which are so universally abhorred by every culture on Earth that only within the rotten, power-mad bell jar of the Catholic Church could they be tolerated and even ignored. Which is what happened: Berg's real story is in tracing exactly how O'Grady's crimes were covered up by the Church, how he was bounced from parish to nearby parish for years, and how various archbishops — and even the current Pope, in his old administrative role in the Vatican — conspired to minimize the damage O'Grady wrought after the victims began speaking out.


The gone-public victims, all grown adults now, are appropriately lost in their own landscapes; the father of one, an aging Japanese-American man howling in recrimination, can barely keep the lid clamped on his furnace of rage. But somehow more stinging is the thorough case erected by the filmmaker and various activists (some of them ex-priests) around the utter self-defensive turpitude with which the Catholic Church, at almost every level, behaved in regards to O'Grady and thousands of predators just like him. The Church comes out of the facts bearing the ethical integrity of a corporation grown fat on the ruined lives of its customers — in other words, as demonstratively criminal. Where's the lawyer bringing it to The Hague?


If O'Grady is mentally ill, it's in a way science hasn't really figured out to address yet; we're far afield from the old ideas of Freudian psychology, represented in the pop consciousness by Frank Perry's classic 60s indie "David and Lisa" (1962). Nominated for Oscars (as was Berg's film, 45 years later), "David and Lisa" is old-school, old-book gray-sky melodrama, in which two near-psychotic teenagers in an old-estate sanitarium overcome their inner barriers and connect. Keir Dullea is a wealthy, unbearably snooty anal-compulsive whose social tools are restricted to derision and dashing from the room; Janet Margolin is a chatterbox schizophrenic who must rhyme to prevent sinking into a complete dolorousness. Something of a sensation at the time among sensitive middle-classers, Perry's film (written by his wife, Eleanor) does date, clearing the feverish, mannered stage where the committed portrayal of mental disturbance ends and sheer, unfettered overacting begins. But it's exactly that stage that's interesting today — part Twilight Zone hysteria, part earnest Actors' Studio "method," part fashionable psychobabble, the movie is something like an act of healing made in response to Hitchcock's "Psycho," released two years earlier. (The sources of both films' sicknesses are horribly maternal.) Watching it is not unlike viewing the black and white home movies of American cinema's maturation, from pure and innocent Golden Age dream machine to struggling but hopeful realism of the American New Wave.



"Deliver Us From Evil" (Lionsgate) and "David and Lisa" (Homevision) are now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[English Language Debut]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/ifc-news-podcast-26-english-la.php Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who directed this week's sequel to Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," screened his last film, 2001's Spanish language "Intacto," to Cannes and Sundance. Nimród Antal, the director of the fading-from-theaters slasher flick "Vacancy," won acclaim and a prize at Cannes along with a European Film Award nomination for his Hungarian debut, "Kontroll." No matter how good you are in your home country, when you first start working in the US it seems you're only likely to be offered genre films and US remakes of foreign languages titles. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at how some of the more recent foreign directors to make a splash have done with their English language debuts.

Download: MP3, 24:10 minutes, 22.1 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28122 2007-05-07 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_26_english_la publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028122 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[English Language Debut (photo)]]> Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028122 2007-05-07 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_26_english_la_photo inherit 28122 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["I Don't Want to Sleep Alone," "Provoked"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/i-dont-want-to-sleep-alone-pro.php Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Left, "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone," Strand, 2007; Below, "Provoked," # Eros International, 2007]


I Don't Want to Sleep Alone


In 2002, Tsai Ming-liang told The Onion AV Club "It's my belief that human beings are like plants. They can't live without water or they'll dry up. Human beings, without love or other nourishment, also dry up. The more water you see in my movies, the more the characters need to fill a gap in their lives, to get hydrated again." That quote calls to mind the films Tsai's made in the years since, including "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," where an endless rainstorm threatens to drown the final night of an old Chinese movie theater, and "The Wayward Cloud," about a dry world so thirsty for water that they've taken to collecting the rain in buckets and plastic bottles and fetishizing and even having sex with juicy watermelons.


Water isn't quite as vital to Tsai's new film, the evocatively titled "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone," but it is present, most visually in the form of an enormous reflecting pool in the crumbling ruins of an unfinished building. The idea of reflection also plays a key role in the story. Tsai's perpetual leading man, the De Niro to his Scorsese, is Lee Kang-sheng and in "Sleep Alone" he plays two different roles, as a comatose man cared for by two women, and as a homeless man who crosses the wrong con man, is badly beaten, and then rescued by a bunch of foreign workers who nurse him back to health.


Tsai's films are typically quiet affairs, heavy on mood and mystery, light on dialogue, occasionally punctuated with glitzy musical numbers; "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" falls in to the director's format of what could be termed "brooding and canoodling." As always, he doesn't skimp on the atmosphere; every dingy corridor or blind stairwell seems tinged with sexual dread. There's even a scene that might top sex with watermelons; after nearby fires have filled the air with a "haze" worthy of a John Carpenter film, one of the Lees tries to make out with the other Lee's nurse while both are wearing gas masks to protect them from the toxic fog. That is some erotic eco-horror.


The takes are as long as ever, whether to ponder an image of inexplicable beauty (like a set of glowing children's toys that Lee encounters on the side of the road) or to confront us with the harsh realities of existence (as when one of the workers has to help the bruised Lee to the toilet). Because the images linger long enough to let your mind wander away, and because no one ever actually says anything, it's easy to get a little lost in one of Tsai's pictures; multiple viewings are a must for a full appreciation. But for those very same reasons, it's tough to muster the stamina to do it, particularly for a film like "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone." You'd almost rather go and have a drink of something a little stiffer than water.



Provoked


What would Jack Hill, the king of women in prison movies, make of "Provoked"? Here is a movie about a women's prison so empowering it's practically transformative. Its heroine, Kiranjit Ahluwalia, kills her husband after a decade of abuse and winds up in jail, where she makes friends, learns English and pretty much has a grand old time. At the end of the film she says "I left my husband's jail and entered the jail of the law and that is where I found my freedom." In Hill's movies jail was so hellish Pam Grier and the rest of the inmates would do anything to escape. When Kiranjit receives her release in "Provoked," she doesn't really want to leave.


"Provoked" occupies a queasy moral space. If it is faithful to its source — the on-screen title is "Provoked: A True Story" without even the benefit of a "based on" or "inspired by" — then Kiranjit murdered her husband in his sleep in cold blood. She was brutally abused, emotionally and physically, but does that justify murder in a manner that's hard to describe as self-defense? "Provoked" says yes.


The film does its best to, yes, provoke the audience into adoring Kiranjit and despising her husband, Deepak ("Lost"'s "Naveen Andrews). It's not terribly difficult; Deepak is a loathsome fool who likes to brandish a hot iron and spit at his wife, "You're a woman! You're nothing! You're a cunt! You're less than nothing!" But some of these scenes still left a sour taste in my mouth than no amount of "true stories" could squelch. Consider the one where Kiranjit and her friends come to the defense of a prisoner who is being picked on because she accidentally killed her children in a drunken haze. Kiranjit stands up for her friend because she is her friend and because she hates bullies. So, bullies are bad but friendly alcoholics who involuntarily slaughter their children are good. That is some perverse prison logic.


Kiranjit is played by Bollywood megastar Aishwarya Rai, the so-called "most beautiful woman in the world" (here, her looks are toned down because, friendly as they may be, British prisons still aren't very glamorous). Rai's won numerous acting awards in India, but if this one-dimensional performance is any indication, her English acting has a ways to go. She staggers through most of the movie with a singular expression of watery-eyed terror and sputters in broken English completely free of prepositions or articles ("I want see my children!"), which might be accurate but also infantilizes the character to unbelievable lengths and constantly grates on the viewer's nerves.


With its theatrical acting and cartoonish villains, "Provoked" looks like an after school special about spousal abuse. That means either after school specials are far more accurate than we've given them credit, or the actual telling of this story is as true as a Jack Hill movie.



"I Don't Want to Sleep Alone" opens in New York May 9th (official site); "Provoked" opens in limited release May 11th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Julia Loktev on "Day Night Day Night"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/julia-loktev-on-day-night-day.php Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: "Day Night Day Night," IFC First Take, 2007]


Russian-born filmmaker Julia Loktev ("Moment of Impact") immigrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of nine, so it would be a misnomer to refer to her as a foreigner. Or could the case be made? This kind of ambiguity hangs over every frame of her Cannes award-winning "Day Night Day Night," a suspense drama concerning that post-9/11 monster, the suicide bomber. Unlike recent films on this volatile subject, however, audiences will never find out what race, ethnicity or worldview its bomb-strapped protagonist belongs to. As the meek, frail-looking, unnamed girl in preparation for the event, newcomer Luisa Williams (who was working as a nanny when she answered a casting flier on a Coney Island lamppost) must carry the entire film without the safety nets of a backstory or recognizable belief system. Unburdened by any heavy-handed didacticism, the film allows us to reflect upon only the minutiae leading up to its finale: expressions, gestures, reactions, sights and sounds. When I visited Loktev in Brooklyn for coffee and a chat, she demonstrated a close-to-the-vest weariness that suggests her festival year has been paved with tough, pointed and perhaps even irrelevant questions about themes that make people's personal sensitivities run hot.


What do you have to be most attentive to when making a film about a suicide bomber?


Well, everything. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. There is no way to deal with the subject without inflaming some sentiments. I was aware of that, and chose to do it in a way that made sense to me. Had I clearly spelled out — she's a Muslim, she's an Arab, she's an immigrant — I would have gotten a whole other set of criticisms that I didn't want to play into. In reverse, I get criticized for the absence of context; that we didn't make her a Muslim, an Arab and an immigrant.


Do you still have ethical obligations to answer to when all of your characters and their motives are non-descript?


I think you do have a certain responsibility to treat the subject matter responsibly, not to sensationalize it, not to play into people's expectations. I'm a very politically aware, newspaper-reading person. [laughs.] The thing I've been most struck by is when I come across the criticism that not putting in the context came out of some naiveté on my part: "She doesn't realize that terrorists have political or religious motives." I kind of resent that. I expect the audience to already know this, and I don't think they're going to learn anything from me telling them that. Part of my ethical responsibility is to not dumb down the film, and to expect my audiences are educated, free-thinking, and reading all the time.


What do you hope this well-informed crowd will take away from the film?


The film is about this girl's story. It focuses very microscopically on her the day and night before, and the day and night of her intended mission. I didn't want to explain the character; I wanted to crawl under her skin and take the audience through that process. I'm interested in the fundamental principle of faith that lies at the core of what she's doing. The first minute I think of faith, I think of doubt, which I'm probably more interested in.


The film is unveiled in tiny details and nuances. Were many of them unscripted?


Well, her story is almost perversely linear. I knew from the start how it would go, what would happen and how. But within that incredibly linear structure, I wanted to make something that's alive in the shooting. We don't have the whole film completely on the page, and yet the resulting film does resemble what was there. We left open spaces for improvisation and discoveries, especially out on the streets.


Will any of those moments wind up in the DVD bonus features?


I would never actually show deleted scenes on a DVD. I never quite understand that because I think you deleted for a reason, so you don't want to show them to an audience. Part of what I do as a filmmaker is to try things, even if I think they're probably stupid and bound to fail. For me, it is very important to be alert in the moment, to allow something will happen that you didn't plan for.


We screened cuts for friends, usually not people in the industry. I drew upon my sociologist friends by inviting them, because I thought, "Well, I need guinea pigs at this point." When I started to focus on the things they were talking about, I decided they were too distracting: "Okay, everything they're attracted to, all these shiny objects, let's throw these out." And then it was a matter of purifying the film and taking out everything extra. That was really exciting.


What did Luisa Williams offer that hundreds of auditioning actresses couldn't?


I had a page of requirements of what I wanted this girl to be, and they were all somewhat abstract. Some were very basic: I wanted her to look about 19, somewhat innocent. When I've seen pictures of girls who have done these things, they don't look like girls you'd expect to do this. I wanted her to be ethnically ambiguous, somebody that everybody takes for their own. But those are all kind of surface things. What I really wanted was a girl I could watch for an hour-and-a-half almost silent, whose main dialogue consisted of "please" and "thank you" — and yet, who I was absolutely magnetized by.


I had these ideas that she's somebody who events pass through and her face registers their passing, so her face was constantly responding to the world around her. Somebody not at home in the physical world, sort of awkward around objects and people, yet uncomfortable with the effect of her body on them. A girl who probably looked like she had never been to the gym. Later, it was absolutely startling to me that I wrote this page without knowing [Luisa] because she fit all of them.


For our first screen-test auditions, we looked at 650 girls, and none of them were right at all. We asked them to say a few things about themselves without smiling as I filmed them. I was interested in how their face responded to the camera because, ultimately, it's a film about a girl and a camera. Most people, when you look at them, have a certain mask. It wasn't about what these girls said; it was about how they looked while they listen. I knew by the time I finished giving them instructions whether I was interested.


Why did you find it necessary that "Irreversible" cinematographer Benoît Debie had never been to Times Square?


That was actually a joke. We did want that, but we thought, "Like hell we're going to find somebody who has not been to Times Square." In the film, the girl arrives there for the first time. Luisa is New York born and bred, so that was part of her challenge: how do you now see Times Square through the eyes of somebody who has never been to New York? There's something unique about that experience; a kind of newness, of being overwhelmed. I thought it might be fun to have a cinematographer who was seeing it through fresh eyes, so it was a nice added bonus when Benoit looked at photos and said, "What is this?" I said, you've got to be kidding! Literally, the first time he came to Times Square was when he came over to shoot the film and we went down to do tests.


The amazing thing is, Benoît is such a thrill-seeker. He walked out of Port Authority, turned on the camera, and started walking backwards down 42nd Street without asking me to spot him. He just assumed I would be behind him immediately to keep him from falling over. That's how we worked. It's nice when you can say in the middle of a shot, "Turn left. Look right. Come around profile. Run!" He just does it, and the resulting footage is great.


In all the Times Square sequences, I was surprised you left in so many bystanders looking straight into the camera. That didn't bother you?


They graze the camera sometimes. They catch its eyes like they would a person, and then they move on. I like that you're made aware of the fact that this is in a real crowd. It's no secret that films are made with cameras, and I suppose my Brechtian side likes those little moments of confrontation. We didn't have that many "Hi, Mom!"s in the footage, strangely enough. People didn't interfere with the shooting much.


In Times Square, there are so many cameras that people are used to it; they don't think about it. It's a mix of New Yorkers and people coming to this place expecting a spectacle to happen. In the middle of filming, I think J. Lo was on "TRL," so there were crowds of teenagers gathering. There's constantly something happening: an MTV camera, jib-arm news cameras, tourist cameras, cameras everywhere. The fascinating thing I found was when I went back to record all the sound effects. And I did that alone — no crew, but a fairly large mike. When I was out in the street, I got a lot more [interference]. Cameras we're used to; a microphone is something else. It was a pain in the ass to get those sound effects. You can cut them off, but you'd be getting the perfect footstep from some guy who'd be like, "Hey, Mom!"


Great use of amplified natural sound, non-professional actors, and a focus on physical austerities... Do you feel a kinship to Robert Bresson's work?


Yes. I'm definitely a Bresson fan, but I think I'm also attracted to things that are more impure, much more baroque, and mess things up a little bit. I'm more a Godard fan; I'm not quite the purist that Bresson was. I'm interested in non-professionals and austerity, but I probably violate that all the time. I go the opposite: I like Park Chan-wook and De Palma. [laughs.]



"Day Night Day Night" opens in New York on May 9th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Guy Maddin on "Brand Upon the Brain!"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/guy-maddin-on-brand-upon-the-b.php Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500
[Photo: Left, Sullivan Brown and Gretchen Krich in "Brand Upon the Brain!"; below, Guy Maddin on the set, both courtesy of Adam L. Weintraub, The Film Company/Vitagraph Pictures, 2007]


Guy Maddin's latest — silent — celluloid concoction can only be called an event. Already a hit on the festival circuit, "Brand Upon the Brain!" will descend upon theaters in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in the coming months, escorted by an orchestra, a foley crew and a live (celebrity!) narrator. It's another delirious genre mash-up from the Canadian filmmaker, one that tells the sordid tale of one "Guy Maddin," a child raised in a lighthouse orphanage by his psychotically protective mother and catatonic father. He falls under the spell of a cross-dressing sleuth, who investigates those curious holes on the back of the orphans heads... As purely entertaining as any of his previous work, it's also his most haunting, as youthful mythmaking is turned into chiaroscuro nightmare, and the adult "Guy's" obsessive remembrance leads him into absolute loneliness.


How did your association start with the Seattle-based The Film Company, the production company for the project?


I got a call in the middle of the night, like one of Josef Stalin's henchman calling and saying "We want you!" — but what they were calling about was something pretty wonderful. As it turns out, The Film Company is a kind of crazy, quixotic, utopian not-for-profit, the only not-for profit film studio in the world as far as anyone knows. They have this weird little manifesto whereby they refuse to accept submissions and scripts from other filmmakers, they just approach them with the green light already flashing. You have been approved to film your project, the only condition is the project can't exist yet, you have to start thinking about it the minute you accept the invitation. They can detect if a script's been sitting around in a drawer for a while, if it's got other producers' breath on it. As it turns out, I didn't have anything kicking around, so I had to create something specifically for them. They said they'd supply everything, so I didn't even ask what the budget was.


Did they give you a deadline?


I'm an impulsive decision maker with everything, but especially when I'm on set. If things feel right, they feel right within the first couple of seconds. The more I have a chance to think about things, the more hesitant, the more cowardly, everything becomes. They told me I'd be shooting in a month. And that meant since I work in a highly artificial manner which requires sets and props, I had to get a script in shape soon, immediately. Luckily I had a plane ride to Paris, a long plane ride, to daydream. I remember reading a New Yorker article about the teen detective genre and its origins. The origin of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.


I decided to make this movie as much of an autobiography as possible, but I needed some sort of fictional construct for it. I decided very quickly that my childhood would be the subject, specifically this central episode of my childhood where my mother and sister were conducting a vicious war over the speed with which my sister was growing pubic hairs. I thought that turning one of the main characters into a teen detective might just be the MacGuffin that Hitchcock always used. He'd always inject something that's not quite true into something to make everything more true. Then it was a matter of things falling into place during that plane ride, and then as soon as I landed I went to my distributors in Paris and e-mailed my treatment to the Seattle people and they started building sets.


What was George Toles' involvement in writing the screenplay?


Before I got on the plane he started suggesting some other fictional relationships. We share writing credits all the time but sometimes he writes way more than I do, sometimes I write more. We have a writing credit kind of like Lennon/McCartney. George is more than just a collaborator, he's the guy whose voice I hear everything I read in. He taught me how to read. So when I'm reading a book, it's George's voice doing all the characters, so he's a collaborator even when he's not collaborating actively. He'd be a collaborator even if he got hit by a bus.


Where did you meet him originally? How did you start working together?


I met him when my first marriage broke up back in 1980. As is often the case, my marriage had killed off all my friendships, so I found myself in need of new friends. The one friend I had left from my pre-marriage days had become a friend of his (he's a film and English lit and theatre professor at a university back in Winnipeg). I started hanging around his film classes and theater productions, and the next thing I knew I was submerged Elia Kazan-style in a world of plays and theater and books. Before that all I used to do was go out night-clubbing and listen to British Invasion music. Very scenester, but without any real heft, any literary or filmic history to back it up. I started listening to vintage music. And all of a sudden I became a voracious consumer of all things pop cultural of the 20th century. I met him at a time when I became explosively inquisitive about all of those cool things.


Can you tell me about your other collaborators, starting with your editor, John Gurdebeke?


We started working together on another auto-biographical piece called "Cowards Bend the Knee," and we discovered this, kind of by accident, this kind of facsimile of human memory that we prefer to use rather than the conventional flashback. More synaptical, neurologically based. We discovered it by just fast-forwarding through the rushes while we were binning them — on the computer, when you fast forward through things, you not only see things faster, the images are more like the way a stone skips across water, it'll touch down upon an image and then skip a whole bunch and not show them to you. Quite often you'd go speeding past something you'd want to see, and then I'd go "no, no John, back up", and then he'll back up, and he'll go past it again. And then forward again, so you slowly go scratching back and forth, more like a DJ, over the image.


We discovered that this process was really fetishizing the moment. I said, "you know what, this is the way I really remember things." If I want to relive a favorite moment, I can skip ahead too quickly, and then go no, no, slow down, I want to approach this in really delectable slowness. And then I'll go back and walk back and forth on it until all the flavor is sucked out of it and then I'll go racing off to the next episode. You can only present facsimiles of memories of real life, that's art's job. This is a cool facsimile, really neurological seeming. It's as good as any, besides... the flashback's been used so much. Why not tap into our nerves?


At what point during the process did you decide you were going to do a live performance?


I guess I'd always wanted to do it. Things kind of occurred to me during the nine days of shooting in Seattle, but often I would just quietly mention I wanted something and it would show up. And so one day I passive-aggressively mentioned "I'd really like a live music performance," and then it was discussed. Then I started adding foley artists, a singer and a narrator, and then I realized we would have to make this into a live event. The narrator strikes some people as an impurity, as it's a silent film, but I learned from reading Luis Buñuel's autobiography "My Last Sigh" that it was very common to have explicators to help viewers new to editing...


In Japan they did it all the time...


Yeah, the Benshi, there's one left, the last Benshi. She studied at the feet of the last Benshi master, she's considered the last Benshi master. I was thinking of getting her, then I thought, no, no, there was too much exposition for intertitles to handle alone, so I decided to dump most of the expository duties on to the intertitles, and let the narrators handle the seasoning. Isabella Rossellini and the original narrator in Toronto have very musical voices, so you could rationalize them as a 12th musical instrument in the pit.


How did you start working with Isabella Rossellini?


I met her once in Central Park, actually — and I'm not a very forward person, especially with celebrities. But, we're both dog lovers, as it turns out, and just as she was coming towards me, she stopped to pet a Labrador Retriever, and started a conversation with its owner. And I thought, that Lab's cute enough, I'll use that as an excuse, so I started petting it too. I looked down, and she was basically ignoring me, but she had allowed the dog to hold her hand in its mouth, and I thought, aw, I'll put my hand in the dog's mouth too. And pretty soon both of our hands were in this big drooling dog tongue, in intertwinement. Very slippery. Before we knew it, the dog and its owner were gone, and we were left with our hands hanging in the air, dog spit dripping off. By that time I had worked up the confidence to tell her I knew her ex-husband a bit, or that I didn't really know him, but that he bought one of my films for his archives, "Tales from the Gimli Hospital," and that I was a filmmaker making a film, and that I had a part screaming to be played by her, an amputee beer baroness. We discovered we both loved Lon Chaney and silent films. We became instant friends, and it has been that way from then on.


I already see in B&W when I'm looking through a movie camera, and all of a sudden if she moves her head a micro-millimeter, the decades will fall away and my knees will buckle and she'll become Ingrid or Roberto. She's a time-traveler and you really need to have your seat-belt fastened when you're filming her. When she walks around, she brings her own nimbus with her, wherever she goes. It can be as superficial as a little pulsing flash of similarity to Ingrid, especially when she's talking, but she doesn't really look like Ingrid. I made a movie where she plays her mother, and you have no trouble telling them apart. Ironically she looks less like her when she's playing her. The vocal impersonation is spot-on, because there are no two people who have that Scand-Italian accent like them.


Do you consider and "Brand Upon the Brain!" and "Cowards Bend the Knee" to be your most autobiographical films?


They're literally autobiographical. I'd say this one is 96% true. That's not a promotional strength in any way — because why should my life be interesting? — but I did have a very Grand Guignol, melodramatic childhood and it's a pleasure, an almost unalloyed pleasure to get it out. Sometimes I feel almost completely crushed with guilt that I've betrayed my family, broken a commandment. At least, it seems I've dishonored my mother sometimes. But it would come off if I had the courage to show it to my family as some sort of fantasy, and most people don't recognize themselves in their own depictions of themselves.


So you haven't shown it to your family?


My brother, who's not in the story, has seen it. He said it hurt a bit, because people he loves are in it. But there are people who watch it and say that it is their life too. And Geraldine Chaplin, who narrated it for me in Buenos Aires recently, said "this feels like my life and yet my parents were wonderful to me, and it just feels like an übermother and überfather." She said somehow it was her autobiography as well. That was the biggest compliment to me. By being specifically about myself I was trying to capture the essence of the way we make sense of the world as children, the way we construct false models of the world that become myths to ourselves. It was really important to me for that to work, and for viewers to feel like it was their childhood, even though they didn't grow up in a lighthouse or have an abusive mother.


Well, becoming aware of your own sexuality is something everyone goes through...


I was trying to reassure the mother of a 13-year-old boy last night that he probably wasn't getting into trouble right now, he was probably just masturbating for the fourth time that night. She didn't really want to hear it but then I finally had to say...that's what you do if you're normal. Would you rather your son not learn until he was 21, like a certain friend we both knew? And she was like, "no, I want my son to masturbate now."


I think that's an important lesson...


Well, here's hoping he's masturbating as we say these words.


Are you doing more of these autobiographical pieces, or will you move away from it for a while?


I might have to move away. I notice whenever I make a film that I kind of use up that subject or setting. It's as good as therapy, I don't think it does work through anything at all, but it just makes you tired of it. The act of filming and editing things turns it into so much footage that needs to be dealt with, and by the time you've finished the whole process, you're tired of it. So whatever scars I have from childhood didn't heal over, I just got bored of looking at them. I'm ready to move on.


I do feel like an adult now, it's strange. I quit having these dreams I used to have about my father that just kept picking at me with unfinished business about his death. I quit having them right after making the movie. I suddenly quit saving things, I found it easy to throw out my old baseball cards, and records — I all of a sudden got rid of my past, and I was a notorious pack rat and collector. My apartment was like a museum, it looked like the Quay Brothers had filmed there. Not anymore. Now my apartment looks like an Ikea showroom.


I think "Brand Upon the Brain!" is the most emotionally involving of your films so far, maybe because of how autobiographical it is...


Well, it's something I've been trying to work towards but there's been so much artifice, so much perceived irony and distance in my early movies, I've finally figured a way of getting past that. For some people it's probably still too irony-clogged, but I think that the two can co-exist. I've been devastated by Douglas Sirk movies, and most people are, if they're being honest. They can co-exist, and I'm just stubbornly going to keep fucking trying to make people accept that. It's taking us a while to recover from that dalliance with postmodernism where emotional involvement with art was considered verboten. But let's face it, that's why it exists. Bedtime stories are there to scare and enchant, and those are the stories that count. You don't want to tell a story to a child to make him think about form. And we're all children.



"Brand Upon the Brain!" opens in New York on May 9th. For more on the film and the line-up of celebrity narrators, check out the official site.

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<![CDATA[What's Up in May]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/whats-up-in-may.php Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Playing in Manhattan and Queens this month, Lee Marvin in "The Big Red One," United Artists, 1980]


The Best of Buster Keaton

May 6 — Jun. 1

The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in DC honors one of the greatest screen comedians with this month-long retrospective of the funniest Buster Keaton films ever made. Highlights include "Our Hospitality" and "The General." Each screening will be shown with piano accompaniment.


"Wild at Heart": Barry Gifford

May 8

Writer Barry Gifford will be on hand at Brooklyn's BAM for a Q&A after screening of the quintessential David Lynch film, 1990's "Wild at Heart," which he wrote. Gifford will also be available after the screening to sign copies of his new novel "Memories of a Sinking Ship."


Lee Marvin: The Coolest Lethal Weapon

May 11 — 24

Legendary badass Lee Marvin receives a long overdue retrospective courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. From "The Killers" to "The Big Heat," Marvin proved to be one of cinema's greatest villainous actors. Marvin also showed that he's got some pretty strong pipes in "Paint Your Wagon," which will also be screened.


Sam Fuller

May 12 — Jun 10

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens presents this retrospective of the works of tough-talking, cigar-chomping cult director Sam Fuller, one of the most well-known directors of war films. Highlights include the recent restoration of 1980s "The Big Red One," the classic noir "Pickup on South Street" and a screening of Fuller's first directorial effort, 1951's "The Steel Helmet."


Cannes Film Festival

May 16 — 28

One of the most prestigious (if not the most prestigious) international film festivals descends upon the moderately-sized French city of Cannes. This year's film festival will include "The Age of Darkness" from Canada's Denys Arcand, the indie "Paranoid Park" from Gus Van Sant, and Wong Kar Wai's English language debut "My Blueberry Nights," which will, hopefully, be ready for its premiere.


Herzog (Non)Fiction

May 18 — Jun 7

The Film Forum in New York City presents this retrospective on the nonfiction works of noted auteur and eclectic filmmaker Werner Herzog. Noteworthy screenings include the Kuwait-based doc "Lessons of Darkness," 1997's "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" (which inspired "Rescue Dawn," Herzog's soon-to-be-released fiction film), and "Grizzly Man."


A Centennial Salute to John Wayne

May 24

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills honors iconic star John Wayne on the occasion of his 100th birthday with a theatrical premiere of a new restoration of 1954's "The High and the Mighty," which Wayne co-produced and stars in. The film is the story of an experienced but burned-out airline pilot who must save the day when his plane's engine fails on a flight from Hawaii to San Francisco.


Seattle International Film Festival

May 24 — Jun 17

Purportedly known as the largest film festival in the world, this three-week festival returns to the city of Starbucks and grunge on May 24th. This year's festival promises to host a diverse lineup of independent, foreign, and documentary films; the official lineup will be released on May 10th at the festival's official website.

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<![CDATA["Comedy of Power," "How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/05/comedy-of-power-how-tasty-was.php Sun, 06 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Comedy of Power," Kino, 2006]


Like it or not, we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the French New Wave — which, we should not be allowed to forget, will always be to film culture roughly what the Age of Enlightenment was to Western thought. Or what movable type was to public literacy. Or what "The Origin of Species" was to biology: a volcanic epiphany, a revolution. This was when the world realized that movies no longer needed to be manufactured by industries but could instead be made by individuals, rebels, idiosyncrats, with more mobile postwar equipment and on-location chutzpah. Chaplin and "Citizen Kane" notwithstanding, this was when, suddenly, movies could be art, made by self-expressive artists (not craftsmen or entertainers) who didn't require guidance or approval from corporations or governments.


That's how the story goes, and even if it's only partially true (most of the New Wavers turned pro dealmakers very quickly), the films are still with us, all prickly and moody and discombobulating, and most of the moviemakers are still hard at play in the fields of cinema. Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, Varda and Resnais are still productive, though none of these gray lions rivals Claude Chabrol for energy and volume of output — he's made 25 features in the last quarter-century alone, and only about half of them have seen the inside of American movie theaters. Chabrol looms so unpretentiously large that his movies succeed or fail entirely in Chabrolian terms — is it prime Chabrol, or just average Chabrol?


The true French heir to both Hitchcock and Lang, Chabrol has famously been all about crime — its motivations, its fallout, its ripple-effects and ironies. His newest film, 2006's "Comedy of Power," is a crime drama of an eccentrically offbeat variety. Fictionalizing the notorious corporate-scandal "Elf Affair" that sent scores of corrupt French CEOs and oil execs to prison in 2003, Chabrol casually stretches in the sun of a legal procedural that typically has less to do with facts than character and social intercourse. Like Enron writ even larger, the case had all to do with mountains of absconded public money, and yet would probably still wilt the interest of any other filmmaker (or screenwriter — in this case, frequent Chabrol collaborator Odile Barski). But as usual, Chabrol views the situation from an unlikely personal perspective: through the prickly, confrontational eyes of Isabelle Huppert as the chief investigating judge, who takes no greater delight in her work than when she can corner a rich man and maker him sputter in horrified rage. Huppert, 53 herself and as vibrant a force as ever, sauces up the movie so indelibly that Comedy of Power evolves into a post-feminist character study — don't expect suspenseful machinations or unrealistic courtroom shenanigans. It's all about the people, and Huppert's workaholic avenging angel, dangerously underfed and self-amused, is fabulously, pathologically invulnerable — even as the murder threats pour in. Therein lies the woman's charm, and Huppert's star power. Released as well: Chabrol and Huppert's first work together, the true-crime teenage-sociopath daydream "Violette" (1978).


From another New Wave planet — specifically, the era of Brazil's "Cinema Novo" — comes Nelson Pereira dos Santos' "How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman" (1971), notorious as the first and possibly the only film ever made about cannibals that, insofar as it takes sides, soberly favors the moral system of the flesh-eaters over their colonial victims. Naturally, it's a comedy. Herzogian in its realism (a year before "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"), Pereira dos Santos' movie is shot like a tropical documentary, but it's set in the 1500s, when the French and the Belgians (among other European forces) were vying for dominance in native-rich South America, pitting tribes against one another and scamming them all for plundered natural resources. The story trails after a pallid Frenchman (Arduíno Colasanti) who after being mistaken for a Belgian (the indignity!) is captured by a cannibal tribe and set up for an honorary eight-month life of happy citizenry in their ranks (complete with wife). After his allotted time is up, he will be ritualistically slaughtered and eaten — unless he can figure a way out beforehand. The filmmaker is less interested in dramatics or empathy than in the avalanche of ironies that attend the situation, sprinkling in title-card commentary from European witnesses from the time, and even having the white man's lovely, all-nude whip of a wife (the astonishing Ana Maria Magalhães, who went on to be a major, award-winning force in Brazilian cinema, both in front of and behind the camera) seduce him at one point with a long, sexy monologue about exactly how he'll be killed and eaten. Colonialism is the target, and it's such a monstrous sitting duck that the film barely has to lift a finger to make a mockery of all things old-school European. Taken just on a political level, "How Tasty" is one of sharpest satires of colonial history ever made, especially since it's sourced out from the exploited culture's sensibility. The New Yorker disc comes with plenty of sociopolitical exegesis — a lengthy essay by Portugese historian and Indiana University prof Darlene Sadlier, intro by Columbia prof/Lincoln Center programmer Richard Peña, and an interview with contemporary tribal spokesman Ailton Krenak — just in case you think the film itself looks cut-and-dried.



"Comedy of Power" (Koch Lorber) and "How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman" (New Yorker) will be available on DVD on May 8th.

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<![CDATA[Strange Spectator Sport Movies]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/ifc-news-podcast-25-strange-sp.php Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 "The Flying Scotsman," which opens this week, stars Johnny Lee Miller as Graeme Obree, an amateur cyclist who broke the world hour record. As far as spectator sports go, track-bound solitary speed cycling may rank as one of the least naturally cinematic to watch. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at some other spectator-unfriendly sports and see how they've fared on screen.

Download: MP3, 24:50 minutes, 22.7 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28121 2007-04-30 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_25_strange_sp publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028121 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Strange Spectator Sport Movies (photo)]]> Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028121 2007-04-30 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_25_strange_sp_photo inherit 28121 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: May 4th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/opening-this-week-may-4th-2007.php Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Julie Christie in "Away From Her," Lionsgate, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Away From Her"

Indie darling Sarah Polley acquires an outstanding veteran cast for her feature film debut (her previous shorts included "All I Want for Christmas" and "I Shout Love"). This drama focuses on a longtime married couple's separation when Fiona (Oscar-winner Julie Christie) is admitted to a nursing home with accelerating Alzheimer's. The film made its debut at last year's Toronto Film Festival.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Civic Duty"

"Six Feet Under"'s Peter Krause stars in this low-budget thriller about a paranoid accountant who becomes obsessed with the idea that the Muslim graduate student next door is involved in terrorist activities. "One Point O"'s Jeff Renfroe directs this indie about our post-9/11 pysche, which, as predictable as the plot may sound, has garnered strong early reviews.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Flying Scotsman"

"Trainspotting"'s Johnnie Lee Miller stars in this true life-inspired story of a Scottish cyclist who broke the world one-hour record on a bike of his own design constructed from scrap metal and spare washing machine parts. The film comes courtesy of long-time British television director Douglas Mackinnon.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Other Conquest"

Eight years ago, Mexican director Salvador Carrasco's debut film secured a Los Angeles release after playing at various film festivals. Now this acclaimed period film about the decimation of the Aztec empire at the hands of Hernán Cortés and the Spanish Armada is getting a rare second chance in theaters. This little-seen film has been compared to both "Schindler's List" and "Braveheart."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Paris, Je T'aime"

It's been a long time since we've come across a themed short film anthology, so we're glad to see a wide assembly of directors, from the Coen brothers to Alfonso Cuarón to Gus Van Sant and more, showcase the diversity of the famous French city. Rumor also has it that producer Emmanuel Benbihy will do a similar anthology film centered on our favorite city, the Big Apple. Seriously, we're excited.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Treatment"

Director Oren Rudavsky's romantic comedy, based on a novel by Daniel Menaker, tells the story of a neurotic prep school English teacher (the always a supporting actor, never a lead Chris Eigeman) whose relationship with a gorgeous widow (Famke Janssen) is put to the test due to his shrink's (Ian Holm) Freudian mind games. The film won the Best New York Award at last year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Waitress"

The unfortunate and senseless murder of indie film actress Adrienne Shelly, known most prominently for her work with Hal Hartley, remained one of the most tragic deaths to strike the film industry in 2006. Fortunately, friends and colleagues of Ms. Shelly worked to piece together her final directorial feature in time for this year's Sundance Film Festival. The film stars "Felicity"'s Keri Russell as an unhappily pregnant married waitress who falls for a newcomer (Captain Mal himself, Nathan Fillion) to her small town.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["Waitress," "Paris, Je T'aime"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/waitress-paris-je-taime.php Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Waitress," Fox Searchlight, 2007, left; Elijah Wood in "Paris, Je T'aime," First Look International, 2007, below]


Waitress


The people in Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" begin as caricatures and ends as characters. They introduce themselves on phony looking sets with Southern slang that's all "What can I get ya, hun?"s and "Have a good time, y'hear!"s. But their obviously constructed surroundings contain — and in some ways mask — the characters' humanity, humor and decency, at least until Shelly's screenplay slow-draws it out with wit and charm and a kind of patience that feels as old-fashioned as the story's setting.


Keri Russell plays Shelly's titular heroine (Shelly herself is in a smaller role), a small town diner pastry chef and waitress named Jenna. Jenna's depressed, and not only because she's got two jobs (whoever heard of a chef having to serve her own food?); she's stuck in an unhappy marriage to Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and just learned there's an unwanted child on the way. She seems fated to endless misery until her baby puts her in front of the new gynecologist in town, Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), a hunky and nervous fellow who strikes up an immediate friendship with the unhappy Jenna.


Jenna's pie diner and the whole bucolic community in which it sits feel at first like a joke at the expense of small town America, but the film reveals itself to be something more: part idealized portrait, part warm-hearted satire. Shelly's intentions become infinitely clearer when Andy Griffith appears on screen as Joe, the diner's owner and most cantankerous customer. Griffith, of course, is famous for playing Sheriff Andy Taylor for eight seasons on "The Andy Griffith Show," and, as a result, for defining the essence, real or imagined, of small town America. Casting him as the town's crabby patriarch and infinitely wise arbiter is as crucial to Shelly's imagery as apple pies and American flags, and it lets Griffith draw upon the audience's memories of his pop culture past even as he plays with them a little (Joe's mouth is dirtier than TV Andy's ever was).


Like most of the characters in "Waitress," Joe seems like one thing and reveals himself as another. This is not a particularly bold or original technique, especially in a movie about idyllic communities in the American heartland. Still, the richness of some characters stands apart from the well-worn storytelling techniques. Earl, for example, looks at first to be just another suffocating husband, but Shelly and Sisto bring something deeper and sadder to the role. The more we see of Earl, the more we realize that he is just as trapped in the marriage as Jenna, if only by his own suffocating desire to be needed and to feel loved. When he learns Jenna is pregnant, he's fearful not that he won't be able to handle his responsibilities as a father, but that Jenna might love the baby more than him.


You don't necessarily grow to like Earl (he is, after all, a pathetic bastard), but you do grow to like the moments when he's onscreen because of the enjoyably awkward tension he has with Jenna. Sisto and Russell have terrific negative chemistry, particularly in one hilarious scene where they have very bad sex. Observe the way he talks to his wife; peppering their conversations with detailed instructions on how she is to respond to him ("Tell me you love me... tell me it will be all right."). It's as if he sees his life as a movie — he's the director obsessed with his material and she is the actress who's dared to improvise the dialogue.


I've said a lot about how smart the movie is even in the face of its seeming plasticity, and it is, but I've also neglected how simple the story is on another level: sweet and funny, and, in Jenna's relationship with Dr. Pomatter, romantic and even a little sexy. Given that Shelly died tragically shortly after completing the project, I went in with the incorrect expectation that "Waitress" would be somehow dark or sad. It is neither, except when one stops to reflect on how charming the film is and how its director will never be able to make another one like it.



Paris, Je T'aime


Most short films are just okay. They're just not long enough to be particularly deep, or moving, or whatever. By their nature, they are slight and somewhat insignificant. Unless you're a connoisseur of shorts, you could spend your whole life going to the movies and never seeing any. They exist in this world mainly as calling cards for young filmmakers. Instead of handing prospective financiers resumes, they hand them the short film they've made.


As a collection of eighteen shorts about the city of Paris (one for each of its neighborhoods), "Paris Je T'aime" is only as good as its component parts, which is to say it is, at least half the time, just okay — not long enough to be particularly deep, or moving, or whatever.


That doesn't mean that some of its parts don't do more than that. There are a few clear standouts, including the final short, "14eme Arrondissement," by Alexander Payne, about a lonely American tourist. It's like one of Payne's features in miniature, only 6 minutes long but just as funny and moving as a full-length film. "Quartier de la Madeleine," a twisted love story about a vampire and her prey (played by Elijah Wood, who once again makes good acting amongst effects work seem so effortless), is darkly stylized by Vincenzo Natali, where most of its brethren are light and shot like documentaries. Alfonso Cuarón's "Parc Monceau," in which an older man (Nick Nolte) and a younger woman (Ludivine Sagnier) discuss the man who has come between them, continues the director's recent love affair with the long take from his last feature, "Children of Men."


Others don't stand out, and others tend to fade together in memory. Some, like Olivier Assayas' "Quartier Des Enfants Rouges" starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as an American actress shooting a film on location, aren't particularly Parisian and could probably have been set anywhere. Others, like Gus Van Sant's "Le Marais," about an intimate moment between two men in a printer's shop, are basically an elaborate set up for a joke. Sometimes you can feel the filmmakers straining against the short format: the Coen Brothers' "Tuileries," for instance, would work a lot better in the middle of a movie about Steve Buscemi's character (a terrified tourist learning about French subway etiquette the hard way), rather in the middle of a movie about 18 different groups of people.


If we don't feel that we know or understand a character, their predicament, no matter how smartly constructed or adeptly filmed, won't have an emotional impact. And in six minutes, it is not easy to make an audience feel like they know or understand a character; in some cases, it helps to start with a movie star in a role, as their preexisting relationship with the viewer can work as shorthand, as it does in Richard LaGravenese' romantic "Pigalle" starring Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant.


"Paris, Je T'aime" shows that short films are usually just okay because they're quite difficult to do well. Here is a collection of some of the best filmmakers in the world; many have made classics, if not masterpieces. If they can't pull off a really great six-minute film, how can we expect some young turk from USC to do it?



"Waitress" opens in limited release May 2nd (official site); "Paris, Je T'aime" opens in New York on May 4th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Ray Lawrence on "Jindabyne"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/ray-lawrence-on-jindabyne.php Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photos: Ray Lawrence and Laura Linney on the set of "Jindabyne," left; Linney as Claire Kane, below — both courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


Known for his wonderful use of natural lighting and well-orchestrated ensemble casts, acclaimed Australian filmmaker Ray Lawrence ("Lantana," "Bliss") has been a long-time fan of Raymond Carver's pared-down short stories. With "Jindabyne," Lawrence finally had a chance to adapt one of the Carver shorts with which he's long been obsessed, "So Much Water So Close to Home." Named for its mountainous New South Wales setting in the southeastern part of Australia, the film explores the ethical, emotional and social ramifications of four buddies who find a murdered Aboriginal girl in the river, but decide to tether her body for the weekend so they won't have to end their fishing trip early. If that sounds familiar, you might remember it as a plot thread from Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" that was adapted from the same Carver story. The crux of this version, though, is the psychological gender divide between a fisherman (Gabriel Byrne) and his wife (Laura Linney), as the media scandal and culture clash that follow only adds heat to their embittered relationship. It's a mature, dense, somber, and most excellent piece of drama, which makes it a shame that it's only Lawrence's third feature in a little over two decades.


I understand that, prior to filming, you were already familiar with the Jindabyne area?


I hadn't been for a while. I used to go fly fishing there over the years. It's the only mountainous area that we have in the country. It's nothing compared to your mountains. Ours are so old, they've been worn down to virtually nothing. But I think a high point in the country, any country, has a quality. To the Aboriginal people in Australia, as I'm told, the highest point in the landscape is the most sacred or significant, so they can see their country fogging up in front of them. When I read the Raymond Carver story, that seemed to be set in the mountains, so [it was] a natural thing to do up there.


In transplanting Carver's story to Australia, did you and screenwriter Beatrix Christian have concerns about making too many alterations to a classic?


The story's quite old now. It's like 30 years old, and I think the men in this film are different from the men in the story. Once we started to work on it, they became different. The sexual qualities have changed to a certain degree from that period of time. In the Carver story, they were more disenfranchised, more on the fringes of a community. It's a much more intimate scene, all in one house. They do get out a little bit, but it's basically between one man and his wife, revolving around her feelings for what he has done.


I'm a great fan of Carver, always have been, and I like his characters. What interested me in this particular story is that it's about responsibility to other people. And again, it was a view of how men and women react to a situation differently. So, I've built on that notion and other things I've found along the way. For instance, once we decided to make the young girl that's murdered an Aboriginal girl, we were dealing with a very, very big subject. It became a race thing. That's relevant everywhere.


What do you find most fulfilling about working with ensembles?


It's a coincidence I've worked on three ensemble films — I'm just basically attracted to really good stories. I'm trying to raise money for a film version of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" with Anthony LaPaglia. That's very much an ensemble piece. But at the same time, I'm taking on another film in Bosnia, and there are only two people in that. I don't know, I like working with a lot of people. Maybe I get bored having to deal with the same two people every day.


It has become a cliché to compare ensemble films to Robert Altman, whose name was often mentioned in the same breath as "Lantana." Now it's become impossible to read about "Jindabyne" without seeing reference to "Short Cuts." Are people off-base by suggesting Altman is an influence on your work?


I was particularly influenced by "M*A*S*H," but at the same time, I was influenced by Bergman's "Secrets of Women" and Ken Loach. Roman Polanski once said that we're influenced by eating wheat germ. I remember seeing ["Short Cuts"] in Canada when it first came out. I rushed to see it, mainly because of my interest in Raymond Carver's stories. I don't know, maybe I'll watch it again. It's sort of like, when you learn how to do a magical trick, the magic disappears. In some ways, going back and looking at that film would take the magic away from it.


The film's poetic sense of dread even reminded me of early Peter Weir films, like "The Last Wave" and "Picnic at Hanging Rock." Have you ever thought about making a straight horror film?


There's a gothic horror film that I would love to make. It's a strange situation because I don't like gratuitous violence. I don't like violent films. But, there's a story by Cormac McCarthy called "Child of God" that I would love to make into a film, about landscape and culture. The interesting thing about that story is that the main character — [a demented, rural murderer] — you have to have sympathy for; the book does it. I asked Hugh Jackman if he would like to do it because he's a really good actor, but he's always playing heroic roles. It would be probably too hard to raise the money for, but I am interested in that level of horror.


It's not so much horror, but there's a certain violence in the landscape, any landscape. You can go to the Arctic or the Minaret plains we were on in "Jindabyne," or the desert, wherever. At once, it's awe-inspiring, but silence comes down on you like a lead blanket, and it can be very frightening. The Aboriginal people are the only ones that seem to be able to live with it. They're the oldest continuous culture of the world, and because they are hunter-and-gatherers and they wander all over the landscape, they have a huge respect for it.


Working with Aboriginal actors, have you learned anything from them that you weren't privy to in your Australian upbringing?


It's a secret culture. I mean, if you want to be a Buddhist, it's easy enough, you just go to study. But you can't be an Aboriginal, you have to be born one. The culture is a sacred thing. There were some personal things told to me by the elder that I worked with. They have a very logical system within the family, and it's an extended family. When the children get to a certain age, where they start to listen to their parents less, they are governed more by their uncles and aunties. Their sense of place and country is very, very accordant.


It was a privilege to find out these things. It took nearly three years of protocol to get it right. In the end, it is what they call a "gammon," which is make-believe. I think it's a partly Irish word. You know, the Irish have experience with the English, and the Aboriginal people have experience with the settlers that's very similar. In fact, a lot of Irish convicts have inter-married Aboriginal people. That's one of the reasons I wanted to have an Irishman in the film; it's part of the subject.


As I said, this gammon is make-believe. So, the ceremony in the end is accurate up to a point. There hadn't been one performed for, I think, 90 years in that area. And in the desert, when they have a smoking — which is basically what the ceremony is — the fire is very small because the desert's flat. The reason the smokestack is so big is that the smoke has to get up and over the mountains, so there's a certain logic to that. Smoke is a thing that cleanses the people of evil spirits, and it's all about their respect for the dead and the landscape. It's all very complicated, and I only touched the tips of it.



"Jindabyne" is now in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA[Fight to the Death!]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/fight-to-the-death.php Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500

By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

Pro wrestler "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's first turn as a leading man, "The Condemned," sank like a stone at the box office this past weekend, netting out a paltry $1,732 per theater. Could it be that, so soon after the terrible events at Virginia Tech, audiences weren't ready for a film whose unfortunate tagline of choice is "10 people will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch"? Or maybe people were just hip to the fact that "The Condemned"'s premise of people fighting to the death for entertainment purposes (that of the audiences both within and watching the film) is hardly new. Movies have used the contrivance of the death-tournament as a vehicle for commentary on our violence- and voyeurism-obsessed culture, as its own excuse for copious violence and voyeurism, or, sometimes, both. Here's a look at some notable entries in the genre.

"Battle Royale"
Judging from films on the subject, high school in Japan can be the eighth circle of social hell — "All About Lily Chou-Chou," "Suicide Circle," and "Blue Spring" paint portraits of breathtaking nastiness and overwhelming pressure to conform. Kinji Fukasaku's cult favorite "Battle Royale" takes the idea of high school as social Darwinism to a literal level, plopping an alternate-universe ninth-grade class onto an island for an annual government-sponsored free-for-all that's intended to leave only one student standing. The prolific Fukasaku's been a longtime national chronicler of violence spawned by social ills, and "Battle Royale" is no different — it combines operatically heightened high school dramas (crushes, rivalries, grudges) with graphic violence and a pervasive theme of youth alienation. Given its content, it's no surprise that "Battle Royale" met with controversy both in Japan and in the US, where it never received a theatrical release — a planned American remake is still listed as in development.

"Enter the Dragon"
Though this 1973 chop socky classic is the prototype for so many other fight to the death movies set in illicit martial arts tournaments, "Enter the Dragon" isn't a fight to the death movie, per se. Han (Shih Kien), the evil drug kingpin, private island warlord and dude with a bear paw for a fist who invites Lee (Bruce Lee) to participate in his kung fu invitational, doesn't lay out any specific rules for the battles. Strictly speaking, you don't need to kill your opponents to be victorious, but pretty much everyone does anyway: even our hero, who RSVPed for this little game of death to avenge his sister's murder, offs his opponent after he comes after him with a couple of broken bottle necks. We remember the movie more for those intense moments when Lee snaps his victim's neck in close up, his eyes bulging and his face quivering with power, than the occasional moments when he shows a little mercy.

"Gladiator"
An unusually thoughtful take on sweaty men slaughtering each other, "Gladiator" dares to question the morality of drawing entertainment from the suffering of others. Russell Crowe's Roman general-turned-slave Maximus is initially reluctant to participate in barbaric sports for the appeasement of bloodthirsty audiences. In the most famous sequence, he single-handedly slaughters a half-dozen armed men without any pretense of showmanship or suspense, and then bellows to the disappointed crowd, "Are you not ENTERTAINED?" Unfortunately, director Ridley Scott's moral posturing is somewhat undone by his glossy staging of the gladiatorial action: the Romans may not be entertained, but modern audiences certainly were by the spectacular sequences that included tigers and Amazonian women on horseback. Maximus' owner and fight promoter tells him, "Thrust this into another man's flesh, and they will applaud and love you for that." And they certainly did: "Gladiator" won the Academy Award for the Best Picture of 2000.

"Highlander"
When you're an immortal who will live forever and can't conceive children, there's apparently very little else to do but wander the earth killing other immortals. So in "Highlander," men chop each other's heads off and absorb their bioelectric energy in a slightly goofy looking special effects sequence called "The Quickening." They are fighting each other because they are told they must and because the last immortal standing will receive "The Prize" a vague reward whose parameters are not entirely explained but which includes the ability to die, a pretty crappy compensation for a guy who's tried his damndest not to die for centuries. On the DVD commentary, director Russell Mulcahy says, "When this film came out it was viewed by certain people [as] a little out there," as if it all makes perfect sense. But no one's yet come up with a reasonable explanation as to why the Scottish Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) sounds French and the Egyptian Spaniard Ramirez (Sean Connery) sounds Scottish, or how there could then be three movie sequels, two television series, and an animated cartoon after Macleod becomes the last immortal and receives his sucky Prize. "There can be only one," except when it comes to movies. Then there can be lots, especially if revenue streams from the after-market stay strong.

"In Hell"
You may not be familiar with the recent career moves of the Muscles from Brussels — Jean-Claude Van Damme's last few films, including his two most recent collaborations with Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, have gone straight to DVD. Which is where, admittedly, they belong — "In Hell" has Van Damme playing an American sentenced to life in a corrupt Russian prison in which the inmates are forced to battle for the amusement and profit of the cruel warden. These shocking developments are overshadowed by the fact that Van Damme is playing a regular schmo — not, like, a regular schmo who happened to study kickboxing during his hardcore military years in Thailand — and so spends the first half of the movie resisting violence and getting pummeled until a stint in solitary and a visit from a CG butterfly symbolizing his murdered wife give him a new desire to live...and kill! With his teeth, even! Lam ankled his follow-up film with the actor (2004's "Wake of Death"), possibly due to lingering trauma from making a Van Damme film that relied more on the action star's emoting abilities than his martial arts ones.

"Mortal Kombat"
The young realm of video game movie adaptations has so far run the gamut from bad to really, really bad, but this 1995 film from Paul W.S. Anderson (who went on to make grander, gooier game adaptation "Resident Evil") achieves a kind of B-movie bliss that can mostly be chalked up to Christopher Lambert's hammy appearance as a thunderbolt-hurling, straw hat-sporting godling. A movie star, a Shaolin monk and Bridgette Wilson-Sampras are but a few of the contestants who convene on a mysterious island to fight in a mysterious tournament in which Earth's fate mysteriously lies in the balance. When you're working with source material best known for its inclusion of the ability to rip your opponent's head and spinal cord out and hold them, dripping, aloft, you're not jostling with Shakespeare for a place on the cultural pantheon. Fortunately, "Mortal Kombat" has no such delusions, and the film takes campy pleasure in less-than-spectacular special effects, Wilson-Sampras' dreadful line-readings and the occasional addition of a phrase directly out of the game — which means that when evil sorcerer Shang Tsung kills someone, he intones, for the enlightenment of audience: "Fatality."

"The Running Man"
Loosely based on a Stephen King novel, this Arnold Schwarzenegger adventure of his post-"Terminator" period plays the "Gladiator" idea — a fascist society maintains control over the populace with blood-drenched entertainment — in a dystopic future. And Schwarzenegger's Ben Richards, like Crowe's Maximus, is a prisoner of the state forced to fight for his own life in the middle of a game he can't possibly win (and, naturally, does anyway). Of course, in "Gladiator," Crowe fights legitimately dangerous threats. In "The Running Man," Schwarzenegger battles a serious of super-powered "Stalkers," each more laughably dumpy than the last. Professor Sub-Zero is a big fat guy with a knife-edged hockey stick; Dynamo is a bigger, fatter guy with a Lite-Brite vest and a fiber-optic mohawk. And so on. It's an incredibly dumb treatment of a seemingly serious topic; any similarity to actual social commentary (like the collusion of corporations and government) or prescient thinking (like the digital manipulation of imagery) is purely coincidental. After all, as Richards himself says, "I'm not into politics, I'm into survival." And, of course, making witty remarks while you kill people ("Here's Sub-Zero! Now: plain zero!").

"Series 7: The Contenders"
While its satirical point is nothing new (see "The Running Man," above, or "The Tenth Victim," below), Daniel Minahan's low-budget, Sundance-favored indie about six randomly chosen Americans duking it out in a televised kill-or-be-killed competition gains some sharpness from its "Survivor"-on-crack angle. While similar films pick a near-future setting and imply that such institutionalized awfulness could only be the product of a dystopia, "Series 7" skips overt sci-fi references, choosing instead to mimic the conventions of current reality TV — the interviews, quick-cut backstories, clumsy reenactments of scenes that weren't caught on camera and an awesomely hackneyed narration by "Arrested Development"'s Will Arnett. Dawn Lagarto, "Series 7"'s memorable heroine, is the show's gruff reigning champion who's also, in a vicious turn, eight months pregnant and fighting not just for her own survival but for that of her child. When Melanie Lynskey showed up as a recent mother and abused spouse competing for a new life in Fox's toothless (and quickly canceled) series "Drive," it wasn't hard to find the character's inspiration.

"The Tenth Victim"
Before "Battle Royale," before "Survivor," even, there was Elio Petri's loopy and seriously 60s "The Tenth Victim," which stars Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress as competitors in The Big Hunt, a government-sponsored game intended as an outlet for those with violent or suicidal tendencies. ("A killing a day keeps the doctor away," an announcement proclaims.) If Andress' Caroline Meredith can take out Mastroianni's Marcello Polletti, she'll will a million bucks — but Marcello's well aware that someone's coming for him. On top of this, both have complicated things for themselves by picking up corporate sponsors who'd like their kills to happen in front of the camera — and then, they have to go and fall in love. The most revealing thing about Petri's overpacked film (beyond Andress' outfits) is that it ventures into screwball comedy — none of the films that followed took such a light tone for what's become such a pointed subject.

"13 (Tzameti)"
In 2005's "13 (Tzameti)," Sébastien (Georges Babluani) stumbles into an underground fight club where the players stand in a circle and aim a pistol (first with a single bullet, then progressively more as the game progresses) at the back of the head of the person in front of them. When a light is switched, they pull the trigger until their target is dead or they are. This perverse sort of Russian Roulette is performed for the delight and gambling potential of the very wealthy (in fight to the death pictures, rich old people have nothing to do but delight in the death of poor young people). What separates "13" from other fights to the death is also what makes it especially chilling. In most instances of cinematic mortal combat, the participants control their own destiny; their fate is determined by their own skills and fighting ability. In "13," Sébastien wins or loses by a simple twist of cruel, laughable fate and victory isn't as glorious as most fight to the death movies make it seem. If he survives, how will Sébastien live with what he's done?


[Photos: The Condemned," Lionsgate, 2007; "Battle Royale," Toei, 2000; "Enter the Dragon," Warner Bros., 1973; "Gladiator," DreamWorks, 2000; "Highlander," 20th Century Fox, 1986; "In Hell," Sony Pictures, 2003; "Mortal Kombat," New Line Cinema, 1995; "The Running Man," TriStar Pictures, 1987; "Series 7: The Contenders," USA Films, 2001; "The Tenth Victim," Embassy Pictures Corporation, 1965; "13 (Tzameti)," Palm Pictures, 2006]

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<![CDATA["Old Joy," The Jean Renoir Collection]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/old-joy-the-jean-renoir-collec.php Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Old Joy," Kino, 2006]


American indies should, it is legended, do what mainstream Hollywood movies can't — and sorry, that does not include crazy violence or eccentric comedy, both of which the studios can do well enough, thank you. (If only independent filmmakers who think exclusively in those terms would fill out their resumes shooting commercials like their supposed to, instead of turkey-stuffing the indie niche with recycled dross and tired "dependies"...) Of course, as Kelly Reichardt's film "Old Joy" amply demonstrated last year, a real, unique, originally voiced indie appears on the radar and, despite unanimous critical hosannas, it is all but ignored by a supposedly authenticity-hungry audience. American movies don't come much smaller, subtler or swoonier with tactile experience than Reichardt's festival hit — a rare commitment to heartfelt naturalism, the most difficult special effect of all, keeps the movie free of bull and cool-indie toxins. The narrative (from a short story by Oregon author Jon Raymond, which was published as an coffee-table book illustrated by photographs) is almost absurdly simple. In Portland, one old college friend calls another: let's get lost, just for a few days, in the Cascades. Mark (Daniel London) is a watchful, even-tempered father-to-be with a high-pressure job; Kurt (Will Oldham) is an unmarried searcher, still living the West Coast dorm paradigm with odd jobs, a headful of weed and unconvincing stories of spiritual awakenings. Their post-hippie pasts are behind them, and the future appears either stressful or non-existent. They head for a hot-springs retreat in the forest, can't find it, camp elsewhere, hit a diner, then arrive and kick back.


That's it, but we see much more: "Old Joy" might be the only film ever specifically made about that universal moment when the bonds of youth begin to rust and fade and become irrelevant against the bombardments of age and responsibility. Not that anyone in the film says as much — Reichardt's strategy is entirely a matter of looks, pauses and unvoiced subtexts, making it a film by and for wide-awake grown-ups. (The acting, in what is essentially a duet, is so genuine and low-key it makes you sit forward and listen carefully.) The moist wilderness around the protagonists is unforgettably sensual, but it's the men's unspoken conflict, with the onslaught of time as much as with each other, that haunts your thoughts afterwards.


In many ways, it's a tradition in film that began with Jean Renoir — humane camaraderie, the plain beauty of social respect and unexpected mutual empathies, the painful distance between the poles of a friendship under pressure. Saying that Renoir is one of maybe seven unassailable masters in the history of cinema is not unlike saying the ocean is large and blue; demonstrating a shrugging nonchalance for his best films should and will peg you to those that know as a pretender. You can never have too much Renoir in your life, and, in what might be the season's premier DVD launch for die-hard cinephiles, Lionsgate has released a lovely three-disc Renoir set, much-needed context for the well-known masterpieces ("Grand Illusion," "Rules of the Game") that should be permanent furniture in every educated person's cultural boudoir. In addition to two rare featurettes (1927's bizarre jazz-sci-fi "Charleston Parade" and 1928's "The Little Match Girl," both starring then-Mrs. Renoir Catherine Hessling), we get five features, from either end of the maestro's career. Renoir's first film, "Whirlpool of Fate" (1925), is a class-conscious melodrama, and "Nana" (1926) is a robust, roomy adaptation of Zola; both prefigure Renoir's spacious use of mise-en-scène later in his talkies, and both star Hessling, a beady-eyed beauty the Renoir divorced, thankfully, in 1930. "La Marseillaise" (1938), smack in the middle of his richest period, is a fabulous, boisterous, joyous account of the French Revolution from the peasant's point of view (Renoir's always hunting for the most modest perspective).


"Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier" (1959), on the other hand, is a document from Renoir's aging years, a strangely self-conscious made-for-TV version of the Jekyll/Hyde scenario that features famed pantomime Jean-Louis Barrault as the proper doctor and his bestial alter ego, played here as a medical-fuck-up mix between Lon Chaney's ape man from "A Blind Bargain" and Harpo Marx. The capper is "The Elusive Corporal" (1962), Renoir's last full-on feature film and a refreshing, buoyant compatriot-film to "Grand Illusion," tracing the escape-happy travails of three French soldiers (led by the late Jean-Pierre Cassel) held as POWs in German camps during the Occupation. For Renoir, even the Nazi guards are people boggled by duty, amusement, guilt and love, and his essential humanism is, as it has always been in a public sphere that prefers cut-and-dried good and evil, a balm for the soul.



"Old Joy" (Kino) will be available on May 1st; The Jean Renoir Collection (Lionsgate) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Robinson Devor on "Zoo"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/robinson-devor-on-zoo.php Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: "Zoo," THINKfilm, 2007]


Only one film at Sundance this year sparked more controversy for its subject matter than what everybody now commonly refers to as "the Dakota Fanning rape movie," and that's "Police Beat" director Robinson Devor's "Zoo." The documentary is based upon the notorious 2005 Enumclaw, WA farm tragedy in which a community of zoophiles (also known as "zoos," or people with a sexual fetish for bestiality) videotaped Seattle businessman Kenneth Pinyan (a.k.a. "Mr. Hands") having sex with a full-size stallion. It wasn't the first time this shocking subculture had participated in such an outing — it was still legal at the time in the state of Washington, but when Pinyan died of internal injuries a few hours later, it became a bona fide media sensation. Devor's film, strikingly shot as an expressionistic tone poem, attempts to take out the provocation of the story in favor of humanizing those who were publicly persecuted after the scandal erupted.


What was your goal in making this film?


I'm not so sure that I'm a goal-structured filmmaker, but as an independent filmmaker living in Seattle, we keep certain things on our radar because we like to shoot up there where we live. We thought it was an opportunity to do something relevant regionally, but I suppose the goal was to see if we could have any impact in resurrecting the reputation of this man and his friends. As my writer Charles Mudede said, "to see if we could help him rejoin the human community posthumously, and not be viewed as a monster."


If you present a sensational story with good intentions and restraint, is that enough to do away with its tabloid appeal?


You could look at it in an anthropological sense where you're an explorer or scientist, and you're going to a remote part of the world, to a society that does things you don't particularly understand or comprehend. But you go in there, listen, record and try not to put judgment on it


That's tough, too. If you editorialize the events, you show an agenda. But if you attempt neutrality, you may not be giving enough ideas for audiences to re-think their preconceptions. What's the happy medium?


They're going to get things that they never got close to in the original newspaper articles. These are people who were never given a voice. Nobody ever interviewed them, spoke to them, and nothing was ever printed for a variety of reasons. So, if it could be seen as something skewed [with] a bias towards them, it's merely because this is an opportunity for them to speak, whereas before they did not have that opportunity.


What did you personally take away from their points of view?


Let me ask you a quick question, because it helps me sometimes if I know what somebody's reaction was to the film. What was yours?


Personally, I have problems with it. It's an audacious experiment, but in trying to humanize the "zoos," I was hoping for more to think about or a richer understanding into their psychologies. Maybe I expected a different kind of movie.


Finding more of a basic commonality, as opposed to going into deep psychological analysis, was preferable to me and Charles. That's why there's very little referencing and contextualizing who they are in terms of other societies, historical precedents, et cetera. It's just not the kind of documentary we wanted to do. We wanted to lay them out in an unadorned manner and let them speak. It was difficult to get them to even speak to us for an hour in a hotel room, so we were working with what we were working with. We felt it was enough to do an interesting film and, you know, why not just let people talk about what they want to talk about?


I do love the cinematography, which has a ruminative quality about it, but there were times when I was thinking less about the people than the images themselves. What do you hope audiences will be contemplating in these quiet moments?


I use myself as an example. I wasn't exempt from letting my imagination get the most of me when I imagined who these people were and what they may be like. All I can ask is that audiences might just say, "Hey, these guys aren't drug addicts," or that some of them might actually be intelligent and sensitive. They're not too different from us on many levels. Again, a commonality was more interesting than the deviance.


You propose a question about Mr. Hands in the press notes interview: "What does this particular human life tell us about humanity as a whole?" I'd like to ask you that question, not necessarily as a director, but as a critical thinker.


I think that was written for me, Aaron.


Really? It's a Q&A that was accredited to coming out of your mouth.


It might have been embellished a bit, but I can give it a whirl. I don't know about humanity as a whole, but I've always looked at Mr. Hands as a guy who is kind of the ultimate embodiment of an American citizen. That is, this guy started off believing in the classic paradigm of American life: went to college, got married, had a kid and worked for a Fortune 500 company. As life went on, he decided that those things were not right for him, and finds himself ensnared in a great ethical dilemma about what he was working for and doing to contribute. He expanded and shifted his social and ethical circles by his sexual choices, and his politics shifted radically from right to left. He's a guy who had it within him to move from one fairly extreme position to another that's extreme, all within the legal limits of the law, and somebody can do [all that] as an American. That's an interesting thing, and we're not posing any morality on it.


How do you think the medium best works in humanizing this subculture?


It's showing that sex is not a huge part of what these guys are doing. The movie is trying to stay away from the sex. It might have been a boring camaraderie, but it meant something to these guys, and so I think the humanizing is in showing people who are not involved in sex with animals all the time, if not the vast minority of times.


For me, the most interesting thread was the participation of "Coyote" in the reenactments, as he was comfortable enough with his lifestyle to show up on-screen. Did you ever consider pursuing him as a main character since he is alive, able to defend his choices, and offers a human face to the psychologies at play?


The thing is, he wasn't there the weekend that the event went down, and he was not the person who was persecuted by the law. He was definitely a factor, I like the guy a lot, and I think we could have possibly used him more. You also have to understand, this is a project that we started in the summer, our financing wasn't in place until late October or November, we finished shooting at the end of November, and got 60 minutes to Sundance that we'd edited for two weeks. Suddenly, we thought ThinkFilm wasn't even going to submit it, and the next thing you know, it got in. I'm proud of the work that everybody did on it to get it into the shape it is today. If I had more time, would I have wanted to explore my relationships with these men more? Absolutely. But it is what it is.


You interview Michael Minard, who plays "Cop #1" in the re-enactments. Why did you include only his personal observations, and not the other actors?


We filmed a lot of our actors talking about incidents in their lives that we thought would be impacting after the journey to the barn — where they're about to have sex with horses, and the audience is sitting back, thinking these are irredeemable characters, feeling superior and looking down on them — the idea was to have our actors talking about the injustices and painful experiences they encountered in the human world, human-on-human interaction. One had been sexually abused, and another guy was possibly involved in a murder. We wanted to remind people as a lever to maneuver some hypocritical thinking we were anticipating. So we did all these interviews, and really, Michael Minard just told this story I thought was very interesting because he said something that I was unable to say in a straightforward manner. That is, "Look, forget about your position on horse sex. This is a guy who died. He had people who loved and missed him." One might think that that is a trite sentiment, but we had to push the meter aesthetically to balance the luridness of the subject.


Did you feel the need to cover your own ass based upon how people might judge your point of view?


Not at all. I was very confident in what we were doing. It was the last thing we filmed, as a matter of fact. After we were in the editing suite, it became a substitute for something we couldn't film: we were going to get people's reactions throughout Seattle, to show how people were laughing it off and taking moral stances. But that felt bogus to us, so we tried a different approach. We thought we would give the actors a chance to speak and just talk about their lives, to see what we could cook up.


I'm sure you've heard it all since Sundance. What was the most outlandish, knee-jerk reaction towards the film you know of?


I've heard nothing but great things. There have been things written on blogs and far-right sites who think the film is ridiculous. I do know that there was a guy in our city that attacked me on television before I even made the film, which is kind of an honor; he gave me some award or something for being an ass. That was a bit pre-judgmental. Certain people in our city, even people within the film community, felt it was a subject that should not be addressed. To pass judgment on an artist who is trying to explore things in a way that a journalist or scientist can approach something is ridiculous. I'm sure I've been attacked here and there for all sorts of things. I can't remember anything exact, and why would I repeat it? [laughs]



"Zoo" opens April 25th in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA["Diggers," "Zoo"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/diggers-zoo.php Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Diggers," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


"Diggers"


Given how silly his other project at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival was, it's a bit of a surprise to see how mature and downright serious Ken Marino's "Diggers" can be. Marino's "The Ten," in which he served as a co-star/producer/writer, is a collection of absurdist vignettes inspired by The Ten Commandments, and, tonally speaking, it's not all that far removed from the sketch comedy show that Marino and his collaborators (including director David Wain) cut their teeth on. "Diggers," in contrast, is a melancholy piece of nostalgia with a couple of laughs sprinkled in to leaven the drama.


By chance, or perhaps not by chance at all, Paul Rudd stars in both movies. In this one, he plays Hunt, a Long Island clam digger like his father before him. When his old man dies, Hunt gets the opportunity to reevaluate what he wants out of his life. Hunt's story intertwines with those of three of his buddies, most importantly Frankie (Marino) who has a wife and a bunch of kids he's struggling to feed. Now that a big corporate fishing interest called South Shell controls the waters of the Long Island Sound, it takes little fishermen like Frankie or Hunt three days to make what used to be a day's pay, and times are getting tough. Even if they want to uphold a longstanding family tradition, it isn't economically feasible anymore.


Both Hunt and Frankie are cornered by their respective familial responsibility: now that his dad's passed away, Hunt should be able to finally move away from Long Island, but he still needs to look after his sister (Maura Tierney) and his father's old boat; Frankie hates South Shell and everything it represents, but he's forced to consider applying for a job there when he can't support his large family on his miniscule income. He needs to save every penny, literally: one scene shows the whole family sitting around the kitchen table, rolling pennies.


For a movie about a bunch of hard-drinking buddies, "Diggers" is unusually sensitive to the women in their lives, no doubt due to the presence of director Katherine Dieckmann. Tierney is good, as is Lauren Ambrose as Hunt's love interest from the big city, but best of all is Sarah Paulson (who's great on the seemingly cancelled "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip") as Frankie's put-upon wife. The pair has an impressively lived-in onscreen relationship, one that oscillates with eerie accuracy between arguments and intimacy. Though Rudd's the lead, Marino gave himself the meatiest role, as Frankie has both the funniest lines and the biggest emotional moments. In both ways, he completely steals the picture. Marino was always one of the most talented comedians from "The State" repertory company, but here he proves himself a fine actor to boot: the scene where Paulson and Marino discuss a shocking bit of news could not have been played better by either participant.


The ending is a bit too "Good Will Hunting" for my tastes, although a climactic, celebratory middle finger is a nice touch. According to Marino, "Diggers" is an autobiographical story (his father and grandfather were clam diggers on Long Island) and the picture is steeped in atmospheric authenticity, physically and emotionally. Having seen the movie, I feel like I'd visited the time and place it portrays. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. But, hey, neither would Hunt.



"Zoo"


"Zoo" begins by invoking the imagery of the American West: glorious vistas, the open road, lush natural beauty. But this is a decidedly unusual horse opera. Here the animals aren't mere conveyances — they're the objects of their cowboys' lust as well.


This restrained sorta-doc is based on a lurid real life scandal. In July of 2005, a businessman was dropped off at a hospital in the Pacific Northwest with a perforated colon. Ultimately, his death was attributed to an ill-fated lovemaking session with an Arabian stallion. During their investigation into his death, police found videotapes of the man (referred to in the film as "Mr. Hands") performing acts of bestiality, and he wasn't alone: in fact, Mr. Hands was part of a group of zoophiles who met to socialize with each other and the animals. Because bestiality wasn't illegal in Washington at the time, no one was ever charged.


Director Robinson Devor ("Police Beat") approaches the material as a poet rather than an investigator. Instead of trying to pump up the seamy details, he lets the surviving participants try to explain themselves and matches their stories up to dialogue-free reenactments. Two of the zoophiles, "H" and "The Happy Horseman," appear only as disembodied voices, their physical appearances in the recreations provided by actors, while a third, named "Coyote," appears as himself.


Devor's restagings involve a few half-seen graphic details scattered around a host of abstract imagery and spacey, droning music. His pacing is slow and even, and the methodical march towards Mr. Hands' death has the feel of a nightmare you're aware of but can't wake from. The actors are shot from behind or with their faces obscured by shadows. The overall mood is mysterious and ethereal; the tone is somber and thoughtful. There are no jokes at the zoophiles' expense. It ultimately looks like the most lyrical episode of "Unsolved Mysteries" ever filmed. All that's missing is Robert Stack's voice.


Despite its palpable sense of atmosphere, Devor's film has its flaws. With so few real names, and with so little visual information to go by, it's easy to mix up the various participants and their roles in the Mr. Hands affair (a fact that, given Devor's rather meticulous visual style, may be intended). Devor's hands-off approach certainly yielded access to interview subjects who would otherwise have been hesitant to divulge the more intimate facets of their sexual preferences, but it also kept the film light on revelations. Much as we might want him to, Devor doesn't probe men's personal lives or this particular incident too deeply. As a result, "Zoo" feels mysterious but not especially curious.


Like another recent picture, Mike White's fictional "Year of the Dog," "Zoo" is about people who love their animals to a fault. Both filmmakers show a great deal of empathy towards their subjects though it would arguably be easier to treat them as objects of derision or scorn instead of misunderstood humanity. Still, "Zoo" is a short movie (at about 80 minutes), and I walked away from it feeling like I didn't entirely understand these men and their motives. One of the animal rights workers says that investigating Mr. Hands' case let her approach an understanding of these people without actually achieving one. Perhaps that's exactly where Devor wanted to take us as well.



"Diggers" opens in limited release April 27th (official site); "Zoo" opens in New York on April 25th (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Summer Movie Preview]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/ifc-news-podcast-24-the-summer.php Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 It's the most indulgent movie time of the year -- from languorous Malaysian love triangle dramas to spandex-suited superhero adventures, here's what we're looking forward to this summer.

Download: MP3, 22:54 minutes, 20.9 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28120 2007-04-23 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_24_the_summer publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028120 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Summer Movie Preview (photo)]]> Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028120 2007-04-23 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_24_the_summer_photo inherit 28120 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: April 23rd, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/opening-this-week-april-23rd-2.php Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Jindabyne," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"The Condemned"

Snag the plot from "Battle Royale," subtract whatever social commentary there was attached and pump the film full of steroids and you have "The Condemned," the latest from WWE owner Vince McMahon's fledgling film company. Last fall's "The Marine" proved to be an enjoyable throwback to the action films of the Reagan era, though... still an awful film. We're just hoping wrestler Steve Austin delivers a fatal Stone Cold Stunner. That would be bad ass.

Opens wide (official site).


"Diggers"

It's no doubt that a comedy about clam diggers from Lawn Guy Land can only come from actor/writer Ken Marino, former member of MTV's "The State." If you miss this film in theaters, though, don't worry — it's getting a DVD release only a few short days later on May 1. The film stars Lauren Ambrose, Paul Rudd, and Ron Eldard and is directed by "A Good Baby"'s Katherine Dieckmann.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Invisible"

So this film is totally, like, "The Sixth Sense," but, like, the twist is, we KNOW the guy's already dead! We were hoping for something better from director (and "Batman Begins" writer) David S. Goyer. "War of the Worlds"'s Justin Chatwin stars as a high school teenager who, following his death, fails to cross over to the afterlife and must find his killer to help his frustrated mother (Marcia Gay Harden) cope with his death.

Opens wide (official site).


"Jindabyne"

It's been roughly six years since the release of the Australian thriller "Lantana," so we're pleased to see director Ray Lawrence return with another film with roiling depths beneath a troubled surface. Three men on a fishing trip discover the body of a dead girl and wait until they return home to report their findings, shocking their families and scandalizing the community. The film won a slew of awards in Lawrence's native Australia, so we're expecting the film to be well-received domestically upon its release. Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney co-star.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Kickin' It Old School"

Yes, Jamie Kennedy movies continue to get greenlit. The movie sounds like "13 Going on 30," except Jamie Kennedy is less charming than Jennifer Garner. A young boy in the mid 1980s suffers a breakdancing accident and lapses into a coma before waking 20 years later looking to revive his breakdancing career.

Opens wide (official site).


"Next"

Nicolas Cage appears to be continuing his streak of subpar films this week with an adaptation of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's short story "The Golden Man" that, as with most feature film adaptations of Dick's writing, bears only slight resemblance to its source material. Cage plays a Las Vegas magician with the ability to see two minutes into the future, drawing the attention of an FBI agent (Julianne Moore) trying to help prevent a future terrorist attack. The thought of Cage wooing film girlfriend Jessica Biel is less than believable, but at least director Lee Tamahori is back to work, hopefully in men's clothing this time.

Opens wide (official site).


"Poison Friends"

Emmanuel Bourdieu's drama recounts what happens when a group of college students befriend (and are betrayed) by a pathological liar; left in the wake of their friend's abandonment, the others must deal with the aftereffects. "Poison Friends" was the opening film at last year's Cannes International Critics` Week and was an official selection at last year's New York Film Festival.

Opens in New York (offical site).


"Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace"

The type of film that only exists in indie-land, "Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace" (that title!) details what happens when a group of former college a cappella singers reunites to perform at a friend's wedding fifteen years later. The film comes courtesy of frequent "Mad TV" director Bruce Leddy.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Snow Cake"

We're glad to see Alan Rickman back in dramatic roles after years as our favorite Hogwarts professor, but we do fear any film's "I Am Sam" sensibilities. Rickman stars as a grief-stricken man who befriends the autistic mother (Sigourney Weaver) of a woman killed in a fatal car wreck.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Ta Ra Rum Pum"

An Indian American family is heartbroken after the father's racing career ends in a debilitating accident. In order to make a living, the family moves to a poor inner city neighborhood and the father takes up a new job as a taxi driver, leaving his need for speed behind.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Triad Election"

Picked up two years after 2005's "Election," Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To's follow-up describes what happens when current Triad chairman Lok (Simon Yam) seeks re-election despite competition, while Jimmy (Louis Koo) looks to leave the gang for legitimate business relations on mainland China. To's film screened out of competition at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and the director recently was honored as Filmmaker in Focus at the 2007 Rotterdamn Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Wind Chill"

Emily Blunt's post-"The Devil Wears Prada" career begins with this horror film about a couple of college students who become stranded on a stretch of road with a deadly history. This horror flick comes courtesy of "Criminal" director Gregory Jacob and "Shadow of the Vampire" writer Steven Katz.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Zoo"

What started off as a sensationalist tabloid story slowly turned into an exposé on the nature of sexual taboos and human nature in director Robinson Devor's documentary on the death of Seattle family man Kenneth Pinyon, who died as a result of injuries he sustained while engaging in sex with a horse. The film premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA["Al Franken: God Spoke," "Hacking Democracy"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/al-franken-god-spoke-hacking-d.php Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Al Franken: God Spoke," Docurama, 2005]


The new doc from the makers of "The War Room" and "Startup.com," "Al Franken: God Spoke" can be easily dismissed as bleeding-heart hagiography, just as Franken himself, like Michael Moore, can be a divisive figure even among our nation's liberal democrats. But there's more to that assessment than meets the eye: an integral but semi-hidden aspect to the bipartisan cultural wars is that celebrity and punditry are admirable goals for conservatives — because conservatives by their very definition represent capitalistic greed, might-is-right and power-mongering. Liberals, in the abstract, represent the opposite — community intercourse, sharing the wealth, justice and peace — and so the very act of attaining fame and ubiquity as a talking head can be condemned as hypocrisy. It's one of the Republicans' many ideological dance steps to which there is no logical counter-step. If liberals like Franken and Moore are going to try to use the media to speak truth to power, the very attempt can be seen as a violation of the principles they're trying to espouse, and, therefore, mere naked vanity.


But no one ever accuses Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly of rampaging egocentrism; it's self-evident, and in keeping with their philosophies. In the neo-con world, bald-faced megalomania is the state to which we're all supposed to aspire. (And do as a nation, in terms of foreign policy, and it has an official think-tank name: "American exceptionalism.") The presumptions behind this liberal-hypocrite reasoning are all lies, of course, to use Franken's favorite qualification — it's akin to denouncing a freedom fighter for battling an invading force in defense of his own country. (They do that as well.) The arena for the cockfight is what it is, and everyone has an equal right to step into the sawdust and starting pecking.


Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus's film captures Franken, before and after the debut of Air America, at his most glorious (making royal public sport of the confident prevarications uttered by the Orwellian mole people at Fox News and elsewhere) and at his most dubious (depressed after the 2004 election, playing with his dog). It's not a freestanding movie so much as a brickbat tossed in a larger battle — continuously being fought between the lying liars and the rest of America. (Notice I didn't say "Democrats," though Franken might've.) One more equation is evident, once you realize that our movie theaters and video shelves are thick as a brick with progressive documentaries and boast virtually no films selling a neo-con perspective. Integer #1: The mass media keeps things unquestionably simplistic and dumb (which is why Air America has a more difficult time finding listeners than Limbaugh et al.). The real political world is complex, but it must be boiled down to bytes and visceral exhortations if you expect busy, wage-stagnated, double-employed Americans to listen before they pass out on their couches.


Integer #2: Everybody's afraid to say it, but it's scientifically demonstrable: conservative ideology absolutely depends on the ignorance and miseducation of its populace in order to be successful. Education is its enemy. Every substantial tenet of the neo-con agenda is based in economic disparity, carelessness for your fellow man and the transformation of honest tax dollars into corporate profit; so, it all must be masqueraded and sold, duplicitously and loudly, as monosyllabic playground morality. Sum total: that conservatism, possessing by necessity the blunt public edge of a battle-axe, sells best on TV and on the radio, and liberal reasoning, which by definition aims to be fair and responsible and attentive to actual and complicated facts, does not.


Inevitably, then, the liberal messages gravitate toward feature-length movies, where the force of reality can be brought to bear on government malfeasance or the true breadth of Wal-Mart's societal damage or Bill O'Reilly's Stalinesque judgments and dishonest leaps of presumption. (As evidenced by the Republican Party-distributed Moore-rebuttal film "Celsius 41.11," released in 2004, neo-cons can't maintain common sense for the length of a feature film, much less be entertaining about it; in fact, the prolonged exposure made Charles Krauthammer and Michael Medved seem like vampires left outside too long at daybreak.) Doob and Hegedus's film only goes so far in contributing to this dynamic, but as another body on the pig pile, it's welcome.


As is Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels's "Hacking Democracy," a terrifying HBO doc about the slow ascension of computerized voting machines, and how much rank dirt has been dug up in the process about how ineptly they're programmed and how much outrageous political skullduggery gone into the deal, leading to inevitable accusations (let's make that "criminal charges") about the degree to which machine-makers like Diebold had been conceiving of these modern miracles as election-stealers from their very inception. Sometime before the primaries begin, the movie should be seen by every client of American democracy.



"Al Franken: God Spoke" (Docurama) will be available on DVD April 24th; "Hacking Democracy" (Docurama) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA["Stephanie Daley," "Everything's Gone Green"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/stephanie-daley-everythings-go.php Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Amber Tamblyn in "Stephanie Daley" Regent Releasing, 2007]


"Stephanie Daley"


As I watched "Stephanie Daley," I was overwhelmed with the notion that I was watching a "Sundance movie." I'm not sure if such a concept has been fully delineated yet within the critical community; if not, it may be time. The closing credits indicate that writer/director Hilary Brougher workshopped her film at the Sundance Institute, and the finished product won a screenwriting award at the 2006 festival, which sort of feels like someone giving themselves a pat on the back, but never mind. From a purely technical standpoint, this is a "Sundance movie," but even before I knew that concretely, I could feel it just by watching it. So what is a "Sundance movie?"


Author and scholar Thomas Schatz wrote in his book "Hollywood Genres" that as we watch more and more similar movies, "we develop expectations which, as they are continually reinforced, tend to harden into 'rules.'" A few pages later he adds, "A genre, then, represents a range of expression for filmmakers and a range of experience for viewers." And as I watched "Stephanie Daley," I could feel those rules hardening around me.


If there is such a thing as a "Sundance movie," then, and "Stephanie Daley" is such a picture, these would be the elements that apply. The basic plot is intensely melodramatic, but it is not played for melodrama: it is played for character study. The screenplay is very serious and almost totally free of any humor. The cinematography, by David Rush Morrison, is absolutely gorgeous, but it is also absolutely minimal, with a limited number of colors in the palette and a heavy emphasis on natural, realistic lighting. One could argue that the range of expression, both emotionally and visually, is somewhat narrow.


"Stephanie Daley"'s raw narrative materials could quite easily make a very traditional Hollywood film. Its title character (Amber Tamblyn) is first seen leaving bloody footprints as she stumbles through the snow; we soon learn her condition stems from the fact that she's just delivered a baby in a public bathroom stall. Months later, a pregnant forensic psychiatrist named Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton) is assigned Stephanie's case and tasked to uncover whether she murdered her newborn, as prosecutors claim, or whether the baby was, as the accused claims, stillborn. As a construction, it's just about perfect and it's easy to conceive of where a major studio would have taken the material, possibly as some kind of psychological thriller that would have turned Lydie into an investigator uncovering her subject's dark secrets (think "Fargo" with more hot button-y birth rights issues).


Brougher takes an entirely different tack. Her "Stephanie Daley" is a mystery story that's not really about its mystery — it's rather a presentation of an air of suburban malaise and a certain kind of moral relativism (traits that also struck me as particularly "Sundance movie"-like). I will not say what Lydie learns about Stephanie or herself, but I will observe that whatever that might be is less important than what both characters ultimately come to see about themselves. Their own truths are more important than ours.


The range of experience for the viewer depends largely on that viewer's own knowledge and expectations of Schatz's rules. I certainly can't fault the filmmaking craft involved. "Stephanie Daley" is powerfully acted — Tamblyn was justly nominated for a Spirit Award for her performance — and shot with a sort of cool, gloomy beauty. Me? I enjoy a good soapy melodrama now and then, and would have preferred a slightly more passionate take on the material. Ironically, such a movie would probably feel fresher now than Brougher's, which was born of a place designed as an alternative to the mainstream that has now become a sort of mainstream all its own (if we called it "alternative" filmmaking instead of "independent," a comparison to rock music in the 1990s would be particularly apt).


There was a certain disconnect between what I wanted the movie to be and what it actually is, but that doesn't mean others won't feel different (the rest of the crowd at the screening I attended seemed a good deal more enthralled than me). And anyway, criticizing what a movie isn't is kind of dirty pool. No doubt Brougher made exactly the movie she wanted. It is a "Sundance movie."



"Everything's Gone Green"


When I spoke with author Douglas Coupland about "Everything's Gone Green," his first work as a screenwriter, at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival, he interrupted our interview and asked me how old I was. When I responded "26," he grinned and told me, in all seriousness, that I was headed for "The worst year of my life." Though I've (so far) found this not to be the case personally, Coupland clearly believes this statement to be true, because I just watched "Everything's Gone Green" and there it is again. After he's lost his job, his girlfriend, a potential fortune in lottery winnings, all in one day, Ryan (Paulo Costanzo), who is only a couple years my senior, is told by a buddy, "Your twenties suck, the worst period of your life. You're lonely. You feel like your head's being blowtorched from the inside. And you don't even know what it is because we were never even taught the words to describe it. So you feel like an idiot and a loser."


Listening to "Everything's Gone Green"'s dialogue, and judging from my brief but very amusing interview with Coupland himself, it appears that a lot of the characters are speaking for the author. All of the major characters go off on rants about their surroundings and their inherent flaws and idiosyncrasies, though they are almost entirely of a very laid back "D'ja ever notice?" variety. As such, the film, directed by Paul Fox, doesn't adhere to the popular show-don't-tell rule of filmmaking, but a lot of these mini -lectures about bacon-wrapped scallops or summer office cruises are very funny, at least in a very laid back "D'ja ever notice?" way.


After he loses his job and most of his financial and sexual prospects, Ryan winds up working for the lottery itself, where his job is to interview winners for the free circular the company has to provide to prove that the whole operation isn't just one big Ponzi scheme. And so the relatively broke Ryan gets to document financial success of a kind with which he will almost certainly never find himself up close and personal. It should go without saying that the movie will ultimately prove (over and over again) that the happiness brought on by massive influxes of undeserved cash is hollow and very short-lived.


Ryan's love interest is an intriguing woman named Ming (Steph Song) who works as a set decorator on the many American film productions that roll through their hometown of Vancouver. Her job ultimately comes down to disguising British Columbia so that it looks like Anytown, U.S.A., which gives Coupland the opportunity to poke fun at American movies as well as to observe how after a while they all become completely interchangeable. And, to an extent, "Everything's Gone Green" is sort of an anti-movie. There is a plot, but it is not pushed forward with any sort of muscular intensity, and any deterrents that stand in our heroes' paths are deflated for big laughs before they can actually do them any harm.


The artwork on the wall of Ryan's apartment in the beginning of the movie — the one he gets kicked out of when his girlfriend dumps him — reads "small, manageable dreams," an idea echoed by a road sign that Ryan drives past in the closing shots that says "choose not to lose." Ryan doesn't really grow, then, he finds his earlier beliefs tested and then affirmed. He should aim low, why the hell not? Coupland certainly obeyed his own dictum here: "Everything's Gone Green" is far from revolutionary, but it is light and fun and won't tax you too much in exchange for ninety entertaining minutes. Ryan comes out the other side of the worst year of his life in pretty good shape. I hope for my sake I do the same.



"Stephanie Daley" opens in New York on April 20th (official site); "Everything's Gone Green" is currently playing in New York opening wider on April 20th (official site).

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<![CDATA[A Cop Movie Cliche Line-Up]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/ifc-news-podcast-23-a-cop-movi.php Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 "Is it true that there's a point on a man's head where if you shoot it, it will blow up?" Probably not, but that doesn't stop "Hot Fuzz," the new film from "Shaun of the Dead" creators Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, in reveling and bringing new life to every cop movie cliché -- and in small-town England, to boot. This week on the IFC News podcast, we discuss some of our favorite film cop clichés, from turning in your badge to seizing the cars of private citizens for official police business.

Download: MP3, 24:30 minutes, 22.4 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [iTunes] [XML]

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28119 2007-04-16 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_23_a_cop_movi publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028119 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[A Cop Movie Cliche Line-Up (photo)]]> Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028119 2007-04-16 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_23_a_cop_movi_photo inherit 28119 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Apichatpong Weerasethakul on "Syndromes and a Century"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/apichatpong-weerasethakul-on-s.php Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: "Syndromes and a Century," Strand Releasing, 2007]


Since his 2000 feature debut, "Mysterious Object at Noon" — which crafted a docudrama out of a surrealist parlor game — Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul (but you may call him "Joe") has become an art-house favorite among cinephiles for his wistful, highly independent vision. Commonly known for his experimental narrative structures, non-professional casts, and themes of nature, sexuality and memory, Weerasethakul's films are becoming a fixture on critics' year-end lists, especially with the 2005 release of his supernaturally romantic folk-tale "Tropical Malady."


His fifth feature is "Syndromes and a Century," one of several films commissioned by Peter Sellars of Vienna's New Crowned Hope festival to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Hardly a literal interpretation of the assignment, the film is bifurcated to chronicle the lives of two hospital doctors, one who works in the jungles of Thailand, the other in industrialized Bangkok. Serenely beautiful and deeply personal, "Syndromes" is an ode to Weerasethakul's Buddhist beliefs, the geographical distinction between where he grew up and where he now resides, and, most importantly, his parents, both of whom practiced medicine and were the primary inspiration behind this must-see drama.


This past week, the Thai Censorship Board demanded you remove four scenes, including one where a monk is simply shown playing a guitar. Instead of recutting the film, you took a stance and pulled its domestic release entirely. How does it make you feel to be censored in your own homeland?


Well, I'm saddened of course. But I think, in a way, I'm glad because now we want to do a petition to be submitted to the government to question what's wrong with our system, and how efficient it is [since] it hasn't been changed for more than 20 years.


Is this a common problem for others?


For some filmmakers, it's become such a standard that when one makes a film, they're automatically aware of the censor system so they won't do this and that. I think it affects the way we tell stories. So many Thai films resort to being about comedy or ghost stories or something very light. But at the same time, this is about a studio system because my film is not part of this system that operates on fear.


Considering you don't even like classical music, how exactly does "Syndromes" relate to Mozart?


[laughs.] Peter Sellars encouraged us to think in a more abstract and emotional way, about how we connect to the pieces of music; the idea behind it rather than the pieces [themselves]. I think Peter focused on three pieces of music. One of them, "The Magic Flute," talks about the idea of magic in everyday life and how we incorporate it into our lives to be able to look into the future. I was thinking about that while talking with my mom about her life, so I'm thinking for me, to realize being alive is magic already. I thought I'd create a film about all this music and the people who give me life.


What kinds of music do you listen to?


Pop music, electronic music... I have a friend who runs a record company, and he sends me discs, so I can update myself. [laughs.] I like this guy in Thailand who created a persona called Cindy Sweet, a one-man operation. It's electronic music, very beautiful.


This is your third feature film to be bisected. What fascinates or inspires you about this particular structure?


At first, I didn't intend it to be two parts. But when we started, it was quite obvious: man and woman, rural and modern. So we said, why not? I think it's about the contrast in Thailand and in my life, how things changed and are changing quickly. We yearn for a certain thing that cannot come back. For "Syndromes" and "Tropical Malady," the reasons for them being in two parts are different. For the previous film, it's more about desire and whether this is a dream or real. I think this is how we all operate, using memory. I always say that making a film is like writing a diary, so it's a way to remember them, and it's how our brains operate. When we remember certain things, we tend to do so in a cinematic way. You know, we have our own favorite angles and time for particular actions or moments. To make films about this is kind of challenging in a way.


Do you have such a poor memory that you need filmmaking as a tool of recall?


No, no, no. You know, like "Tropical Malady" is sometimes not about particular memories, but certain feelings or events accumulating. For me, to put it on film is about love. About someone you love, like my mother or my lover.


You live in an urban area and hold a degree in architecture, yet your films keep returning to the jungles of Thailand. Is it because you see a deeper correlation between the environments, or is it more about your own nostalgia?


It's both, because the landscapes of Thailand are changing. Sometimes when you go to outer Bangkok, you still seem the same thing you did 20 years ago. For me, it's conflicting, how we were and are going. Obviously, what's changed is the way we shop. It's quite cliché, but it's everywhere; in Thailand, too. We no longer have these small shops, which change to something like Wal-Mart or Target. In Thailand, this kind of megastore is everywhere downtown. We don't have a museum or big cultural institution, so this shopping mall becomes our new place for recreation. Like a new temple.


Globalization wins another battle.


It's quite obvious, but sometimes we're slow to realize it. For example, my boyfriend and I will have nothing to do on the weekend. Okay, let's go to the mall! It's so shallow, but I mean, there's really nothing. We don't have a decent park or movie theater. When you're in tourist Thailand, there're many historical places to go. For us, it's so boring. There are some nice restaurants and bars, but I like quiet places. I'd prefer to walk in a park or a museum, some place I can be a little more conscious of my breathing. We have some parks, but they have speakers and sometimes they play music. I have to say, Thailand night life can be fun.


You grew up watching American disaster movies and effects-driven blockbusters. Are you still into popcorn movies?


Yes, I love watching these because I like special effects, and I really don't differentiate. My films are somehow similar; I'm making emotional disaster films. It's very intriguing that when you watch these kinds of films, you think about the future, in terms of the content itself, the special effects, how we are moving very fast [with] digital technology, the new ways of distribution, things like that.


Would you like to make a film like that?


Definitely. Like in "Syndromes," we already did, but in little things. We have that one shot of a solar eclipse. Audiences aren't sure if it's an effect or not. For me, I approach each movie differently, [but] I appreciate special effects that sometimes just want to show off: "Okay, that's big! Wow, you're good!"


What was the last blockbuster that left you smiling?


I enjoyed "Grindhouse" very much. Is that a blockbuster? I really loved Tarantino's part.



"Syndromes and a Century" opens in New York on April 18th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: April 20th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/opening-this-week-april-20th-2.php Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


[Photo: Daniel Auteuil and Alice Taglioni in "The Valet," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


"Fracture"

Anthony Hopkins gets all serial killer-y on us once again in this thriller featuring Academy Award-nominee Ryan Gosling (the male Clarice Starling?) as a young district attorney out to get Hopkins for the attempted murder of his wife, whilst David Straithairn hams it up for a big paycheck. We're hoping director Gregory Hoblit is in full-on thriller mode ("Primal Fear") rather than courtroom drama mode ("Hart's War"), but judging from the previews, we won't be holding our breath.

Opens wide (official site).


"Hot Fuzz"

British comic geniuses Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright follow up their brilliant 2004 horror-comedy "Shaun of the Dead" with a film that spoofs action and cop clichés. Pegg stars as a hot London cop with the highest arrest record on the force who's sent to a sleepy village in the country and paired with a bumbling action-craving loser (Frost). Much like "Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz" finds Pegg and co. assembling a stellar British cast that ranges from Jim Broadbent to Paddy Considine. Expect some serious funny with this one.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"In the Land of Women"

Now that "The O.C." has finished its four-season run on the FOX network, 27-year-old teen heartthrob Adam Brody can move on to a slew of more ambitious emo roles. Brody's first post-"The O.C." work finds him moving from L.A. to Michigan to live with his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), shack up with young Kristen Stewart and learn all sorts of life lessons from the single mom next-door-neighbor (Meg Ryan). We're expecting a Fray song somewhere in the film's third act.

Opens wide (official site).


"Stephanie Daley"

Writer-director Hilary Brougher ("The Sticky Fingers of Time") premiered this film, in which a 16-year-old girl (Amber Tamblyn, nominated for a Spirit Award for the performance) is accused of concealing her pregnancy and murdering her infant, at last year's Sundance. Tilda Swinton co-stars as the forensic psychologist assigned to her case. We're glad to see this film get a limited release, regardless of its vaguely Lifetime movie premise.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Syndromes and a Century"

Thai wunderkind Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest film is loosely based on the story of his parents' courtship. The film was commissioned as a part of the New Crowned Hope festival hosted in Vienna to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang (Rock Me!) Amadeus Mozart and premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Tripper"

A Reagan-obsessed serial killer (boo!) murders a bunch of hippies (yay!) at a music festival in this low-budget horror film courtesy of "Scream" star David Arquette. The film was originally featured as a part of the After Dark Horrorfest last November and recently has been gaining attention as a result of MySpace and Arquette's college touring. Fratboys getting stoned on 4.20 (the film's release date, get it!?) are totally stoked.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Vacancy"

Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson star as a married couple locked in a motel room trying to evade killers who want them to star in a low-budget snuff film. Hopefully Hungarian director Nimrod Antal can keep up the suspenseful tone he maintained in his last film, "Kontroll," before the film becomes another "Scissors."

Opens wide (official site).


"The Valet"

In order to save his reputation, his marriage and his affair, a big business CEO sets up his mistress with a valet after the three are caught in a photograph by a paparazzo's camera in Francis Veber's latest comedy. Much like 2001's "The Closet," this film features Veber finding comedy through the characters' secret relationships and their attempts to keep them hidden. Gad Elmaleh, Alice Taglioni, Daniel Auteuil and Kristin Scott Thomas co-star.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[Mike White on "Year of the Dog"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/mike-white-on-year-of-the-dog.php Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Producer, writer, actor and now director Mike White made his memorable first dip into independent film as the writer and star of the 2000 Sundance Film Festival darling "Chuck & Buck." His career has spanned mediums and genres — in television, he worked as a writer on both "Dawson's Creek" and the critically adored "Freaks & Geeks," and in film he's collaborated several times with Jack Black, most notably on the Richard Linklater-directed "School of Rock." But it's the role of Buck that likely lingers in the minds of most indie film fans — White's nasal-voiced manchild was simultaneously repellent and, miraculously, sympathetic, even as he persistently stalked his childhood (and only) friend.


White's new film "Year of the Dog" marks his directorial debut, and delves into similarly uneasy territory between comedy and dread. Molly Shannon plays Peggy, a single suburban 40-something living in happy codependence with her dog until an accident deprives her of her beloved canine companion and sends her on a journey of what you could call self-discovery. I caught up with White in New York to talk about the film.


I've actually seen "Year of the Dog" described in some places as a romantic comedy, which is... not a phrase I would have chosen. So I wanted to ask you how you'd describe it.


I would say it's a comedy with some really sad moments. It plays to me like some of the other independent movies I've done — "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl" — going back and forth in tone from moment to moment. Sometimes people will be laughing at the same time someone next to them thinks it's tragic. It's a drama-dy; it's almost an anti-romantic comedy. It's definitely not "lady falls in love, finds a man and drives off into the sunset."


I'm sure you're getting this from everyone, but are you a vegan? Are you an animal rights person? Are you a devoted pet owner?


I'm a devoted pet owner and I'm a vegan, but I'm not a perfect vegan.


What's an imperfect vegan?


Well, I don't eat meat, I don't eat dairy and I try not to eat animal stuff, but I'm not perfect about it. I went down to Mexico for four months and by the end I was eating fish because there was nothing there that I could eat, and I'd much rather live. To me, the movie came out of my own experiences, but I don't think the message is that everyone needs to go out and be a vegan. It's more that this is [Peggy's] particular passion and she's basically looking for the people in her life to accept her and accept it — not necessarily prescribing it for everyone else.


There aren't many sympathetic portraits of PETA activists — they seem to be regarded as one of the more petulant branches of activism. How did you end up there, thematically?


I like to write about people who don't necessarily get that kind of investigation in movies. I'm not really interested in writing about the Everywoman looking for love or the Everyman who can't lie anymore. I like eccentric, idiosyncratic characters, and I thought it would be interesting to write about a character who some might say is a bleeding heart, but who really just comes at things from a emotionally childlike place. There's definitely a part of me that has that — that part that sees a dog that's going to be euthanized and says, "Ugh, I need to do something." Movies about animals are always skewed towards little kids or are really sentimental, while contemporary adult comedies have a cynical side to them. I thought it would be fun to meld those things.


Peggy seems like such a wholly conceived character, from her floral prints to her office job to her sensible car. I know that you'd written [the role] for Molly Shannon, but wanted to know where the character originated, because she seems like the kind of person everyone's mom knows.


I felt like, in a weird way, she's a female version of Buck [in "Chuck & Buck"]. She retained a childlike innocence about her and yet she, unlike Buck, is extremely demure. I had this idea of people talking at her — she's the kind of person everyone leans on. She's almost like a dog. There's no back-and-forth, she's really just there to be supportive. I've certainly had friends like that over the years who you take for granted. When they start agitating or having their own needs, you're like "Wait, this is not what we bargained for! You're supposed to be the one who sits there and laughs at my jokes."


I thought your portrayal of sexuality in this film was particularly interesting — Peter Sarsgaard's character is essentially asexual and Shannon's has, if anything, seriously repressed any romantic desires. As you've said, there's no general tie-up romance here, and it isn't something you see often in a film — that idea that it's okay to not always seek romance.


I agree... I personally think this is a very punk rock movie, even though I wanted to dress it up in a sort of schoolmarm-ish "dog and lady" [look]. It's funny, because some of the responses to the movie been "This is propaganda-mongering" or "This is PETA activism," [but] if she ended up with a guy in the end and went running off into the sunset like most other movies, nobody would be saying that. That's just movies. I think that we as a society are really pushed all the time that we need to pair up, and that is the ultimate end goal. To show characters that aren't necessarily going to fit into that, or that aren't even seeking it, is a truly unusual characterization.


I have a lot of friends who are single, and I know a lot of people who are in relationships or have been in relationships and they're just: "If it comes, it comes. I'm not going to spend my whole life searching for a date." Regina King's character believes that relationships are her religion and so she's prescribing that to Peggy and believes that if it makes her happy, then it's going to make [Peggy] happy. And people do that with kids, or work, or whatever. Not everybody is going to find their life meaning in that, and there should be representations of people who are outside of that world.


I felt like the ending of "Year of the Dog" was in way more radical than that of "Chuck & Buck." At the end of "Chuck & Buck," you get the sense that he's rejoining or joining society. [Peggy]'s choosing not to join mainstream society.


I wouldn't disagree, but I also think it's a more mature progression in the sense that they're both looking for understanding, but his understanding really starts and ends with him, and her understanding is about her, but also about doing something beyond her. It is a more activistic thing and I do think she's a more sophisticated and mature person. But it's also, as you were talking about, "radical." I think she's torching the place and his presence in that wedding makes the whole thing a little bit subversive. He's more behind enemy lines and she's saying "I'm out of here."


From a directorial standpoint, it seems that you chose to shoot the conversations so that characters are always alone in the middle of the frame. There's this cumulative suggestion that conversation is a useless endeavor in a lot of these everyday interactions.


Well, it was a little bit about people talking at her, and not a lot of connecting going on. In some [shots], once when she starts going on the dates or with the animals, you see them more connected in the frame and it has more traditional coverage. It isn't so direct on, it's a little more from the side.


I like the idea of portraiture, of letting the frame really show who [characters] are — some of the stuff you get in documentaries. When somebody's being interviewed in a documentary, you get their awards behind them.


You use this blissfully sunny California setting in a unique way.


There's this documentary [Errol Morris' "Gates of Heaven"] that's actually about pet cemeteries, and it captures this version of California that really strikes true to my childhood growing up there — the artificial man-made lawn and then the dead mountainside next to it. With the sun beating down, it's a kind of artificial but kind of inviting world. [Peggy] is basically in mourning throughout the entire movie, while the world around her is so poppy and bright and colorful, and there's a disconnect there, but it lends itself to the absurdity of the journey.


You mention "Gates of Heaven" — do you have any other reference points or influences?


I saw "Gates of Heaven", which is one of my favorite movies, and I thought "If I was going to direct, this is the kind of movie, stylistically, that I would want to direct." Movies have just become so quick cut-y — especially comedies, which are always cutting on the joke. I feel everything in our world has gotten so sped up that sometimes I just like going to the movies and slowing down and letting the movie take place, and also having enough time within it to associate while I'm sitting there. I could watch and be like, "Oh yeah, my dog died," and think about the dog, and then come back and not have lost my way in the movie.



"Year of the Dog" is currently in theaters (official site).

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25397 2007-04-16 00:00:00 closed closed mike_white_on_year_of_the_dog publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025397
<![CDATA[Mike White on "Year of the Dog" (photo)]]> Mon, 16 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025397 2007-04-16 00:00:00 closed closed mike_white_on_year_of_the_dog_photo inherit 25397 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Sombre," "Notes on a Scandal"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/sombre-notes-on-a-scandal.php Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Sombre," Koch Lorber, 2007]


No one should want to see even one more serial killer thriller by this late date — it'd be like reaching for the JB after a three-week bender during which you barfed up your stomach lining and lost control of your bowels (or something). Lament though I may, they keep coming, and in the never-ending cataract of bloody nonsense something interesting occasionally happens — like Philippe Grandrieux's debut film "Sombre" (1998), a dark, introverted French film that trails after a tortured sex murderer (Marc Barbé) as he stumbles through the countryside (and trails happenstantially after the Tour de France) killing women. Grandrieux isn't interested in psychological explanations, nor is he sucker-punching us with gore, suspense or those ridiculous, elaborate clue-laden schemes that only serial killers in movies seem to concoct. In reality, as in "Sombre," the selection of victim is usually a matter of bad luck. But Grandrieux's approach is better than simply realist — it's terrifyingly intimate (the camera stays so close during the murders that it's as if you're caught in a headlock) and subjective, the film itself often launching off into an abstracted storm of confused imagery, not unlike Lodge Kerrigan's much-lauded "Clean, Shaven."


It's a stormy, moody, portentous experience, full of evocations of a tormented consciousness (and observations of a social landscape largely oblivious). Eventually, it's clear that "Sombre" isn't a thriller at all — the glowering, inarticulate anti-hero eventually meets up with a shy and aging virgin (Elina Löwensohn), is mistaken by her and her saucy nudist sister (Géraldine Voillat) for a reasonable romantic acquaintance, and is welcomed into their family's sphere. With almost imperceptible grace and logic, Grandrieux shifts the focus onto Löwensohn's catastrophically lonely spinster (a memorably brave performance), who despite several near-brushes with the maniac's homicidal impulses tries to accept him as her companion and her burden. The upshot is unpredictably moving — and has little to do with corpses, bloodthirstiness or crime solving.


Richard Eyre's celebrated Oscar-nominee "Notes on a Scandal" is a study in narrative evolution of the opposite kind — Judi Dench's hilariously acidic school-prof narrator comes off as the plummy, amused voice of cynical sanity for most of the story, until it dawns on us and everyone else that she's a dangerous fruitcake. The narrative movement belongs to Cate Blanchett's grown-up hippie-chick, married with children but still vulnerable, in her new job as a high school art teacher, to sexual self-indulgence and the attentions of a ballsy and talented rogue of a student. As the kid and the leggy teach secretly rut like weasels, Dench's old-guard busybody plays psychological ping-pong with Blanchett's scatterbrained diva, keeping her own agenda carefully under wraps. That is, until her seams begin to fray as well — you know going in, and you're not wrong, that "Notes" works best as a stage for two brilliant and epically talented actresses to engage in a very Brit but fascinatingly nasty pas de deux. (Bill Nighy, as Blanchett's aging husband, brings up the rear, but he's really no competition.) It's an old-fashioned movie in this sense — laudable for the classic opportunity to watch the performers, as amply armed as they are with intelligence, insight, bravura, energy and wit, simply perform within an inch of their lives.



"Sombre" (Koch Lorber) is currently available on DVD; "Notes on a Scandal" (20th Century Fox) will be available on April 17th.

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<![CDATA[Being Henry Rollins]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/ifc-news-podcast-22-being-henr.php Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Season two of "The Henry Rollins Show" kicks off April 13th on IFC, and in honor of the premiere, special guest Henry Rollins joins us on the IFC News podcast to talk about Iraq and whether or not films can change the world.

Download: MP3, 21:54 minutes, 20 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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28118 2007-04-09 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_22_being_henr publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028118 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Being Henry Rollins (photo)]]> Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028118 2007-04-09 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_22_being_henr_photo inherit 28118 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[The Ballsy Cinema of Paul Verhoeven: A Selected Filmography]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/the-ballsy-cinema-of-paul-verh.php Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Elizabeth Berkley in "Showgirls," United Artists/MGM, 1995]


Few filmmakers have generated as much box office juice, public outcry, critical revulsion and, conversely, a unique kind of reactive critical delight as Paul Verhoeven. In filmography alone he's unusual: he's made good movies ("The 4th Man"), bad movies ("Hollow Man"), underrated movies ("Total Recall") and movies so shockingly misguided they transcend ordinary measures of taste and artistic merit ("Showgirls"). Personally, I like him because he's such a good subject: even when his movies are bad, they're unfailingly interesting.


And give Verhoeven credit: while a lot of interesting artists' skills wane commensurately with their age, he's as edgy as ever on the precipice of the big 7-0. It's hard to think of anyone else who'd make an erotic thriller set during the Holocaust, and certainly impossible to think of anyone else who'd try to make that erotic thriller both moralistic and sexy. Verhoeven's latest film, "Black Book," is both.


He's an envelope pusher to the end. Good or bad (or something else entirely), his "Showgirls" will always be the movie that tried to break through the box office poison of the NC-17 label — and without the massive success of his own "Basic Instinct," no one would have even had the opportunity to try it. He failed (spectacularly), but who else would have even made the attempt? Here's your answer: just try to name three other NC-17 movies since "Showgirls.


Frankly, dude's got balls. You probably have to if you're going to get your actors to appear as emotionally and physically naked as Veroheven consistently does, and you definitely have to if you're going to ask your leading lady to allow you to drown her in a vat of shit on camera, as Verhoeven did in "Black Book." (Imagine that conversation!) For more on the shooting of that scene and the rest of the movie, check out the interview he gave to IFC News' Aaron Hillis last week.


With all that in mind, here are a few of Verhoeven's balliest, I-can't-believe-he-did-that moments in English (Verhoeven's early Dutch work will have to fill out an article all its own at a later date).



Attack of the Fish Wolf!

From "RoboCop" (1987)


"RoboCop" is not exactly a down-to-earth sort of movie — it is, after all, the story of a cop who's brought back to life as a badass robot after he's murdered in the line of duty — but Verhoeven goes way out there during the no guts, no gory glory finale, when Robo busts loose and gets revenge on the gangsters who killed him. The ballsiness comes in when Paul McCrane's hood tries to run our hero over in a big truck. At the last moment, the robot formerly known as Officer Alex Murphy dives out of the way, and McCrane and his truck plow into a vat labeled "TOXIC WASTE." McCrane comes out the other side of the crash instantly transformed into a hideous mutant with claws and dripping skin who shambles around whispering "Help me!" It's an utterly absurd moment, but it speaks to why "RoboCop" was such a hit: Verhoeven believed the premise enough to make it real, and played Murphy's story for tragedy, not ironic laughs. To throw a drippy skinned fish mutant into the mix, you've got to be a certified genius or an authentic wacko.



Fade to White

From "Total Recall" (1990)


Verhoeven experimented with ambiguous stories back in Holland (as in "The 4th Man," where the line between fantasy and reality never fully delineated), but it takes some serious balls to experiment with ambiguity in a big budget sci-fi picture. In "Total Recall," Arnold Schwarzenegger's Douglas Quaid pines for the exciting life of an interplanetary hero, and after a failed "virtual vacation" memory implant, discovers that he is, in fact, an interplanetary hero. And though Schwarzenegger goes on a pretty conventional hero's journey where he defeats the villain (including a twisted version of himself) and gets the girl, Verhoeven never clarifies whether Quaid's adventures are real or a figment of his possibly schizophrenic imagination. At the end of the movie, Verhoeven gives Schwarzenegger's character a grand finale and a romantic kiss, but he brings in an unsettling strain of music and fades to white instead of black, a choice, he suggests on the "Recall" DVD commentary, made to suggest that Quaid has been lobotomized as one character warned him about earlier. "It's very disturbing to the audience," he explains, "because they want an adventure story, not a fake adventures story." As if trying to leech a good, non-robotic performance out of Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't ballsy enough. Verhoeven would try a similarly open-ended finale with his next picture...



Stone's Gams of Steel

From "Basic Instinct" (1992)


"Basic Instinct" is a potpourri of gutsy, borderline crazy choices, but the one that really distinguishes Verhoeven from his peers is a choice he made in pre-production: to reject the numerous script rewrites he'd been working on for months and return to screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' original screenplay. That meant taking the good with the bad — among the latter are lines of dialogue like "She wants to play? Fine, I'll play!" and "Everyone SHE plays with DIES!" — but there's also a kind of fevered girl-fearing, ultra-macho logic that doesn't play when it's watered down: it has to either run hot-to-the-touch or not at all. As in their later collaboration, "Showgirls," this is an allegedly sexy movie wherein very little of the sexuality that is represented resembles any of the sex real people have in the real world. But that's the whole thing: this is not a real club, that is not a real lesbian couple, that is not how murder suspects behave under interrogation. And while we're on the subject, gender aside, what's ballsier than that most infamous of scenes, where Stone uncrosses her legs and maybe flashes Wayne Knight, Michael Douglas and us her hoo-hah. Stone has claimed she didn't know the camera was pointed down there ("Hey Jan, why are you lighting my crotch?"), Verhoeven's simply maintained that everyone knew all along what they were doing. No real woman would behave in such a brazen, hooched-out fashion, but, surrounded by all that wonky Eszterhas dialogue, it plays straighter than straight, like a statement of purpose and defiance.



How Can You Pick Just One Moment?

From "Showgirls" (1995)


We touched on the NC-17 controversy, but that's barely a drop in the bucket of ballsy moments from "Showgirls." Verhoeven cast an actress best known as a goodie-goodie on a kids television show and turned her into a mentally unbalanced hip-shaking lunatic. Out of a massive cast he presented just one likable character, then showed her getting brutally raped. He threw in a graphic menstruation joke. He argued for the legitimacy of stripping as an art form. He tried to pass the movie off as serious drama. He kept his name on the finished film, but later took his name off the basic cable version (where the voluminous nudity is obscured by digitally inserted underwear) because it didn't represent his directorial vision. The pièce de résistance: when "Showgirls" was nominated for a record number of Razzie Awards, Verhoeven showed up at the ceremony to collect his statuettes. In typical Verhoeven fashion, he was the first director in history to do so.

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8452 2007-04-09 00:00:00 closed closed the_ballsy_cinema_of_paul_verh publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008452
<![CDATA[Andrea Arnold on "Red Road"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/andrea-arnold-on-red-road.php Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Andrea Arnold holds herself together remarkably well for someone who was out until 8am the night before (or is that morning of?). When I caught up with the UK-born Oscar-winner (for 2003 short "Wasp") in New York, she was coming off a marathon night of celebrating with the other filmmakers of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's prestigious New Directors/New Films festival — her debut, "Red Road," was one of the bigger entries in this year's line-up. The title refers to a looming cluster of slablike housing projects on the outskirts of Glasgow. Jackie (Kate Dickie) works as a CCTV operator, monitoring an array of closed circuit security cameras around the city and alerting the police when needed — until one night, when she spots a man she recognizes on screen. After tracking him for days, she traces him to the Red Road flats and finds a way to insert herself into his life for reasons that only gradually become clear.


"Red Road" is the first entry in the Advance Party trio, a planned set of three films from three first-time directors (Morag Mackinnon and Mikkel Norgaard round out the group) following a prescribed set of rules: the films must be set in Scotland and they must make use of a group of predefined characters. If this sounds a little...Danish, well, the project was conceived by filmmakers Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen (who will serve as executive producers on each of the films) after a conversation with Dogme95 deity Lars von Trier. I spoke with Arnold about surveillance and working within the rules.


I'd read that some international journalists assumed that the CCTV station [in which Jackie, the main character, works] was your own invention.


When I was at Cannes, I had a lot of interviews where people didn't believe that the whole CCTV was a reality. There were people from all over the world interviewing you, and there are lots of countries that don't have those kinds of surveillance systems. They thought it was some kind of science fiction idea.


There is a bit of that look to it. Is the station in the film based on what the actual stations look like?


That's a real place! That really exists, that place. They had a section on one end that they only used on special occasions — it wasn't somewhere monitoring the city. We were able to use that area and fill the screens with our images. That place genuinely exists.


So with the characters, how much were you given, and how much did you build out yourself?


I can give you an example — Clyde [Tony Curran] was described as out of prison on early release for good behavior; he was 35; women liked him; he was guilty; and he hung out with his old prison friends. And I got most of those things in the film — they're there. April [Natalie Press], who's the girl who lives in the flat with Clyde, was given quite a brief description. She was described as being shy, never initiating the conversation. She's a newcomer and in every film she's arriving in that place, so I had her arriving with her bags from London.


She had a whole story that didn't end up making the film. It was tempting to go off in directions once you got to know the characters — you wanted to have a film with each of them. I could have done a film with her, or with Stevie [Martin Compston]... You didn't have to include all the elements — within those restraints, if something didn't appeal to you, you just left it. There's something about Jackie — I connected her and Clyde up almost immediately. I felt that they had to get together because something in her description and something in his made me feel that they were connected. So I did work that out from what I was given.


And each film in the series starts over fresh?


There won't be anything carrying on from my film — it will be a different universe, [the other two directors] will do whatever they want with the characters. That was something we decided together. If we wanted to, we could have made a trilogy, but I think that would have been much harder work — we'd have to really really collaborate. We decided it would be more freeing and we'd be able to make more individual films if we didn't make a trilogy.


As you went first, did you get more say over the casting? I know you've worked with Natalie Press before, in "Wasp."


I'd like to think not, but the fact that my film was more developed meant that I knew what I was looking for. All of us, by accident, picked different characters as our leads — I picked Jackie and Clyde, Morag has Alfred, who's the father-in-law, and Mikkel has April and Stevie — so we decided we'd give each other preference or at least say who'd we like for those roles. I think people thought we'd be really competitive over the casting but we weren't we were really supportive of each other.


How did you end up finding the Red Road flats? They're a remarkable location, and it seems like they shape the film in their own way — did you write the story around them, or vice versa?


No, the story started first. I knew that [Jackie] would be looking for [Clyde], and he had to live somewhere. I looked at places where they house ex-prisoners, and I drove around Glasgow and saw them and was very struck by them, and was able to incorporate them into the script. I wanted the place where she first goes to see him to be impenetrable, and they are impenetrable to start. And I wanted, as she got closer, for her to see the humanity in the place, because they look pretty oppressive from the distance, but when you get in closer you see the kids, you see all the people — there's a lot of people living there — and it's not what you think. There's a little bit of that in the film, perhaps not so much as I would have liked.


What's happening with them now?


They're going to get pulled down. I felt annoyed with myself, because when they were looking for a title, I couldn't think of anything — it needs to come organically for me, a title, it needs to really feel right, but the financiers needed it for their documents. I had to think of something, so I said "Why don't we call it 'Red Road'?" And it stuck. I didn't really think about what it meant to call a film by the place in which it's [set]. I didn't mean for it to be so deliberately connected to that area — I'm not trying to say "This is Red Road." I wished I'd changed the title, because people do live there, and the film is showing a certain perspective. I think it was not right, but it's too late now.


What have the reactions been like from people who've lived there?


A lot of the people who were in the film lived around there in the flats, and they all came to the premiere, and I've only had positive feedback. But — they were all in the film, they felt like a part of it. I haven't had any feedback from someone who hasn't been involved in the film.


Almost half of the film is taken up by the main character's involvement in surveillance before she actually engages in the narrative — in terms of films like "Rear Window," did you feel like your film is a reference or an update?


I didn't think about those films at all — I'd seen "Rear Window" a long time ago, but hadn't had it in my brain until the editor mentioned it while we were editing. When I saw it, there were some amazing [correspondences] — this woman in the cafe... though I guess if you're looking out the window at a bunch of people living across the road, there are going to be a lot of similarities in what everybody sees, because life is life.


So what are your thoughts on CCTV? Invasive? Effective?


I deliberately made the decision to be ambivalent in the film — just to show it, not take a stance, because I thought that would interfere with the story. I didn't want to be heavy-handed with my feelings about it. I thought showing it is interesting in itself, and a lot of people won't know about it, so they'll be able at the end of it to think, well, what do I think about this — is this okay or not okay, and what does this mean for my life?



"Red Road" opens in New York and LA on April 13th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Andrea Arnold on "Red Road" (photo)]]> Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025398 2007-04-09 00:00:00 closed closed andrea_arnold_on_red_road_photo inherit 25398 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Flannel Pajamas," "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/flannel-pajamas-jonestown-the.php Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Flannel Pajamas," Hart Sharp, 2007]


Despite the hoopla, genuine indies, the kind of passion-made, personal film without slumming stars or boutique-studio funding, are rarer than we think, and often just as difficult to define as such. (Indie cachet is a vital marketing factor, after all.) Here's one way to tell: if a film eschews the compromises required in being bought up and shipped into theaters by Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics or Lionsgate, and is instead — gasp — self-distributed. It's hard to question the authentic indie-ness of a filmmaker who shoulders the Herculean task of self-promoting, self-selling and self-financing his or her film's theatrical run. 2006 saw a few, among them David Lynch's "Inland Empire," Andrew Bujalski's "Mutual Appreciation" and Jeff Lipsky's "Flannel Pajamas." Lipsky, a principal figure in the post-Reagan rise of "independent film" (an experienced executive, he co-founded the now-defunct distributors October Films and Lot 49), isn't a rising young hotshot ready to defect to the Industry once his resume film is recognized at Sundance (think about how quickly Darren Aronofsky, David Gordon Green, Jared Hess and Gavin O'Connor surrendered their careers to the machine). "Flannel Pajamas" — his sophomore feature as a writer/director — is instead an eagle-eyed, mature, true-to-thyself piece of cinema made for the sheer making, a film in which the people count more than the PR footprint the movie might make in the Park City snow.


The material is simple: two New York singles (Julianne Nicholson and Justin Kirk) meet, woo, fuck, fall in love, move in together, mix up with each others' messy families, marry, grow disillusioned and break up. That's it — Lipsky's entire intent is to tell the truth, to examine the arc that virtually everyone endures at least once in our lives and yet films (American films, anyway) always ignore. Even so, the movie doesn't feel generalized or iconic — the textures of the characters' lives are specific, thorny, culturally alert and thrumming with surprise. These people talk, like you and your friends do, to entertain each other and to cover up their weaknesses. Kirk's slightly goofy theatrical marketeer is so forthcoming and generous you begin to look for secretive chinks in his White Knight armor; Nicholson's country girl is utterly beguiling except when she is moody and hypersensitive. (A busy but yet-to-be-discovered wonder best known for the 2000 indie "Tully" and plenty of episodic TV, Nicholson is one of the most addictively watchable actresses of her generation.) Egos bump and grind, sexual politics create emotional blisters, the matter of children never gets resolved, family darkness emerges from the background, all of it orchestrated in an off-hand way that evokes how real lives plow forward and intersect, not how movie plotlines rise and fall with oceanic predictability. Did Lipsky try and fail to get distributors interested in "Flannel Pajamas"? If so, the state of Indieville is far more dire and anemic than we ordinarily think.


On the other hand, Stanley Nelson's documentary "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple" found a theatrical distributor — in many ways, non-fiction is the new indie — and the day you see it in any context might be the darkest day of your year. Entirely orthodox in its ways and means, "Jonestown" has a truly apocalyptic story to tell: of how a lonely, poor and mildly disturbed Indiana boy named Jim Jones adopted the Pentecostal business plan of his Midwestern outlands and created the Peoples Temple, a socialist, multi-racial, utopian ministry that drew in thousands of starry-eyed devotees before it began to go crashingly, sickeningly wrong. In the years since its immolation via cyanide and Kool-Aid in 1978, Jonestown has become something like a cultural scar we can only chuckle about if we dare to think on it at all. But Nelson's film matter-of-factly reiterates the details, interviewing dozens of Temple survivors, who recall both their rapturous experience finding love and community as a member of the congregation, and their eventual awareness of their abused, delusional state of near-slavery under the increasingly deranged Jones. Today, the tale plays as a proto-fascist/totalitarian paradigm in miniature, with Jones employing the gamut of Stalinist tactics (informant dread, paranoia, threats, limited media, work-worship, etc.) to maintain his control. It's a revolting parable on power, as well as a devastating inquiry into the religious impulse, ending with the modern era's most spectacular auto-da-fé. You may learn all there is that is known about the Jonestown phenomenon, but the central mystery — how could intelligent, loving parents be persuaded to pour cyanide down their own toddlers' throats, and then drink it themselves while holding their cold children? — remains imponderable, chilling and all-American.



"Flannel Pajamas" (Hart Sharp) and "Jonestown: The Life & Death of Peoples Temple" will be available on DVD on April 10th.

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<![CDATA["Year of the Dog," "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/year-of-the-dog-jack-smith-and.php Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Molly Shannon in "Year of the Dog," Paramount Vantage, 2007]


Year of the Dog


Mike White's characters are all cut from the same swatch of alienated cloth: prone to obsession and often a little touched in the head, they struggle to live within the norms of adult society. Even the most innocuous of White's characters — like a Nacho Libre, or Dewey Finn from "School of Rock" — are, at best, lovable eccentrics. Not for nothing was White a writer and supervising producer on the beloved television show "Freaks and Geeks." He's practically American film's foremost authority on the subject.


His latest tour into personal peculiarity is also his directorial debut. "Year of the Dog" follows a particularly Whiteian heroine: a spinster named Peggy (Molly Shannon) who lives in perfect utopia with her darling beagle Pencil. But when her dog dies suddenly (of mysterious poisoning), Peggy's life spirals into chaos. She tries to fill the void with a new dog (a much less cute, much meaner German Shepherd named Valentine) and with relationships with two diametrically opposed men: a schlubby part-time hunter named Al (John C. Reilly) and an animal shelter employee and vegan named Newt (Peter Sarsgaard). We can relate to Peggy's pain — Pencil's every glance is like a dagger to the heart of unadulterated cuteness — but at a certain point grief gives way to scary, even dangerous behavior.


White's produced more mainstream films, like his Jack Black collaborations, but "Year of the Dog" is a lot closer in tone to his breakthrough screenplay, 2000's "Chuck & Buck," in which an emotionally immature man reconnects with a childhood friend with stalkerish results. Both films begin with the sudden death of character that upends the apple cart that is the hero's existence (in "Chuck & Buck," it's Buck's mom that croaks) and both films start with humor that gives way to more uncomfortable chuckles until you're fidgeting in your seat. Though "Year of the Dog"'s trailer sells the film as a sweet romantic comedy, be forewarned: this film goes to some dark places.


That's not a criticism, mind you, merely an observation. Grief can do terrible things to people, and it certainly does to Peggy. That's not to discount the obvious affection White has for her, and really all of his characters, which never wavers, even when the audience begins to: he loves them for their flaws, not in spite of them. As "Year of the Dog" progresses, it becomes more clear that Pencil's death didn't cause the problems in Peggy's life, it merely uncovered them. When she becomes a vegan in response to her growing obsession with protecting animals, Peggy tells her sister-in-law (Laura Dern), "It's nice to have a word that describes you. I've never had that before."


As a first-time director, White's technique is relaxed and assured, and he pulls good, understated performances from Shannon and Reilly (and an appropriately exaggerated one from Sarsgaard). I particularly liked his use of close-ups in dialogue scenes that aren't as close as they should or would typically be. As a result, Peggy is put at a distance, not only from the audience but from the other characters in the film. She is always at a remove from people, who, she remarks on more than one occasion, always let her down in ways that animals don't. Once Pencil is gone, no one can get close to her.


The movie has a few good laughs (particularly from Peggy's excitable co-worker Layla, who announces her engagement with the line, "I guess all my whining paid off — and I'm not even pregnant!") but this is White undiluted by collaborators who might want to push him more towards the mainstream. Here, he's allowed to be as prone to obsession and as touched in the head as he wants.



"Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis"


"Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis," also opening this week, is another portrait of obsession. Smith was a member of the New York avant-garde art scene in the 1960s and 1970s who became infamous when his film "Flaming Creatures," an orgy of glitter, chiffon and orgies, was deemed so obscene that public screenings were raided and prints confiscated by the police. Smith hated the notoriety and what he considered the monetary exploitation that followed in its wake, when cinephiles like Jonas Mekas started hosting screenings of "Flaming Creatures" without consent or compensation. As a result, he never truly finished another project for the rest of his career.


Most artists have their share of quirks, but Smith was a flat-out iconoclast, a rabid anti-capitalist with a fervid love of trash (literally — one friend recalls a story where the pair were walking down the street and Smith stopped to rearrange garbage in the gutter to make it more aesthetically pleasing). Throughout the 70s and 80s, Smith held endless improvisational plays in his loft; as the story goes, one night no one showed up and Smith went on and performed all night anyway (don't ask me how they know that if no one showed up). In the years after "Flaming Creatures," Smith kept his work in a constant state of flux. At the only public showing of one of his later films, he was editing the raw footage in the projection booth in the middle of the screening. "I want to be uncommercial film personified," Smith said, and he meant it.


Mary Jordan's doc includes tons of great Smith material, which, per the artist's nature, has been difficult to see for years, even before his death from AIDS in 1989. Still, at 95 minutes, without any discussion of his life outside of his art, "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis" is a little thin on material, and by the second hour it falls into a bit of a sour grapes rut. (For someone who was so uninterested in ownership, Smith was sure obsessed with other people's money). I felt like I learned a great deal about Smith the artist, and only a little about Smith the man. Perhaps Jordan's point is that to Smith, the two aspects were one and the same.



"Year of the Dog" opens in limited release on April 13th (official site); "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis" opens in New York on April 11th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: April 13th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/opening-this-week-april-13th-2.php Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Chris Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Lonely Hearts," Roadside Attractions, 2007]


"Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters"

Drawing the ire of both longtime fanboys and the Boston Police Force, the Cartoon Network's popular [adult swim] program lands its first ever feature film. Though the cult audience for the show remains as devoted as ever, devout fans and message board members throughout the Intarweb feel that this latest entry in the series just cries of "sell out." Regardless, we still think this will be the best film ever to star a talking milkshake.

Opens wide (official site).


"Disturbia"

The latest teen thriller stages a modern retelling of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window," substituting Jimmy Stewart and a broken leg with upcoming "Transformers" star Shia LaBeouf (la-boof!) and a government-sanctioned ankle bracelet. Early reviews of the film state that LaBeouf's natural charm and the clever use of technology form an interesting statement about the voyeuristic use of modern technology, but we're just hoping director D.J. Caruso can create an entertaining thriller after a series of subpar films ("Two for the Money" and "Taking Lives").

Opens wide (official site).


"The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai"

Japanese director Mitsuru Meike carves political metaphor out of gratuitous sex scenes in the first "pink" (softcore) film to reach the US — about a call girl who accidentally gets struck by a bullet only to awaken with the ability to understand foreign languages and complex mathematical formulas and a container housing the finger of the American president. Odd indeed...

Opens in New York (official site).


"Hair High"

In an industry in which 2D animation is nearly unseen while talking animals ride surfboards or tap dance and learn "valuable lessons," thank goodness there's still room for Bill Plympton. Transferring his usual whacked-out weirdness and usual sense of humor from short form to feature, the legendary animator's latest details what happens when a 1950s teenage couple is murdered on prom night only to return one year later for revenge.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Hearts of an Empire"

This debut feature from documentarian Jay Thompson follows the adventures of the "Fighting 501st," a group of devoted Star Wars fanboys numbering in the thousands who willingly dress up as famous Star Wars characters despite public ridicule. While the "Fighting 501st" mostly remain loyal fans of the George Lucas series, the group also uses their popularity to sponsor charity events and raise international attention of the Star Wars universe.

Opens in Madison, Wisconsin (official site).


"Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis"

Beloved by John Waters, Andy Warhol and Stefan Brecht, Jack Smith was an otherwise little-known performance artist whose works predated many of his successors and frequently influenced Fellini, Godard and Jarmusch. In Mary Jordan's mesmerizing documentary portrait of Smith, the artist's works are shown through archival footage of his multi-hour one-man theatrical productions, highlighting the vast energy and creativity of this rarely-known master.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Lonely Hearts"

The past year's neo-noirs haven't kept our interest. After watching both "The Black Dahlia" and "Hollywoodland" squander their A-list cast on mediocre thrills, our hopes aren't too high for this latest, which finds Jared Leto (fashionxcore!) and Salma Hayek playing 1940smurderous lovers who lure their victims through personal ads. Naturally, there are two homicide detectives (John Travolta and James Gandolfini) hot on their trail. Early reviews suggest that the often bounced-around film would be better suited to a straight-to-DVD release, which, you know, is never a good sign. Director Todd Robinson's grandfather was one of the cops who investigated the original murders.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Pathfinder"

You know, Vikings get a bad rap in film ("The 13th Warrior," anyone?), so we're not surprised that this latest B-action/adventure flick portrays them as barbarians ripped like steroid-using pro wrestlers (or, er, Spartans?). This film stars "The Lord of the Rings"' Eomer and comes courtesy of the director of the remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," but shares its unfortunate title with a Nissan SUV.

Opens wide (official site).


"Perfect Stranger"

After reading the synopsis for this film, we think they should have renamed it "To Catch a Predator," but too late now. If the thought of Halle Berry getting all steamy with Bruce Willis via the Internet turns you on, then this erotic thriller is for you — Berry plays an investigative reporter snooping out the secret dealings of Willis' shady businessman. It's hard to believe that this film comes courtesy of the director of "Glengarry Glen Ross," but at least it's not about this guy.
Opens wide (official site).


"Private Fears in Public Places"

The latest from influential French director Alain Resnais follows a group of six Parisians who attempt to find love within the city of romance.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Redline"

"The Fast and the Furious-er." Or is it "The Fast-est and the Furious"? Eh, well, we're pretty sure you get what we're going for. Stunt coordinator Andy Cheng's film aims for slick and fast pacing under a shoestring budget as four race car drivers speed off to Las Vegas in order to claim a million dollar prize. And for those of you who care, "Redline" features the personal exotic car collection of producer Daniel Sadek (minus the Ferrari crashed by star Eddie Griffin), so there's a positive.

Opens wide (official site).


"Red Road"

A woman working as a CCTV operator encounters a man from her past she never wanted to see again. The winner of the BAFTA Scotland category, this film draws parallels from everything from Hitchcock to "Spider" and comes courtesy of short film director and Academy Award-winner Andrea Arnold.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Slow Burn"

We still have no idea why this film from "The Art of War" screenwriter Wally Beach is getting a theatrical release, but bear with us as this nearly four-year-old flick (it was filmed in 2003) finally sees the light of day. Ray Liotta stars as district attorney Ford Cole (only in the movies...) who's embroiled in a tense showdown between gangleader LL Cool J and the assistant DA Jolene Blalock as he eyes a shot at a mayoral candidacy.

Opens wide (official site).


"Year of the Dog"

We've loved Mike White since he wrote indie darling "Chuck & Buck," so it's no surprise that we're excited for his directorial debut. Add in some Molly Shannon, John C. Reilley and a dead beagle named Pencil and you've got something to look forward to. Shannon stars as a secretary whose life changes unexpectedly after her dog dies. Expect some seriously depressing moments, but given it's a romantic comedy, it's all gonna be okay in the end...right?

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[Back to the Grind House]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/ifc-news-podcast-21-back-to-th.php Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's overstuffed 191-minute double-feature roars into theaters this week, smiting all naysayers along with plenty of zombies and scantily clad women. On the podcast, we take a look back at what grindhouse theaters were actually like, what kind of movies they showed, and where modern day films like "Grindhouse" fit in.

Download: MP3, 23:33 minutes, 21.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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28117 2007-04-02 00:00:00 closed closed ifc-news-podcast-21-back-to-th publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10028117 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Back to the Grind House (photo)]]> Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10028117 2007-04-02 00:00:00 closed closed ifc-news-podcast-21-back-to-th_photo inherit 28117 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: April 6th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/opening-this-week-april-6th-20.php Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Richard Gere in "The Hoax," Miramax Films, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Are We Done Yet"?

The follow-up to Ice Cube's 2005 family comedy "Are We There Yet?" finds our second-favorite former N.W.A. member married and living in suburbia with the same two kids who bothered him in the first film. After moving into a new house, Cube must battle with an eccentric contractor (the irascible John C. McGinley, most well-known for his role as Dr. Cox in "Scrubs"). What began as a remake of Cary Grant comedy "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" unfortunately turned into yet another bland family comedy sequel, but really, we weren't expecting much to begin with.

Opens wide (official site).


"Black Book"

Paul Verhoeven's American filmmaking career wasn't all that bad (who can forget the three-boobed alien from "Total Recall" and Peter Weller's death scene in the beginning of "RoboCop"?), but he's suffered after "Showgirls." We're excited to see Verhoeven return to his homeland for his latest picture, a WWII-based drama about a Jewish singer's fight for survival. "Black Book" has won critical acclaim for the Dutch filmmaker and even served as the Dutch entry for this past year's Academy Awards — not bad for a former Razzie winner.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Firehouse Dog"

Spuds McKenzie + firehouse + kids = this. Maybe something good will come out of "this," as the premise was quirky enough for "Wonderfalls" co-creator and TV veteran Todd Holland, but really, we miss nagging toy animals.

Opens wide (official site).


"Grindhouse"

What's there to say about this Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez mash-up that hasn't already been said? All we can add is that we're excited as hell for this double billing of two of the most influential filmmakers of the 21st century. Though Rodriguez and Tarantino shot to fame in the mid 90s as directors of "cool" cinema (the Mariachi trilogy and "Pulp Fiction," most notably), this collaboration cites the B-movies of the exploitation yesteryears. Plus, Rose McGowan has a machine gun for a leg — how cool is that?

Opens wide (official site).


"The Hoax"

We didn't expect to get excited about a film directed by Lasse Hallstrom (ho-hum) and starring Richard Gere, but when that film tells the story of fraudulent author Clifford Irving, what's not to get excited about? Gere reportedly does some of his best acting in years in this film festival favorite about an author whose "official" biography of reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes turns out to be bogus, leading to one of the biggest media frenzies in history. Marcia Gay Harden and Alfred Molina co-star as Irving's wife and collaborator, respectively.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Reaping"

We're trying to ignore the irony of the fact that production of this film was interrupted by Hurricane Katrina. This religious-themed thriller from genre director Stephen Hopkins finds a former Christian missionary inspecting a town suffering from supernatural occurrences similar to the Biblical plagues. Hilary Swank's genre pictures generally seem to strike out, and, considering the way this one sounds like a bad M. Night Shyamalan pitch, we're not expecting much.

Opens wide (official site).


"The TV Set"

Director Jake Kasdan may be more well-known for his filmmaking family (father Lawrence wrote the fifth and sixth "Star Wars" films) than his own career (the quirky "Zero Effect" and studio comedy dud "Orange County"), but his latest film offers some promise as it tracks an idealistic writer trying to navigate his TV pilot through the madness of the television industry. We love the idea of Sigourney Weaver as a headstrong network president.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Whole New Thing"

"The Fishing Trip" director Annon Buchbinder's latest film has been making the festival rounds since its premiere at Toronto in 2005, garnering a series of awards, including a win at the Commonwealth Film Festival and a Genie Award nomination (Canadian Oscars, eh). The film tells the story of a former home schooled middle school student who develops a crush on his gay English teacher when he's enrolled at his local high school.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[What's Up In March]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/whats-up-in-april-1.php Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Rear Window," Paramount Picture, 1954 — screening as part of the Fashion in Film Festival]

Miami International Film Festival

Mar. 2-11

For early spring breakers hitting South Florida, the Miami International Film Festival might be a great time to check out Paul Verhoeven's latest film, "Black Book," or perhaps the Luc Bresson tribute. Regardless of what film is playing, the frostbitten IFC News team is jealous.


Pimps, Prostitutes and Pigs: Shohei Imamura's Japan

Mar. 2-29

2006 saw the loss of one of Japan's premier New Wave directors, as Shohei Imamura passed away at the age of 79. Often seen as the "anti-Ozu," Imamura rejected the middle-classicism of the celebrated 1950s Japanese filmmakers and instead focused on the portrayals of the downbeat and downtrodden of Japan's lower classes. Films to be screened in this series include "Vengeance is Mine," "Warm Water Under a Red Bridge" and "The Pornographers."


"Infernal Affairs": The Complete Trilogy

Mar. 9

Check out the original Hong Kong police thriller recently re-made by Martin Scorsese into 2006's Best Picture Oscar winner, "The Departed," at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in D.C. Also included in the screening of the original "Infernal Affairs" are the two sequels that followed, which each explore what happened before and after the events of the first film.


A Panel on "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"

Mar. 15

As Matthew Broderick continues his career as one of the strongest stage actors in New York, we still think of his fondly as our favorite 80s teenager, Ferris Bueller. From a pre-nose job Jennifer Grey to an ever-quotable Ben Stein, John Hughes' "Ferris Bueller" remains as one of the smartest-written films in a decade most of us would rather forget. To celebrate the release of "Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes," a new collection of essays based on the works of John Hughes, the IFC Center will feature a panel discussion with the writers (of which there are many). Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?


Fashion in Film Festival

Mar. 17-25

The Museum of Moving Image in Queens presents this interesting collection of feature films, documentaries, video art, experimental films and newsreels that investigate how the art of fashion is presented through film. Films to be screened include Alfred Hitchcock's Anita Colby-inspired "Rear Window," the Howard Hawks silent satire "Fig Leaves" and a collection of newsreel and doc footage curated by fashion expert Marketa Uhlirova.


"Network," with special guest Sidney Lumet

Mar. 19

Legendary director Sidney Lumet ("The Wiz"!) will be on hand for this screening of his Oscar-nominated 1976 television satire "Network" at the Academy Theater in Beverly Hills.


"Live Free or Die" with Andy Robin

Mar. 22

Stamford, CT native and former "Seinfeld" writer Andy Robin directs his first independent feature, "Live Free or Die," about a ragtag group of criminals attempting to stage a heist in the Granite State. Robin will be on hand at the Avon Theatre in Stamford for a Q & A session after the film.


Lost & Found: "The Curse of Quon Gwon" and "Her Wild Oat"

Mar. 29

"The Curse of Quon Gwon," long thoughts of as a lost example of early Asian-American cinema, and "Her Wild Oat," an early Colleen Moore flapper comedy of the silent era, receive restoration treatments from the Academy and will screen at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Michael Mortilla will provide a live piano accompaniment at the screenings — swank!


The 9th Annual Method Fest Independent Film Festival

Mar. 29 - Apr 5

The only film festival solely dedicated to the art of acting, the Method Film Festival hits Calabassas, CA, for a week, showcasing independent features and shorts of actors embracing their inner Stanislavsky. Somewhere, Ryan Gosling is stoked.

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<![CDATA[What's Up In April]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/whats-up-in-april.php Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz," TeleCulture, 1983]


Fassbinder in the Collection

Apr. 2 - 22

To mark the acquisition of the remastered version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (which will also be screening, its 919 minutes spread out over four days), NYC's MoMA presents a selection of Fassbinder films from their vast collection. The series also includes the North American premieres of two documentaries by Juliane Lorenz, director of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, about the restoration of "Alexanderplatz."


The 14th New York African Film Festival

Apr. 4 - 12

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the independence of Ghana, NY's Walter Reade Theater presents this annual film festival of titles meant to dismantle previous notions and prejudices about African society. This year's festival includes a special feature focusing on rarely seen archival footage, ranging from colonial propaganda films to newsreels made shortly after independence.


Fares to Remember: Seven Movies for Taxi 07

In honor of the modern-day taxicab's 100th anniversary and the upcoming "Taxi Week" in New York, the IFC Center presents a seven-film tribute to taxis in film. Films to be screened include Martin Scorsese's iconic "Taxi Driver" (of course!), the Harold Lloyd silent comedy "Speedy," Neil Jordan's "Mona Lisa" and others. Films not to be screened include the Jimmy Fallon/Queen Latifah "comedy" "Taxi" and any selections from HBO's "Taxi Cab Confessions" series.


Noir City: Film Noir at the Aero and Egyptian Theaters

Apr. 12 - May 2

Two series are presented at the Aero and Egyptian Theaters in Santa Monica and Hollywood, beginning with "Noir City: Ocean View" at the Aero, highlighting the city's film noir history, beginning with a screening of Billy Wilder's classic "Double Indemnity." To the Egyptian comes a film festival pitting both classic and obscure noirs set in the cities of Los Angeles and New York, when noir was at its blackest. Each double bill offers one film set in New York and the other in LA.


Thai Takes 3: Independent Film Festival

Apr. 13 - 15

This indie film fest highlights emerging and established Thai and Thai-American filmmakers and will be held at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Be sure to catch "The Unseeable," the latest from director Wisit Sasanatieng ("Tears of the Black Tiger"), and the semi-autobiographical "The Tin Mine" from director Jira Maligool.


Sarasota Film Festival

Apr. 13 - 22

This annual film festival descends upon balmy Sarasota for the ninth year in a row, establishing this small Florida city as home to one of the fastest growing film festivals in North America. This year's highlights include the presentation of a Humanitarian Award to actor Edward Norton, discussions with Oscar-nominated actress Marcia Gay Harden and former "Sopranos" mobster Joe Pantoliano about their new movie "Canvas," and an international street fair following a day of screenings of films from around the world.


Recent Films by Hong Sang-soo

Apr. 16 - 21

The Brooklyn Academy of Music hosts screenings of three of Korean master Hong Sang-soo's latest films, including 2004's "Woman is the Future of Man," 2005's "Tale of Cinema" and 2006's "Woman on the Beach."


"Leave Her to Heaven"

Apr. 20

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science in Beverly Hills presents this rare screening of 1945's "Leave Her to Heaven," John M. Stahl's nearly forgotten noir starring "Laura"'s Gene Tierney in her only Oscar-nominated role as a dangerously jealous wife. It's a rare chance to enjoy this film in all of its lurid Technicolor beauty.


Great to Be Nominated

Apr. 23 - May 7

This series, sponsored by Beverly Hills' Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, features a picture from each Academy Award year that received the most nominations without winning the Best Picture award. The films of April focus on the late 1970s and include a 30th anniversary screening of "Star Wars," a newly restored print of the Fred Zinnemann-directed "Julia," Warren Beatty's directorial debut "Heaven Can Wait," and the Bob Fosse bio-musical "All That Jazz."


9th Annual Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival

Apr. 25 - 29

Chicago Sun-Times critic, Pulitzer Prize winner and "thumbs up" creator Roger Ebert hosts this film festival based out of Champaign, IL, on a group of hand-selected critically overlooked films. This year's festival includes screenings of the sci-fi thriller "Gattaca," Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" and the Ebert-penned "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Ebert, still recuperating from surgery, will be there watching the film and introducing the festival.

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<![CDATA[Paul Verhoeven on "Black Book"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/paul-verhoeven-on-black-book.php Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Thom Hoffman and Carice van Houten in "Black Book," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


"Robocop." "Basic Instinct." "Showgirls." After 20 years of directing violent, sexually explicit and genuinely iconic movies in Hollywood, Paul Verhoeven decided the only way he'd be able to make more personal projects would be to return to his native Holland. Inspired by actual events in the waning years of WWII, "Black Book" stars Carice van Houten as a popular Jewish singer whose personal losses lead her on an action hero's journey to becoming a revenge-seeking member of the Dutch Resistance. In true Verhoeven fashion, historical accuracy gets an adrenaline shot of sensationalism, leading to van Houten's complicated affair with the head of the Dutch SD (Sebastian Koch, "The Lives of Others") and an already-notorious pubic hair bleaching scene. As bold as the films he makes, Verhoeven speaks fast and tangentially, which only allowed me to ask a few of the many questions I had readied for this truly idiosyncratic artist.


Were there other reasons for returning to the Netherlands besides not being able to get your dream projects made in America?


No, that was the reason. I mean, there were several reasons altogether that pushed me to make the decision. First of all, after "Hollow Man," I felt a little bit disappointed, not even by the financial situation, [but] because I had succeeded [in making] a movie that I didn't feel was extremely personal. There were many attempts to push me to do "Basic Instinct 2," which I ultimately refused. They continued to send me scripts about science fiction and action. After doing four science fiction movies of the six that I made in the United States, it was time to go back to reality. I felt that I had been drifting and dwelling long enough in science-fiction-action-fantasy land.


I tried to set up one or two projects, notably a project about a woman I think is very interesting. She lived in the 19th century, mostly in New York, and her name was Victoria Woodhull. She was a proto-feminist and a friend of this very famous Brooklyn preacher, Henry Beecher, whose sister wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In that area, [Woodhull] was working on the business market, she was basically running for President, but she had a prostitute background. She was also a healer and a clairvoyant. If you analyze the whole case, you'll see a lot about the United States as it still is now, but basically filtered by a full century in between. I tried, and I didn't get it off the ground. I think people thought it was too audacious or provocative, or God knows what.


At that same time, I asked my Dutch screenwriter [Gerard Soeteman] — who had written all my European movies before I emigrated to the U.S. in 1985 — to work more diligently on this old project that we had, which is now called "Black Book." It was based on a lot of research we had done already in the 70s and 80s that we had never resolved. We were always blocked; we never found how the second part of the movie should be and whatever. The situation in the United States at this point didn't lead to anything that was close to my heart, that would remind me of the time when I decided why I wanted to become a film director. You might know, I'm trained as a mathematician. I wanted to get that feeling back when I was 27, when [I made the] switch over from mathematics to filmmaking, and I got that opportunity with "Black Book." So, the moment that the script was finished, and a lot of European countries — Holland, Germany, England and Belgium — liked the script and were willing to participate, I jumped on the occasion. I thought, "Okay, let me take a sabbatical from American filmmaking, and let me do this movie so at least I know why I'm living."


How much different is working on a Dutch or European production now than how you remember it from before you emigrated?


There were a lot of Dutch movies made in the last 10 to 15 years. I've found that if people make a lot of movies, they start to get better crews. I had an excellent crew, very well prepared to do this quite complex and expensive movie. I didn't feel any difference between shooting a movie in the United States or in Holland and Germany. It's more that if you want to make a digital movie like "Lord of the Rings" or even "Starship Troopers," you shouldn't do it in Holland. I think we used nearly no digital imagery. I wanted real planes, boats, trains, everything real, and that's what I got, so if you exclude the digital fields — which, of course, are much more developed in the United States or even in Australia — I think the situation is the same.


Financially, it's pretty much a disaster because this so-called European Union is not so union, you know. All these countries have their own laws, and they're getting more and more nationalistic instead of being more European. I have the feeling that everybody is retreating in his own country again. To get all this money together to the degree that we needed it — which was 21 million dollars from four different countries, 20 or 30 different sources, plus many distribution deals — was a nightmare. It was a financial mosaic that, while I was shooting, I often had the feeling could be collapsing at any moment. Sometimes there was really no money to pay the crew, and I think they all felt they were working on an interesting movie, so they stayed. These things are very difficult in Europe. That's a disadvantage, clearly, in comparison to the United States.


What is an advantage is that access to top acting talent is so easy. There is no filtering through agents and managers and agencies. I could ask any actor, be it one of the top actors in Germany, like Sebastian Koch, or in Holland, like Carice van Houten, "Can you play a scene for me? Act it out so I can see how you would do it, and I can see if you are the right person or not." That was all possible.


On the field of artistic freedom, it was quite sensational because there was nobody interfering with the way I wrote and filmed the script. There was nobody telling me "Too much nudity. Too much violence. This is politically incorrect. We should be careful. The audience won't like this. Tone it down." In Los Angeles, people are so afraid to offend the audience that everything that is, in any way, a little bit dangerous is basically taken out of the script when you work for the studios. That didn't happen here. When I started the first 10 years in the United States, working for these smaller companies like Orion and Carolco — where I did "Flesh + Blood," "Robocop," "Total Recall," "Basic Instinct," even "Showgirls" — that interference didn't exist either. But slowly, as these companies all bankrupted and disappeared, I became more and more a part of the studio system. Then, of course, there was much more scrutiny from the top to not be too outrageous, and I've always been pretty outrageous. [laughs.]


Yes, you have. Is there anything that actually shocks you anymore?


In general? American politics shock me a lot sometimes. I mean, it's more the reality of the situation where this government has misled the people of the United States and not given them insight. Slowly, of course, these things became clear, but I think that's extremely disturbing. Movies or anything like that are never shocking to me. But to mislead a country and people willing to sacrifice themselves, or their sons and daughters, and only to find out that the motivations for this war were concocted... I think that is terrible. I think we're living in dangerous times.


Speaking of ugly truths, I want to ask you about shooting that Abu Ghraib-esque prison sequence. How many times did you have to pour a cauldron of shit on poor Carice?


Three or four times. Yeah, of course, we had four or five cameras there, and we all hoped that the first take would be enough, but it turned out to be more difficult. The floor was wrong, the camera was too late, or too this or too that, so I had to ask her to do it several times. She hated it, nearly had to throw up after every take, and was rushing back and forth to the shower between takes to feel clean for a moment. It was not real shit, of course, but the smell was still absolutely disgusting. I knew that it would be difficult, so my wife and I sent her flowers at the beginning of the day and said, "Good luck today!" [laughs.] She knew it would be hard, but she's a tough girl, and when she's acting, she becomes the character. She'll go anywhere you want her to go.


Early last year, a group of film bloggers from around the world each re-evaluated "Showgirls" on the exact same day. Have you heard of the "Showgirls Blog Orgy?"


Yes, I read an article on the internet about this, and I heard there were many different opinions. Where do I find this? I'll write it down.



"Black Book" opens in New York and LA on April 4th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Black Book" and "The TV Set"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/black-book-and-the-tv-set.php Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The TV Set," THINKFilm, 2007]


"Black Book"


After seven very quiet years, Paul Verhoeven returns from moviemaking exile with "Black Book," his first feature since disappointing invisible rapist movie "Hollow Man." Or, perhaps, Verhoeven's exile continues: "Black Book" is also the first feature the talented and controversial Dutch filmmaker has made in his native Europe in over twenty years. Whether Verhoeven's return home was offered or imposed upon him, there's no denying he revels in the accompanying creative freedom. "One day you're singing, the next you're silenced," someone says in "Black Book," and no doubt, Verhoeven, pigeonholed in Hollywood as a director of sci-fi trash, can relate. "Black Book," a picture bursting with the director's signature mixture of bleak wit, brutal violence and sexual depravity, is his most accomplished, entertaining and truly "Verhoevian" work since "Basic Instinct."


Like "Basic Instinct," "Black Book" is an erotic thriller, but unlike Joe Eszterhas' epochal boobies-and-butchery wankfest, Verhoeven's latest is set in the past, in occupied Holland at the tail end of WWII, where a buxom woman — and aren't they all in Verhoeven's cinematic universe? — named Rachel goes undercover in the Nazi regime in order to help the Dutch Resistance and extract revenge on the men who murdered the rest of her Jewish family. She uses her feminine charms to slink her way into the confidence of Müntze ("The Lives of Others"' Sebastian Koch), a powerful Nazi officer but, like so many movie heroines before her, lets herself fall for her prey.


The full definition of that "Verhoevian" tag is elusive, but the director's obsessions (or maybe fetishes is a better word) are not. "Black Book" shares a host of thematic echoes with the rest of the director's oeuvre. Like "Total Recall," it features a group of Resistance fighters nearly torn apart by a mole within their ranks (it's worth mentioning that Verhoeven's "Soldier of Orange" is also about the Dutch Resistance). Like "Basic Instinct," its female lead is an untrustworthy blonde, though, in this case, she's using her irresistible gams for good instead of evil. Like "Hollow Man" and "RoboCop," "Black Book" is about someone who undergoes such an extensive physical transformation that they're not only physically unrecognizable, but emotionally as well. And like so many of Verhoeven's movies, there are numerous homages to Hitchcock: if "Total Recall" was his "North by Northwest," "Black Book" is his "Notorious," if only Ingrid Bergman had wiggled her naked butt on camera for the delight of Cary Grant and the rest of the audience. Add in a dash of Dietrich and her sex and espionage (or "sexpionage," if you will) picture with von Sternberg, 1931's "Dishonored," (where Dietrich plays a spy so sexy she seduces herself along with her target) and you've pretty much got the whole movie in a nutshell.


In other words, the material is as old as World War II, if not time itself, but Verhoeven makes it sing. Nazis are dependably scary movie villains, but they've rarely been whipped into such an unstoppable, horrific force: appearing out of nowhere, crashing through walls, guns a-blazin' they're like an army from hell, more akin to the bad guy in a slasher movie than a war film. The movie is paced like an endless sprint: it goes and goes and never lets up.


You can love him or hate him, but you can't deny Verhoeven's fearlessness, which borders on recklessness. He pushes himself and his audience. He tries an erection joke. He literally covers a character in shit. He humanizes some of the evil Nazis (who ultimately come to Rachel's aid) and vilifies some of the heroic Resistance (who cover a character in shit). The most crucial line of dialogue may be the phrase "everyone has unknown depths"... except maybe for Verhoeven himself, whose darkness is up there on the screen for all the world to see.



"The TV Set"


A producer and director of a show as good and as mishandled as the short-loved cult classic "Freaks and Geeks" can speak with some authority on the madness that is the network pilot season. And so writer/director Jake Kasdan does in his funny and insightful comedy "The TV Set," a movie short on huge laughs but long on authenticity and insight. I have no evidence that the shenanigans Kasdan portrays are based on real ones he has experienced or heard about from friends in the business, but his film looks, sounds and feels genuine. Some of it is so bat-crap insane it has to be true. I don't want to believe that a head of programming would say something like, "Original scares me a little. We don't want to be too original," but I do.


Kasdan's story follows a television pilot script called "The Wexler Chronicles" (named, no doubt, to recall the original title of another iconoclastic television show that was ultimately renamed "Seinfeld") from casting through production through the climactic moments when executives decide whether or not to put the show on its fall schedule. Its writer and director is an aging, fattening man with a bad back and a growing family named Mike Klein, played by a perfectly understated David Duchovny. His arch-nemesis is Lenny (Sigourney Weaver) a tenacious exec who lets her 14-year-old daughter make her casting decisions for her and whose latest smash hit is a reality show called "Slut Wars" (which sounds totally absurd until you watch an episode of a real show like "Pussycat Dolls Presents: The Search for The Next Doll"). Everyone agrees "The Wexler Chronicles" is the best script the network has, but whether it makes good television is another matter altogether.


A movie like "The TV Set" makes it very clear why a network like HBO, whose artists are only limited in their creative endeavors by their imaginations (and possibly their budgets) has made such tremendous leaps and bounds in viewership while traditional outlets have floundered. If "The TV Set" is to be believed, its remarkable any quality programs are made at all. The system seems designed to encourage failure. Consider the testing process completed pilots are sent through before the networks put them on the air. A group of people are placed in a room and given a device with a dial; they're instructed to turn it one way at any moment they're enjoying what they're watching and the other way when they're unhappy. How can you possibly judge the quality of anything that way? Are these numbers based on the acting? The writing? The lighting? The judges' stomachache? During this show's testing, the ratings spike when the attractive female lead flirts with her co-star. "The boner factor," Lenny nods approvingly.


Kasdan debunks two different myths about the Hollywood creative process: that productions are works of authors with a singular vision or, conversely, that they are the work of talented artists working in collaboration with nothing but the best final product on their minds. From the creators to the executives to the cast to the assistants to the grips, everyone is looking out only for themselves. Even Mike, who wrote "The Wexler Chronicles" in response to the suicide of his brother, gives in to the network's ultimatums: the choice between maintaining his integrity or feeding his family is a relatively easy one. And in this kitchen, everyone is the cook: the lead actress (Lindsay Sloane) changes her costume because it's not "sneaky sexy" enough; when left to his own devices, the assistant director choreographs a lengthy panning shot from the show open that takes all of the focus away from the dialogue and actors because he thinks it's more "cinematic."


With projects like "Freaks and Geeks," "Undeclared" and his first feature film "Zero Effect," Kasdan's maintained his own creative integrity and worked on projects whose quality speaks for itself. But he's never had a commercial hit of "Slut Wars" proportions. I doubt "The TV Set" will be that hit — it's sort of a more cynical "Get Shorty" with a lot more inside baseball — but I also doubt Kasdan much minds.



"Black Book" opens in New York and LA on April 4th (official site); "The TV Set" opens in limited release on April 6th (official site).

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8442 2007-04-02 00:00:00 closed closed black_book_and_the_tv_set publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008442
<![CDATA["Radio On" and "The Bridesmaid"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/04/radio-on-and-the-bridesmaid.php Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Radio On," Plexifilm]


Rare is the film that endeavors to, and succeeds at, encapsulating a cultural and generational Zeitgeist — not the "spirit" of movies or fashion or entertainment trends, but of life in the street, in the bars, in the underfurnished bedrooms and in-between meeting places populated by the age's new grown-ups, caught somewhere between the burning questions of teenage-dom and evasive answers of adulthood. Wong Kar-Wai got famous making these movies in Hong Kong; the legacy of arthouse cinema, from Michelangelo Antonioni to Wim Wenders to Leos Carax and Gus Van Sant, is rich in Zeitgeisty goodness. Christopher Petit's 1979 debut "Radio On" may be the subgenre's purest tissue sample, because it freeze-dries England on the dusk of the punk era without seeming to try very hard (and does it at a time when British cinema was all but completely moribund). Supported by a nominal narrative, the movie is really a mood piece, viewing the British landscape with a gimlet eye and finding solace only in postpunk pop singles, which structure the movie much as they structure the day for Petit's disenchanted contemporaries, and several generations of jaded kids since.


The music, always heard on LPs, cassettes or radio play, is by David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Devo, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury, etc.; the philosophically beautiful black and white images were shot by Martin Schafer, longtime behind-the-camera cohort to Wenders, who co-produced the film with the BFI. Schafer's saturnine compositions may stand as the most gorgeous monochromatic cinematography ever shot in England, and the visions of industrial waste, semi-rural nowheresville, urban disconnectedness and late-capitalist angst state Petit's position better than any narrative could. As it is, the story hardly tries — a numb and introverted DJ (David Beames) drives in his old coup to Bristol to look into his brother's mysterious suicide. Of course, he discovers nothing, except England itself along the way, home to lost immigrants, political fugitives (like Proll), hustlers, dispirited laborers and punks with nowhere to go. (As a service-station attendant still mourning the death of Eddie Cochrane, Sting makes his first film appearance.)


What "Radio On" gets at is difficult to articulate — a mournful portrait of national anomie, a trapped-in-amber windshield view of a conflicted, self-esteem-challenged country in economic decline. Petit (who was a 70s film critic for Time Out in the UK) is strictly observational, whether it be via the unforgettably evocative roving-camera intro through the dead brother's flat, set to Bowie's "Heroes," or the infinite variations on road-movie transcendentalism, as private car interiors are contrasted against the stark, inky landscapes through which they travel. Clues to history are honey-dripped throughout (a patch of glimpsed graffiti reads "Free Astrid Proll," a railroaded member of the Communist splinter group the Baader-Meinhof Gang), but "Radio On" itself is something of a historical marker — no film has ever captured that epochal time and place in more telling detail.


Or there's Chabrolville, which despite septuagenarian French New Wave stalwart Claude Chabrol's years remains forever in the present day. Given his doggedly consistent fascination with psychopathic crime intersecting with contemporary bourgeois lives, it's a surprise to find that his recent film "The Bridesmaid" (2004) is only Chabrol's second adaptation of one of mystery-doyenne Ruth Rendell's novels (1995's "La Ceremonie" was the first). It is, in any case, a psychodrama of typically brisk efficiency and relaxed gallows humor. The semi-functioning family at the center is sketched in — responsible son (with incestuous lurkings) Benoît Magimel, high-spirited single mom Aurore Clément, bickering sisters — before we meet the titular catalyst at a family wedding: Senta (Laura Smet), a sensuous but off-putting seductress with a mysterious past. Magimel is all pro, deciphering life with his eyes as the chump who gets vacuumed in by this odd girl's impulsive devotions and Nietzschean delusions, but Smet, all eyelashes and butterscotch skin, is the film's prize; she doesn't act out the character's slowly revealed pathologies so much as keep them barely contained behind her mesmerizing stare, like mad dogs in a cage. Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as matter-of-fact genre expertise.



"Radio On" (Plexifilm) will be available on DVD on April 3rd; "The Bridesmaid" (First Run Features) is currently available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: March 30th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/opening-this-week-march-30th-2.php Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News



[Photo: Paul Schneider and Aaron Stanford in "Live Free or Die," THINKFilm, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"After the Wedding"

A Best Foreign Language Film nominee at this year's Academy Awards, "After the Wedding" is the latest from "Brothers" director Susanne Bier. The film tracks what happens when the headmaster of an orphanage in India ("Casino Royale" baddie Mads Mikkelsen) is sent to his native land of Denmark and discovers a devastating life-altering family secret.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Blades of Glory"

Will Ferrell stars in yet another sports-related comedy — this time, the SNL vet pairs with "Napoleon Dynamite" himself, Jon Heder, to poke fun at the world of competitive figure skating. Ferrell had a strong 2006, receiving both commercial ("Talladega Nights") and critical success ("Stranger Than Fiction") after a subpar 2005, while Heder looks like he'll get his first hit since 2004. The film promises to feature the most ridiculous wigs since "Alexander."

Opens wide (official site).


"The Hawk is Dying"

We'd love to see Paul Giamatti expand from his recent string of down-on-his-luck loser characters, but we'll take loser Giamatti over no Giamati any day of the week. The beloved actor stars as an auto repairman in Gainesville, FL, who begins taming a wild red-tailed hawk to escape from his mundane life. The film comes courtesy of "Trans" director Julian Goldberger and originally premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Live Free or Die"

"Seinfeld" writers Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin showcased their first feature film at last year's SXSW, netting a jury prize and industry attention. The film tells the story of two dimwitted small town criminals (Aaron Stanford and Paul Schneider) on the run from a murder they didn't commit. And of course, in true indie fashion, Zooey Deschanel offers a supporting hand.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Lookout"

Indie darling Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in this heist thriller directed and penned by "Out of Sight" screenwriter Scott Frank. Gordon-Levitt plays a former high school sports phenom turned mentally damaged janitor who becomes part of a heist at the bank at which he works. We're pretty much excited for anything Gordon-Levitt does these days, whether it's getting his "Veronica Mars" on in the high school-set film noir "Brick" or playing a gay prostitute and sexual abuse victim in Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin." Also, look forward to Jeff Daniels in a supporting role with full "The Squid and the Whale" beard in tow.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Meet the Robinsons"

Though Disney found commercial success with its first post-Pixar computer animated feature "Chicken Little," critics complained that its fantastic visuals could not make up for an uninspired storyline and lame pop culture clichés. Things are looking better for "Meet the Robinsons," as Disney's second foray into CGI sans Pixar is rich in source material (the film is based on author William Joyce's bestseller) and spectacular graphics. But doesn't the main character look a lot like the kid from "Jerry Maguire"? What's the deal with that?

Opens wide (official site).


"Race You to the Bottom"

Two best friends run off together on a sexually liberating (and metaphorical!) road trip to Northern California, leaving their respective boyfriends at home while shacking up on their way to the Golden State in Russell Brown's feature directorial debut. "Buffy"'s Amber Benson and "Harry + Max"'s Cole Williams star as the sexually nebulous couple.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Ten 'til Noon"

Repetition is the name of the game in this Scott Storm-directed indie in which the same ten minute period is shown through the eyes of ten people all connected to the same crime. While the film's premise clearly shifts the formula of mainstream crime thrillers, we're betting that you'll be exhausted by the film's midpoint. Just imagine watching each season of "24" within a 90 minute framework.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Return of the Gimmick]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/ifc-news-podcast-20-the-return.php Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 "Meet the Robinsons," the 46th animated Disney feature, is the company's second one to be released in 3D. A novelty offering that had its heyday in the 50s, 3D moviegoing is coming back in a big way, at least with a certain type of family friendly blockbuster. Then again, so is seeing movies on the big screen -- really big. The ability to see a film on IMAX is becoming a standard offering for big titles. This week on the IFC News podcast, we discuss the rise of IMAX, 3D and 3D IMAX, and look at past attempts to improve upon the standard moviegoing experience with smells, a live narrator and a joy-buzzer under your seat.

Download: MP3, 24:09 minutes, 22.1 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20803 2007-03-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_20_the_return publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020803 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Return of the Gimmick (photo)]]> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10020803 2007-03-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_20_the_return_photo inherit 20803 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Joseph Gordon-Levitt on "The Lookout"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/joseph-gordonlevitt-on-the-loo.php Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Chris Pratt in "The Lookout," Miramax, 2007]


By mainstream standards, the widest exposure 26-year-old actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has yet received was as the youngest of four wise-cracking aliens on TV's "3rd Rock from the Sun." But those in the know (meaning you, since you're reading this) have likely been following Gordon-Levitt's below-the-Hollywood-radar blip for the last couple of years, be it as the troubled hustler in Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin" or the neo-noir brooder in Rian Johnson's "Brick." The talented Californian can be seen this weekend alongside Jeff Daniels, Isla Fisher and Matthew Goode in "The Lookout," the directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Frank ("Out of Sight"). In this crackling heist thriller, Gordon-Levitt finds himself in the titular role as Chris Pratt, a former high school star athlete who works as a bank janitor after a car accident leaves him with irreparable brain damage. I briefly yakked with Gordon-Levitt down in Austin, TX, where "The Lookout" was premiering as the opening-night film at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.


You could easily have the Hollywood meal ticket if you wanted it. What makes you choose smaller and independent projects instead?


It sounds simple, but I just want to be in good movies. I'm not so concerned with whether it's studio or indie so much as "Is it a good script?" or "Do I like the director?" "The Lookout" is far from an indie movie, y'know; it was made by Miramax. But even though it was produced by a corporate studio that's ultimately owned by Disney, it has the integrity of an independent because Scott Frank cared so deeply about it and was given the power to make the movie he wanted to make. That, to me, is ultimately much more important than where you're getting financing.


What's the difference between a worthwhile script and a waste of your time?


That's a good question. It's hard to put your finger on what makes something good. I can just tell if, while I'm reading it, I'm inspired. If I get excited, stand up, pace around, if I start wanting to read the words aloud, if it makes me think or laugh, things like that. It's the same criteria, I guess, as what makes anyone like a good movie or book. I read a lot of scripts and most of them are bad. [laughs] It's always funny to see where that point is that I'll be like, "Okay, maybe this is going to turn around." I read a little bit more: "This could be good, maybe if..." Read a bit more: "No, it's bad."


I don't know exactly what it is, but I guess if it's boring, fake or simplistic. Or a gimmick. Or I feel like it's shamelessly pandering to money instead of genuinely trying to say something.


"The Lookout" is a very screenwriterly film, even referencing the art of storytelling within an otherwise unrelated heist set-up. When you collaborated with Frank, did he come across as a writer first, then director?


Well, yes. It's easy for a director to get caught up in moment-to-moment visions, what's a great-looking shot, things like that. Scott's prime concern every day was telling the story. Every single scene in the movie moves it along — it's very tight that way. And he needed to make sure all those moments landed while we were shooting. As far as how I should be feeling or looking, he mostly left that to me because he wanted it to happen naturally. Still, Scott had a very specific idea of what he wanted the movie to look like. When I first met him, he started showing me books of photographs of grand vistas from the middle of the country. The movie is shot in a wide aspect ratio, and that's been his vision, that's what he wanted to make.


So many actors would have superficially hinged everything about this character on his brain trauma, but I think you've done well in fleshing out Chris without making his injuries the crux of his personality. How did you approach this?


Thank you. Isla was telling me I didn't look "retarded" enough. [laughs] Well, I spent time with people who had suffered traumatic brain injury like Chris had, which meant everything to me. I couldn't have done it without the help of these guys — Darren, Dan, Ryan — all of whom had very different experiences so you can't make any generalizations. Every time you try to draw a boundary around somebody, [then] examine it closely, you find that those boundaries are arbitrary illusions. I hung out with this one guy named Dan, whose injury was quite a bit worse than the character I was playing. The first thing I noticed about him was that he wouldn't stop cracking jokes. He had a real sense of humor about the whole thing, making fun of himself, his arm that didn't work, his accident... I don't even want to go into the details of what happened to him. It was a horrible, tragic thing, and he would laugh at it. That really struck me.


I think "The Lookout" could've been a really morose, dark, terrible movie, and I'm really glad it's not. Scott always kept an eye on that, too. He wanted it to be a fun thriller, and I think he really accomplished that. It's funny, actually: when I finally saw the movie, I was surprised by how entertaining it was because my subjective experience of shooting it was a struggle [with] a lot of pain, darkness, hard, slow life for three months up in the Winnipeg prairie. I was like, "This isn't slow. This isn't a struggle. This is fun. I'd go see this with a girl on a Friday night." I did not expect that.


I've heard you're a bit of an audiophile. What have you been listening to lately?


These days, I'm trying to listen to nice, pretty music because for the last year, I did three movies where I was listening to nothing but hard, hard — and I don't mean metal — music about aggression. With "The Lookout" — I hadn't done before — it somehow worked for me to only listen to one band. For the whole three months, once I got to work until we were done at the end of the day, I'd only listen to Pearl Jam. Maybe it was because I've been listening to them since I was 12, or maybe it's because they really strike a perfect balance between having that hard, aggressive, manly thing and also being emotionally expressive, kind of vulnerable.


I think it did something to me to only ever hear that one voice. It's hard to describe exactly what it is, but it somehow worked with what I was trying to achieve in making this guy whose brain doesn't work like ours does, to have it just repeat and repeat and repeat like that. They have eight albums, so it's not like I was listening to the same songs over and over again, but it really worked; it helped me keep my focus. When I finally saw them on tour, it was a big part of allowing me to shed some of the layers that I had put on myself to play the character.


What do you think is missing between the interaction of film and music?


Let me tell you, I'm glad you asked. [hands me a card for his website, HitRecord.org] This is the first time I ever made business cards. That's my idea; it's some stuff I made, some videos, films, writing, songs. The coolest thing on there, I think, is a little short where I made the audio first and put visuals to it afterwards, based on a resuscitation poem. I think movies are inseparable from music, and the way they make movies nowadays where you shoot, then the guy comes in, watches and scores it — it works sometimes, but it's also gotten old. [Director] Rian Johnson's cousin Nathan made the music for "Brick." Rian's making his next movie right now in Europe, and Nathan's there with him. The composer of the score is there on set working on the music as they're making the movie. That's cool.



"The Lookout" opens in limited release on March 30th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Small Town Noir]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/small-town-noir.php Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "Fargo," Gramercy Pictures, 1996]


Kansas City might not be an obvious place to set a heist film, but Scott Frank's "The Lookout" makes atmospheric use of the wide spaces at its outskirts and surrounding farms to tell a compellingly neo-noir tale of an unusual recruit in a bank robbery. Film noir may have been born in an urban world (Los Angeles, perhaps, with a few childhood visits to San Francisco and New York) and defined by the look of a labyrinth of seedy bars, dark alleys, mansions in the hills, crowded lunch counters and broad sidewalks, but modern noir is just as likely to be found in Midwestern suburbs as in your pick of America's big, bad cities. There may in fact be more punch in seeing the less expected suspects of a small town get pulled in to dark intrigues. In "Out of the Past," Robert Mitchum's Jeff fled to far away Bridgeport, CA to escape his misdeeds and lead a quiet life, only to have the city find him. These days, small town life is no more benign than downtown New York — here's a look at films noir both old and new that venture further along down the highway.



"Blood Simple" (1984)

Directed by Joel Coen


There are no blind alleys or rain-soaked trenchcoats, and the private detective isn't a dashing, square-jawed matinee idol, he's doughy, sweat-stained M. Emmet Walsh. To be sure, "Blood Simple" does not look like film noir. Much of the action takes place on a run-of-the-mill suburban street; there's even a gag at the expense of one of the characters when he peels out dramatically without realizing he's headed down into a cul-de-sac and has to turn around and drive back. But even plucked out of the genre's requisite surroundings, there's no denying the noir that seeps through the characters' heinous acts of adultery, deception, jealousy and violence. In true noir everyone, including the nominal hero, is flawed or crooked. True to that ethos, there is no innocence by the end of "Blood Simple," just varying degrees of villainy. Either you've cheated on your husband, or you've betrayed your boss, or you've assaulted your wife, or you've been hired to kill someone, or actually killed someone. No one's hands are clean, not even Frances McDormand's, who may be the sweetest femme fatale in history, and also one of the most efficient. She looks nice, but think about this: how many of the men in her life are alive by movie's end?



"Fargo" (1996)

Directed by Joel Coen


It's hard to get over the accents — the joke is so ubiquitous (and more than a little cheap) that on first viewing, it's all you remember: "You betcha!" The Coen brothers grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, which makes them as entitled as anyone to poke fun of the area — they're certainly well-versed in the quotidian details of midwinter Minnesota life. There are no great masterminds behind "Fargo"'s central kidnapping crime; everyone involved, from William H. Macy's amusingly discontented car salesman turned instigator Jerry Lundegaard to Steve Buscemi's weaselly low-rent hood Carl Showalter, is deeply incompetent. Then again, no one in the Brainerd area seems suited to crime or criminality — Lundegaard's plan may have started crumbling before he ever set it in action, but witnesses can't even manage to describe Showalter as more than "funny looking." Into this mix comes Frances McDormand's infinitely sensible police chief Marge Gunderson, who, seven months pregnant, relentlessly cheery and equipped with a hat with ear flaps, is in all ways the opposite of a noir hero. All ways except in her competence — an awkward figure padding out into the snow, she patiently unwinds the events that led to a set of roadside murders. The film's famous reveal — the woodchipper! — is both funny and shockingly violent, but it's Marge's chiding talk with an apprehended criminal afterward that sticks in your gullet, as she greets his actions not with cynicism or jaded curiosity but with genuine incomprehension: "And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day."



"Gun Crazy" (1950)

Directed by Joseph H. Lewis


Before it succumbs to many of the trappings of traditional film noir, including big city bank heists and getaways (albeit ones spectacularly filmed in unforgettably long takes, courtesy of director Joseph
H. Lewis and cinematographer Russell Harlan), "Gun Crazy," one for any all-star film noir list, is rich with small-town details. The story concerns the "thrill crazy" relationship between loves-on-the-lam
Annie (Peggy Cummins) and Bart (John Dall) who have one of the wildest and most suggestive meetings in all of the movies. She's a trick shooter in a carnival and when they meet she's shooting blanks — but not for long. He's in the audience when she calls for a challenger and the two battle back and forth with their pistols, matching each other bullet for bullet. By the time they've each lit crowns of matches off each other's head with their guns, the impending intercourse is pretty much a formality. "What else do you do besides shoot?" she asks when the contest is over, and it's pretty clear she's not talking about crochet. The seamy, smelly, elephant-poop-laden world of the traveling carnival has never been so sexy.



"The Ice Harvest" (2005)

Directed by Harold Ramis


"As Wichita falls... so falls Wichita Falls," or so reads the enigmatic graffiti that greets John Cusack's crooked lawyer Charlie several times over the course of the wretched Christmas Eve charted in Harold Ramis' pitch black comedy noir. Wichita, KS, battened down in the grip of an alarming ice storm, has never looked so terrible — not that there are many instances of it appearing on film with which to make a comparison. "The Ice Harvest" isn't really about Wichita anyway, at least not in the sense that there's any local flavor. Wichita — hardly, in real life, a small town — stands in for any out-of-the-way nook someone doesn't want to be trapped in. Most of the film's characters, including Connie Nielsen's femme fatale Renata, who appears to have been dropped into Kansas straight from the embrace of a 40s noir film, are so eager to cut ties with the town that they double-cross and messily murder each other without hesitation or much experience. The film is remarkable for its misanthropy — Charlie and his untrustworthy partner Vic (a very funny Billy Bob Thornton) are dislikable people, but then so is everyone else, including Charlie's ex-wife, now married to his best friend Pete (Oliver Platt). In her fixed smile during an agonizing holiday dinner scene, we catch a glimpse of a whole other world of respectable misery the film only brushes by on its way to a violent end.



"Shadow of a Doubt" (1943)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock


With its closely cropped lawns, sun-drenched streets and its very own traffic directing cop (who is apparently on duty all day, every day), the town of Santa Rosa, California, the picturesque setting for Alfred Hitchcock's familial film noir "Shadow of a Doubt," could legally change its name to Mayberry and pull it off. And of course, that's the point (with Hitchcock, everything has a point; the setting, the clothes, even the catered lunch for the crew). "Shadow of a Doubt" is perhaps the prototype of the now endlessly mimicked and frequently parodied set-up where the seemingly idyllic suburbs hide darkness beneath their chlorophyllous exteriors. The film — often cited by Hitchcock as his personal favorite amongst his work — follows Joseph Cotton's mysterious Uncle Charlie, who rides into Santa Rosa (on one of the most ominous pollution-spewing trains in cinema history; the symbolic exhaust from its chimney practically obliterates the midday sun) to stay with his sister's family, but soon his behavior draws the suspicion of his beloved teenaged niece Charlie (Teresa Wright). Everything from then on is about surfaces and secrets, double meanings and duplicates from the two Charlies to the elder one's murderous moniker (the seemingly oxymoronic "Merry Widow Murderer"). And the setting is critical; we assume people from the big city are conniving kleptomaniacs, but places like Santa Rosa are supposed to protect honesty and goodness like they were endangered species in a national park. Like he did so many times, Hitchcock shatters our hard-fought illusions with a wrecking ball.



"A Simple Plan" (1998)

Directed by Sam Raimi


No small town noir is as devastating as Sam Raimi's first foray into serious cinema, because no other one is as determined to show fundamentally good people crumble under the weight of moral compromises. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), his blundering brother and his brother's unpredictable, heavy-drinking friend stumble onto a downed plane containing a corpse and four million dollars, and, after some bickering, come up with a plan to keep the cash. Naturally, things go wrong, and soon, very wrong — the film would seem ludicrously gothic were it not for the convincing progression of its terrible events, and the sometimes amusing bumblings of the would-be criminals. Living in the snow-covered Minnesota town in which they grew up, the characters manage to discover in themselves dissatisfactions that would never have occurred to them were the possibility of something else not dangled tantalizingly in front of their faces. Even Bridget Fonda, as Mitchell's sweetly pregnant wife, reveals, in a memorable turn, an inner, steely Lady Macbeth.

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<![CDATA["The Lookout" and "The Hawk is Dying"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/the-lookout-and-the-hawk-is-dy.php Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Paul Giamatti in "The Hawk is Dying," Strand Releasing, 2007]


"The Lookout"


Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) can't get a grip, literally or figuratively. The car accident that robbed him of a promising future and Sundays at the hockey rink also damaged his brain, leaving him mentally and physically impaired. Glasses and bottles slip through the unresponsive fingers of his left hand the way thoughts fall through the cracks of his crippled noggin. He's constantly writing himself reminders in his little pocket spiral notebook so he stays on his routine and doesn't forget to brush his teeth. Chris is better off than Leonard from "Memento," but they could both benefit from the same therapy classes.


Like Leonard's, Chris' handicap is a bridge to a dark criminal underworld that he would never have known existed before his accident. In movies, people with memory loss are very susceptible to criminal activity. You never see someone in a movie bump their head and goes to work for the Peace Corps but, then you never really see anyone go to work for the Peace Corps in movies. It's not nearly as cinematic a subject matter as bank robbery, and so that is where Chris' destiny lies.


His only friend his blind roommate Lewis (Jeff Daniels), Chris is desperate for some human (not to mention sexual) contact, and that's exactly how a shady but charismatic character like Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode) is able to sink claws into him. Sidling up next to Chris at a Kansas City bar, he plies him with companionship, free drinks and his kewpie doll bombshell buddy Luvlee (Isla Fisher). Chris is so happy to be amongst people again he barely notices when Gary begins to make intimations about robbing banks; just by coincidence, Chris works as a late night janitor in a local bank. Cue the planning, robbing, deceiving, shooting and dying.


This sooty concoction comes from Scott Frank, a talented screenwriter ("Out of Sight," "Get Shorty") making his directorial debut, and he exhibits some classic screenwriter-turned-director attributes. It's a meticulously written film, from Chris' ironic voiceover (which is supposed to sync with the notes he leaves himself in his notebook, but often doesn't) to the integration of good storytelling lessons into a narrative (Lewis advice to Chris, and perhaps Frank's advice to aspiring screenwriters: "You can't tell a story if you don't know where it's going."). Another director might have excised some of the clunkier elements, but they do add a refreshing directness to the film; sometimes a big, thudding cross-hanging-over-Chris'-shoulder metaphor (which Frank employs not once but twice during "The Lookout") can do us all some good.


Though it doesn't really look like a traditional entry in the genre, "The Lookout" falls into the world of film noir on the strength of its tragic hero. Chris is more loser than innocent; the car crash was his fault and the mistakes he makes in its aftermath are all his. He's a pathetic guy, but not exactly a likable one and, as Levitt plays him, he has a dark side that manifests itself via outbursts that bubble up when he can't figure out how to make himself dinner or snag a loan from his parents.


Levitt's become one of the most talented and reliable young actors on the indie film scene. With "The Lookout" and other recent standouts like "Brick" and "Mysterious Skin," a pattern's emerged: he's drawn to socially awkward loners, particularly ones with dark secrets in their past that they can't atone for or deal with. What about that appeals to Levitt is unclear; does he feel like he must atone for "3rd Rock"? Dude, it wasn't that bad.


Never terribly outstanding (except when Daniels is on screen), "The Lookout" is nonetheless a solid genre picture, carefully plotted and acted, with a nice balance of style and substance. Unlike most modern day stabs at noir, it's more reserved than flashy; like Chris himself, the movie is withdrawn and subdued, sometimes charming and a little bit sad.



"The Hawk is Dying"


The movie I most anticipated and disliked from Sundance 2006, "The Hawk is Dying" — based on the novel by Harry Crews — comes with a fine creative pedigree and a murderers' row of a cast, including Michelle Williams, Michael Pitt and Paul Giamatti as George, a man obsessed with capturing and training birds. After the death of his nephew, George dedicates himself to training a wild hawk. Until his task is complete, he will not eat or sleep or, lamentably, make a good movie.


Despite the talented cast and creators, the project never gels and, like a lot of festival films, it's drenched in human anguish, heavy on the symbolism, and light on entertainment or enlightenment. And mostly it's just Giamatti with a big leather glove on his hand and a hawk on his arm grunting and sweating as the hawk flaps and squawks around. For two hours.



"The Lookout" opens in limited release on March 30th (official site); "The Hawk is Dying" opens in New York on March 30th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Re-Animator" and "The Perfect Crime"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/reanimator-and-the-perfect-cri.php Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Pulp is as pulp does, but sometimes its context is the pivotal factor -- take Stuart Gordon's outrageously uncomfortable, justly famous 1985 classic "Re-Animator," adapted from a nothing Lovecraft story (cowritten by Gordon, career snickering cheese-master Dennis Paoli and theater vet William Norris). The indie-made movie, which initiated the still-seething stream of cheap Lovecraft filmizations, was very much a creature of its time -- released tentatively and briefly into busy multiplexes and the last few real urban grindhouses left by the mid-80s, "Re-Animator"'s ludicrous gore, humor and theatrical elan zoomed right over most audience's heads, and so it sank unceremoniously (and despite a glowing, albeit characteristically clubfooted, review by Pauline Kael).

Ah, but by 1985 VCRs were just becoming standard operating equipment for most homes and dorm rooms, and VHS-renting video stores were cropping up like mushrooms on every street corner, ushering in the era of low-cost, low-impact, risk-allowing movie choices, and therefore the now-market-dependent principle of scantly released features finding new audiences on video. Gordon's film found a new audience in a big way -- generations of shelf-scrounging renters discovered this ghoulish hopfest, and then passed on the good news, so that by now it has accumulated five straight-to-video sequels and ripoffs, including the upcoming "House of Re-Animator," which brings Gordon back to the franchise for a scenario set in the White House.

Gordon was one of the original founders of the experimental Organic Theater group in Chicago; his dalliances with movies have been erratic, with "Re-Animator" remaining his premier achievement. (It beats out his recent David Mamet adaptation, "Edmund.") "Re-Animator" is such a fierce, energetic, high-flying concoction that every aspect of it feels like a well-tuned joke -- from its timeless, TV-tinged university setting to the iconic acting to the balls-out comic gore, which predated Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead 2" by a few years, and in any case set a new standard for discomfiting dismemberment satire. Lovecraft's young intern Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs, in a performance that should've made him a household name, not just a psychotronic favorite) is a megalomanic wacko with a reanimating serum he tests out at every opportunity, resulting in crazed, out-of-control corpses staggering about, body parts (including intestines) perambulating on their own, and, in the film's most Dantean set-piece, the defilement of a young blonde's naked body (Barbara Crampton paid her dues here, but never cashed in) by a long-tongued severed head held by its own headless body. It's delirious, unpretentious chutzpah of a kind that no one -- not even Gordon -- has been able to tap reliably since. The ersatz sequel, "From Beyond" (1987), is almost as transgressive and hilarious, but after that, the magic was gone.

Scabrous fun of a newer stripe, Álex de la Iglesia's "The Perfect Crime" has this nasty Spaniard, in a crowd of nasty Spaniards, going more and more glitzily commercial. De la Iglesia made a splash in the mid-90s with "Acción Mutante" (1993) and "Day of the Beast" (1995), inventively offensive genre blasts barely released here. Since, he's apparently become an ironic Hitchcockian-Tashlinian, evolving into his country's most daring camp satirist after Almodóvar (when Almodóvar bothers with satire). This aggressively misogynist murder fantasy is set entirely within a department store, the ladies' section of which is the kingdom of vain, womanizing sales-god Rafael (Guillermo Toledo). Everything is changing-room-nookie bliss until a contest for the position of floor manager is upset by a rubber check, and a scuffle produces an accidental corpse; butchery, blackmail, skullduggery and hijinks ensue. De la Iglesia has no fear of tastelessness -- the demonization of the cast's only plug-ugly woman (a lovelorn schemestress played by Mónica Cervera) would be cheap and insulting if it weren't for the film's speed, wit and generally low view of humanity.

"Re-Animator" (Anchor Bay) and "The Perfect Crime" are both currently available on DVD.

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<![CDATA["Re-Animator" and "The Perfect Crime" (photo)]]> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 1008435 2007-03-26 00:00:00 closed closed reanimator_and_the_perfect_cri_photo inherit 8435 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[This Is What It Sounds Like When Comedians Cry]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/this-is-what-it-sounds-like-wh.php Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 As the adage goes, "dying is hard, comedy is harder." So why is it that so many comic actors are eager to cast aside the funny for the oh-so-serious? Sure, you're much more likely to bag an Oscar nomination for a role that calls for droopy-eyed soulfulness than for one that involves carrying out a ground campaign against gophers, but in the end, it's your monologue about caddying for the Dalai Lama that everyone knows by heart.

The latest instance of a comedian crossing the humor line is Mike Binder's drama "Reign Over Me," which features Adam Sandler as a man emotionally shattered after losing his family on 9/11. As Sandler rides around the city on his scooter, reestablishing his sanity and his friendship with a former college roommate (played by Don Cheadle), you have to wonder if this performance is going to be more "Punch Drunk Love" (yes!) or "Spanglish" (ack!). In honor of Sandler's valiant (if perhaps ill-advised) venture back into the dramatic, here's our look at the mixed results that have come about when our favorite comedians have gone serious.


09022010_number23.jpgJim Carrey

The very rubber-faced qualities that make Jim Carrey such a gifted physical comedian sometimes defeat him when he plays it straight. At rest, that spastic visage is surprisingly boyish, but also a little...smug? Or maybe it's just that Carrey, when he's not in full-bore supercomedian mode, seems too smart for the dreck to which he can commit himself so earnestly. To watch him wade wide-eyed through drippy period piece "The Majestic" or to somberly bracket the soapy "Simon Birch" as the narrator and adult incarnation of the main character is to wait on the edge of your seat for him to crack and acknowledge to the audience and to himself that the dreadful dialogue he's uttering could be comedic gold, given the proper satirical touch. And wait you will in vain -- Carrey's latest attempt at drama, the nonsensical numerical howler "The Number 23," finds him, rumple-faced, gamely playing two characters -- good-natured dog-catched (hee!) Walter Sparrow and fictional detective Fingerling (hee again!) -- with nary a wink or a smile.

Not that Carrey's serious roles have been all bad; while I always thought his most acclaimed role as Andy Kaufman in 1999 biopic "Man on the Moon" was overrated, there's no denying Carrey inhabits the comedian's every twitch. And as the unexpected straight man in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," Carrey is, bereft of his comedic trappings, the saddest clown on the LIRR, worn down by the day to day slog of life, but still open to finding a little unanticipated magic in it. --Alison Willmore


09022010_fireworks1.jpgTakeshi Kitano

In the U.S., Takeshi Kitano is a cult icon, a shaper of laconic gangster films that emphasize the empty moments in between blood spurts. His role in Japan is far more complex, having shot to stardom as a member of "The Two Beats," a controversially foul-mouthed comedy duo that came to prominence in the 70s. It's shocking to see clips of them now, since "Beat" Takeshi plays the fast-talking vulgarian to "Beat" Kiyoshi's befuddled straight man. His rapid fire delivery is a far cry from the sullen thugs of "Sonatine" (1993) and "Fireworks" (1997). Kitano went on to dominate television in Japan through the nineties (he was voted Japan's favorite TV celebrity from 90-95), doing a little bit of everything including a game show entitled Takeshi's Castle (86-89), where contestants endured humiliating stunts in order to meet his "Count." The show was later dubbed with a mocking English voiceover and ran in syndication in the states as the Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. That xenophobic nugget (look at those crazy Japanese!) exposed me to Kitano's vast career before his discovery in the states, which is in dire need of a recovery, or at least a few subtitled DVDs of "The Two Beats" in their prime. --R. Emmet Sweeney

09022010_shopgirl1.jpgSteve Martin

Steve Martin was accused of attempting a Bill Murray-like slight-of-bland when "Shopgirl" came out in 2005, two years after Murray sighed his way to a Golden Globe for "Lost in Translation." Playing a post-middle aged, successful, rich man with a thing for Claire Danes' depressive ingénue, Martin tried on melancholy minimalism and it fit him like a giant inner tube. The most unseemly part of the failure was that it was truly an inside job; Martin was responsible for the source material (his novella of the same name) and even provided the turgid narration. Audiences recoiled at the sight of The Grey One's gnarly, old man hands on Danes' bare bum and the film was called, among other things "art decoration for an aging celebrity's unpleasant fantasy." Martin has rarely found success with the serious thing; though he was praised for his role in "Grand Canyon," since then he has tried again with "A Simple Twist of Fate," "The Spanish Prisoner" and then the curiously bad "Shopgirl." I hold out hope that he has it in him somewhere, but without the body armor of the straight man suit or comic bag of tricks, Martin seems to wax over with self-consciousness. --Michelle Orange


09022010_rushmore1.jpgBill Murray

For a while after graduating from the ranks of "Saturday Night Live," nobody could shape a character as funny as he was human like Bill Murray. Even in small roles -- like immortal groundskeeper Carl Spackler in "Caddyshack," who was given special dispensation from the Dalai Lama (something along the lines of "Gunga galunga") -- Murray made huge impressions. But at some point in the mid-90s, Murray transmogrified from comedian who could act into an actor who was also funny. Whether it was because the choice comic roles weren't there anymore, or he started thinking about his legacy, Murray traded the Harold Ramises and Ivan Reitmans of the world for the Sophia Coppolas and Wes Andersons. His first partnership with the latter, 1998's "Rushmore," yielded one of his finest performances in a career full of them as Herman Blume, a man so introverted he was practically antithetical to the goofy, genially grating persona Murray had worked for nearly 20 years.

He's taken a few goofy roles since, but he's mostly stayed in his "serious" mode. But it's one thing to be serious; it's another to be boring, and Bill's come dangerously close in recent films. The Blume role, such a departure, now seems like his standard operating procedure, and what previously felt so fresh now smells a bit stale (see "The Life Aquatic" and "Broken Flowers"). Instead of taking serious roles, Murray seems to take himself seriously -- something that can spell doom for an actor/comedian. Let's hope Bill figures out he doesn't need to be either an actor or a comedian. At his best, he does both equally well. --Matt Singer

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36228 2007-03-19 00:00:00 closed closed this_is_what_it_sounds_like_wh publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10036228 _entry_authors Michelle Orange , Matt Singer ]]> _entry_authors Michelle Orange , R. Emmet Sweeney ]]> _entry_authors Michelle Orange , Alison Willmore ]]>
<![CDATA[This Is What It Sounds Like When Comedians Cry (photo)]]> Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10036228 2007-03-19 00:00:00 closed closed this_is_what_it_sounds_like_wh_photo inherit 36228 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: March 23rd, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/opening-this-week-march-23rd-2.php Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Guy Pearce in "First Snow," Yari Film Group Releasing, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Air Guitar Nation"

From spelling bees to crossword puzzles to mad hot ballrooms, filmmakers have found an interest in documenting something we can only describe as "competitive hobbies." First time director Alexandria Lipsitz focuses on a group of selected individuals who dare to dream of air guitar greatness, as competitors from all across the globe meet in a small city in Finland to take part in the annual World Air Guitar Championships. Though we here at IFC News remain steadfast Guitar Hero II rockers, we're hard-pressed to turn down anything guitar-related, real guitar or imaginary.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Color Me Kubrick"

After premiering nearly two years ago at the Dinard Festival of British Cinema, Brian W. Cook's wildly eccentric film about a wildly eccentric poseur pretending to be a wildly eccentric director reaches US theaters. How can you not love John Malkovich as a fake Stanley Kubrick? Expect him to steal every scene in the film.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"First Snow"

First-time director Mark Fergus, who recently picked up his first Oscar nomination for the "Children of Men" adapted screenplay, co-wrote his debut feature about a hotshot salesman whose life goes into a tailspin after receiving an ominous fortune from a psychic. Guy Pearce stars as the man whose fate is left up to supernatural mysteries.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Hills Have Eyes 2"

"Rohtenburg" director Martin Weisz tackles the Wes Craven-penned sequel to that cannibal horror film from last year. Now, let's take note, this is not the sequel to the European backpacking horror film or the one with the flesh-eating zombie/monkey virus or even another "Saw" film. Cannibals, people. Cannibals.

Opens wide (official site).


"Journey from the Fall"

This Vietnamese import from "The Anniversary" director Ham Tran follows what happens when a father is left behind in his native country as his family is forced to emigrate to the United States. Somewhere, we're sure, Angelina Jolie is watching.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Last Mimzy"

You know, being the cinephiles that we are here at IFC News, we still have no idea what the hell a "mimzy" is. New Line Cinema founder and CEO Robert Shaye directs this kids' film, his first since the 1990 crapfest "Book of Love," about two siblings who begin to develop special powers after finding a mysterious box of toys. We'd guess that "The Office"'s Rainn Wilson will be the best part of this one, but considering the film's lack of positive buzz, theatrical release on a packed weekend, and Shaye's directorial track record, we're tempted to suggest that studio execs shouldn't be headlining their own films anymore...

Opens wide (official site).


"Memory"

This Canadian suspense thriller from first-time feature director Bennett Davlin examines what happens when a medical researcher teams up with a doctor to root through the genetically stored memories of a serial killer. "Memory" stars Billy Zane and the hottest Cylon in "Battlestar Galactica," Tricia Helfer.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Offside"

It might be a little early to proclaim "The Circle" director Jafar Panahi Iran's answer to Almodóvar, as the Iranian director fills his films with women fighting against oppressive societies. But still — "Offside" tells the story of a group of young girls who dress as boys in order to sneak in to a World Cup soccer game, as women are not allowed in the stadium. Word of mouth for this one is mostly positive.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Page Turner"

A former gifted piano player returns to the musical conservatory that turned her away, inveigling herself in as the page turner for the chairwoman who caused her to fail her entrance to the school. Catherine Frot and Déborah François (of "L'Enfant") star.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Pride"

Based on a true story. Troubled teens growing up in rough urban neighborhoods. Inspirational teachers. You get the drill. We wouldn't expect anything new in the underdog sports film "Pride," from first-time director Sunu Gonera, but at least we get to see Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac act up a storm.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair"

"Gunner Palace" directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker present another documentary on the effects of war in a bombed-out Iraq as a freedom-loving Iraqi journalist is mistaken for Tony Blair's possible assassin and sentenced to prison in Abu Ghraib. The film continues Epperlein and Tucker's darkly comic take on the American occupation through the use of original comic book art and a Kafka-esque portrayal of the journalist's imprisonment.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Reign Over Me"

Adam Sandler gets depressed (drama!) and Don Cheadle gets all Good Samaritan in "The Upside of Anger" director Mike Binder's latest, about two college roommates who rekindle a friendship several years after the September 11th attacks. We liked Sandler a bunch in "Punch-Drunk Love" (we keep trying to convince ourselves "Spanglish" never happened...) and love Cheadle in everything, but we've yet to find a non-documentary film concerned with 9/11 that we actually liked. We're hoping Binder's film uses 9/11 as little more than a dramatic plot device, but we're not holding our breaths.

Opens wide (official site).


"Shooter"

Though this film may sound more like something Harrison Ford would've done fifteen years ago, we're hoping director Antoine Fuqua can regain the form he displayed in 2001's tense "Training Day." Though we certainly love us some Mark Wahlberg ever since he dropped the Funky Bunch, sniper movies have a tendency to just not do it for us ("Enemy at the Gates," anyone?).

Opens wide (official site).


"TMNT"

Hollywood continues to destroy our collective childhoods with this update of the 90s film/cartoon/comic book series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Though director Kevin Monroe opted to film completely in computer graphics for this franchise reboot, we'll take the live-action films any day of the week. In the immortal words of Vanilla Ice, "Go ninja go ninja go! Go ninja go ninja go!"
Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Do Critics Matter?]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/ifc-news-podcast-19-do-critics.php Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 "300," "Ghost Rider," "Wild Hogs" and "Norbit" -- this year's top box office draws to date are also some of the worst reviewed films, while critical darlings like last year's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" have trouble attracting any audience in the theaters. This week on the IFC News podcast, we discuss whether critics matter when it comes to box office success.

Download: MP3, 22:24 minutes, 20.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25378 2007-03-19 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_19_do_critics publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025378 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Do Critics Matter? (photo)]]> Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025378 2007-03-19 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_19_do_critics_photo inherit 25378 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Air Guitar Nation"'s Bjorn Turoque]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/air-guitar-nations-bjorn-turoq.php Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane (left) and David "C-Diddy" Jung of "Air Guitar Nation," Shadow Distribution Inc., 2007]


No word yet from the International Olympic Committee on whether air guitar qualifies as a genuine sport, but to watch the contestants vying for the crown at Finland's Air Guitar World Championship is to have no doubt. Alexandra Lipsitz's "Air Guitar Nation" chronicles the events leading up to and encompassing the 2003 contest, with specific focus on the rivalry between U.S. champion David "C-Diddy" Jung and dark-horse competitor Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane. Now retired from active competition, Bjo... er, Dan was willing to sit down with me to discuss his life of pretend sex, over-the-counter drugs and mimed rock 'n' roll:


Let me understand this. You are an actual musician?


I am.


And you composed the music for this film?


I did.


And there's footage in the film of you actually performing?


There's a brief shot of me playing with my band.


So, then, air guitar? What the hell?


Well, I heard about [the U.S. competition], and it was like, "Okay, here's a chance to play what's going to be a sold-out show. I won't have to bring any gear, I won't have to learn any songs and maybe there'll be some groupies. It'll be the easiest gig I ever have to play." Once I did the first one, I realized it's not like playing in a band. There's the live experience of it, there's the roar of the crowd, but it's a whole different animal from playing in a band.


So this started as a side gig and eventually built into this whole dark-horse campaign against C-Diddy. How did your friends react?


I tend to put myself out there as the butt of many jokes — so I don't think anyone was that surprised; it made a lot of sense. My girlfriend at the time found it a little annoying that I kept doing it. Our first year anniversary was during the L.A. competition, and she was like, "This is how we're going to spend our anniversary, going to L.A. for you to compete in a fucking air guitar competition?"


Did you regard the whole 2003 effort — the Internet campaign and the fund-raising and the talk show appearances — as part of the performance?


In the movie, you can see two different people. Most of the time when I was doing interviews and all that stuff, I was trying to imagine, "Who is Bjorn Turoque? Who is this fantasy? If this is my fantasy of a rock star, what's he like?" The more times I'd do interviews, the more I got to know him. But there are moments in the film when it's just me talking. So the whole experience is in some ways a performance, but what surprised me was that, looking back, I actually did get obsessed with it. I always knew it was funny, I always knew it was kind-of a joke, but I really couldn't stop.


How many of the competitors come out of performance to begin with — musicians, theater, improv, like that?


Most of the people are not musicians, most are just fans. They just love this music, and this is their chance to feel that they're "Fast" Eddie Clarke from Motorhead. I grew up in the suburbs in Denver, and I'd put posters all over my wall, sit in my room, turn up the music really loud and just rock out to that music by myself.


Air guitar is something that doesn't really require any skills, it doesn't require any lessons, it doesn't require gear that you've got to schlep around. It's like dancing. When you hear the right beat and you've had a couple of drinks and you're somewhere where you feel like doing this [performs an air-lick], you just do it. It's an atavistic response to music. You hear a powerful E-chord, you just want to go, Rawrrr. It's a natural response to rock 'n' roll.


Is it more than just connecting with the music, though? Every air guitar performance I delivered didn't end when the music stopped; I had to bask in the adulation of my air-audience.


You know, when I was that kid in that bedroom, and I saw that picture of Led Zeppelin and I saw Jimmy Page — his stance and his swagger and his sense of presence — that's something I wanted to emulate.


And now, in this competition, you break out of just having the mirror as your audience.


I think there are people that gravitate towards wanting that kind of feeling, of communicating with an audience. But I have been a musician all my life, and I love it. My band has a great show and the crowd goes nuts; they come up to me afterward and say they loved it, and that's a great feeling. It's shocking that you can get that same feeling in the competitions. I think that making that leap from the bedroom to the stage is definitely not for everyone, but there's always the class clown that needs to get up and make an ass of himself, and that's the kind of person that's going to be playing air guitar. [Laughs]


How much did your rivalry with C-Diddy extend offstage?


I think it did for a while, but we've both retired from competition and we've gone to film festivals together, and we air guitar together, back-to-back, so now it's a mutual appreciation and admiration. I admire his skills, he admires my idiocy and persistence.


Did this whole experience affect you in any way?


It's revealed something to me about myself: That it's actually okay to be the second-place guy. It's kind-of better, in a way; I enjoyed that status and the humor of it. That's who I am.



"Air Guitar Nation" opens in New York on March 23, Los Angeles on March 30, rolling out to other cities in subsequent weeks (official site).

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<![CDATA[Rock Does Rohmer]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/rock-does-rohmer.php Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: "I Think I Love My Wife," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


Chris Rock and Eric Rohmer are two artists whose names aren't likely
to appear in the same sentence, or even the same library. But with
nary a warning (or much of an ad campaign), here comes the Rock-directed "I Think I Love My Wife," a remarkably faithful adaptation of Rohmer's 1972 "Love
in the Afternoon" (released in the US as "Chloe in the Afternoon"). Fans of both may cringe, expecting another comic's craven attempt at an Oscar grab, or a Hollywood dumbing down of a legendary auteur's masterpiece. That
Rock avoids both of these pitfalls is nothing short of miraculous — he approaches the original material with respect and retains its ambiguities while recasting it entirely in his own vulgar (and hilarious) idiom.


"Love in the Afternoon" was the final film of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" cycle, which began in 1962 with the breezy wandering eye tale "The Bakery
Girl of Monceau." The series is made up of these ogling eyes and the decisive moments when the gap between gaze and flesh could easily be closed. The films are dazzlingly verbal and reassuringly concrete, as each Rohmer protagonist (usually in voice-over) wrestles with the practical consequences of each coupling, while the rich cinematography (the last four by the great Néstor Almendros) traces luminous hands on backs and feet in sand.


The plot of "I Think..." (and "Love") is simple: Richard (Chris Rock), a
white-collar businessman, grows bored of the regularity of
middle-class life and begins fantasizing about liaisons with random
women he sees on the street. Then an old crush from his school days,
Nikki (Kerry Washington), shows up at his office looking for help with
a new job — and they begin a slow flirtation stoked by regular lunches
that the man keeps from his wife, Brenda. Eventually he has to come to
a decision of whether to engage in an affair or return to his wife.
Chris Rock's script with long-time collaborator Louis C.K (creator of
the underrated HBO show "Lucky Louie") remains scrupulously close to the
original, retaining the same narrative structure, use of voice-over, and unblinking view of male lust and the apathy instilled by the routines of marriage. What makes the film more than merely a respectful imitation is how much Rock invests of his own personality and obsessions.


The largest departure from Rohmer's film is its consideration of race,
which informs every frame. In one of the introductory scenes, Richard
walks to work, saying hi to the only other black employees at his investment banking firm — two custodians he meets on the way to an
elevator. An even more revealing detail occurs off-handedly; when
Richard asks Brenda whether any black children will be at their kids'
play date (they live in a white suburb), he spells out B-L-A-C-K so
the child won't hear. This is a glimpse of a black middle-class that's rarely seen on-screen, one that balances acceptance into the white business world with hopes of maintaining ties to the black culture they're separated from. In Rock's film, Richard is an outsider in both worlds. Rock gently satirizes Richard's disconnect from mainstream black culture at a dinner party, as Richard's friends spout rote criticisms of hip-hop culture and negatively compare black youth to
Jewish youth (do you think Spielberg got expensive rims as a kid?). This isn't to say the film abandons Rock's acerbically juvenile wit — there are reams of gut shot vulgarities that lay bare what Rohmer more artfully insinuates. The one truly comic part of Rohmer's film is a fantasy the lead indulges in, where he possesses a magical pendant that annihilates women's free will — and a montage follows of him seducing ladies on the street. Rock reprises this daydream, discarding the pendant, and pitches it at a baser level — the id gone wild (and possibly drunk). Instead of asking women to come home with
him, he asks if he can bite their ass and fuck on the spot, screeched
in that child-like way of his, the innocent glee spilling out of the frame. It's a case of different sensibilities — but both reflecting their own bemused truth.


As impressive as Rock's accomplishment is (did I mention the Viagara joke to end all Viagara jokes? Well, it's in there), he still doesn't compare to Rohmer as a director of gestures (nor does he have Almendros to spruce up his rather drab looking images). The decisive moment in both films occurs with a subtle movement and a glance in the mirror that triggers both leads to make up their minds about their futures. In "Love" this occurs organically as a part of the action, its impact generated by the unexpected resonance such a small motion can have. In "I Think..." the action is slowed down as the viewers' attention
is forcefully focused on to it. This excessive underlining robs the scene of its force, and turns into a cliché. It's the only moment in Rock's film that does a disservice to Rohmer.


Where Rock may have exceeded his model is in the ending, justly
celebrated in the original, but here it's turned into a euphoric comic
set-piece at turns uproarious and deeply moving, where Richard's
nostalgia for the slow jams of Peabo Bryson and Gerald Levert unveil
each lovers' banal insecurities and most basic desires. It's the
bravest and most idiosyncratic ending to an American film that I can
recall, and by itself could make "I Think I Love My Wife" one of the
must-see films of the year.

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<![CDATA["My Country, My Country" and "Bloody Reunion"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/my-country-my-country-and-bloo.php Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "My Country, My Country," Zeitgeist Films, 2006]


We should all be "fair and balanced" when it comes to characterizations of the current Iraq war, which would mean — you'd think — an ethical approach for documentaries that would entail prioritizing the suffering, deaths, injustice and damage as endured by invadees over that of the invaders. Right? Poles over Nazis, Afghanis over Russians? During the American-Vietnam War, the documentaries (from Emile de Antonio's "In the Year of the Pig" to Peter Davis's "Hearts and Minds" and beyond) guiltily mourned the bloodcurdling horror inflicted upon the Indochinese. (Only years later did Hollywood dare to portray that absurd conflict exclusively as an American trauma.) In Iraq today, there doesn't seem to be any bones about it: we invaded and occupied the crumbling nation à propos of nothing, killed anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 civilians (the high number is courtesy of UK medical journal The Lancet, which has little history of politically gaming stats), and argue at home about whether we're sufficiently "supporting" the troops as they "surge," and not about how we paid and are still paying for all of that blood and ruin with our tax dollars, and why our elected leaders shouldn't be prosecuted as war criminals.


The documentaries we've gotten, however, have tended to shed sympathetic tears only for the American soldiers, compelled by who knows what propagandized baloney to sacrifice their lives and limbs (in relatively minor numbers), and to kill Arab men, women and children in their own streets. (Prime example: Deborah Scranton's award-winning "The War Tapes," which, being soldier-shot, weeps and shudders for the Yanks but disdainfully observes the indigenous populace from a distance as if they were hyenas on the veldt.) The best exception to this xenophobia is still Laura Poitras' "My Country, My Country" (2006), the most sensible film yet about the occupation, and as a counterpoint against acres of corporate-spun non-news, it is indispensable. Time and again, in the months leading up to the 2005 elections, Poitras manages to be where platoons of U.S. telejournalists were afraid to go. Her hero is a Sunni activist-doctor named Riyadh, a clear-thinking, educated everyman on a quiet crusade in and around the Triangle to repair whatever damage he can, and to get as many Sunnis to vote as possible — even if it's not for him. (Anti-secularist that he is, he deserves a bumper magnet.) It's a project that even takes him to the fences around Abu Ghraib: "We're an occupied country with a puppet government," Dr. Riyadh says to the pleading prisoners, "what do you expect?"


But Poitras, traveling alone, also rides with the Kurdish militia, records U.S. military briefings, attends outraged public hearings, listens in on security contractors trying to make sense out of chaos and sits in Sunni living rooms as shells fall in the street. She never intrudes on her own movie; what we see, remarkably, has the electric heat of a new experience, of seeing what has been heretofore officially proscribed. Best of all, the film is so immaculately constructed that it cannot be dismissed with charges of partisan subjectivity — Poitras covers the waterfront as she avoids ideology and cant, and yet everything that unfolds, from the combat-copter rides over Baghdad to the Arab TV footage of the Fallujah bombing, is first-hand evidence of an illegal occupation, an oppressed native people, and an abundance of needless pain and decimation. Without uttering a word herself, she calls the cards on every prevaricating pundit and politician blathering about "the enemy."


In other news: if you love Asian pulp — Japanese, Korean, Thai, what have you — sooner or later you're going to find yourself pondering what life must be like in East Asian public schools. While the predominant crucible at work in the heart of American pulp may be the family, in Japan etc. the tribulation of the classroom haunts the cultural psyche. I couldn't begin to count the number of recent Asian horror films, thrillers, fantasies and heartbroken melodramas fueled at their center by the slights and wounds of their countries' respective educational systems, the primal traumas of which spawn endless explosions of slaughter, chaos, derangement, infinite woe and evil craziness. (You might begin with "Battle Royale," "Oldboy," "Peppermint Candy," "The Power of Kangwon Province," "Memento Mori," "Bounce Ko Gals," "Ringu," "Bungee Jumping of Their Own" and so on.) Which brings us to the unpretentious glories of Lim Dae-woong's "Bloody Reunion" (also known as "Seuseung-ui eunhye," and "To Sir with Love," and "The Teacher"), a simple but full-blooded Korean slasher film that probes the high-school-memories dynamic with a laser. Schoolmates now in their 20s collect at the secluded home of a beloved, ailing teacher for an ad-hoc reunion; when the truth slowly emerges from underneath the Asian sense of propriety (the teacher was in fact an abusive horror, and all of the kids are scarred for life), a killer begins kidnapping them and torturing them to death. If you're looking for a metaphor for what may well be a real and pervasive social wound, you can hardly get more outraged and mournful. The movie may not be terribly scary — who's titillated by slasher films anymore? — but as yet another elegy for a generation of Asian walking wounded, it's fascinating.



"My Country, My Country" (Zeitgeist) will be released on DVD on March 20th; "Bloody Reunion" (Tartan Video) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[An Indulgent Reflection on Movie Theaters]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/ifc-news-podcast-18-an-indulge.php Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 As we prepare to head off to Austin for the SXSW Film Festival, we discuss the greatness of the Alamo Drafthouse, and look back at some of our favorite movie theaters and moviegoing experiences.

Download: MP3, 23:22 minutes, 21.3 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25377 2007-03-12 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_18_an_indulge publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025377 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[An Indulgent Reflection on Movie Theaters (photo)]]> Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025377 2007-03-12 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_18_an_indulge_photo inherit 25377 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/opening-this-week.php Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Nomad (The Warrior)," Weinstein Co, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Adam's Apples"

This feature from Danish filmmaker Anders Thomas Jensen (who won an Oscar in 1998 for his short film "Election Night") has been lingering around film festivals since August of 2005, and finally finds its stateside release this week. What happens when a neo-Nazi is forced to serve a community sentence at a church? Hijinks ensure. This black comedy was Denmark's submission for the 2006 Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"American Cannibal: The Road to Reality"

Filmmakers Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro follow up their 2002 short "Creative Process 473" with this not-so-subtle indictment of the reality television industry in which a film crew documents the train-wreckish production of a controversial reality show. The filmmakers advertise the film as a "true" documentary, though we were left rather unimpressed at last year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon"

First-time director Scott Glosserman presents the week's other faux documentary, an interesting twist on the horror genre. The film follows a psychopathic killer who grants a documentary film crew exclusive access to his reign of terror over a fictional small American town. Popular character actor and horror icon Robert Englund reprises his role as Freddy Krueger.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Caffeine"

Hormones are set ablaze in this indie comedy about the sex lives of the clients and employees of a small coffee shop in London. The feature directorial debut of television producer John Cosgrove features a winning cast that includes Mena Suvari, Katharine Heigl, Marsha Thomason and... Breckin Meyer (why?).

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Dead Silence"

Those spunky young Aussies who created the "Saw" trilogy try their hand at...more horror. James Wan directs this flick about a young widower who returns to his hometown to investigate his wife's murder and stumbles across a Dreadful Secret that's haunted Raven's Fair for years.

Opens wide (official site).


"I Think I Love My Wife"

Chris Rock's directorial debut film, 2003's "Head of State," had an interesting premise and a strong cast, but underperformed both at the box office and with critics. We're hoping Rock bring his A game for this one, as his writing efforts tend to be a mix of hits (TV's "Everybody Hates Chris") and misses (2001 clunker "Down to Earth"). Rock plays a married man drawn to a younger woman as his wife, preoccupied by her own career and raising their two children, has little time for him.

Opens wide (official site).


"Nomad (The Warrior)"

The nation of Kazakhstan regains some of its dignity following the political debacle of Borat with this historical epic set during the 18th century. "Nomad: The Warrior" tells the story of a young boy who is destined to unite the three warring tribes of Kazakhstan against invaders and national enemies. It's the most expensive film ever to be shot in Kazakhstan at $40 million and was the nation's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Premonition"

Former rom-com queen Sandra Bullock has of late been choosing a series of gutsier roles, from her critically-praised supporting turn as Harper Lee in the Truman Capote biopic "Infamous," her role in Oscar-winner "Crash," and that convoluted time-traveling house movie. In "Premonition," Bullock stars as a married woman whose life is thrown into chaos when she learns of her husband's death in a car accident, but wakes up the next day with him alive and well next to her.

Opens wide (official site).


"Tortilla Heaven"

First-time director Judy Hecht Dumontet presents this indie about a restaurant owner in small town New Mexico who discovers one of his famous hand-made tortillas bears the face of a certain Messiah. Jose Zuniga stars as the restaurant owner and television veterans George Lopez and Lupe Ontiveros deliver supporting roles.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Wind That Shakes the Barley"

Ken Loach finally struck gold at last year's Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme d'Or and besting eventual Oscar pictures "Babel" and "Pan's Labyrinth." Loach's story about Republicans in early 20th century Ireland recently came under fire for being "anti-British," though both Loach and star Cillian Murphy deny any ill sentiments towards England.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Burmese Harp" and "Un Chant d'Amour"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/the-burmese-harp-and-un-chant.php Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Burmese Harp," Criterion Collection]


It's a cinephile's burden — to observe the brouhaha about a contemporary film that does nothing at all that wasn't already executed better in the medium-distant, but still forgotten, film culture past. Clint Eastwood's "Letters to Iwo Jima" was a perfectly serviceable portrait of WWII warfare made remarkable, in many critics' eyes and in the purview of the Academy, by the fact that it dared to focus sympathetically on the Japanese during the titular battle. For a Hollywood film, it was a first, and for Eastwood, a kind of antidote to the weepy Greatest Generation ballad that was "Flags of Our Fathers."


But in a more general sense, it was a strange and largely unnecessary retread — manufactured by an all-American crew as if we hadn't already seen, since the 1950s, the Japanese war films of Kon Ichikawa. Some of us even remember them. Most Japanese filmmakers — including Akira Kurosawa — were dedicated in the postwar years to avoiding any sort of direct address of the Pacific conflict, for which Japan bore a crushing amount of guilt and responsibility. (What the Emperor's military machine did to China alone would qualify for a top-five war crimes honor in any century.) Not Ichikawa, whose films have dug unflinchingly into the then-recent history of genocidal massacre, cannibalism, mort-lust and kamikaze destruction — all seen as the pitiful dehumanization of Japanese citizens and Japan itself. (Yasuo Masumura did a good job this way, too, in the long-unseen 1966 combat-zone corker "Red Angel," lately come to DVD from Fantoma.) Ichikawa's masterpiece remains 1956's "The Burmese Harp," which, when it won the top prize at Cannes, awakened the world to the possibilities of a true Japanese New Wave, beyond the rock star Kurosawa and the aging mandarins Ozu and Mizoguchi.


"The Burmese Harp" harbors something of a mushy, sentimental heart — its portrait of a close-knit Japanese platoon, singing a mournful variation on "There's No Place Like Home" while scrambling away from combat during the war's last days and eventually awaiting repatriation as the British attack, borders on the idyllic. But the experience is convincing and genuinely felt, and subject to a dire trajectory: the unit's beloved lute player Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) is sent into the mountains to persuade a stubborn group of soldiers to surrender, just as the bombs fall. Mizushima's compatriots fear the guileless private is dead, but Mizushima survives, by masquerading as a Buddhist monk in his return journey through the massive WWII killing fields, changing in the process, surrendering his old life and eventually committing himself to burying the uncountable dead.


A decade after Hiroshima, a Japanese filmmaker makes the most heartbreaking anti-war film of all time. Little about "The Burmese Harp" seems groundbreaking today — it is simply a cudgel on your tear ducts, and arguably the first war film made anywhere that suggests that war finishes nothing, and indeed creates traumas and responsibilities without end. It's a hard rock of a message to genuinely swallow, for the Japanese in the 50s, or Americans today, the vast majority of whom still claim to "support" illegal Third World carnage as long as it's "handled" well and we are sure to win. Oh yeah: naturally the Criterion disc comes with a new Ichikawa interview and an essay by Nipponophile Tony Rayns, among other prizes.


Talk about hard to swallow: "Un Chant d'Amour," the notorious semi-pornographic short made in 1950 by budding novelist/memoirist/playwright Jean Genet a mere year after dodging a ten-strikes-you're-out life prison sentence thanks to the intervention of Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre, emerges onto DVD. And what a heated, potent, hot-and-bothered 25 minutes it is — Genet, who'd spent years in prison for everything from homosexual acts to thievery, had unique things to say about prisoners in love, and "Chant" is one of those films that occupies its own completely unique vision of the universe. Simply put, Genet converts the grim, deprivative lifestyle of the inmate into an achingly romantic passion (as in, a religious passion, or tribulation), in which the walls and bars that separate his lonesome, lovelorn muscle men become the fetishized definition of their desire. (The predatory guard outside the cons' cells is pathetic because he's outside.) Simple cock-in-hand lust becomes an almost spiritually rebellious quantity.


In fact, the film resembles Carl Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc" more than any prison film (or stag reel), despite the semi-erections. Genet made the film as gay porn for rich collectors (much as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin wrote softcore smut for cash in the 30s), and it comes with a long history of censorship and bannings; if you saw the film at MoMA or wherever decades ago, you didn't see the masturbatory nudity you can see today. Genet denounced the movie once he got famous, but it's difficult to see why: it's totally in keeping with his sensational literary voice, and, as far as movies are concerned, utterly singular. Cult Epics hasn't just released a famous, controversial short film, but packed it into a two-disc box along with an intro by avant-garde granddad Jonas Mekas, an audio commentary by underground pioneer Kenneth Anger, and two lengthy interviews with an aging and happily self-congratulatory Genet.



"The Burmese Harp" (Criterion) will be released on DVD on March 13th; "Un Chant d'Amour" (Cult Epics) is now available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Ken Loach on "The Wind That Shakes The Barley"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/ken-loach-on-the-wind-that-sha.php Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The Wind That Shakes The Barley," IFC Films, 2007]


Ken Loach must have an awfully big trophy case. The 70-year-old British writer/director has won enough accolades for three filmmakers, including two British Independent Film Awards, two Césars, a slew of prizes from the Berlin, Portland and Venice Film Festivals and several awards from Cannes, including, oh, the Palme d'Or for his latest film, "The Wind the Shakes the Barley," a story of two brothers in the IRA during the 1920s.


I spoke to Loach on the eve of the US release of "The Wind the Shakes the Barley"; he used the word "balance" frequently during our conversation — balancing the political content in the film, balancing the needs of one audience against another. It's one possible explanation for why the film, for all its anger, never loses focus, never becomes a simple laundry list of injustices, and never forgets the human cost of war.


Is there anything more satisfying than winning a Palme d'Or? As awards go, it seems like one of the best.


It is one of the best. You don't make films to win prizes, but it did give the film a seal of approval. It was very satisfying, particularly because it's for the whole film, the actors, the writer, and the producer, the cameraman, everybody.


What drew you the material?


Well, it's an extraordinary story of how people who were not professional soldiers, who were farmhands and clerks and shop assistants, drove the British empire, the most powerful empire in the world, out of their country. In and of itself, that's a brilliant story. And then how that conflict turned into a civil war and why that happened, and the tragedy of that, is a very important story as well. I had it in the back of mind to do it for a long, long time.


Are Damien and Teddy [two brothers who are the central characters of the film, played by Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney, respectively] based on specific people who were in the IRA?


No, but there were brothers who fought each other. There were two brothers in the town we filmed in called the Hales Brothers. The one who was anti-treaty had his fingernails pulled out by the British. The one who was pro-treaty was assassinated.


The story is about huge political issues, but at the same time, it's also about these two brothers and their story. How do you balance those different aspects? It's got to be difficult.


Yes, it is. It's a balance but, in the end, the personal has to take priority, because otherwise you're stopping the film to point something out to the audience and that's just bad work. When you're looking at the script, you're thinking, "Well we've got to have a scene where we show this or that." But actually, when it's all cut together, the total effect makes things a lot more implicit and you don't need to spell things out. I've found in the past that dialogue you put in in order to make a point you invariably cut out, because you don't need it.


What's the reaction to the film been like in England?


Well the right wing was apoplectic and seriously disturbed. There were a handful of right-wing commentators who just poured abuse on the film, particularly when it won the award at Cannes, because they hated this view of history being approved. A typical comment was, "I haven't seen the film and I don't intend to see the film. And I don't need to read "Mein Kaumpf" to know what Hitler was like." This was typical! It's not an argument, it's just abuse. You can't discuss that! Apart from that, the reaction has been very good. In Ireland, it was amazing and really warm and supportive.


Watching the film, I was particularly struck by how often the soldiers are simply pointing their guns and yelling at the Irish. At some times there seems like there's more screaming than actual dialogue in the film.


It's the army technique! The British soldiers in the film are, by and large, real ex-soldiers. The Army wouldn't help us, the reservists wouldn't help us, so we had to find ex-soldiers. And I said to them, "How would you deal with this situation in real life?" They said this is what you'd do. This 'wall of sound' is a technique to disorientate the people. It isn't about individuals being brutal, it's a technique they're taught.


I remember when I was given military training, you were taught how to bayonet an enemy soldier, and you had to shout as you were doing it. It's part of the drill. You put the blade in, twist it around and you're shouting all the time! And the shouting is, as I said, to disorientate and to confuse and to not give them time to settle. Cause if they settle, they'll fight back.


Despite all the violence in the film, the most intense scene may be the one where the members of the IRA just sit and debate the treaty that's just been passed [making the Irish state a dominion of the British empire].


Yeah, it was a very enjoyable scene to do. We'd had sessions beforehand where we talked about why people would argue from a certain point of view, and what their best arguments were. Everybody came to the scene not only with the script in their mind but with their own ideas that they could supplement. The substance of the scene is scripted, but I ran it like a real meeting and we filmed it like a documentary.


There's an interesting line of dialogue in the film that goes, "It's easy to know what you're up against. It's another thing to know what you're for." Do you agree with that statement?


I think it's absolutely true of the vast majority of people. People will see injustice, or they'll see the illegal war in Iraq or they'll see exploitation of people and they'll say, "This must end. This must stop." But how do you construct a society to put in its place? That's one of the interesting things that comes up at times like this. When an imperialist country is being forced out, the question becomes "What kind of society can we build?" And that's the big question. In Ireland, some people weren't into it, they just wanted the Brits out. Some people want the society to stay the same, they just want to be the ones in power. All that is up for grabs, but it was in many colonial struggles. The American constitution, for God's sake; it wasn't just about getting the British out, it was about Thomas Payne and the rights of man and wanting a different kind of country. And you've ended up with George W. [laughs]



"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" opens in limited release on March 16 (official site).

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<![CDATA["300," "The Host"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/300-the-host.php Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


["300," Warner Bros., 2007]


"300"


Once the big battle of civilizations begins, it's easy to see why director Zack Snyder and his fellow filmmakers thought "300" would make a great action movie. The Spartans were basically the only society in history built entirely on a foundation of badassitude: in Sparta, economy, politics, agriculture and education were all minor concerns compared to looking good in a loincloth and stabbing many people with pointy things. Basically, they were good-looking and dumb and it stands to reason they'd make a fine subject for a good-looking dumb movie.


But even though "300"'s visual style moves beyond simply looking good into a stylishness and pictorial beauty rarely equaled in genre pictures, its dumbness overwhelms its prettiness. If battle footage can be beautiful, some of it in "300" certainly is, but, oh how stupid everything surrounding it is.


"300" is, in some ways, a silent movie. In some ways, it would be better as one. Silent movies share "300"'s outlandish (and outlandishly) stereotypical villains and its emphasis on movement. But silent movies didn't weigh down their narratives with endless slow motion techniques and they didn't ever have dialogue this bad, because they didn't have any dialogue at all.


"300" runs two hours, but it's only about eighty minutes of plot stretched by an extra hour/hour-plus by the rampant over use of slow-mo; there isn't a moment too unimportant that it can't be given an inflated and unearned sense of grandeur by some thunderclaps, the operatic choral score and a few hundred frames a second ("Must... bend... down... to... adjust... boot... strap!"). Taking the action very, very (very) slowly is at odds with "300"'s (and the Spartan's) dedication to badassness: with very few exceptions, Snyder's slow-mo makes its heroes look about as cool a fighting force as a gimpy elephant. Maybe Snyder got drunk on the admittedly beautiful visuals his blue-screen technique was yielding (his actors were filmed in a big empty stage; all the golden-hued skies and roiling seas were added in post). There will be no need to wait for a DVD and a pause button to soak in Snyder and his animators' visual accomplishments; he built those pauses into the actual film for us, at the expense of "300"'s pace and entertainment value.


That may have something to do with the movie's origins in the world of comic books. Graphic novelist Frank Miller — who co-directed one of my favorite movies of 2005, Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of his "Sin City" books — turned the tale of the 300 Spartans who fought impossible odds against the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae into a five-issue mini-series for Dark Horse Comics in 1998. Comics distill action into specific moments; the artist essentially acts as writer, director and editor by selecting, designing and drawing those images. In focusing in with his slow-motion camera, perhaps Snyder intended to turn cinema into a sort of moving comic, a series of connected still images.


Unfortunately for him, what makes movies different and special is their ability to present motion, and that is something that is, as a result of Snyder's slideshow technique, in short supply in "300." Aside from a very dramatic long take of Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) mowing down a battlefield full of Persians, most of the fight scenes are indistinguishable snapshots of carnage that in their complete interchangeability show Snyder hasn't mastered Miller's knack for moving the narrative along panel to panel.


It's like something to be admired on the wall of art gallery, not on the wall of a dark room with seats in it. Despite all the artistry, I kept wanting something exciting to happen, and it never really does. For all the posing and rippling muscles and occasional decapitations, "300" doesn't quicken the pulse or pull the viewer to the edge of the seat. Like a guy rejected from playing one of the 300 Spartans, it's too dumb and not good-looking enough.



"The Host"


[This review originally ran as part of IFC News' coverage of the 2006 New York Film Festival]


The creature at the middle of this feature is a mutant: a freakish mixture of fish, lizard, monkey, and Godzilla that devours its victims and then, if it chooses, regurgitates them whole to enjoy their delicious succulence at a later date. "The Host" is a mutant too, a pure pulp concoction with a library of horror quotations, enough brilliantly absurd satire for a stand-up comedy special, and a family at its center that makes the Hoovers from "Little Miss Sunshine" look like the Cleavers. You will laugh and cry; certainly in the way a frightened child cries, because this movie is absolutely terrifying, but also in the way a sissy blubbers when Bambi's mom eats lead, because the thrills are supported by a compelling story and moving characters.


Like all effective monster movies, "The Host" starts from a place of reality to signal a warning about man's callous attitude toward nature. In the chilling prologue, based on an event that really happened in Korea in 2000, an American scientist orders his Korean underling to dump hundreds of gallons of formaldehyde down the drain and into the Han River simply because the bottles are a little dusty. Six years later, the chemicals have spawned a truly gruesome beast, who launches an assault on sunbathers by the Han River. Dopey Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) is an unfortunate bystander, and though he survives, his daughter seemingly does not. Gang-du and the rest of his neurotic family (senile father, preppie brother, professional archer sister) barely have time to mourn when they're quarantined after the Korean government announces that the mysterious creature is also host to a deadly virus. When things look their bleakest Gang-du gets a fuzzy phone call from his daughter. Somehow, she is alive. But how will he rescue her?


A review this short doesn't have enough space to contain all of my enthusiasm about this movie, or to share even a sample of its unforgettable scenes, both scary and silly. It is, in a deep sense, indebted to the happy horror aesthetic pioneered in the 1980s by Sam Raimi in his "Evil Dead" trilogy. It's hard to imagine the scariest movie of the year might also be the funniest, but "The Host" nearly pulls it off. When it's not setting the audience squirming with suspense, its satire of the American war machine and its Orwellian modus operandi is sharper and funnier than anything any we've seen from stateside filmmakers (of the government's treatment of the virus, one character succinctly observes, "If the government says so, we have to accept it.").


Bong Joon-ho made a quiet but powerful impression on American arthouse audiences last year when his melancholy police procedural "Memories of Murder" finally made its U.S. debut. Though both films feature a general distrust of authority and a bleak worldview, the two are strikingly dissimilar in tone, in scope, and in style. That's a good thing, suggesting that, good as he is already, Bong is still exploring his possibilities, still coming into his own. He may yet grow into one of the finest directors of his generation, mutating every genre to suit his delightfully fiendish purposes.



"300" opens wide on March 9th (official site); "The Host" opens in limited release on March 9th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: March 9th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/opening-this-week-march-9th-20.php Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "The Exterminating Angels," IFC First Take, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"300"

2005's "Sin City" proved that a $40 million dollar film could be shot entirely in Robert Rodriguez's garage and still manage to win both critical and commercial success while pleasing fanboys everywhere. Now Zack Snyder, director of 2004's remake of "Dawn of the Dead," attempts to transfer another Frank Miller graphic novel from page to screen in "300," a loose telling of the Battle of Thermopylae. Early reviews indicate that Snyder may have another winner here, as the director, much like Rodriguez in 2005, remains faithful to the Miller-penned source material.

Opens wide (official site).


"Believe in Me"

80s cult independent film director Robert Collector (lesbian prison thriller "Red Heat," anyone?) returns after a nearly 20-year absence with this family-friendly drama about a basketball coach who starts coaching the girls' team after expecting to coach the boys' team. The film won the Best Feature prize at the Jackson Hole Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Beyond the Gates"

Before he attempted to turn "Basic Instinct 2" into a good movie, Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones filmed this drama based on the true story of a Catholic priest and an idealistic English teacher caught in the midst of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. Unsurprisingly, early reviews compare it to 2004's "Hotel Rwanda," but believe the story suffers due to the film's focus on its white protagonists.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Exterminating Angels"

A filmmaker hosting a series of sweaty, breathy auditions for his latest film about female sexuality soon develops intimate relationships with his actresses, blurring the lines of art and life, business and pleasure. In anybody else's hands, this film would read like a Skinemax flick, but, helmed by "Secret Things" director Jean-Claude Brisseau, the film might just be quality erotica for the art house crowd.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Host"

"Memories of a Murder" director Bong Joon-Ho's latest film made headlines at last year's Cannes Film Festival; the controversial monster movie takes a few jabs at the United States government for its involvement in South Korea. Well, we love horror films with overt political messages, and the buzz on this one is ridiculous.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Maxed Out"

Documentarian James D. Scurlock presents his first feature-length film, a look at the nature of debt, both public and personal, government and individual, in the United States.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Namesake"

We're really glad that Indian director Mira Nair's foray into Hollywood filmmaking was brief (2004's uninspired "Vanity Fair"). This (more indie) time around she's got some popular source material in the form of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel of the same title, and frequent David Lynch cinematographer Frederick Elmes as her D.P. And any time we get to see "Harold and Kumar"'s Kal Penn play drama is fine with us.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Ultimate Gift"

2007 Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin plays a little girl dying of cancer in this faith-based adaptation of Jim Stovall's novel about a trust fund baby who must go through twelve challenges in order to earn his grandfather's inheritance. Director Michael O. Sajbel was responsible for last year's "One Night with the King."

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[What's Up In March]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/whats-up-in-march.php Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Rear Window," Paramount Picture, 1954 — screening as part of the Fashion in Film Festival]

Miami International Film Festival

Mar. 2-11

For early spring breakers hitting South Florida, the Miami International Film Festival might be a great time to check out Paul Verhoeven's latest film, "Black Book," or perhaps the Luc Bresson tribute. Regardless of what film is playing, the frostbitten IFC News team is jealous.


Pimps, Prostitutes and Pigs: Shohei Imamura's Japan

Mar. 2-29

2006 saw the loss of one of Japan's premier New Wave directors, as Shohei Imamura passed away at the age of 79. Often seen as the "anti-Ozu," Imamura rejected the middle-classicism of the celebrated 1950s Japanese filmmakers and instead focused on the portrayals of the downbeat and downtrodden of Japan's lower classes. Films to be screened in this series include "Vengeance is Mine," "Warm Water Under a Red Bridge" and "The Pornographers."


South by Southwest Festivals

Mar. 9-18

This popular interactive, film and music conference has been hitting Austin, TX every year since 1987, and we here at IFC News will descend upon the Texan town along with other journalists, industry types and cineastes everywhere. This year's festival will include panels with "Grindhouse" director Robert Rodriguez, "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane and mainstream/independent director Richard Linklater, and will feature the world premiere of Scott Frank's "The Lookout."


"Infernal Affairs": The Complete Trilogy

Mar. 9

Check out the original Hong Kong police thriller recently re-made by Martin Scorsese into 2006's Best Picture Oscar winner, "The Departed," at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in D.C. Also included in the screening of the original "Infernal Affairs" are the two sequels that followed, which each explore what happened before and after the events of the first film.


A Panel on "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"

Mar. 15

As Matthew Broderick continues his career as one of the strongest stage actors in New York, we still think of his fondly as our favorite 80s teenager, Ferris Bueller. From a pre-nose job Jennifer Grey to an ever-quotable Ben Stein, John Hughes' "Ferris Bueller" remains as one of the smartest-written films in a decade most of us would rather forget. To celebrate the release of "Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes," a new collection of essays based on the works of John Hughes, the IFC Center will feature a panel discussion with the writers (of which there are many). Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?


Fashion in Film Festival

Mar. 17-25

The Museum of Moving Image in Queens presents this interesting collection of feature films, documentaries, video art, experimental films and newsreels that investigate how the art of fashion is presented through film. Films to be screened include Alfred Hitchcock's Anita Colby-inspired "Rear Window," the Howard Hawks silent satire "Fig Leaves" and a collection of newsreel and doc footage curated by fashion expert Marketa Uhlirova.


"Network," with special guest Sidney Lumet

Mar. 19

Legendary director Sidney Lumet ("The Wiz"!) will be on hand for this screening of his Oscar-nominated 1976 television satire "Network" at the Academy Theater in Beverly Hills.


"Live Free or Die" with Andy Robin

Mar. 22

Stamford, CT native and former "Seinfeld" writer Andy Robin directs his first independent feature, "Live Free or Die," about a ragtag group of criminals attempting to stage a heist in the Granite State. Robin will be on hand at the Avon Theatre in Stamford for a Q & A session after the film.


Lost & Found: "The Curse of Quon Gwon" and "Her Wild Oat"

Mar. 29

"The Curse of Quon Gwon," long thoughts of as a lost example of early Asian-American cinema, and "Her Wild Oat," an early Colleen Moore flapper comedy of the silent era, receive restoration treatments from the Academy and will screen at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Michael Mortilla will provide a live piano accompaniment at the screenings — swank!


The 9th Annual Method Fest Independent Film Festival

Mar. 29 - Apr 5

The only film festival solely dedicated to the art of acting, the Method Film Festival hits Calabassas, CA, for a week, showcasing independent features and shorts of actors embracing their inner Stanislavsky. Somewhere, Ryan Gosling is stoked.

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<![CDATA[The Monster...Is You and Me]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/ifc-news-podcast-17-the-monste.php Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we're inspired by "The Host" to discuss some of the more popular horror movie tropes, like "This Is What You Get When You Mess With Nature," and "This Is What You Get For Relying on Technology," and analyze their larger significance.

Download: MP3, 21:52 minutes, 20 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25376 2007-03-05 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_17_the_monste publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025376 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Monster...Is You and Me (photo)]]> Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025376 2007-03-05 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_17_the_monste_photo inherit 25376 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Mira Nair on "The Namesake"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/mira-nair-on-the-namesake.php Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: Irfan Khan and Tabu in "The Namesake," Fox Searchlight, 2007]


Taking several steps back from the lush canvas that was her adaptation of "Vanity Fair," director Mira Nair turns her glance inward, bringing personal insight and a more straightforward style to "The Namesake." Based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, the film attempts to portray the universality of the modern immigrant experience by tracing the lives of Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) as they face the transition from their life in Calcutta to their new home in New York, and eventually that of their son Gogol (Kal Penn), who struggles to reconcile his identity as a first-generation American with a growing realization of how strongly his roots still reach back to the culture of India. I spoke with Nair in New York:


This film seems to address two divides: the divide of country in Ashoke's and Ashima's story, and the generational divide in the story of Gogol's relationship with his parents. Does one theme inform the other?


Good question — I don't know if they inform each other. I think the story of parents and children, and therefore the generational divide, is a story that's not unique to any one culture, it's the same in many places. Of course, in the case of "The Namesake," it's deeply affected by the fact that the parents are born and raised in Calcutta, in a deeply Indian context, and that their children are born and raised entirely in an American context.


The fact is that the parents realize they can't spoon-feed what they have known. There's no stasis, things move. And they're also wiser than most, in that they're not going to sledgehammer down Gogol's throat everything that is Indian and everything that they know.


So there's a certain amount of fluidity, but the story is the ancient story: How do you grow up? How do you come of age? How do you realize who you are? Sometimes, many times, you realize a little too late. You have regrets; you have things that you wished you had done. I know when I became a parent it was the only time I really realized what I had put my parents through. It's about that continuum, but greatly affected by the fact that there are two cultures here.


You've said this film expresses your love for two cities: New York and Calcutta. The things there are to love about New York will be more obvious to American audiences, but what about Calcutta?


Calcutta is incredibly layered; layers of history in that city. And it's a city that's devoted to politics and art, the mix of it. It's a city that is full of erudition in the least expected places. Look at the house Ashima comes from: It has stenciled wallpaper next to a patch of cement next to a family portrait. That was not an art-designed home — that is how it came. I love the need of people to express themselves. It's classic Bengali living — an oil painter, singing, protests... that's life in Calcutta. It's always bristling with some kind of life. I love that city. I discovered musical theater in that city; I grew up in that city. It was a wonderful banquet for me to try to capture that.


You've talked about bringing your Punjabi background to this story about Bengals. Jhumpa Lahiri had mentioned bringing you to her parents' home for dinner to get you better acclimated. What did you see in the Bengali personality that you had to revise in your own approach to telling this story?


Well, I'm Punjabi, but I grew up in Bengal, so I know very well how different it is. The oxygen of culture in Bengal is very inspiring to me. It's not like I had to temper my Punjabiness, because I wasn't making a Punjabi film. But going to [Lahiri's] family and meeting her parents, who were, in her own admission, the way she channeled [her characters] — her mother especially, for Ashima — these were the flesh-and-blood people of the characters that she had written; that was a big key to how to play Ashoke and how to play Ashima. I even took Tabu and Irrfan, the actors, to Mr. and Mrs. Lahiri for the same reasons: They spent the day together, and it was a big, big key in how to get their characters right.


The press notes mentioned your reliance on paintings and still photos when you were developing the look of this film. What inspired you?


I love contemporary photography. Raghu Rai, a great Indian photographer, made this image of a man and a rickshaw pulling the Goddess Saraswati down a boulevard in Calcutta. That image gave me an idea: Durga and Saraswati are like the key gods of the city of Calcutta; you can't go a block without seeing a goddess of some kind, really. I thought it would be very important to have the blessing of the goddess in our film, because it is a Bengali film, in actual sense. So that image gave me the idea to have the goddess floating above us and being lowered down to the street. It's like that: Image will give me the idea to make a scene.


You've got a gallery show opening at the Sepia Gallery on March 8th. Did all this come to you upon...


I created it. I made it happen, because of the photography that I love, and we created a really photographic film. So I talked to a publisher in the summer — I designed [a companion book for the film], a mix of text from Lahiri's novel and images from the movie as well as the images of these classic photographers. That book was the foundation of taking it to the Sepia Gallery, and I said, "Do you want to do this?" And they loved the idea.


Did your personal investment in this story inspire you to carry this project beyond just the film?


Of course. It was like total possession, I can't tell you. And because I know how precious it is to be inspired, I really follow that inspiration. It doesn't happen often that you have this wave of, "I have to make this. I was born to do this."



"The Namesake" opens in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and San Francisco on March 9, rolling-out to other cities in subsequent weeks (official site).

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<![CDATA[Early Hitchcock, "Quiet Flows the Don"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/03/early-hitchcock-quiet-flows-th.php Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Murder!," British International Pictures Inc., 1931]


Anyone that loves cinema loves Alfred Hitchcock — he virtually personifies the art form, and defined its visceral potential for at least four generations of filmgoers. No one — not one movielover — can dislike Hitchcock; his career has the length, breadth and distinctive voice to make him the Jupiter of the American pantheon. What critically beloved master has had such a firm tap on the pulse of his mass audience, and what crowd-pleaser has generated as much scholarly cross-examination? Hitch's seamless engagement with both pulp buoyancy and subtextual meta-ness makes him unique and ubiquitous in our modern pop culture: decades after his death, his name is still a common adjective, and his best films — "Vertigo," "Psycho," "The Birds," "Rebecca," "Notorious," "Rear Window," "Suspicion," "Lifeboat," "The 39 Steps," "The Wrong Man" — still grab your eyeballs and stoke your amygdala into a hapless state of unease.


Hitchcock is certainly no longer merely "the master of suspense," but is in fact a cottage industry of film theory, tenure security, cultural trope and remake business. Which is good, because many of his films are far from suspenseful, and in any case what is best considered to be Hitchcockian has more to do with visual eloquence and cinematic innovation than suspense. The new, beautifully designed Lionsgate box of five restored early films — all of which have been roaming around as untouchables in the public-domain circle of home video hell for decades — is what we're talking about: each film, from the 1928 revenge drama "The Ring" to 1931's outrageous satire-farce "Rich and Strange," is virtually a glimpse into the young Brit filmmaker's skull as he attacks the limitations of silent film narrative, as well as the technical encumbrances of early sound, with a Da Vinci-esque lust for invention. The most ordinary scenes — the melodramatic face-off that makes up most of 1929's "The Manxman," say, or "The Ring"'s various pre-noir portraits of social doom — are converted by Hitchcock into explosions of stylistic expression, using double exposures, composition-in-depth, unpredictable camera movement and Soviet-style associative montage to make his emotional points. From the very beginning, it wasn't about the actors, it was about the space between the action and the audience.


"The Skin Game" (1931) is a perfect example — a stodgy John Galsworthy play about farmland class war that Hitchcock electrifies with savvy camera placement, empathic confidence (holding on an image or face when another director would've moved on) and rousing montage chaos. "Murder!" (1930), England's first sound film, is famous for the retrospectively extraordinary scene in which Herbert Marshall susses out an integral matter about a misconvicted murder trial while shaving and listening to the radio — a simple early talkie moment Hitchcock managed by having an entire unseen orchestra play an aria from "Tristan and Isolde" from behind the bathroom set where Marshall stood. But with moments of frisson in the courtroom and in the circus tent, you can see Hitchcock's idiosyncratic fascination with sensationalistic set-pieces was already in place and turning gears. All of the films are in newly pristine shape, and are supp'd by a mini-doc featuring interviews of Hitchcock pal Peter Bogdanovich, as well as the filmmaker's daughter and granddaughter.


Opening a window on another, altogether different cross-section of cinema history is the freaky DVDing of Sergei Gerasimov's five-and-a-half-hour "Quiet Flows the Don" (1957), famously regarded as the "Gone With the Wind" of Soviet cinema. (Maybe — I always thought Sergei Bondarchuk's six-hour "War and Peace" was the "Gone With the Wind" of Soviet cinema.) In the digital archiving-&-distribution video epoch, no detour from the mainstream autobahn of movie culture remains a secret for long, it seems, and we've been inundated lately with the effluvia left behind by the Communist dream machines of both Soviet Russia and East Germany. Like advertising, most Socialist agitprop acquires a yellowed-snapshot quaintness and naïveté with time, envisioning as it does a mythical utopia of red-cheeked laborers and thriving equity. Today, we can take its measurements as kitsch, as totalitarian heebie-jeebies, as pure formal craziness, or as some bobble-headed conglomeration of all three. (And we do: Futurist/Socialist Realist poster art from the Soviet Union fetches big bucks as cultural art nowadays.)


"Quiet Flows the Don" is a little different — a rambling, episodic, muscular peasant melodrama (based on a novel by Nobel-winner Mikhail Sholokhov) that follows two extremely unlucky lovers as they face untold tragedy before, during and after the October Revolution. Hardly propaganda (even considering the John Fordian love of Cossacks, a military clan to which Sholokhov belonged), Gerasimov's epic is all about sex — a seemingly endless march through the struggle between traditional agrarian-social values and the messy reality of sex desired, refused, consummated, forcibly taken and child-productive. Shot on and around the titular river so starkly it often looks as if it was photographed in black-&-white when it wasn't, the movie is a go-for-broke tragic swoon that Douglas Sirk could've made — given a taste of state repression and a love for the rolling valleys of south-central Rossiya.



The Alfred Hitchcock Box Set (Lionsgate) is now available on DVD; "Quiet Flows the Don" (Kino) will be available on DVD on March 6.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 26th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/opening-this-week-february-26t.php Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Into Great Silence," Zeitgeist Films, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Black Snake Moan"

If you thought director Craig Brewer's "Hustle and Flow" had an over-the-top premise, just be prepared for his latest Southern drama about a God-fearing former blues musician (Samuel L. Jackson) who attempts to "cure" a sexually abused woman turned nympho (Christina Ricci) of her sinful ways. "Snakes on a Plane" (a ranting and raving Samuel L.) meets "The Exorcist" (less puking, more humping) with a bit of "Monster's Ball" thrown in? We shall see.

Opens wide (official site).


"Full of It"

"Comedian" director Christian Charles follows up his acclaimed Jerry Seinfeld documentary with a (sigh...) teen comedy about a young kid who starts telling lies to the popular clique at his new school, only to find out that new problems arise when his lies start becoming truths. The film has a host of TV veterans, including "Punk'd"'s Ryan Pinkston as the lead teen and supporting roles being filled in by former "Daily Show" host Craig Kilborn and a wildly inappropriate Teri Polo. Kids who listen to Panic! At the Disco must be stoked.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Into Great Silence"

German director Philip Gröning puts Mel Gibson to shame with this meditative take on spirituality more hardcore than anything in "The Passion of the Christ." Gröning spent six months (after waiting sixteen years for approval) in the confines of the Grande Chartreuse, a Christian monastery in which monks quietly fulfill their daily prayers, tasks, rituals, and rare outdoor excursions. No voiceovers, no score, and, at almost three hours, no mercy for those with short attention spans.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Two Weeks"

Writer and director Steven Stockman casts Ben Chaplin, Thomas Cavanagh, Julianne Nicholson and Glenn Howerton as siblings who gather at their dying mother's house for one quick, last goodbye but wind up trapped together for two weeks. Somewhere in this comedy is a tad bit of melodrama, we'd expect, but with Sally Field playing the mother of the family, this film could be promising.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Wild Hogs"

"Van Wilder" director Walt Becker's middle-aged road comedy about a group of four friends who start a biker gang doesn't seem to be generating any positive buzz — in fact, The New York Times recently labeled the film as potentially the worst movie of the year. We recommend checking out the much funnier (and, dare we even say, more pleasing to the eye) 2000 Clint Eastwood film "Space Cowboys," or, hell, even that episode of "The Simpsons" when Homer gets the motorcycle. It's shorter and features a lot less Tim Allen.

Opens wide (official site).


"Wild Tigers I Have Known"

The debut feature film from indie boy wonder Cam Archer is, underneath that festivalesque ambiguous title, a coming-of-age story dealing with sexual confusion and gender bending. The film premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival, where critics generally hailed it as an artful and sensitive portrayal of teenage queer identity.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Zodiac"

We're glad that David Fincher is returning to the crime thriller genre after the overrated claustrophobic mess that was "Panic Room" (we still find "Se7en" to be the second-best serial killer film after "The Silence of the Lambs"), and his film on the Zodiac Killer of the 1970s might provide a refreshing take on an oft-imitated story (three films in the past four years!). Oh, and we still can't get over the ridiculous hairstyles on Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo. Priceless.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Craig Brewer on "Black Snake Moan"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/craig-brewer-on-black-snake-mo.php Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Sundance, 2005: Filmmaker Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow," the brash tale of a Memphis pimp chasing his dreams of becoming a rapper, makes its buzzed-about premiere and is soon picked up for a reported $9 million, one of the festival's biggest deals. Critics are everywhere from elated to affronted by the film, which isn't sparing or apologetic about the grittier details of its hero's life. Star Terrence Howard ultimately nabs an Academy Award nomination for his role, while Three 6 Mafia wins an award for the song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." Their performance is one of the most memorable Oscar moments in years.


Two years later, Brewer is back with a film whose premise makes "Hustle & Flow" look like "The Sound of Music." "Black Snake Moan" stars Christina Ricci as nymphomaniac with a history of childhood abuse who turns up, beaten and half-naked, on the doorstep of former blues man Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson). He takes her in, cares for her, and decides to cure her of her reckless tendencies... by chaining her to his radiator. But despite its neo-exploitation set-up, "Black Snake Moan" is a surprisingly earnest tale of redemption and a make-shift family. I caught up with Brewer shortly before the film's opening.


Where'd you grow up?


My whole family is from the Memphis area — all my people are buried there. I was born in Virginia, on an Army base, but we always spent our summers divided between the two grandparents.


I had this love of music, so whenever I would go back home my family would take me down to Beale Street, they would take me into Sun Studios, and I really started learning a lot. There's a certain spirit that is in Memphis music where you don't have a lot — you look at Stax Records and it's an abandoned movie theater with all of this antiquated equipment. And all of those people are still around, and became friends of mine, session players who got paid to do the wah-wah in "Shaft" when "Shaft" happened — they don't collect anything. When I started writing, I really connected to the plays that I grew up with, these Southern plays of extremities. I always loved Beth Henley ["Crimes of the Heart'], obviously Tennessee Williams, the books of Flannery O'Connor... I think that no matter where I was, I was always obsessed with Southern culture. And I've been living there now for thirteen years.


So you've done hip-hop, blues...


...And the next [film will be] "Maggie Lynn," which is the outlaw country music movie about this woman with two kids who used to play with her brother and her daddy, when he was alive, at state fairs, mountain music type stuff. It's me exploring if mothers and women can really take some time to be selfish for themselves — can they completely leave the role that they've been placed in? Can they ever stop loving that man that they can't help but love? I feel that, especially in country music, with women like Tanya Tucker and Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, that struggle is ultimately what drives them to be great. I'm sure there are going to be plenty of people who say this is the atonement for [previous films'] treatment of women and all that kind of crap, but she's a tough little girl, and on stage, she tells everyone she wants to put the cunt back in country, and she does. And for me it really starts with the music, and that's why ["Black Snake Moan"] has more of a fabled tone... this is not a realistic movie. I mean, we don't chain up our women, to my knowledge.


You've got such outrageous set-ups in your first two films — the elevator pitches would be something like "This one's about a pimp, and this one's about a nymphomaniac chained to a radiator." Where are these ideas coming from?


They first and foremost come from the music — I'm in my car, listening to this stuff, and something will come to me. But really, I just steal from me — "Hustle & Flow" is about me, my wife, my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law after my dad died at 49, trying to make something good from the 20 grand I got from his inheritance. At the time I was working the night shift in receiving at Barnes and Noble, my wife was a seamstress — during the days, she made wedding gowns — but she got to know these strippers who were always coming in to get her to do costumes. So she started cocktail waitressing at this one place, she then started dancing.


And as much as we decided to be young and dumb, it's really this kind of soul-robbing thing that you find yourself in, where you think, we've got to pull out of this life. It led to us knowing a lot of extreme people, but... they all really wanted to make a good movie for us. So with my first movie, "The Poor and Hungry," we had pimps, strippers, drug dealers and car thieves helping me make this black and white movie about a car thief who falls in love with this cello player. We had to build sets in our shitty little house, we had a window unit that was the only air that we had, but the power of the unit, plus my Adobe Premiere cutting of the movie was too much, so I had just one or the other. We had to quiet down people next door if we were filming.


I met so many people who were all talk, who were all about manipulation, but were rarely about getting down into making something. And I had been like that. It's part of the process — you're cynical, you go see movies and the first thing you want to do is go to a Denny's all night and go, "I could have done better than that," and then that steam runs out and at some point you go, "Well, what am I going to make?" That was where "Hustle" came from. And where I always feel a little misunderstood — and I wish I could keep making movies so that people could see all of my work — is that I really think that because of the urban element of "Hustle & Flow," people don't see that I'm actually trying to make things about people and not about judging them so much.


And I do look at DJay and I really don't think that he was thinking about the sins of exploiting women and it was something that I didn't really want to...


Get into?


Well...I think that I could get into it, I just don't think I had room. I mean, he ends up in jail, he doesn't end up with a record contract, I was much more inspired by the movies of the 80s where it was good enough for Richard Gere just to graduate in "An Officer and a Gentleman" instead of shooting down MiGs in "Top Gun." So I felt that just getting the song on the radio was a big enough victory for him.


But it's ultimately a song about pimping.


You mean "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp"? Yeah, but then I look at that third song: "This is my life and it's a battle within / I've got to survive, even if I'm sinning to win / But if I show no remorse I reap the devil's reward / He said he'd give me riches and I'm looking for more." And I know people have problems with rap and the misogynistic tones and the violence, but I think of the blues — "Wanna buy me a bulldog and chain it in my front yard, and that'll keep my woman from sneaking off at night." "I'm your back door man, I'm your back door man, the boys don't know but the little girls understand." For some reason we give those songs a pass...


Well, there is an element of persona [to hip-hop] — no one really expects Young Jeezy to be living on a pile of cocaine...


With five Bentleys outside? But blues, rhythm and blues and rock and roll have always been the artistic exorcism that dances between reality and fantasy. Sometimes I need to be — if I'm on my way to some meeting, I've got to blare some gangsta shit, and some of it's about killing, and I really don't feel an urge to go out and kill anybody. And I feel the same way about movies — it is a little bit like church. You're in this dark theater, you're all facing the same direction, you're not really having any judgment on you for experiencing something. Now, I've never pimped in my life, but I have definitely felt like it. I have lied to people and manipulated them so I can use their locations, to make something that I thought was good.


Making a movie is a very vulnerable thing, especially in my situation — I'm not doing "Grudge" sequels, I'm letting everybody know, hey, this is from me. I'm not Sam Jackson, I'm that crazy girl at the end of the chain. She's very much alone, she's always been alone, and even though he does this thing that, symbolically, oh my god, he's chaining a woman up against her will, he really is the only person in her life who's not wanting something from her.


And I'm not saying he's a saint, he's got some good old fashioned male vengeance in him, he's got a captive woman and his woman just left him, so he's got some shit he has to say.


So how do you see exploitation films fitting into what you've made? They both seem to owe a lot to the genre.


Some of my more taboo movie experiences were when my granddaddy said "Hey, we're going to watch ''Gator Bait,' don't tell anyone." There was always something about those films that I knew I should like and shouldn't like at the same time.


We have something in our culture right now that's really interesting — we seem to be really preoccupied with young white girls going crazy and going out without any underwear and getting drunk. Whole days will be spent in the news cycle asking "What's wrong with these girls?" And we're fascinated by it. We'll watch reality shows, and watch girls get in fights, and later going out to parties and making out in hot tubs, and I guess I wanted to see some old man saying "Cut that shit out" — because I felt like I was very much a part of it as well.


The exploitation element is always an interesting one to watch with an audience — when you start employing elements of exploitation, you, right or wrong, bring your audience into that culpability, into the guilt. My favorite moment in the movie is when Christina is almost completely passed out — she's feverish, and [Jackson] is trying to pick her up, he's trying to help her and in her fever, she lunges forward and kisses him, and the audience flinches like they were in a horror movie. Off of a kiss! I think that they're caught in this difficult place, and I'm caught, as a filmmaker, in this interesting place of titillating them and terrifying them at the same time. I think that's why that exploitation feel, I think, worked. I didn't think it was, like, a frosting to put on the cake. I felt that if I'm going to explore all these Southern archetypes that I'm obsessed with, that includes that 18-wheeler mudflap silhouette, it includes that redneck fantasy. I mean, look at her shirt, for Godsakes. I'm giving you archetypes to say this is a fable.



"Black Snake Moan" opens in wide release March 2nd (official site).

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<![CDATA[Craig Brewer on "Black Snake Moan" (photo)]]> Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025399 2007-02-26 00:00:00 closed closed craig_brewer_on_black_snake_mo_photo inherit 25399 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Black Snake Moan," "The Wayward Cloud"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/black-snake-moan-the-wayward-c.php Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Black Snake Moan," Paramount Vantage, 2007]


"Black Snake Moan"


"Y'all ready for some shit?" a bald, bearded Samuel L. Jackson bellows near the climax of "Black Snake Moan." Brother, you ain't kidding. Not because Craig Brewer's latest film, the highly watchable, highly curious, highly unclothed "BSM," is shitty, but because, as Jackson's character, an old farmer, bluesman and self-styled faith healer named Lazarus, implies, there is some crazy crap going on in it. Whatever criticisms we may level against Brewer, there's no denying "Black Snake Moan" is unlike any other film made recently. You can boil it down to a logline — it's sort of "Misery" meets "The Exorcist" meets "A Dirty Shame" — but even that doesn't do justice to the passion of the filmmaking or the authentic wackiness of the story. Brewer's "Hustle and Flow" may have felt an awful lot like a hip-hop version of "Saturday Night Fever"; "Black Snake Moan" is wholly original.


Set in a Deep South, deep poverty milieu like that of "Hustle and Flow," the story begins in a small Tennessee town where the denizens are more likely to drive a tractor than a car, and where everyone knows the town floozy, Christina Ricci's Rae. When her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) leaves her to serve in Iraq, Rae goes on a sex, booze and drugs bender of astonishing proportions and, through a mixture of bad luck and worse luck, winds up unconscious and seminude at Lazarus' doorstep. After Rae refuses to lie still amidst raging hallucinations and coughing fits, Laz decides to chain her to his radiator until he can "cure" her of her "wickedness."


Lazarus is a former blues singer, and "Black Snake Moan" (itself named for an old Blind Lemon Jefferson tune) works as a lesson about the blues and as a sort of blues itself. An opening narration informs us there is only one kind of blues, and that is between a male and a female. Lazarus and Rae have that sort of relationship between them, one defined by sex and need, but really their story is about their failures as lovers and mates. We meet both characters as they are left by their significant others, Rae by Ronnie, Lazarus by his wife, now sleeping with his brother. While Ricci rarely wears a single article of clothing that covers the flesh below her middle thighs or her navel, and spends most of the movie writhing and/or crawling on the ground gripped by a sexual fever, the movie is more about the struggle to fill the emptiness in our lives than about how sexy Ricci is.


And yet there's no denying or ignoring the way Brewer lingers on Ricci's slim, half-dressed physique. Though "Black Snake Moan" is ultimately a redemption story, it doesn't seem to mind delighting in its sins before it's time to get redeemin'. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to call some of the scenes exploitative — hell, even the marketing sells the film as an exploitation picture.


But like many of the unappreciated filmmakers who made some of those old exploitation pictures, Brewer has legitimate artistic chops; a good ear for dialogue, a talent with actors and a knack for making films with really good soundtracks. At times his visuals are as saucy as his subject matter: a shot that captures Rae's stupor by dragging the camera at a ninety-degree angle to the ground might just be the best approximation of drunkenness ever recorded on film.


Ricci is fearless and surprisingly touching, Jackson is fun (though at times his "SAY IT AGAIN MUTHA FUCKA!" shtick gets a little too close to "Pulp Fiction"'s Jules) and Justin Timberlake looks remarkably naïve for a guy who most recently was seen bringing sexy back. The ending might be a little too pat, but I think that comes from the blues, too, which take on an increasingly important role in Rae's (and Lazarus') rehabilitation. "Ain't not better cure for the blues than some good pussy," someone says in "Black Snake Moan." Rae's story suggests that the reverse may be true as well.



"The Wayward Cloud"


It's been over a year since I've seen it (as part of BAM's once annually, now presumably defunct, "Best of" series programmed by The Village Voice), and the details are a little fuzzy, but I still give "The Wayward Cloud" a hearty blanket recommendation for anyone old enough to legally watch people have sex with bulbous fruits and then sing and dance about it. Yes, it's a mondo-apocalypto-musical(o) romp from Tsai Ming-liang, whose previous picture, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" was a nearly silent film about a group of people (and, perhaps, ghosts) haunting a decrepit movie theater in the midst of a driving rain storm.


In "Dragon Inn" there was water everywhere; in "The Wayward Cloud," there's none to be found. A horrendous drought sends the characters in search of hydration wherever they can find it — including the inside of a watermelon, which in turns becomes an object of desire both for the stomach and unmentionables as well. Rather graphic man-on-woman-on-produce sex ensues, as well as Tsai's trademark long takes and, yes, minimal dialogue.


I recall not entirely following what was going on, and not particularly caring while I was completely enthralled by Tsai's unusually frenetic pacing and camerawork (for him, anyway). I do remember wondering how different "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" would have been if "The Wayward Cloud" had been playing on the screen in its theater on that fateful night. To crib a line from "The Naked Gun," you can learn a lot from something if it's awful wet, and, in this case, you won't come up dry.



"Black Snake Moan" opens wide on March 2 (official site); "The Wayward Cloud" is playing at the Anthology Film Archives in New York until March 4.

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<![CDATA[Great Moments in Spirit Awards History]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/great-moments-in-spirit-awards.php Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Ally Sheedy at the 1999 Independent Spirit Awards, courtesy of FIND. For more on the awards, including a list of the winners, see the official site.]


Another year, another awards season over, another reason why the Spirit Awards are still more fun than the Oscars: the Spirit Awards don't have interpretive dance. Ever.


Originally called the "FINDIE Awards" upon their inception in 1984, and the Independent Spirit Awards shortly (and wisely) thereafter, the ISAs remain, more than twenty years after their creation, a place for young talent to get noticed and for deserving talent to get recognition.


There may well be campaigning and politicking and all that unsavory awards season stuff as well, but it doesn't seem to interfere with the results; the Spirit Awards have a remarkable knack for getting it right. Comparing the list of Spirit Awards Best Feature winners to the one from the Oscars is mind-boggling; you don't need the benefit of decades of hindsight to realize which award is building a better, more groundbreaking, more watchable catalogue of winners. Consider the two competing canons over the last decade: One has celebrated "Short Cuts," "Pulp Fiction," "Fargo," "Election" and "Memento." The other has spotlighted "Forrest Gump," "Shakespeare in Love," "Gladiator," "A Beautiful Mind" and "Chicago."


And, in the end, the Spirit Awards are just plain fun to watch. Here are a few of our favorite Spirit Awards moments and the reasons why the Spirit Awards pretty much rock.


(Most, coincidentally, are available for viewing on our Spirit Awards video player here.)


They're Not Politically Correct

Every year the Spirit Awards have an Honorary Chair; recent ones include Tom Cruise, Naomi Watts, Halle Berry, Quentin Tarantino and Salma Hayek. In 1992, the honorary chair was filled by Jodie Foster, who delivered a speech about the studio system entitled, "The Scum Sucking Vampire Pig Theory of Hollywood." In contrast, if one were to use the phrase "Scum Sucking Vampire Pig" at the Oscars, one would almost certainly be removed forcefully from the premises. Foster got to do it while speaking (honorarily) on behalf of the whole damn show.


They Don't Take Themselves Too Seriously

As evidenced this year, and pretty much every year, the Oscars love a good bit of witty presenter banter. So much of it is banal and intentionally inoffensive, but you can count on a Spirit Awards script to have some balls (as evidenced by provocative comedienne Sarah Silverman serving as host for the last two years). A classic example came in 2004, in a brilliant bit delivered by Jake Gyllenhaal and Emily Mortimer on the subject of awards season screener copies. "We're not saying all independent films are depressing," Mortimer began. "Many of them are uplifting, as well as depressing." That's why screening tapes are so important, added Gyllenhaal. "They enable Hollywood's elite to watch gloomy movies in the comfort and safety of their own homes, surrounded by friends, nurturing family and servants who can help them through the difficult awards screening season." The gag went on to include a 1-800 support line — it pretty much outfunnies the entirety of the 2007 Academy Awards.


They're Educational

The Spirit Awards are always a good platform to learn about young filmmakers or to sort out confusion over names. This year, after a pronunciation gaffe, we all definitively learned that the young female star (and Spirit Award winner) from "Half Nelson" was Shareeka — not Shakira — Epps. In 1996, Laurence Fishburne used a moment at the podium to clear a similar miscommunication. "Ladies and gentlemen," he intoned, "this is Samuel L. Jackson. I am Laurence Fishburne. Please do not get us confused with each other again." If only Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman were just a little more indie, we could finally get that one cleared up as well.


The Songs Are Better

The Academy Awards always include performances of the nominees for Best Song and, invariably, at least four out of the five from every show are totally awful. The Spirit Awards songs, in contrast, are parody numbers aimed at poking a little fun at the Best Feature nominees (again, not taking things too seriously). One of the best — and most surreal — came in 2005, when Michael McKean and backup singers Annie O'Toole and Jane Lynch paid tribute to "Kinsey" with a song that name-checked Nebutol addiction and masturbation and included the phrases "And Kinsey has sex — with — GUYS!" Why this is awesome feels fairly self-explanatory.


People Get Drunk and Do Crazy Shit

Held in a big party tent on the beach in Santa Monica, California, The Spirit Awards are notorious for their laid back attitude and dress code, and for the fact that they serve booze throughout the show and people tend to say things they might otherwise hold in. The all-time classic example, and really, one of the all-time greatest acceptance speeches in the history of all awards shows, came in 1999, when Ally Sheedy won Best Female Lead for her role in "High Art." After her name was announced, Sheedy leapt onto the stage without using the stairs, then let everything out: "I've never been nominated for anything before," she yelled, "This may never happen again. I'm taking my fucking time!" She dragged Rosanna Arquette, who presented the award, back over to the podium, and made Arquette stand with her as she said "You have no idea how much the two of us have been through. At least twelve years of not being able to get an audition for a sitcom!" Too much information, Ally. When a brief opportunity arose, Arquette, along with co-presenter Don Cheadle, literally ran from the stage to escape the scene. And yet, when I watch it online, I cannot look away.

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<![CDATA[Award Hangover]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/ifc-news-podcast-16-award-hang.php Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we compare notes on picking Oscar winners, discuss the ceremony and go over the Spirit Awards.

Download: MP3, 22:36 minutes, 20.7 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25375 2007-02-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_16_award_hang publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025375 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Award Hangover (photo)]]> Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025375 2007-02-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_16_award_hang_photo inherit 25375 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Cam Archer on "Wild Tigers I Have Known"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/cam-archer-on-wild-tigers-i-ha.php Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Still from "Wild Tigers I Have Known," IFC First Take, 2007]


He first appeared at Sundance as one of the festival's legion of volunteers. A few years later, he was back as a guest and filmmaker, first with several of his shorts, and then in 2006 with his first feature, "Wild Tigers I Have Known." A poetic, borderline experimental exploration of teenage sexuality, "Wild Tigers" follows a lonely kid named Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) as he navigates the perils of middle school bullies and a storm of hormones. An intense crush on another boy named Rodeo (Patrick White) sends Logan on a trip that's equal parts daydream and nightmare, into woods, caves and a feminine persona named Leah.


Archer calls the 06 Sundance "a nightmare... I mean, everybody related to the film came out there to see the premiere, and it was great to have that support; at the same time, you're already so vulnerable. It was wonderful for everyone to be so supportive, but I just felt really awful the entire time because I was really nervous." "You know," Archer says with a chuckle, "Sundance is kind of a big deal"


Thankfully for Archer's nerves, the premiere was a success, and "Wild Tigers" was ultimately acquired for theatrical distribution by IFC First Take. I spoke with the director on the eve of the film's release.


The film feels very personal. I'm guessing you get asked constantly whether or not it's an autobiographical movie.


Yeah, just a few days ago someone asked me, "Who was Rodeo?" I don't know why everyone is so compelled to know that. Everything we make as artists should always reflect what we're interested in or are going through or have gone through. I think that's the nature of personal work and "Wild Tigers" is definitely a personal work. Of course there are several liberties, but it comes from a real place and it ended up being a nice reflection of things that either I've gone through or really good personal friends have gone through.


You wrote, directed, produced and edited the film yourself. What was your favorite of those four roles?


I'm a big fan of editing actually. It really is the ultimate power because you're shaping what's going to be the movie. I've always believed that my films are made in the editing room, and we just try to shoot enough footage so that I can really play with it in several different ways. So I really think that's my favorite part. Is it the part I should be doing? Probably not [laughs].


You've had a long collaboration with your cinematographer, Aaron Platt, who was nominated for a 2007 Spirit Award for his work on "Wild Tigers."


Yeah, Aaron and I met at school at UC Santa Cruz in a still photography class and we just started talking about our mutual interests in filmmaking. We'd done some small projects here and there but then I think Aaron called me and said something like, "Well you should call me cause I have a lot of the gear we would need," and so it kind of went from there.


It's interesting; there're so few people who are fortunate enough to meet someone they can collaborate with again and again. There's really something to be said for this relationship that Aaron and I have formed, and we've definitely grown from it. It's really difficult to think of my movies without thinking about him. We're both really inspired by growing up with MTV and cheesy horror films and that kind of very stylized culture.


I wanted to talk about what films and filmmakers influenced you, but I have to admit the 'cheesy horror film' thing isn't something I got out of your movie. I'm surprised to hear you say that.


[Laughs] Well, "Wild Tigers" is so heavily stylized. And I think that was the case with these 80s horror films. Aaron and I just watched "Labyrinth" — these movies have these characters living in very non-real worlds and the lighting is very present. Now, I'm more of a fan of still photographers and, of course, Gus Van Sant [an executive producer of the film] is great, and Kenneth Anger and Terrence Malick are also filmmakers that I think are so distinct and unique are definitely inspirations to both of us.


And now that I think about it, there are spiders and lions in "Wild Tigers," which are sort of tinged with horror.


There are, that's true. And I think Logan adopting his Leah persona to me that seems like something right out of a John Carpenter film. It feels ridiculously performative, and yet you can't help but be caught up in this mystery.


[laughs] I read online that years before your films showed there, you were a volunteer at the Sundance Film Festival.


I was, I used to work outside a theater. I had a wonderful time; I can't say anything negative about the experience. It's funny though, people will say "Oh, that's how you got your films into Sundance." If only it were that simple! I never met a programmer. Ever. I never met anyone who would have even known a programmer. It was just fun to be surrounded by that filmmaking community.


As a director, is it important to you that the film receive a theatrical release or do you really just want it to be seen by as many people as possible, regardless of the format?


No, I don't, actually — it's weird. I'm one of the few filmmakers who would actually discourage someone from seeing my film. [laughs] I think that film will definitely have a greater life on DVD, but there's something to seeing a film in a theater that is really pretty fucking awesome. It's the way to see a movie you're really interested in. And "Wild Tigers" being in theaters is just so surreal; I always just thought it would end up being on DVD-Rs that college and high school students would be passing to each other in the hallways. At least I hoped for as much.


What are you working on now?


It's something I wrote just after we premiered "Tigers" at Sundance. It's about a middle-aged woman who suffers from a hair pulling disorder called trichotillomania, which is an impulse control disorder similar to kleptomania or pyromania. It's these individuals who can't help but pull out their hair, typically one strand at a time. It really destroys these people's lives.


Well I don't think you'll have too many questions about your films being autobiographical after that one.


I know! I hope people start asking me, "Oh, do you pull out your hair?"



Wild Tigers I Have Known" opens in New York on February 28th (official site).

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8413 2007-02-26 00:00:00 closed closed cam_archer_on_wild_tigers_i_ha publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008413
<![CDATA["The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On," "Deep Red"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/the-emperors-naked-army-marche.php Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On," Facets/Kino International, 1987]


"Kamikaze documentary" — that was the phrase used by more than one critic when Kazuo Hara's bristling, intensely odd film "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" cut its slim but recalcitrant swath through the world's theaters in 1987. It earns the label. Documentaries themselves are, in a way, the safest kind of movie — safely moral in concept, safely conventional in form, and usually unadventurous as a viewing experience. Unless you're Werner Herzog (a veteran kamikaze), you're most likely to make a non-fiction film about an injustice or social situation to which there are a limited amount of conceivable responses. As entertainment, docs can be safe to the point of tedium, never voyaging out into unknown waters or testing our role as viewers.


There are exceptions, of course, that tend to lodge in the memory because they exude the electrical charge of risk and danger. (I'm thinking Herzog, natch, but also "Winter Soldier," Frederick Wiseman's "Titicut Follies," the Maysles' "Grey Gardens," the genuine war-in-the-streets frisson of Patricio Guzman's "The Battle of Chile," etc.) Life, as it happens, uncontrollable and chaotic, is the documentary's secret, and too often unemployed, mega-weapon. So it is with Hara's film, a rough-and-tumble chronicle of the present life of a sociopathic moralist as he dramatically confronts postwar Japanese society. Kenzo Okuzai is that rare animal — an authentic anti-authoritarian who, because he's willing to lose everything, cannot be intimidated or daunted by social norms and laws. By the time filming begins, the "anti-emperorist" Okuzai already has a long record of domestic resistance (including publicly pelting Hirohito with marbles in 1969, a notorious episode in modern Japanese lore), and is now committed to uncovering an illegal killing during WWII while his platoon was stationed in New Guinea.


Investigating a murder that took place in the midst of the hellacious Pacific war of the '40s has an ironic taste to it, but Okuzai is dead serious, and nothing stands in his way — demanding the truth be told, he routinely assaults and kicks his aging and sometimes ailing fellow veterans, who are naturally reticent to talk about 40-year-old crimes. He duplicitously presents his own family to the witnesses as survivors of the murdered soldier, and even pulls admissions of cannibalism from the old men. (They're more relaxed about owning up to hunting the presumably more game-like natives for food; only when the Guineans proved too fleet and clever did the Emperor's warriors resort to killing and eating each other.) Throughout, Okuzai carries himself with a bizarre mixture of polite Japanese stolidity and feverish anger; when the police deal with him (which is frequently), they are at a loss as to what to do — the man's rampaging behavior, even if he's responsible for very little damage to limb and property in the end, sets society's fragile structures shaking. Of course, Hara colludes with his subject (the film crew gives Okuzai's crusade a legitimate feel), and reportedly the megalomaniacal Okuzai attempted to take over the film at several points. It's a film in seething flux from scene to scene — kinda like life.


Dario Argento's is a more easily stomached style of frisson — the Italian horror-maven/style-geyser has been such a popular name brand among psychotronica fans that by now he may seem like yesterday's news, or perhaps may be known only as Asia's dad and as the director of the gorier episodes from Showtime's Masters of Horror series. But go back to 1975's "Deep Red (Profondo Rosso)," and you see what still fuels Argento's reputation as Europe's premier pulp wizard. A ridiculous giallo serial murder plot set in Rome, with slumming star David Hemmings (star of Antonioni's "Blow-Up," a fact hardly lost on Argento) as the wrong-man investigator-cum-target, is all you need to know about the film's nods toward traditional "content." The story turns out to be so baroque and hermetic that you end up just surrendering to Argento's boggling visual density — the film is a moody, sadistic opera bouffe of swooping camera moves, infectious Old World atmosphere, compositional clues and nutsy set-pieces that don't speak to the ostensible psychosis of the killer so much as to the obsessive imagination of the filmmaker.



"The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" (Facets) and "Deep Red" (Blue Underground) will be available on DVD on February 27.

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<![CDATA[Daniele Thompson on "Avenue Montaigne"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/daniele-thompson-on-avenue-mon.php Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: "Avenue Montaigne," ThinkFilm, 2007]


The street is real, a stretch in Paris lined with theaters, concert halls, auction houses, and anchored by a tiny café where artists, performers, businessmen and blue collar workers intermingle. Into this locale, director Danièle Thompson — co-scripting with her son Christopher — places a TV star (Valérie Lemercier), desperate to move beyond the role that made her a celebrity; a pianist (Christopher Thompson, again), oppressed by the demands of his fame; his father (Claude Brasseur), conflicted about the auction that will close a chapter of his life; an American director (Sydney Pollack), on the hunt for the perfect Simone de Beauvoir; and a young woman from the provinces (Cécile de France), who interacts with them all. I spoke with Thompson about and the comedy, drama, and humanity that courses down "Avenue Montaigne."


There's a generosity to this film — even the gold-digging girlfriend isn't judged too harshly. Were you in an especially good mood when you wrote this?


It's a very interesting question. You think, "My God, where do I start? What thread do I pull first in this strange, abstract idea?" It actually came out of one evening when I went to see a beautiful concert at Avenue des Champs-Elysées [from which Avenue Montaigne extends]. It's a place I know very well. It's like Lincoln Center; you go all your life and you walk by and you go in, but [this evening] I suppose I was looking for an idea and I looked around as a cinematographer. I looked at this place, "This is very beautiful."


Outside at 11:30, people are pouring out of the theater next door, people are going out of the downstairs auction room, there's a restaurant with the doorman with his uniform. And then there's this little café which a lot of the Parisians know, and which, as we say in the film, is the only place in the area where you can have a normal meal any hour of the day or night. We have millions of these cafés in France, but [usually] everybody in them is the same. Everybody works in the same area; if it's a beautiful area, people are better dressed. If it's a poor area, people also look the same. This place, they don't — you have very elegant people mixing with people who work.


So I walked out of the concert and everybody was rushing [into the café], thinking maybe they could grab a table, because those nights, it's an assault on this place. And I felt there's something about this place, which is very, very different from anywhere else in the world. Maybe we should talk about these people and how they meet, how they get together in this little café. It started like that.


The egalitarian nature of the café extends to the rest of the film, doesn't it? I was thinking how film protagonists are often isolated to their own strata — you don't usually expect to see a character who's a famous TV star hanging around the kitchen of a concierge.


But that's close to real life, because you do end up there. The concierge's [Claudie Dani] place is a sort of a refuge for these people. I guess, whoever you are and wherever you are — and this is very much what the film is about — you need to break up the doors of the prison somehow and try something else. The French title [for the film] is "Orchestra Seats," which is very much a metaphor for the fact that wherever you sit, you always look: Would it be better on the side? Or somebody comes and sits in front of you and he's a giant and prevents you from watching the show. There's always that search: Am I in the best place I could be?


It's not unusual for a parent to direct a child's performance in a film. Mother/son writing teams are a little unusual, though. How did that dynamic work?


Well, we did it with my first film, "La Buche," which was about seven years ago and the big test. Once we passed that step, it became work, which is what it is now. It's very interesting, and I did it for a long time with my own father [Gérard Oury] — we used to write my father's films. Once you overcome this family problem, it's very, very interesting to work with someone younger — or older, for him — with another point of view: a woman and a man, different sensitivities. It's a good team, because there are things I say that he never would have thought about, and a lot of things he says I never would have thought about.


Did he essentially write his own role?


No, it's all mixed.


Was there anything you brought to his role that he couldn't have seen?


What's interesting in the character is the fact that this young man never really understood the couple that the father and mother were, felt maybe a little forgotten by the parents, because of their passion for art and the fact that they'd built this collection and would rather go to some gallery opening than a PTA meeting. This is what we say in the film, but it goes much further than that. Some couples are parents more than couples, and some couples are couples more than parents, and this is the case for this young man. But I don't think [Christopher] would have missed that, because we built these characters together.


You brought Sidney Pollack in to play a famous American director. Was there anything you had to change in your approach when you were directing him?


You have to forget that he's a director. I had many directors in the film. Valérie Lemercier is a very good director; Albert Depontel is a director. The three of them had just finished films when they came to the set, and they were so relieved to just sit there. They loved it, so it made me feel very comfortable.



"Avenue Montaigne" opened in New York on February 16, with a national release to follow (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 23, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/opening-this-week-february-23.php Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet
IFC News


[Photo: "Amazing Grace," Roadside Atttractions, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"The Abandoned"

Horror films set across international waters seem to be all the rage these days ("The Grudge" and "Hostel" series hint that wherever you may go in this world, someone will want to kill you), and "Aftermath" director Nacho Cerda (best name ever) doesn't seem to want to reinvent the wheel with this story of an American of Russian descent who returns to her homeland to uncover some family secrets. During her trip, she discovers that the farmland her family owns may very well be "...DAMNED" (emphasis added in the film's press release), and if the studio tells you it's scary, then it's sure to be. Now please stop rolling your eyes.

Opens wide (official site).


"Amazing Grace"

"Seven Up!" series helmer Michael Apted directs a strong cast of English thespians — including Ioan Gruffudd, Albert Finney, Michael Gambon, Rufus Sewell and "Infamous"'s Toby Jones — in this historical epic about the life of antislavery pioneer William Wilberforce. Early reviews have been pretty mixed, as critics hail Apted's depiction of a difficult subject matter (slavery's past) but feel that the film struggles to find a contemporary connection.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Astronaut Farmer"

Astronaut movies seem to bleed altogether, as it's usually a small group of believers firmly set against a disapproving greater society ("October Sky", "Space Cowboys" and, hell, "Armageddon" come to mind), so we're not expecting too much, just judging by the plot of the film. But with "Northfork" director Michael Polish at the helm, well...you never really know what to expect.

Opens wide (official site).


"Glastonbury"

For those who don't know, the Glastonbury Festival is one of the longest running music festivals in the world, dating back to 1970 and regularly housing performances by wildly diverse bands such as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, the Beat, the Pogues and Coldplay. Director Julien Temple has a history in music and film (he directed "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle," dozens of music videos and "Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten," which premiered at Sundance this year), but reviews of "Glastonbury" have been mixed so far, as critics feel that it focuses too much on the performances and not on the festival's overall impact on the musicians, the fans and the residents of the town of Glastonbury.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Gray Matters"

"Gray Matters" is set in that indie film-dom romanticized New York (see "Kissing Jessica Stein" and "Sidewalks of New York") that we just can't seem to take the urine-soaked subway to here in reality. But first time director Sue Farmer's Woody Allen-lite romantic comedy comes with a twist, as a brother and sister (Tom Cavanagh and Heather Graham, respectively) both fall in love with the same woman (Bridget Moynahan). We're excited by the prospect of some hot Graham-on-Moynahan action, but five bucks says the film's more dinner party than bedroom.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Number 23"

We certainly miss the manic, slapstick Jim Carrey of yesteryear ("Dumb & Dumber" especially), and we're guessing Carrey's got another non-comedic miss on his hands with this one. The film's been saddled with both a silly plotline and the direction of Joel Schumacher, which is never a good thing. We do like the subtle "Twin Peaks" thing going on with Virginia Madsen, so...there is that.

Opens wide (official site).


"Premium"

African American filmmaker Pete Chatmon received serious attention from the film industry after his short film "3D" screened at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, as he now prepares for the release of his debut feature. "Premium" tells the story of a struggling black actor whose life is turned upside down when his ex-fiance returns into his life only 36 hours before she is to be married. Early reviews state that the film's melding of satire and romantic comedy (think "Hollywood Shuffle" meets any Julia Roberts film) work mostly due to the film's strong writing and acting. Chatmon may be a director to watch out for.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Reno 911!: Miami"

We love us some Deputy Dangle, and with all that "Borat" frenzy behind us, we're hoping more movie studios greenlight projects from talented television comedy writers. "Reno 911!: Miami" follows the members of the Washoe County Sheriff's Department as they attend a law enforcement convention in Miami Beach shortly before a bioterrorist attack. And even more exciting, "Reno 911!: Miami" marks a reunion of the now-defunct mid-90s comedy group "The State," as all of the members will appear in the film.

Opens wide (official site).


"Starter for 10"

"The Last King of Scotland"'s James McAvoy seems to be everywhere these days — his latest project is an 80s-set British rom-com about a working-class student who aims to appear on the British Quiz Show and win the heart of his beautiful teammate.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Taste of Tea"

"Party 7" director Katsuhito Ishii returns with another film blending traditional live-action and animation in this story about an odd and quirky suburban family. An ordinary housewife develops a second life as a homemade animator, while the family's young daughter begins to worry when she realizes she is being followed everywhere by a giant version of herself. Wackiness may very possibly ensue.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Wayward Cloud"

Tsai Ming-liang's latest film re-connects his lead characters from 2001's "What Time Is It There?", returning them back to Taipei from Paris during a water crisis affecting the entire city. Minimalist plots and long shots are Tsai's strong points, but the director also incorporates signature lively and imaginative musical sequences are interspersed throughout the narrative.

Opens in New York (IMDb Page).

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8410 2007-02-19 00:00:00 closed closed opening_this_week_february_23 publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008410
<![CDATA["Gray Matters," "Glastonbury"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/gray-matters-glastonbury.php Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Gray Matters," Yari Film Group, 2007]


Gray Matters


There's something to the idea of a gay reimagining of
the classic screwball comedy as a love triangle
between a straight brother and his gay sister who both
fall in love with the same woman. But "Gray Matters"
takes that charming premise in charmless and
unsophisticated directions.


Writer/director Sue Kramer acknowledges in the press
notes that she wanted to capture the "elegance and
grace of [a] 1940s movie classic," but her film feels,
sounds and looks more like an episode of "Mad About
You" than like a film by Howard Hawks or Gregory La
Cava. Her characters talk quickly enough to exist
within a screwball comedy world, but what they say
never even approximates the wit of Preston Sturges or
Billy Wilder. Granted, the comparison is unfair;
Kramer is a first-time filmmaker and I'm measuring her
against some of the giants of the art form. But if
she's retooling these filmmakers' movies for a modern
audience who else can I compare her to?


Heather Graham plays Gray (sadly, she does not have a
crazy sidekick named Matters), a bubbly ad exec who
lives with her doctor brother Sam (Tom Cavanaugh). The
two share a life of dinner parties, jogging in the
park, being mistaken for a couple, and, occasionally,
working. They're both single, partly because the
furnishings in their apartment have more personality
than they do. Enter Charlie (Bridget Moynahan), a
zoologist who happens to be the perfect mate for both:
she is a 1940s film buff, she loves dogs and she
never wears a bra. She falls for Sam and Gray falls
for her and realizes for the first time in her life
that she may be gay. Molly Shannon is Gray's easily
excitable co-worker; Alan Cumming plays one of her
straight suitors and later dresses like a woman.


According to the press notes Kramer is not gay, and it
leaves my curious why she chose to explore the topic
when she, evidentially, doesn't have a great deal to
say about the (gray) matter. Gray's acceptance of her
own homosexuality is one big joke (including "wacky"
therapy sessions with Dr. Sissy Spacek at bowling
alleys or on rock climbing walls) and her big coming
out story a time in her past when she literally came
out of a closet. Kramer's better when dealing with
more general female topics, like how society and media
and, yes, men give women warped self-images; Gray is
terrified, for instance, of her unsightly chin fat,
but, of course, Heather Graham has no chin fat (and as
one who does, I should know).


It's an idiosyncratic picture; whatever else you can
say about it, it's hard to deny "Gray Matters" comes
from an singular voice, even if that voice is mostly
interested in cheap therapist jokes and giving all due
praise to that remarkable spice nutmeg (seriously,
count how many times it comes up in casual
conversation). Still, in one delightful moment,
Kramer hits her target. Gray comes home to find
Charlie alone, watching a classic musical that both
love and know by heart. The two begin reenacting the
dance, and for once, the promise of that gay
reimagining of classical Hollywood cinema is realized
is a moment of true beauty and charm, one that carries
the same blissful high as the movies Gray, Charlie and Kramer love. But then Sam walks in, the moment passes and it's back to business as usual.



Glastonbury


Epic in length and scope, if not level of success,
Julien Temple's documentary about the Glastonbury
Music Festival is sort of like a history lesson by a
professor on a long, strange drug trip. Forget
chronology or story: free association reigns as Temple
pieces together his nearly two and a half hour
chronicle of Britain's longest running and most famous
celebration of music, hippie culture and building
sculpture out of garbage. It's Burning Man with a
better soundtrack.


A few totally bitchin' moments aside — who knew
Richie Havens could wail on the acoustic guitar?!?
— watching "Glastonbury" is like watching someone
else's home movies: they have all this nostalgia and
all these fabulous personal stories associated with
the images. We just see a bunch of guys on drugs
flopping around in some mud for 140 minutes.


There's lots of footage of Glastonbury musical
performances from Radiohead, Coldplay, Joe Strummer,
The Prodigy, Pulp, and many, many more (though
rarely full songs, which kind of sucks) spliced with
lots of footage of Glastonbury attendees, using the
public toilets, doing drugs, sneaking their way onto
the festival grounds. Temple covers a lot of ground,
literally and figuratively, but the buzz that everyone
at Glastonbury gets from being there didn't transfer
to the film. Even if most everyone on screen looks
like they're having a pretty good time, we're not
really having one watching them.


The movie is too long and too focused to fully enjoy.
Rather than a theatrical release, the project would be
best served as a DVD, where you could skip around and
watch the performances at your leisure. With Temple's
hand on the remote control, as it were, the concert
tends to run long.



"Gray Matters" in limited release February 23rd (official site). "Glastonbruy" opens in Los Angeles on February 23rd (official site).

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<![CDATA["Lunacy," "Apartment Zero"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/lunacy-apartment-zero.php Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Lunacy," Zeitgeist Films, 2006]


It could be said that movies get closest to being fabulous art not when they are at their most self-consciously "artsy," but when they reflect an obsessive visionary's perspective and personality as purely and expressively as a painting or a poem. If this is so, then Jan Svankmajer's films belong on the highest shelf, because it's quite possible that no moviemaker's oeuvre is as uncompromised and as hermetically sealed as his. When you watch, you're uneasily shaking hands with the man's unexamined, fecund imaginative power source, with no intermediaries present. Famously a die-hard Surrealist who still "belongs" to recalcitrant Surrealist federation in the Czech Republic, Svankmajer has been exploring the anxiety of everyday objects for over 40 years, and in a vast variety of forms (including poetry, sculpture, painting, ceramics, collages and cabineted creations fashioned largely from taxidermied animals). Of course he is predominantly a stop-motion animator, inheriting the Czech puppet tradition and forcing it down the gullet of his own noxious id. His filmography is basically one long smash-up of subconscious fears, cultural recyclings, socio-sexual commentary, food used in ways it shouldn't be, things that shouldn't be food but are, and a crystalline faith in the desire of objects.


His new feature, "Lunacy", is quintessential Svankmajer — not quite the textual acrobatics of "Alice" (1988) or "Faust" (1994), but, as the title suggests, closer to the Freudian craziness of his many shorts and "Conspirators of Pleasure" (1996). The "story" is an almost abstracted play on nightmare logic — our hero Jean (Pavel Liska) has reoccurring dreams about being mugged in his sleep by asylum attendants, a situation that proves sympathetic to a cackling maniac called, simply, the Marquis (Jan Triska), who has more than a whiff of Sade about him, and who dresses 18th-century style and lives in a castle performing outrageous black masses. Needless to say, Jean's singular nightmare returns again and again, the Marquis's sanity is hardly to be trusted, and a climactic visit to a Charenton-style nuthouse leads us to question if there's any significant difference between the patients and the staff.


Throughout, Svankmajer interpolates his narrative with parallel visions of rogue flesh on the animated march — literally, perambulating cow tongues (a motif he first explored in 1969's "A Quiet Week in the House"), eyeballs, moist calves' brains, self-slicing steaks and bleached bones, all roaming over the film's interior landscapes like escaped lab mice. (In one appalling sequence, chickens pecking at self-grinding beef lay eggs that hatch more meat, which jump into the grinder...) Svankmajer's political thrust here is too wacky to parse — the Reign of Terror is explicitly evoked, but who exactly the aristocrats, the revolutionaries and the madmen are is impossible to figure. Perhaps this is how Sade saw it from behind his asylum walls: an anarchic exchange of one organizational derangement for another. Who knows — it's Svankmajer's little universe to command. We're just tourists.


A far more reasonable take on insanity, Martin Donovan's "Apartment Zero" (1988) made one of biggest indie splashes of the late '80s, co-opting primal Hitchcockian ingredients and going for broke. Set, evocatively, in Buenos Aires, the movie tracks the unsettled but budding friendship-cum-codependency between two immigrant roommates — a boisterous, hedonistic, semi-educated American (Hart Bochner) and a socially inept, nervous British movie geek (Colin Firth). A serial killer is meanwhile terrorizing the city, and suspicions fly just as social virtues are exchanged and each man begins to leech off the other. Naturally, an imbalance is reached, personalities imperfectly swap (kinda), and blood spills. The actors have a revving ball, while their characters introduce a pre-Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon moviehead parlor game, which my wife and I long ago dubbed the "Apartment Zero" Game. Simply, one person names three actors from a film, the other must name the film. Firth's neurotic dweeb beats out Bochner's rangy hotshot every time, but the game quickly established an extra-cinematic life all its own.



"Lunacy" (Zeitgeist) and "Apartment Zero" (Anchor Bay) will be available on DVD on February 20.

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<![CDATA[Our Oscar Picks]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/ifc-news-podcast-15-our-oscar.php Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 As the Oscars are fast approaching, this week, we indulge in the always satisfying act of Oscar prognostication. Using the most convoluted of logic and the power of our combined film knowledge, we discuss a few of the less talked-about categories as well as the big ones, and go on record with our picks of the winners.

Download: MP3, 23:23 minutes, 21.5 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25374 2007-02-19 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_15_our_oscar publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025374 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Our Oscar Picks (photo)]]> Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025374 2007-02-19 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_15_our_oscar_photo inherit 25374 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Ryan Fleck on "Half Nelson"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/ryan-fleck-on-half-nelson.php Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michelle Orange

IFC News


[Photo: Shareeka Epps and Ryan Gosling in "Half Nelson," ThinkFilm, 2006]


When "Half Nelson" opened last summer, it quickly brought Brooklyn directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to the forefront of the independent film scene. They were rewarded with three Gotham Awards in November, including Best Feature — the first of many honors, as it turned out. The performances of star Ryan Gosling (nominated last week for an Academy Award) along with newcomer Shareeka Epps and actor Anthony Mackie elevated a strong but spare and risky story into a strikingly unique portrait of one of Fleck's favorite themes, an "uncommon friendship."


"Half Nelson" was also a slightly unwieldy addition to a larger canon, that of the Teacher Film; there is at least one a year these days, and if "Half Nelson" sufficed for 2006 (along with an assist from "The History Boys"), last month's "Freedom Writers" already has a lock on 2007's star entry. The Teacher Film is generally an inspirational drama, as often as not based on a true story, about a teacher who manages to motivate and educate his or her students against all odds. In the case of "Half Nelson," one of the main "odds" just happens to be the teacher's crack addiction.


Released on DVD this week, it seems fairly unlikely that Half Nelson will join the list of "Top 10 Teacher Movies" as voted by the teachers of America, a roster of DVD stalwarts that includes "Goodbye Mr. Chips," "Stand and Deliver," "Dead Poets Society," "To Sir With Love" and "Dangerous Minds." I spoke with Ryan Fleck about the influence of that list (if any) on "Half Nelson," and how their various depictions of alternative teaching methods proved to be either inspiration or anti-inspiration in creating the character of Dan Dunne, and his uncanny, symbiotic relationship with one of his students.


How familiar were you with the Teacher Film genre before making "Half Nelson?" Did any of the archetypal films make a formative impression on you, as a filmmaker or otherwise?


In writing the script for "Half Nelson," we were well aware of the clichés of the inspirational teacher drama, and tried to move around them in unexpected ways. We never really studied those films. We just didn't think of "Half Nelson" in the tradition of those movies. The movies we watched to help us establish the mood of the story were more along the lines of Hal Ashby, "Midnight Cowboy" and early Altman.


[Of the films on the Top 10 Teacher Movies list], I have only seen "Stand and Deliver," "Dangerous Minds," "Teachers," "Dead Poets Society" and "Mr. Holland's Opus." And I don't remember them very well. I recall seeing "Teachers" on TV when I was about ten years old and thinking it was really interesting. I think Nick Nolte smokes pot at some point. It was pretty shocking for me at the time, but I don't remember much else. I liked "Dead Poets Society" very much.


You have mentioned that a lot of your favorite movies deal with "uncommon friendships" ("Rushmore," "Harold and Maude"), was there one in particular that was a key inspiration in making "Half Nelson?"


There was no one specific film that influenced "Half Nelson." But we did derive a lot of inspiration from the films of the 1970s, especially some of Hal Ashby's movies: "Coming Home," "Harold & Maude," "The Last Detail." There's something about the rebellious nature of the characters mixed with political insights that seems to be missing from most American films today.


Most of us don't seem to be paying enough attention in life to take advantage of potential uncommon friendships. Why might that be?


I'm not sure why we don't take advantage of potential uncommon friendships in our lives. I think most of us spend too much time alone in front of our computers and not enough time interfacing with people in the real world. Just a guess.


Have you gotten any interesting reactions from teachers who have seen the film? Or addicts?


Yes, teachers' reactions to the film have been all over the place. Most of them really appreciate the film, but we occasionally get some angry reactions. I think some people are very disturbed by Mr. Dunne's teacher-student boundary issues and accuse us of disgracing the teaching profession, which is pretty silly. For the record, we think public school teachers have one of the most underpaid and under appreciated jobs in this country. That is a true disgrace. But our film just isn't about that issue. But, again, most teachers have been incredibly supportive of the film.


We've had even more support from former addicts who have seen the film. In fact, one person came up to us after a recent screening in shock. This person told us they were a former drug-addicted school teacher who had a very unique friendship with one of her young students. She thanked us for making the film and said it was almost therapeutic for her to watch. And we've talked to others with similar stories. Very interesting.


In talking about staying true to the story of Mr. Dunne and Drey you have said that the effect wouldn't have been as dark if you had gone "the 'Dangerous Minds' route." Can you explain that a bit more?


By "dark" I probably meant to say "real." The truth is I don't really remember "Dangerous Minds" very well, but the pieces I've seen seem pretty silly. I think the "true story" it was based on was about a black woman's experience teaching in a tough, inner-city school. Why did they change it to a white woman? I mean, I know why, but to do that stinks of racist bullshit. I don't inherently have anything against the inspirational teacher genre, but I just thought it would be interesting to switch it up a bit. Teachers are human too. And some of them are even drug addicts. Why not explore that?



"Half Nelson" comes out on DVD February 13th.

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<![CDATA[Unsexy Sex: A Valentine]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/unsexy-sex-a-valentine.php Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michelle Orange, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore


[Photo: "Killing Me Softly," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2002]


On-screen chemistry's a funny thing. Some actors come together and click; others might as well be staring out at each other from separate screens across the multiplex. When it comes to romance, good chemistry can mark the difference between a sense of believably heated liaison and a sense that you're just watching two famous people smash their faces together. Nowhere is this clearer than in love scenes — whether extravagantly staged or staunchly naturalistic, movie sex without a spark can range from boring to downright ludicrous. In honor of Valentine's Day, we're taking a closer look at the ludicrous side of the spectrum with some of our favorite examples of unsexy sex.



Body of Evidence (1993)

Directed by Uli Edel


There are at least four lengthy sex scenes (plus a sequence where Willem Dafoe strokes a cat while watching Madonna get acupuncture needles stuck in her butt) in "Body of Evidence," but the funniest has to be the last one. By this point in the film, Dafoe, a shady defense attorney, has grown fed up of his client (that'd be Madonna) and her devious feminine trickery. He barges into her home and accuses her of telling his wife that he's been cheating on her. Madonna denies it and Dafoe throws her to the floor, but since Madonna's character is into rough sex, that's basically like slipping her some Spanish fly. In short order, the two are in the midst of a wild and wildly ridiculous lovemaking session that includes masturbation, bondage, biting, strangulation and anal
sex. Most of "Body of Evidence"'s sex scenes are far funnier than they are erotic — I'm also quite fond of the one where Madonna ties up Dafoe with his own belt and then pours hot candle wax and champagne on his chest after announcing they're going to do it "My Way" like she's Frank Sinatra or something — but that fetish potpourri really exemplifies why they all don't work. One kink might have been sexy; but six all at once within a two and a half minute span? The scene's so jam-packed that the characters don't even have time to enjoy themselves before they're on to their next wacky indiscretion. Madonna and Dafoe look like they're working their way through a checklist of deviancy as quickly as possible so they can put their clothes back on. —Matt Singer



In The Cut (2003)

Directed by Jane Campion


There are some actresses who shouldn't have sex. Something strange happens in my brain when I see Cate Blanchett, for instance, in bed; neurons misfire, it just doesn't work. It's not a matter of being a roaring femme fatale or innocuous honey pot, it's a certain switch, and they can flick it or they can't. I don't necessarily think Meg Ryan can't, but in 2003's "In the Cut," Jane Campion's moody serial killer thriller, much of the hype around the movie was derived from the question of whether she can. As a mousey New York teacher, Ryan gets caught up in a murder investigation being conducted by a bowl of hot tamales (Mark Ruffalo and his formidable moustache). Rumors of their graphic sex scenes abounded, and while it's true that the two are naked a great deal, the dark, libidinal abandon of it all failed to kicked in. In fact at the end of the film, when Ruffalo is cuffed to some sort of radiator, encouraging the demure Ryan to have her nasty way with him, the dreaded giggle impulse is triggered. Campion fails her actors in these scenes — you can see that they are game and able, though Ryan generates more heat, in one particular scene, on her own than with her dirty-talking detective — in capturing all the flesh and none of the fun. —Michelle Orange



Killing Me Softly (2002)

Directed by Chen Kaige


Neither Joseph Fiennes nor Heather Graham really found a place for themselves in Hollywood. I place the blame on 2002's "Killing Me Softly," the only English-language effort to date from revered Fifth Generation Chinese director Chen Kaige (of such irreproachable arthouse fare as "Farewell My Concubine"). After the film was dropped directly to video, Graham was left with a guest-star spot on "Scrubs" and a quickly canceled show of her own, Fiennes slunk off to act in a slew of middling period dramas no one's heard of, and Chen returned to China to make the sentimental "Together" and the ridiculous fantasy epic "The Promise." What could possibly be so mojo-killing? "Killing Me Softly" is an erotic thriller about a British mountain climber and a comically naïve Midwestern expat — I'll leave you to divine which actor fits into which role — who meet cute at a London crosswalk and wordlessly rush off to bang. Believably portraying such reckless passion, particularly only a scarce few minutes into a film, would be a challenge for any actor. To say that Graham and Fiennes fail is too generous — they manage to make the film's frequent, panting displays of their famous flesh actively boring. Graham's Bambi-eyed ingénue begins to suspect her brooding boy-toy of murdering his last two girlfriends, but marries him nevertheless, and the film's plodding poor-man's Hitchcock themes of lust and danger cumulate with a howler of a kinky love scene involving a silk scarf and a fireplace that could earn "Killing Me Softly" a place on the cult classic pantheon. —Alison Willmore



Miami Vice (2006)

Directed by Michael Mann


As much as Michael Mann is an expert of the impenetrable chatter of cops 'n robbers, he's clueless when it comes to the allusive game-playing of flirtation. There's no starker reminder of this than in "Miami Vice," a visually ravishing film that screeches to a halt with every intimation of intimacy. After a tense sit-down with coke supplier José Yero (John Ortiz), Crockett (Colin Farrell) ambles off to speak with the operation's second-in-command, Isabella (Gong Li), whence comes the soon to be legendary line that he's a "fiend for mojitos." This inexplicably charms Gong (visibly uncomfortable speaking English), and so begins another grueling male rescue fantasy. They whisk each other away to Havana on speedboat fumes, gropingly do the salsa, and (cue the angsty Chris Cornell ballad) furtively hump under latticed shadows at a seedy hotel. It's all Hollywood handbook seduction — lots of dead-eyed stares and sensitive cheek grazing, but no hint of idiosyncrasy or humor — that is, nothing identifiably human. At least Tubbs (Jaimie Foxx) gets a cute premature ejaculation joke in his scene of amor. —R. Emmet Sweeney

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<![CDATA[The Life and Times of Nicolas Cage]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/ifc-news-podcast-14-the-life-a.php Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 The career of Nicolas Cage (né Nicholas Kim Coppola) has been one of spectacular highs ("Adaptation," "Leaving Las Vegas") and even more spectacular lows (Have you seen "Captain Corelli's Mandolin"?!). It remains to be seen which category Cage's latest effort, "Ghost Rider," will fall into, but this week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look at Cage's past work and sometimes strange public persona.

Download: MP3, 21:42 minutes, 19.8


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25373 2007-02-12 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_14_the_life_a publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025373 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Life and Times of Nicolas Cage (photo)]]> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025373 2007-02-12 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_14_the_life_a_photo inherit 25373 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Jasmila Zbanic on "Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/jasmila-zbanic-on-grbavica-the.php Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Mirjana Karanovic and Luna Mijovic in "Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams," Strand Releasing, 2007]


With the release of her directorial feature debut, Sarajevo-born filmmaker Jasmila Zbanic has put Bosnia and Herzegovina on the proverbial map as a region to watch in the international film scene. Winner of the Golden Bear (and two other prizes) at last year's Berlin Film Festival, "Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams" doesn't just take place in Zbanic's homeland; it specifically deals with a national issue that goes largely unaddressed in cinema — the countless Bosnian women who still suffer in the aftermath of the Yugloslav wars of the 90s. In this rich and justifiably acclaimed drama, single mother Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) harbors a wartime secret that greatly affects both her own well-being as well as that of her 12-year-old daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic). And it only takes an event as uncomplicated as Sara's upcoming class field trip to act as the catalyst for a heartwrenching confrontation between mother and daughter over the truth of Esma's horrifying past. The vowel-challenged "Grbavica" (pronounced GRR-BAH-VEE-ZAH, as named for Esma's neighborhood) is tough to discuss without divulging some of the film's plot reveals, so a SPOILER WARNING is in full effect during this chat with Zbanic.


For me, the moments that packed the most potent punch were usually the subtlest, like when Esma makes small talk with a friend about going to the post-mortem identifications as if it were a social occasion. Is it a typical Bosnian attitude to be so nonchalant about the distressing moments in day-to-day life?


At the beginning of the war, one bullet was something to be shocked about for days, and then after you have been under siege for three-and-a-half years, one bullet didn't mean so much. In any film, drama is created out of these kinds of things, but I wanted to use it as it is in Bosnia today, where you have to accept it as part of normal life. That sounds really dramatic, but you just go on trying to deal with it.


How have Bosnian women responded to the film?


Women who survived these [atrocities] were pretty happy that somebody is talking about it because they were, for many years, forgotten about from our society. No one talked about it. Some would say, "We appreciate what you're doing, but we can't watch this film, it would be too emotional for us." I wanted to make this film not just about Bosnian women, but more universally as a women's topic. Of course it is located here, though rape happens not just in wars, but during times of peace in the U.S., in Western and Eastern Europe, in every country. That's why one scene shows peace in Bosnia after the war, and there is a soldier in a cafe who almost rapes a woman. It is not just a wartime effect, but something that has happened throughout the history of women and relationships.


When you received your awards at the Berlinale, you took the opportunity to speak out about Serbian war criminals who still haven't been captured. What do you hope to ultimately achieve with your films and status as a filmmaker?


When the Berlinale received it for competition, I suddenly learned that I had to do eight hours of interviews for five days. I was thinking, as a filmmaker, I don't want to talk about my films. I said everything I wanted to in the film itself, so what is the purpose of all of this? Of course, the media is very much needed to help present my film to audiences, and my aim is to have this film seen, so what more could I do than just talk about the film? Knowing how hard our life is in Sarajevo because war criminals are still not captured, I thought, okay, I'm going to use every opportunity I can to speak about Bosnia. When I talk to people, they say, "Oh, they are not captured, really?" There have been so many more wars after Bosnia that this was completely forgotten about. I never thought while making the film that I wanted to achieve anything in a political sense, but once it was finished, I thought I would really try to change something.


Do you think this newfound soapbox will affect your filmmaking in the future?


I mean, I could say that, first of all, I'm a filmmaker and I want to make films that are important to me. I wouldn't make a [strictly] political-issue film because I don't think my film is political in this way. On the other hand, every film is political, even the most stupid films. I don't think it will affect my filmmaking, because I try to make films that could maybe have meaning to human beings for the next 100 years. It's in my everyday life that I want to talk about things that are unjust. After the film, during my interviews and things, I pointed out that Bosnian women who were raped didn't have any status in our society. With the big media coverage, we actually managed to change Bosnian law. So, you know, this has little to do with filmmaking, but still has something to do with being a filmmaker, because I think aesthetics is a part of ethics.


You were only a teenager when the civil wars started, but you wrote the script just as you became a mother. So whose perspective resonates more with you, Esma's or Sara's?


When I was writing it, I was trying to make the story from Sara's perspective, and I felt that something was wrong. I thought I should keep it with Esma as much as Sara, because the question of Sara's identity and future is something for the next generation to answer. We still don't know what the issues of this generation will be because they are new, and mine is a generation of victims, I could say? We remember the war, and now we have to deliver it — even if we don't want it — to our kids. I never mention the war in front of my [six-year-old] kid, but she picks it up from TV or somewhere. She comes to me and says, you know, what are mass graves? And I have to answer, so I'm delivering my trauma to her, and I'm trying to explain in a way so that she won't have to carry it. So, that's what makes Esma's perspective more similar to mine, not only because I'm a mother, but because she's in a position of being hurt. Also, I don't want to stay a victim [like Esma], I hate when I notice things that could define me as that, so I'm trying to overcome it.


I want to ask you about some of the great music choices you have throughout the film. Could you explain the cultural significance between those spiritual and turbo-folk songs?


Music for me in a film is never... I don't want to use music as a slave of the image. I want music to be art, or a body in itself to give something to the film. So, I wanted to have these two worlds that Esma goes into. One is her inner world, where she's at home or the women's center, and the other is this outside, oppressive world where music is aggressive. [Turbo-folk] came from Serbia, and there are some theories that it was a weapon of war because it's brainwashing music. You really want to get up and dance, and if a gun is near you, you would shoot. So I wanted to use it as one more layer of portraying Esma's life.


I was reminded of another great film I watched recently concerning a similar topic. Have you seen Coixet's "The Secret Life of Words"?


No, but journalists keep asking me that, so I just ordered it from Amazon. [laughs]



"Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams" opens in New York on February 16th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 16th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/opening-this-week-february-16t.php Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Avenue Montaigne," ThinkFilm, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Antibodies"

German director Christian Alvart follows up his 1999 film "Curiosity & the Cat" with this suspense thriller about a small-town detective whose interrogation of a serial killer threatens the core of his beliefs.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Avenue Montaigne"

France's entry in the Best Foreign Film category at this year's Oscars reminds us a bit of 2001's "Amelie," as Cecile de France stars as a young waitress from the countryside who changes the lives of the art-centered customers of the cafe. "Avenue Montaigne" is the latest from "Jet Lag" director and writer Danièle Thompson.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Bamako"

African filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako paints a picture of political and personal strife in contemporary Africa in this drama about a couple's disintegrating break-up set against the backdrop of public proceedings against international financial institutions blamed for the country's woes. Danny Glover, who executive produced the picture, also has a cameo.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Breach"

"Shattered Glass" director Billy Ray presents another film based on a true story about a young man faced with a questionable morality. This thriller follows a young up-and-coming FBI agent who's asked to spy on his superior, who is believed to be a double agent working against the interests of the nation. Ryan Phillippe and Chris Cooper play the rookie and double agents, respectively.

Opens wide (official site).


"Bridge to Terabithia"

Hungarian filmmaker Gabor Csupo transforms this popular children's story about two fifth graders who encounter a magical kingdom hidden deep in a forest into a feature film (his first) after spending over a dozen years producing and developing the popular "Rugrats" series. Indie fave Zooey Deschanel and cult icon Robert Patrick support.

Opens wide (official site).


"Days of Glory (Indigènes)"

This World War II film details the story of a group of North African soldiers enlisted to fight for the French as a part of an "indigenous" unit. Director Rachid Bouchareb is said to employ every World War II film cliché in the book for this film, but critics state that the film's modest budget and culturally diverse ensemble cast allow the filmmaker to explore racial conflicts in a war-time setting.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Ghost Rider"

It seems as though every superhero in the Marvel Comics catalog is getting his own movie; the latest is for the marginally popular Ghost Rider, a former motorcycle stunt rider who moonlights as an evil bounty hunter at night after making a deal with the devil, Mephisto. The film has a familiar superhero director in "Daredevil"'s Mark Steven Johnson and action star in Nicolas Cage ("National Treasure," "The Rock"), but still seems a bit ho-hum to us. We're just a bit disheartened the producers didn't go for the original Ghost Rider.

Opens wide (official site).


"Music and Lyrics"

Hugh Grant. Drew Barrymore. Valentine's Day. We think it's safe to say that there are no surprises in this one.

Opens wide (official site).


"Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls"

In a span of a few short years, February became the month of Tyler Perry, an unknown African American playwright who struck gold when his first film, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," produced on a budget of $5.5 million, grossed over ten times that amount. Together, Perry's first feature and his second, 2006's "Madea's Family Reunion," have grossed over $100 million, so it's no surprise Lionsgate greenlit his latest, a romantic comedy with Gabrielle Union and "The Wire"'s Idris Elba. It's unclear yet whether Perry's latest film will uphold his winning streak at the box office ("Daddy's Little Girls" is the first Perry film without his popular Madea character), so we'll just have to wait and see come Monday.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA["Days of Glory," "Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/days-of-glory-grbavica-the-lan.php Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Days of Glory," Weinstein Company, 2006]


Days of Glory


The French film "Days of Glory," about a group of heroic North Africans who overcome systematic racism and oppression to help liberate France during World War II, reminded me of the American film "Glory," about a group of heroic African Americans who overcome systematic racism and oppression to help the North during the Civil War. Curiously, "Days of Glory" is not in any way a translation of the film's original French title, "Indigènes," a derogatory term for the African soldiers in the French army. Maybe the title was changed to specifically invoke the earlier movie, and to relate it to a struggle American audiences could relate to.


That's important, because "Days of Glory" assumes a level of knowledge about the war, about the racial issues within France and their colonies, that most potential American audiences won't have. That the Africans receive prejudicial treatment is obvious and never in doubt, but I'd be curious to know (and the movie doesn't explain) how these colonies were related (socially, economically, culturally) to France, and why their subjects felt such loyalty to a place they'd never been and that treated them as if they didn't exist, even after they helped to free them from oppression.


Like "Grbavica" (reviewed below), the factual specifics are always more interesting than the fictionalized plot, which features a climactic battle and epilogue straight out of "Saving Private Ryan." Accordingly, the most interesting character is the one who has the richest subplot beyond the battle scenes. His name is Messaoud (Roshdy Zem) and when his platoon lands in France, he spends a night with a beautiful French girl (Aurélie Eltvedt) who treats him as a man and not a subordinate. When the troops move again, he has to leave her behind and spend the rest of the film wondering why she isn't sending him the letters she promised. Initially, we think the girl isn't good to her word, but later we learn the French government censored their letters (and refused to tell her his whereabouts) out of sheer racism.


"Days of Glory" often feels like a history lesson and, like a lot of history lessons, it's a little dry. Still, my opinion of "Days of Glory" is largely irrelevant: after viewing the film French President Jacques Chirac overturned a law that had kept colonial soldiers in World War II from receiving pensions equal to those of their French brethren, an incredible reversal that ended decades of mistreatment. So to say that "Days of Glory" is perhaps more important than it is good, or to note that it is a uniquely French experience (just as, perhaps "Glory" is an American one) does not matter. The movie has already changed the world for the better and is now as much a part of history as a retelling of history. At that point, everything else is pretty much gravy.



Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams


The title is tougher to pronounce than it looks, and it looks pretty tricky. Grbavica — pronounced like "Gruh-BAH-vich," I think — is the name of a neighborhood in Sarajevo inhabited almost entirely by women, with several generations of men seemingly erased from existence by the decade of strife in Bosnia. The survivors work and live off tiny pensions they get at a community support group, and raise their daughters alone.


Such is the case for Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) and her tweenage child Sara (Luna Mijovic), both very well cast for physical resemblance. Kids have become something of a taboo subject in Grbavica ("Only fools have children these days," someone warns) but Esma and Sara are quite happy — we meet them in the midst of a spirited mother-daughter tickle fight — before they're nearly torn apart by the revelation of some of Esma's closely guarded secrets. Of course, the secrets aren't really guarded all that closely, and most audience members will be able to guess what they are long before they're revealed on screen. But if the film's central mystery isn't all that compelling, the setting of "Grbavica" often is.


I'm not an expert on contemporary Bosnian life, but I imagine that the world presented in "Grbavica" by first-time writer/director Jasmila Zbanic is authentic to the one she knows and has lived in. The scenes at the women's support group are particularly haunting though they are frequently silent; Zbanic often has the women sit and lets the camera pass over their faces, which say more than enough about where they've been and what they've seen. I suspect casting these roles was both difficult, in that they'd call upon the actresses to relive the things that have happened to them, and easy, because there was almost certainly no shortage of women who qualified for them. Karanovic is a fine actress who stands out during her character's darkest moments and who blends in with the rest of the survivors when seated amongst them.


Small, observed details are often more powerful than the rather heavy-handed machinations of the plot. The way Zbanic's camera glides over Esma's scars, the way the citizens of Grbavica casually drop nuggets of horror into their conversations — only 11 of 41 original classmates will be attending a class reunion, for instance — shows how inured they've had to become to tragedy in order to survive. Zbanic's subject matter is thoroughly feminine; "Grbavica" exists in a near vacuum of masculinity and shows how the women react to the few men who are left. "You're all animals!" Esma says at one point to describe the male population of Grbavica and within the confines of the film it's often hard to disagree with her. Most of the men left in Sarajevo are thugs or gangsters; even Sara's sheepish first boyfriend is a thug who is waving a gun in her face even before they've ever kissed.


In one scene, Esma has a picnic with a potential suitor on top of a hill, the entire town laid out beneath them. It would be a gorgeous view, and quite a romantic moment, if the Bosnian weather weren't so oppressively gray that it obliterated the visibility of everything except the foreground. Grbavica may be a land of dreams, but those dreams are not about sunny days. As this scene suggests, "Grbavica" isn't a bleak movie, but rather a movie about finding hope and beauty in a bleak world.



"Days of Glory" opens in limited release February 16th (official site). "Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams" opens in New York on February 16th (official site).

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<![CDATA["13 Tzameti," "The Dr. Mabuse Collection"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/13-tzameti-the-dr-mabuse-colle.php Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "13 Tzameti," Palm Picture, 2006]


Some films are bulletproof from spoiler overkill, while others, whose structures are delicate and whose impact depends on left curves, are vulnerable as hell. Géla Babluani's superb, disconcerting, seismic "13 Tzameti" is one for the latter camp — so, if you hadn't read about it during its brief release last year, don't ruin it now. The less you know, the better, although saying that frames up its own kind of hype-exhaustion, and Babluani's movie is a nightmare in a minor key, a small-framed riff on socioeconomic injustice that will, if you let it, get under your nape skin and scratch you raw.


"Tzameti" is 13 in Georgian (in the UK, the title reads more coherently as "13 (Tzameti)"); Babluani is the son of famed Georgian director Temur Babluani and brother of George Babluani, who stars as the open-faced hero Sébastien, a young Tbilisi immigrant doing uninsured construction work in France. In the house he's roofing, mysterious messages come for the owner, a desiccated old junkie with an angry wife. When the dopey coot finally dies, and payment for labor performed is not forthcoming, Sébastien whimsically grabs a letter that had been portentously delivered — in it, he finds a hotel reservation, a train ticket and instructions. He takes off, wordlessly hoping to take advantage of whatever earning opportunities might present themselves, and we discover the police are trailing him.


Where Sébastien actually lands, and what secretly happens there, constitutes the film's left hook sucker punch that keeps hitting you to the last minute. It's simple, violent and horrifyingly cold-blooded, eloquent as a metaphor for class exploitation and capitalist amorality — humans as disposable trash, as pawns, as meat. Low-budget and shot in shadowy black and white, "13 Tzameti" has the muscular, ethical inevitability of an existential fable.


It's easy to love movies that posit dreadful secret machinations operating under the surface of ordinary life — isn't that how things are actually run? One of the great modern myths of covert power is Dr. Mabuse, a criminal mastermind that began as the villain in a few books by Luxembourgian novelist Norbert Jacques, first adapted by Fritz Lang in epic serial form in 1922 as "Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler." A mere gambler/mobster he did not remain; in Lang's 1933 masterpiece "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse," the evil genius became a mind-controlling force not necessarily dependent on corporeal form. This is how he was reconstituted for the Cold War in the 60s, by Lang and far less talented filmmakers, in a series of West German films that borrowed ideas from German Expressionism, James Bond, John le Carré and Marvel comics. The new triple-feature DVD set The Dr. Mabuse Collection houses three cheapjack samples of blissful mid-century pulp: "The Return of Dr. Mabuse" (1961), "The Invisible Dr. Mabuse" (1962), both directed by one Harald Reinl, a hack-journeyman who made dozens of German espionage thrillers and a few German westerns, and "The Death Ray Mirror of Dr. Mabuse" (1964), directed by Argentine B-man Hugo Fregonese.


The first two films stalk the wet, Langian streets of Berlin with stolid U.S. agent Lex Barker; the third opts for a more Ian Flemingish milieu and flits over to sunny Malta. Everywhere, it seems, bodies turn up, hospitals and institutions are hiding secret conspiracies, oblivious victims are radio-controlled by a constantly reincarnating Mabuse to kill or commit suicide, and plans are hatched to destroy or take over the globe one asylum ward and curvaceous double-agent at a time. Here, you do not seek out deft screenwriting and committed acting (the wall-to-wall English dubbing, the only alternative on these public-domain prints, obviates the requirement for either in any case). Rather, you get a retro-tech sense of ominous, Euro-urban dread not unlike the ghostly Parisian emptiness summoned in the serials of silent pioneer Louis Feuillade. When will Mabuse's time come around again?



"13 Tzameti" (Palm) will be available on DVD on February 13. "The Dr. Mabuse Collection" (Image) is available now.

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<![CDATA[Maria Maggenti on "Puccini for Beginners"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/maria-maggenti-on-puccini-for.php Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Elizabeth Reaser and Gretchen Mol in "Puccini for Beginners," Strand Releasing, 2007]


Writer-director Maria Maggenti's 1995 lesbian rom-com "The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love" was a GLAAD Media Award winner and a staple in the blossoming New Queer Cinema movement. But following the film's success, Maggenti disappeared from the director's chair for the next dozen years, and it has taken her the last seven just to finish her follow-up feature. Premiering at last year's Sundance and just now seeing a theatrical release, Maggenti's gender-bent sex comedy "Puccini for Beginners" focuses on an erudite love triangle set in a romanticized Manhattan that owes a bit to Woody Allen. The film unfolds in screwball set-ups, focusing on a neurotic writer named Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser), who, after pushing away her girlfriend (Julianne Nicholson), falls for both a Columbia professor (Justin Kirk) and his glassblowing ex (Gretchen Mol). It's the kind of bisexual wackiness that plays best in Salt Lake City, or as so Maggenti explains in her chat with me:


Allow me to play the broken record; what took so long for your second film?


God, I wish I were on my fourth film already. It certainly wasn't because I don't like doing it; I love doing it! But I had to make a living, and nobody was offering me directing jobs, so I got caught up in being a screenwriter for quite a long time. My first project after "Two Girls" was a Dreamworks script called "The Love Letter," which took three years. Then I kind of created a universe for myself, which wasn't script doctoring, but y'know, rewrites and stuff? That paid the bills, but the whole time, I was trying to make this movie. It was very hard to get financing, like walking over glass, which largely has to do with cast, because names come and go. I got a job on the TV show "Without a Trace" in 2002, moved to Los Angeles, and became a television writer for 3 years, with health insurance and a regular paycheck. But I realized I'd never make another movie if I didn't do it soon.


["Tadpole" director] Gary Winick, who I knew from around the time of "Two Girls," had started the company InDigEnt. He said, "Why don't you bring your film here?" and I kept saying there's no way, it's too big, and I can't do it for that little amount of money. But they basically promised complete creative freedom, including who I was going to cast. So I sold everything in Los Angeles, including what was in my silverware drawer, and moved back to Manhattan. We shot the film in 18 days in September 2005, cut it in nine-and-a-half weeks, then premiered at Sundance that January. After seven years of struggle, it all happened very quickly.


One of the struggles you faced was scoring your lead actress. Why was it so hard to find someone who was — in your words — funny, bold, and "fuckable"?


Yes! Well, I think some of that was self-selecting. Actresses are not encouraged to be intellectual, and that's a good thing, because what makes an actor so wonderful is that they don't come from their heads, but their bodies and emotions. But I kept telling my casting director that I needed somebody who could say "pulchitrude" and make it sound real. Elizabeth came in a week-and-a-half before we started shooting, and at first, I didn't notice her at all. The second time she came in, she did a chemistry read with Gretchen, already on the project, and it was evident that it was the right combination. She's a beautifully trained actress, a very funny and warm individual, and she really seemed to get it.


I'd like to think of myself as a progressive-minded critic, but I often feel that most LGBT cinema isn't strong enough to reach beyond its niche audiences. Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions, but what's your assessment?


Yeah, I have to be honest, I feel the same way. I think I'm in an interesting position because "Two Girls" was, at the kind of... I won't say the zenith, but it was part of this notion of a niche audience, and I know that because of how the film was marketed. At the same time, many believe that the film had "crossover potential."


Meaning marketing execs decide whether straight people will like it, too?


That's exactly what it means. The films exist in a larger context as the culture has become more stratified in the last 10 years. Between what I call the "cultural haves" and the "cultural have-nots," this kind of material falls into a kind of subculture, unfortunately. I use the same assessment for all works; is the material good, is it funny, is it challenging? Yet I also know I'm competing in a marketplace that, frankly, the fact I have a lesbian main character means a lot of people won't see it, no matter how funny it might be.


The first time we showed the film, we had six Sundance screenings, and they were all very gratifying. Oddly, my most spectacular screening was in Salt Lake City, which I had been told by colleagues might be my toughest because these were not cineastes, but quote-unquote "regular people." But everyone stayed for the question-and-answer and they laughed their heads off. The hilarious thing is, being the ignorant New Yorker that I am, they all wanted to know why I had the angel of Moroni in my opening title sequence, to which I, being the great sophisticate that I am, said, "What are you talking about?" In the opening credit sequence, we have this little gold angel holding a trumpet. Well, that was B-roll from the Mormon Center on the Upper West Side. That's a gratifying thing when you know anyone can identify with the characters' conflicts, life in the city, and even sushi-chef gags.


You once said, "I'm not above someone slipping on a banana peel if it'll get a laugh."


I'm not, are you kidding?


So how do you approach deep-rooted cultural issues with a breezy touch or easy laughs?


That's just how I look at things. All that stuff everyone talks about comes from years and years of political activism and gender studies at Smith College. I don't know if it's about age, or if I've always been a little bit of a giggler. I just see things upside-down.


Among your creative inspirations for "Puccini," you've listed opera, psychoanalysis, 1930s romantic comedies, living in NYC... and heavy metal music?


Yes, isn't that crazy? A couple of years ago, I fell for a serious metalhead who had a band, right? I was introduced to this whole new universe, and I got him into opera. He was fascinated by Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana," and I saw this intense relationship between metal and all this other stuff I love. It's so excessive, I mean, it's over the top. While living in L.A., I would pop that shit in my car, and I just couldn't believe I wasn't riding a low rider. I love the beat and macho-ness of it. You have to understand, I'm a woman who barely watches television. I live so completely in my own little Maggenti universe, it's pathetic. So I was suddenly saying to my colleagues, "Have you guys ever heard of Audioslave?" and they're like, [sarcastically] "Maria, yeah?" Well, I never have, and I think they're amazing. So I'm a slow learner, I guess you could say.


You recently made a short on behalf of the Sundance Institute, exclusively formatted for mobile phones. How do you feel about an immersive medium being experienced on tiny little screens you carry with you?


I'm quite horrified by it, to be honest. When they called me and asked to shoot for a cell phone ratio, I was like, are you kidding? Come on, we need people in theaters! It was actually my mother in San Francisco, now in her 70s and ten times more connected to the real world than I am, who said, "Oh, Maria, people love looking at little things on their cell phones and they share them," And I said, what do you mean they share them? She says, "I see kids on the bus, and they all gather around to watch it," and that made me feel a little bit better. I approached it first as a short film, which I hadn't done since graduate school, and that was really, really fun. And then I looked at what it means to shoot something so tiny. I mean, it's two by two inches, and it will never be seen bigger than that. Even when you download it on your computer, you're going to see maybe four by four inches, and I found that incredibly freeing. Plus, it had to be culturally sensitive, appropriate for children, all these parameters, and I found it really liberating. At that size, it's all about juxtaposition and editing and faces.


Are you working on anything new?


I sold this TV idea to Showtime called "The Beard," and we'll see what happens with that. I have to write the pilot, they have to like it enough to shoot it, and then they have to like that. You know what I really want? Someone to hire me to direct a movie. I've been thinking lately that when you do an independent film, it's kind of like being raised by a single parent. You often don't have a lot, but you're united against the world, you use your resources as best you can, and you're really close because you know what your mom's going through to make sure that there's food on the table. When you make a studio picture, it's like having rich parents that don't really understand you, and the best way for them to love you is to give you stuff. Since I was raised by a single parent, I know that experience, but I'm really looking forward to having some rich parents.



"Puccini for Beginners" is now playing in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Science of Sleep," "Vibrator"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/the-science-of-sleep-vibrator.php Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Science of Sleep," Warner Independent, 2006]


No one's mentioned it in my earshot, but Freud seems to be hot again among restless filmmakers — amid the new post-Godardian wave of metafilmic strategies (I'm thinking of Todd Solondz, Wong Kar-wai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hong Sang-soo, Carlos Reygadas, Michael Haneke, Michael Winterbottom, Ilya Khrjanovsky's infuriating debut "4," and so on), the old-school demarcations of id, ego and super-ego are back, and the domain of the unconscious as a war-game field of symbolic trial and subjective flux is once again grist for movie narrative. Maybe it's Charlie Kaufman's fault, but there's hardly any other way to look at "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Birth" (which, some astute wags have pointed out, is a remake of the Surrealist classic "Un Chien Andalou"), "Lemming," "Mirrormask," "A Scanner Darkly," "Inland Empire," a whole slew of J-horror entries and their Hollywood remakes, and, most tenderly of all, Michel Gondry's "The Science of Sleep." It would seem that movies are inherently too much like dreams to escape the literal, subjective-perspective analogy for long. Gondry's movie — his first without Kaufman's script-guidance, not including the doc "Dave Chapelle's Block Party" — is a love song to the developmentally arrested, mixing and matching levels of consciousness while adhering carefully to Freud's faith in desire as a motivating force — desire for romance, for fame, for emotional justice, for a parent's unconditional love.


Gael García Bernal plays Stephane, a Spanish twentysomething beckoned to Paris by his mother with promises of a job. The job turns out to be a tedious dead end (hilariously), but it hardly matters because Stephane's life is a chaotic tug of war between reality and his extraordinarily rich and messy dream life — which intervenes so often and so matter-of-factly we often do not know whether or not what we're watching is inside the hero's lovable head. (All the same, every scene is either "real" or subconscious — there's no meta-fictional slipperiness with Gondry, who seems completely disinterested in objectivity.) Naturally, the two realms bleed into each other, particularly once he meets Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a somewhat prickly craft-artist living next door who shares Stephane's passion for handmade toys, recycled junk and dedicated pretend-play.


Gondry's style emerges whole-hog here, a savvy and affectionate high-tech/low-tech mix scrambling digital effects with cheap video, junkyard leftovers, folk-stitched totems and cotton clouds. There's something preschoolish going on in the movie and in Stephane's skull, and the film's bric-a-brac style helps express Stephane's needy, imaginative character in ways he could never articulate. "The Science of Sleep" is, I think, a romantic comedy, but its narrative arc is so infused with non sequiturs and flights of cheesecloth fancy that it can be hard to tell what it is. What could be better?


Just as tangled in subjective emotional worlds, Ryuichi Hiroki's "Vibrator" (2003) traces the ersatz romance between a lonesome and unstable bulimic girl (Shinobu Terajima) and a slack but sweet-natured truck driver (Nao Omori). That's all it does, but it happens from the inside out, with the heroine's self-conscious narration manifesting as punctuative interior-voice intertitles, saying in effect what this wrecked, nervous modern girl can't bring herself to utter in person. Hiroki is a master realist-humanist (two more of his earlier films are also coming out from Kino, and his 2005 film "It's Only Talk" was the best film at 2006's New York Asian Film Festival), and "Vibrator" plays it urban-cool and moment-to-moment, until it sneaks up to your soft side with a sledgehammer. Terajima, who might be the most galvanizing and convincing Asian actress of her generation, simply breaks your heart — not merely at the film's end, but throughout. "Vibrator" was never distributed in the U.S. (neither was "It's Only Talk," a bruising portrait of manic-depressive life), making it already one of 2007's best "releases," and another point in the argument for acknowledging DVDs as the new and viable alternative-exhibition platform.



"The Science of Sleep" (Warner Home Video) and "Vibrator" (Kino) will both be available on DVD February 6th.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 9th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/opening-this-week-february-9th.php Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Hannibal Rising," Weinstein Co., 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Black Friday"

Indian director Anurag Kashyap's latest documents the investigations following the Bombay bombing of 1993, which occurred just two weeks after the bombing of the World Trade Center. The film tells the stories of the bombings through the different people involved, including the police, the conspirators, the victims, and the middlemen. "Black Friday" was nominated for the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2004.

Opens in limited release (IMDB Page).


"Hannibal Rising"

The Hannibal Lecter series continues with this fifth (!!) film about our favorite Oscar-winning serial killer (insert your own "fava beans and a nice chianti" joke here). This latest entry details Lecter's youth in Europe through his string of gruesome murders. French actor Gaspard Ulliel ("A Very Long Engagement") steps in some mighty big shoes as the young Lecter, but early reviews state that Ulliel's Lecter brings a new level of creepiness absent from the previous films. Or, it just might be another Hollywood cash-in on a film series that should've ended two installments ago. We'd bet on the latter.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Lives of Others"

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature film may be one of the interesting films to come out of Germany in the past few years, winning a total of seven German Film Awards and garnering Best Foreign Film nominees from both this year's Golden Globes and Academy Awards. The film tells the story of a German Stasi agent's gradual disillusionment after he is ordered to spy on the dealings of a celebrity couple. "Funny Games"'s Ulrich Mühe stars.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Norbit"

"Norbit" easily wins the year's creepiest marketing campaign award; the film's disturbing posters show Eddie Murphy (as a woman) in a fat suit straddling a nerdy Afro'ed Eddie Murphy (as a man) underneath. After earning some serious acting credibility for his supporting role in "Dreamgirls," Murphy seems primed to take a fall from grace of "Catwoman"-esque proportions.

Opens wide (official site).


"Operation Homecoming: Writing the War Experience"

Richard E. Robbins covers the war experiences of the Iraq conflict through the first-hand accounts of American troops through their own words. The film is based upon the Operation Homecoming movement created by the National Endowment of the Arts and will include dramatic readings from Hollywood actors based on the writings of the soldiers.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[What's Up In February]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/whats-up-in-february.php Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Once Upon a Time In The West," Paramount Pictures, 1969]


Ennio Morricone

Feb 1—10

In honor of his upcoming honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and his recent concert at Radio City Music Hall (his first in the US), New York's Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to famed film composer Ennio Morricone in this ten-day retrospective of some of his most prized films. Screenings will include his Sergio Leone epics "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Once Upon a Time in America," the late Gillo Pontecorvo pioneer film "The Battle of Algiers," and the Roland Joffe period piece "The Mission," which Morricone will be on hand to introduce.


The Cinema of Donald Cammell

Feb 2—11

Though he only produced a handful of works, the 25-year career of brilliant but troubled director Donald Cammell feels far too short. New York's Film Society at Lincoln Center will feature several of Cammell's films in this retrospective, including the sci-fi horror "Demon Seed," the Nicolas Roeg co-production "Performance," and the director's cut of his final film, "Wild Side".


Hong Kong!

Feb 2—28

The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago hosts its annual month-long celebration of the Chinese New Year with a host of new films out of Hong Kong. This year's festival includes a retrospective on influential action film director Johnnie To and will include a sneak preview screening of his latest feature, "Exiled," on February 17th.


Werner Herzog: Visionary at Large

"Eclectic" might be the only word one could use to describe German auteur Werner Herzog, both through his own filmmaking ("Aguirre, the Wrath of God," "Fitzcarraldo") and his personality (Les Blank's documentary "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe"), as the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago hosts this ten-film tribute throughout the month of February to Herzog in honor of his upcoming Christian Bale-starring "Rescue Dawn."


Crispin Helion Glover presents "What is It?"

Feb 9—11

Crispin Helion Glover will be on hand at the IFC Center to present his first feature "What Is It?", an unclassifiable film that was both self-produced and self-financed by Glover himself. Each screening will also feature a live dramatic presentation and a supplementary slide show. Trust us, "What Is It?" is simply more than a film, it's an event.


57th Berlin International Film Festival

Feb 8—18

This annual festival remains one of the premiere film events in the world.


Meet the Oscars

Feb 9—24

Get a chance to check out the 50 Oscar statuettes before they are handed out at the Academy Awards on February 25th. This exhibit, hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, will be on display at locations in both Hollywood and New York.


A View from the Vaults: Warner Bros., RKO Pictures, and First National Pictures Inc.

Feb 9—24

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City pays homage to some of the greatest pictures produced by the Warner Bros., RKO and First National studios. Highlights include Bette Davis' Oscar-winning performance in "Jezebel", the Raoul Walsh directorial comedy "Gunga Din," and 1950's "Mighty Joe Young" (sans Charlize Theron).


Welcome to the Billy Wilder Theater

Feb 9—Mar 31

"8 Mile" director and archive chairman Curtis Hanson will be on hand to present the opening of UCLA Film & Television Archive's Billy Wilder Theater in honor of the pioneering director of the classical Hollywood director. To inaugurate the opening of the theater, UCLA will screen two of his most important (and hilarious) films, with 1960's "The Apartment" playing on opening night and 1959's "Some Like It Hot" following the night after.


Danny Glover in Person

Feb 14—15

Executive producer and star Danny Glover will be on hand at the Film Forum in New York City to discuss "Bamako," a film that premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival and originated from the nation of Mali.


Gangster & Crime in the Big City

Feb 15—22

The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater presents this short series on our favorite movie genre, the gangster film! Films to be screened include the expected Quentin Tarantino film "Reservoir Dogs," a "Scarface" double feature (both the Hawks and De Palma versions), and a new print of the hard-to-see Burt Balaban pic "Mad Dog Coll."


The 79th Academy Awards

Feb 25

They make get more and more boring each year, but you know you'll watch them anyway. We're bummed that Jon Stewart was not asked back to host the Oscars, but the addition of Ellen Degeneres promises to be a good time. With a beer in one hand and predictions in the other, be sure to catch the Academy Awards at 8 PM on ABC.

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<![CDATA[Movies: The Beginning]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/movies-the-beginning.php Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Hannibal Rising," Weinstein Company, 2007]


This week's release of the film "Hannibal Rising" marks the crest of a new wave of Hollywood filmmaking: the rise of the prequel as a major box office force. First with 2005's "Batman Begins" ($370 million worldwide) and then with last year's "Casino Royale" ($570 million), prequels have suddenly become more than a quick, cheap way to cash-in on a hit. They're just as commercially viable as — and in some ways more commercially viable than — a standard sequel.


The prequel (simply, a sequel whose events take place before the chronology of the film it is following) is in some ways the perfect Hollywood enterprise. A prequel is what you make when you can't get or don't want your original film's overpriced stars or directors or writers to return. The focus remains instead on the property, the brand: and brands don't get pay raises or star treatment. Actors age; James Bond the property and Batman the brand remain young forever.


Prequels are particularly appropriate for these sorts of franchises because they all contain iconic elements, and icons need origins. "Batman Begins" shows us where Bruce Wayne's bat fetish comes from. "Casino Royale" shows us why James Bond is such an unrepentant womanizer. Commonly, prequels like to present happy accidents, whereby characters stumble onto their destinies without realizing their significance. For instance, in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas" Fred casually plays a carnival game, unaware the prize will be an egg that will soon hatch into his beloved pet Dino. Audiences probably like these sorts of gags for the slight, knowing buzz of superiority that comes with them: they understand something even the characters themselves do not yet grasp.


According to the always reliable Wikipedia, the first cinematic prequel — or, at least, the first use of the actual term "prequel" — was 1974's "The Godfather Part II," which is technically part-prequel and part-sequel: some events lead up to the story of the first picture, some continue the story of the first picture. Coppola was smarter than many who followed him, because he must have known a crucial flaw in prequel storytelling: an inherent lack of surprise. We know Vito Corleone will rise to power because we've already seen him as the The Godfather, so we watch his sections with less anticipation than bemused curiosity. The Michael Corleone sections in the "present" (technically the past, but let's not get confusing) are far more engrossing because to the viewer the future is not written, and we don't know what will happen. The classic line used to justify prequels is "we know where the characters will end up, but not how they will get there."


But, of course, if how they got there was all that interesting, that was the story the filmmakers would have told in the first place. Thus another fundamental flaw of prequels: they tell no stories, only backstories. By their definition, prequels fill in the holes in the history of characters, or explain how characters transmogrified into the icons we know them to be. But those icons became popular because of who they were in those films, not because of who they were before those films which is totally irrelevant. Many prequels include the phrase "The Beginning" to attempt to bestow some sort of narrative significance, but they're not fooling anyone.


Prequels are also great ways to bring back dead characters in ways sequels obviously couldn't. Typically, these prequels belong to movies that are unexpected hits; if filmmakers expect to make a whole series of movies they probably won't kill off their lead characters. So when the creators of "Infernal Affairs" bumped off one of their two leads, they went the prequel route in "Infernal Affairs II" (and later still went the "Godfather Part II" route with the part-prequel part-sequel "Infernal Affairs III").


It's not for me to guess whether "Hannibal Rising" will be a success — haven't you always wondered where he got the taste for chianti? — but, regardless, prequels have shown a newfound strength at the box office and so there are sure to be plenty more of them in the future. So it's an appropriate time to look back at a few of the worst prequels, to see why they work or (more commonly) don't work, and to remember that many of the worst movies ever made were prequels. So tread carefully, moviemakers. And learn from the mistakes of those who have come before you.



"Missing in Action 2: The Beginning" (1985)


Prequel to: "Missing in Action" (1984)


Plot Summary: In Vietnam at an indeterminate time after 1972, Col. James Braddock (Chuck Norris) and a platoon of American soldiers are imprisoned and tortured at a barbaric Viet Cong prison camp. Years later (i.e. in the first movie), Braddock will return to Vietnam, rescue more American P.O.W.s left behind, and get revenge on his captors.


Reason Why It's Not a Regular Sequel: Braddock already returned to Vietnam once to save American soldiers. Doing it again might make him look ineffectual. And if there's one thing Chuck Norris is not, it's ineffectual.


Relatively Necessity of Prequel: High. The Braddock of the first "Missing in Action" is traumatized by his captivity in Vietnam; this film offers the opportunity to see why.


Most Shocking Revelation: Events and even people don't seem to match up between the two "M.I.A."s. In the original, Braddock meets his old torturer, Colonel Vinh. But in "The Beginning" he's tortured by a guy named Colonel Yin. Things get even more confusing in the third film in the series (the first sequel, technically speaking) "Braddock: Missing in Action III." Though "The Beginning" depicts years of imprisonment stretching well past the end of the Vietnam War, "Braddock" shows Chuck Norris at the fall of Saigon in 1975, where he's also got a wife. So he was combat shocked, imprisoned for years after the war ended...while also serving elsewhere and getting married. Pick a side Norris, we're at war!


Least Shocking Revelation: That even though Braddock claims to be mentally scarred by his imprisonment in "Missing in Action" he actually seems pretty cool with everything in "The Beginning." In fact, when he gets the opportunity to escape, he hangs around the camp and kills every single Vietnamese soldier in the area rather than simply fleeing.


Waiting For the Check To Clear: Chuck Norris, but in fairness to Chuck, that Total Gym thing I've seen on TV looks totally awesome.


One Scene That Sums It All Up: During his forty-minute escape that's really more of a systematic execution, Norris gets to beat up Colonel Yin, first in a kung fu fight, then by exploding him. So he's already blown up the man who he will later return to Vietnam to face. Again, Chuck Norris is totally awesome.



"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning" (2006)


Prequel to: "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (2003)


Plot Summary: In 1969 — four years before the events chronicled in the Michael Bay produced remake of Tobe Hooper's epochal slasher film — two teens (and their foxy girlfriends) driving across Texas on their way to join the army run afoul of a burly gentleman named Thomas Hewitt, later to be known as Leatherface.


Reason Why It's Not a Regular Sequel: The 2003 "Massacre" killed R. Lee Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt; a prequel enables him to reprise the role. But more importantly, at the end of the first picture, Leather face lost an arm, meaning unless he's going to hire a kid sidekick to follow him around, it'd be awful difficult to operate that chainsaw.


Relatively Necessity of Prequel: High. When someone's as genuinely deranged as Leatherface there's a certain amount of curiosity as to how he got that way. Unfortunately, the film gets most of the "origin" out of the way in the first ten minutes and the rest is your standard gorgeous-20-somethings-in-scantily-clad-peril.


Most Shocking Revelation:That Leatherface is the spiritual brethren of "Perfume"'s Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. As it turns out, Mr. Hewitt was actually born in a slaughterhouse; his mother worked there and couldn't even get so much as a coffee break to go and have her baby, so (much like the scene in "Perfume") she just plops down on the floor, pushes him out, then leaves him wrapped in butcher paper in a dumpster. Instead of a miraculously sensitive nose, Leatherface would gain the power to appear out of thin air and shove a meat hook into things.


Least Shocking Revelation: Leatherface dresses like a butcher because he used to work as a butcher. Creative.


Waiting For the Check To Clear: Michael Bay, the producer of the recent "Massacre" series, who stood to clear a tidy sum regardless of "The Beginning"'s artistic potential.


One Scene That Sums It All Up: As the torture of the innocents begin the two guys are tied up and hung from Leatherface's ceiling. As one loses his cool, the other pleads "Dean! Stay with me! I need you to be a soldier!" Dean and the audiences both, it seems.



"Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd" (2003)


Prequel to: "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)


Plot Summary: In 1986 — roughly a decade before the classic Farrelly brothers film starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels — Harry (Derek Richardson) and Lloyd (Eric Christian Olsen) meet in a high school special needs class. Hilarity theoretically ensues.


Reason Why It's Not a Regular Sequel: Clearly Carrey and Daniels weren't interested in reprising their roles; clearly the producers weren't interested in paying them enough to make them interested.


Relative Necessity of Prequel: Low. Few questions were asked, let alone left unanswered by the original. Its biggest benefit to audiences is retroactive: it makes the original seem like a Joyce novel in comparison.


Most Shocking Revelation: Lloyd's trademark chipped front tooth broke when he literally ran into Harry for the first time. Most would be deeply annoyed if some stranger mussed their dental work. These two becomes pals for life. But hey — they're dumb.


Least Shocking Revelation: That Lloyd's (other) trademark, his bowl cut hairdo, is actually cut with a bowl.


Waiting For the Check To Clear: Eugene Levy who plays Harry and Lloyd's evil principal beneath a moustache and even bushier eyebrows than normal. Sorry Eugene. We can still tell it's you.


One Scene That Sums It All Up: After Harry has an awkward encounter with a chocolate bar in a bathroom (a twist on a similar moment in the first film), Bob Saget enters and screams, "There's shit everywhere!" accurately describing both that scene and the film surrounding it.



"Amityville II: The Possession" (1982)


Prequel to: "The Amityville Horror" (1979)


Plot Summary: Before the Lutz family was terrorized by an unholy evil in their quaint Long Island home, the Montelli family faced said same unholy evil in said same quaint Long Island home.


Reason Why It's Not a Regular Sequel: The original "Amityville Horror" was based on the real Lutz family and their account of the events that transpired in the month they lived there. After they left, plenty of other people came and went from the house, and no one since has complained of any supernatural shenanigans, making a straight sequel a bit tougher to justify (though producers would later, in 3-D no less).


Relatively Necessity of Prequel: High; if the film's purpose was to explain how the house got so horrifying in the first place. Unfortunately "Amityville II" begins with the evil already firmly entrenched as tenant, so it's more like "Amityville Too."

Most Shocking Revelation: That with its lengthy exorcism subplot and crazy demon dude with a reverb voice, "Amityville II" is as much a rip-off of "The Exorcist" as it is of the first "Amityville Horror."


Least Shocking Revelation: Sleeping with your brother, as the Montelli's eldest daughter does, will lead to the undoing of your family. Well, yeah, and you don't even need to be possessed by the devil while you're doing it.


Waiting For the Check To Clear: Burt Young, as the bored-looking and intensely abusive Montelli patriarch, marking the days between "Rocky III" and "Rocky IV."


One Scene That Sums It All Up: The final shot of the film echoes its first: the quiet image of the Amityville house with a "For Sale" sign on the lawn, a deadly threat not only to tenants but to audiences everywhere.



"Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist" (2005)


Prequel to: "The Exorcist" (1973)


Plot Summary:Years before the events chronicled in the William Friedkin film, Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) encounters a demon who possesses a young crippled boy in East Africa.


Reason Why It's Not a Regular Sequel: With all of the original film's cast fully grown or dead, there's little incentive to make a direct sequel, particularly after the shall we say "limited" success of 1977's "Exorcist II: The Heretic."


Relatively Necessity of Prequel: Low. Other than explaining exactly what the early scenes of "The Exorcist" are all about, there's very little reason this movie exists, which is probably why it has such an identity crisis.


Most Shocking Revelation: That this film, by Paul Schrader, really is worse than the one by his replacement, Renny Harlin, who was hired to reshoot the film from top to bottom (and did; his slightly better, slightly louder, and slightly dumber version is called "Exorcist: The Beginning").


Least Shocking Revelation: In light of the languid pace and horrid (as opposed to horrific) special effects, its not all that surprising when Schrader at one point acknowledges on his director's commentary, "I didn't quite know how to shoot this scene," and that he "...[doesn't] know quite what it means," when a character dies with a butterfly in his hand.


Waiting For the Check To Clear: Satan, who clearly phones in the evil (and the crummy computer generated demons) throughout the picture.


One Scene That Sums It All Up: Schrader's final thought on the commentary track: "Somehow we made it through that."

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<![CDATA[Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on "The Lives of Others"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/florian-henckel-von-donnersmar.php Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michelle Orange

IFC News


[Photo: "The Lives of Others," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


When "The Lives of Others," the spectacularly named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's directorial debut, was nominated recently for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it was just another notch in the belt for a film that's been racking up laurels around the world. Von Donnersmarck's gripping story of a playwright and the member of the Stasi police assigned to monitor him in 1984 East Germany finally opens in the U.S. this Friday. The writer/director's parents come from East Germany, and though he grew up as one of the first non-criminal inhabitants of Roosevelt Island in New York City, he visited relatives in East Germany often, particularly after the family moved back to the West. The 33-year-old Von Donnersmarck, almost unreasonably tall, with a resplendent corona of blonde curls, was back in New York last week, affably battling jet lag to talk about his film.


Have you noticed that reactions to "The Lives of Others" vary from country to country?


Yes — not a great deal, but there are a few things. In Japan they're very interested in the musical aspect of the film, and American audiences do see parallels to the Patriot Act, and in Russia they find it most extraordinary that any of the Stasi people were brought to some kind of justice. In Spain they only go on about the fact that I beat Almodóvar at the European Film Awards.


The cinema itself seems to depend on the idea that we will invest emotionally in the lives of other people, on that human impulse — do you feel the lack of that impulse, seemingly inherent in so many members of the Stasi police, is somehow inhuman?


I think there's also a deep need in people to get information. You know how in the Harry Potter books, Harry has the invisibility cloak? In German mythology there's also something like the invisibility cloak — if you got an invisibility cloak, would you use it, or throw it away?


[long pause] I would use it.


And what would you use it for?


Well, I wouldn't use it in a sort of fetishistic way, or to collect information for the sake of collecting information, a lot of it completely useless. There's that scene in "The Lives of Others" where an officer is reporting in about a specific typewriter, and under questioning he can recite the exact model of typewriter owned by any given writer in East Germany — it becomes ridiculous, it's comical.


It's very hard to separate one from the other there, to know when you're crossing the line. For instance if I used the invisibility cloak and I went there into the next room and, I don't know, watched some girl shower — that would be borderline, huh?


[laughter] Borderline?


But if I have an order that I have to monitor this woman, because she could be a terrorist, and I have to make sure that she isn't engaging in some Islamic conversation on the phone while she's in the bathroom, then I have to be there. Same effect, but same motivation? No, probably not. If you give a government that kind of power — the Stasi had the invisibility cloak, George W. Bush, since the Patriot Act, has the invisibility cloak. He would never feel that they were using it for personal motives in any way, no, they are using it to "safeguard democracy." But are they really? I don't think you should give individuals great power, because as soon as you do that, you know the quote: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.


What is your personal feeling, then, on where that line is?


I think no one should have that power. Of course it's going to be easier to wage a war against the enemies of the state or even terrorism if you surveil people. But maybe that additional difficulty, if you're not allowed to do that, is the price you have to pay for freedom. Let's say you're trying to wage a war against terrorism, imagine — at that time in East Germany it was the war against imperialism or capitalism — but let's say in the US, where you have the Department of Homeland Security monitoring people, you said "let's increase the man force to the number the Stasi had," which was one person for every 50 inhabitants. In the United States, how many people are there?


I'm not positive — I'm Canadian — but I think it's 300 million.


OK, for 300 million, that would mean somewhere around six million people working in surveillance. To be perfectly safe, you would have to say half of the population monitors the other half and then you'll have zero terrorism. But you'll also have nothing worth protecting left. And that's the kind of extreme you'd have to take it to. No one ever said that freedom doesn't come at a price. When Michael Moore compared Canada and the US in that NRA documentary ["Bowling for Columbine"], I thought it was very plain. He kept on going on about the 1500 people who died by accident because Americans feel they have to have guns, and I was thinking through all of that, it's probably one of the prices you have to pay for freedom. Imagine the Jews in the Holocaust: do you think it would have been that easy for the Gestapo to go in there and take all of those Jews to Auschwitz if they had all been armed, if they had had Uzis under their beds? No, I don't think so. Because of one act (of legislation) they had to pay a far greater price. Still, there is also a price for freedom: you're not going to be as efficient in the war against terrorism, you're not going to have as safe an environment for kids as you would if there were no guns around. Freedom is very precious, and I know you Canadians will take freedom over order any day. I was in Canada two weeks ago and a taxi driver said to me, "You know, the difference between us and the Americans is that they'll take freedom over order any day and we'll take order over freedom any day."


Hmmm.


I thought that was very interesting. He also said that Robin Williams said Canada is like a quiet apartment over a noisy party.


Are there any other German directors that have influenced you? Do you feel a certain responsibility to tell German stories on film as part of the process of understanding, or healing, the way a lot of the New German Expressionist directors, like Fassbinder, did?


Well, not like Fassbinder, no. I'd say some of the older German directors, like Fritz Lang, William Wyler, and Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder. I think films are essential for anything in culture; films are the most important cultural product of our time, and so, if you believe that culture and art can be important in healing, then film has to be most important. I think that in some way films are a kind of therapy, actually. If you make a film like "Remember the Titans" in the U.S., for example, you're going to do more against racism than any campaign you could possibly launch.


Because it reaches more people?


Because it reaches them on a deeper level, also. Let's say you write a book against racism, you can tell your story once, in words. To make a film you can tell it six or seven times, at the same time, through words, through lighting, through production design, through music, through sound. You can reach a far greater artistic and emotional intensity.


At the end of the film, when the Stasi Minister and Dreyden (a playwright) meet (after the fall of the wall), they have this very loaded and interesting exchange where the Minister says "life was good in our little country," insinuating that they needed each other in a way, that without the Minister, there would be no Dreyden. I was wondering how you felt about that idea of artistry flourishing under repression.


Well, I don't agree with that at all. Maybe I should have put a little disclaimer: "The views expressed by the characters of this film do not necessarily reflect the views of the director."


You had mentioned that the films that came of East Germany during that period are kind of useless.


Yeah, and they really are. No, I don't think that dictatorship makes art flourish at all. If you have a pseudo-liberal system where you pretend that art is free, but it's actually under extreme censorship, the result is just going to be boring. It's the same in Russia, actually. Not many great writers emerged from communist Russia, the Russian revolution pretty much killed them off.


OK, last question: The performances of your actors are so extraordinary, and the casting seems to be letter perfect, how did that process work for you?


It took a long time, because I knew exactly what actors I needed, and wanted, and I had to wait for them. They didn't have to be stars, they just had to be very solid actors, and very intelligent people. These were very intelligent actors, and that is what helps you most. Some directors just meet their actors, they don't actually cast them; they know from the meeting that they can work together.


Who did you cast first?


Ulrich Mühe (who plays Captain Wiesler). Actually no, that's not true. The first person I knew I wanted on board was Ulrich Tukur, who plays Ulrich Mühe's boss. I didn't even know his work that well, but he was the first person I sent the screenplay to and I said "Look, I need you in this film." It may have been because my wife was such a big fan of his, and I knew it would impress her if I got him for the film! These are very banal reasons, there's no great artistry behind them. And Ulrich Mühe was the only person who could play that part, he's an amazingly precise actor. For him it was a very big thing, to be cast in a lead role with an unknown director, so he invited me to his home, twice—


He was casting you!


It's true, he was. He quizzed me about how much I knew about the Stasi, and then toward the end, he said, "This character spends the entire film in the surveillance center in the attic, just sitting there, and is moved all the time, how do you play that? How do I act that?" I knew this was what it all boiled down to, this was the big question, and I might as well answer it honestly, so I said, "Maybe you don't act it at all." I guess he really liked that answer, and we were lucky after that.



"The Lives of Others" opens in limited release February 9th (official site).

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<![CDATA[January Was The Cruelest Month]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/02/ifc-news-podcast-13-january-wa.php Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 January's traditionally been the worst month of the year for new films. But never fear -- it's finally over, and we have plenty of recommendations for February and March to whet your appetite and make you remember that movies aren't all "Code Name: The Cleaner." Here's our look at some upcoming films we've already seen and loved or are just looking forward to ourselves.

Download: MP3, 19:39 minutes, 18 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25372 2007-02-05 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_13_january_wa publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025372 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[January Was The Cruelest Month (photo)]]> Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025372 2007-02-05 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_13_january_wa_photo inherit 25372 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Idiocracy," "Sherrybaby"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/idiocracy-sherrybaby.php Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Idiocracy," 20th Century Fox, 2007]


It would take a hardier soul than me to figure out why social satire in American movies is as hot as four-day-old fish and why merciless examples of the genre on American TV (think "The Simpsons" and "South Park") thrive for years. Maybe Americans appreciate a good flogging, but don't cotton to paying $10 a ticket for the privilege. Or maybe, just maybe, Americans don't quite understand that "The Simpsons" and "South Park" are reaping guffaws at their expense. (That would account for the box office failure of Parker and Stone's "Team America: World Police," which ripped nothing so much as the gut-bucket ignorance of Yankee prejudices.) Surely Mike Judge would choose Explanation B, since his hit MTV series "Beavis and Butt-Head" was adored by the same clueless demographic it savagely mocked, and since his new film "Idiocracy" paints such a hilariously bleak portrait of Homo Americanus that it was essentially censored and dumped late last year, unleashed onto only seven screens on the entire North American continent, none of them east of the Mississippi.


Which is why you've never heard of it — Fox treated it like a plague blanket. It's not too surprising — by way of a military hibernation experiment that sends clueless Everyman Luke Wilson 500 years into the future, Judge furiously limns out an America completely clogged with rank stupidity. There are too many barbed jokes to ingest on one viewing, but Judge explicitly blames dumbed-down media, ubiquitous advertising, anti-intellectual Bushian politics, brainless entertainment and technologically induced laziness. In other words, Rupert Murdoch — Fox News, of course, takes a drubbing, but virtually every arm of the News Corporation, which owns 20th Century Fox, is also lambasted. And Judge takes no prisoners — his style is often crude and cruel, which is as it should be.


Still, the mostly obese citizens in Judge's future world who can't add or entertain a thought that doesn't involve immediate sensory indulgence share the responsibility for the collapse of civilization. (A memorable throwaway image: in a dilapidated city inundated with garbage, cars continue to drive off the edge of a broken highway ramp, one after the other.) It's a messy movie, and Judge's low budget sometimes forces him to cut corners. But it should be seen and kudoed just for its principled stance against the cretinism most American entertainment happily exploits. Ah, if only the Bush-voting, war-mongering, "American Idol"-hypnotized, "Wheel of Fortune"-challenged, book-allergic, super-sized, Velveeta-slurping wrestling-&-Toby Keith devotees out there would see "Idiocracy" and take the slap in the face like grown-ups.


Still, Judge's film isn't despairing — for true despair, go to Laurie Collyer's "Sherrybaby," one of 2006's many recovering-junkie-struggle movies, a sub-subgenre decidedly less beloved by audiences than by serious actors looking for open ground in which to ply their craft. By any standard, Collyer's film is indelible, seething with conviction, and so expertly written you want to crawl out of your skin as you're faced again and again with the heroine's enraged struggle with society. Collyer knows realism — her previous film, "Nuyorican Dream," is a heart-rending inner-city doc. But this movie's engine is Maggie Gyllenhaal as an ex-smack slave fresh out of prison and looking to get back with her young daughter — who has been living comfortably with her childless aunt and uncle, thank you. Boiling family resentments, feelings of disconnect from her child, struggles with her p.o., N.A. meetings, flophouse problems, having to suck off a civil worker to get a job, jonesing to escape into a heroin haze all the while — Gyllenhaal's Sherry has the burdens of Job, and the actress is so fierce and committed to fleshing out this ex-stripper/hardened abuse victim into three dimensions that it's impossible to forget her. But there's suffering here, for her and us, make no mistake — maybe catch "Idiocracy" afterwards, and a future of wrestler-Presidents, crotch-kicking sitcoms and stupefying illiteracy will look attractive.



"Idiocracy" (20th Century Fox) and "Sherrybaby" (Universal Studios) are both available on DVD.

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<![CDATA[Looking Back at Sundance]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/ifc-news-podcast-12-looking-ba.php Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Back from Sundance and only slightly worse for wear, we discuss what we liked and what we didn't like at the 2007 festival.

Download: MP3, 23:25 minutes, 21.4 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25371 2007-01-29 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_12_looking_ba publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025371 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Looking Back at Sundance (photo)]]> Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025371 2007-01-29 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_12_looking_ba_photo inherit 25371 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 2nd, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/opening-this-week-february-2nd.php Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Constellation"

Writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman gathers a talented cast of up-and-comers and whatever-happened-tos, including Gabrielle Union in the former category and Rae Dawn Chong in the latter, for this soapy tale of 40-year-old biracial love affair and its effects on a Southern family.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"East of Havana"

Emilia Menocal and Jauretsi Saizabitoria's doc peers into the world of Cuban hip-hop.

Opens in New York (official site).


"In The Pit"

Juan Carlos Rulfo directed this doc about construction workers building Mexico City's Periferico highway — no, come back! According to the critics who've seen it, the film is supposed to be remarkable.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Puccini for Beginners"

Maria Maggenti, who over ten years ago wrote and directed landmark lesbian indie "The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love," returns with a considerably more upscale romance centered on a love triangle between Justin Kirk, Gretchen Mol and Julianne Nicholson.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Raising Flagg"

This self-designated "zany" comedy-drama stars Alan Arkin as a handyman named, yes, Flagg.

Opens in Palm Desert (official site).


"The Situation"

Claiming to be the first US film to deal with our country's occupation of Iraq, "The Situation" stars Connie Nielsen as a journalist writing about the assassination of an Iraqi leader. Damian Lewis plays the intelligence official she's dating.

Opens in New York (official site).


"An Unreasonable Man"

This doc, which premiered at Sundance last year, offers at not-unsympathetic portrait of four-time presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

Opens in New York (official site).

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25400 2007-01-29 00:00:00 closed closed opening_this_week_february_2nd publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025400
<![CDATA[Opening This Week: February 2nd, 2007 (photo)]]> Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025400 2007-01-29 00:00:00 closed closed opening_this_week_february_2nd_photo inherit 25400 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Pommel Horsing Around: The Tragically True Story of A Cultless Cult Film]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/pommel-horsing-around-the-trag.php Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Gymkata," MGM/Warner, 1985]


"The skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate," the poster screamed. "When you fight for ultimate stakes, you use the ultimate weapon!" the video box shouted. No one noticed.


"Gymkata"'s reception was thoroughly unremarkable. The All Movie Guide called it "a standard no-plotter." Roger Ebert reviewed the film, giving it one star, but could barely work up the strength to mock it. The movie grossed just over five and a half million dollars when it was first released theatrically in1985. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, in its first weekend of release, "Gymkata" made $1.2 million, ranking tenth at the box office behind a Chuck Norris vehicle, "Gotcha!" (a movie based on a squirt gun toy), "Ladyhawke" (starring Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer and a bird) and, in its second month in theaters, "Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment." To call "Gymkata" a footnote on the history of cinema would be to vastly overstate its importance.


In an aside during his review, Ebert hinted at the movie's power. "I heard more genuine laughter during the screening than at three or four-so-called comedies I've seen lately," he wrote. "I was even toying with praising the movie as a comedy." Ever the forward-thinker, Ebert had stumbled onto an idea that would gradually take hold while the film languished in an even deeper obscurity than the one that met its initial release. This week, with very little fanfare, and without the benefit of bonus materials, "Gymkata" comes to DVD for the first time, a cult movie in desperate need of a cult.


As Ebert noted, it's difficult to categorize "Gymkata" in simple good or bad terms. By any standard definition, the film is terrible. The acting is amateurish, the story confusing when it's not altogether incoherent, and the dialogue often sounds like it was written by a computer program designed to string together random words into sentences. But anyone who has seen "Gymkata" cannot deny that it also holds a strange sway over the viewer; it's bad, but not painfully bad. In fact, it's one of those movies that is so utterly misguided it's almost pleasurable to watch. And it's an easy to movie to watch again, and again. I'd estimate I've seen in nearly two dozen times in the last decade.


The plot — and I swear to you I'm not making any of this shit up — involves an American gymnast named Jonathan Cabot. After his secret agent father goes missing in action, Cabot is recruited to take his place in a deadly tournament called "The Game," taking place in a made-up Eastern European country named Parmistan. The United States wants to launch a spy satellite from Parmistan and, for reasons left to the audience's imagination, if Cabot wins The Game — a contest whose main objective seems to be to not get shot in the chest with an arrow — they will be allowed to do so.


Cabot is selected for this assignment because of his unique skill set: a hellacious mullet and his incredible gymnastic abilities. Before heading to scenic Parmistan, Cabot learns to combine his athletic prowess with beating the crap out of people, thus making him a practitioner of "gymkata." This decision proves most fortuitous when Cabot arrives in Parmistan and finds that the obviously insane civil engineers who designed the country's infrastructure chose to build gymnastics equipment into the country's architecture. Hence, in the film's signature moment, Cabot defends himself from a village of loony Parmistanians (more on them later) by swinging himself around on a well conveniently mounted with pommel horse handles.


Information about "Gymkata" is sketchy; few if any have ever cared to inquire about the film, and those involve probably preferred it to stay that way. The film is based on a long out-of-print novel, 1957's "The Terrible Game" by Dan Tyler Moore, which was, according to the quote from The Cleveland Press adorning the paperback edition, "One of the most exciting stories in recent years." It's a nearly impossible book to track down (unless you want to shell out big bucks for it on eBay) but here's one reader's description I found online:

The USA and the "REDS" were competing for political advantage in a foreign "backwards" country. The country's leader decided that their national military competition rules would be used to decide the better, more powerful country with which to align themselves. So our hero and his dad are chosen to travel and compete against a team from the RED side. The rules allow a competitor to kill an opponent under certain circumstances.


Astonishingly, this description makes "Gymkata" sound like a fairly faithful adaptation; subtract the dude in the gym shorts kicking guys on the uneven bars and you've basically got "The Terrible Game," right down to the illogical geopolitical implications and national pastime that's almost as barbaric as lacrosse.


But the broad strokes don't get at the totality of the wackiness that is "Gymkata," from the expository scene set against the backdrop of a couple of men in a warehouse shoveling an enormous mountain of what looks like cocaine to the alarming number of close-ups of Thomas' crotch to the Parmistanian city known only as "The Village of the Crazies," where the townspeople are crazy, the livestock is crazy and the monetary unit is the crazy (1 crazy equals roughly 1/650th of an American dollar). It is here that Cabot climbs his pommel horse well, so, if we choose to, we can believe that the Crazies in the Village of the Crazies built it that way because are so batshit insane.


In reality, all the gymnastics equipment is there because the star of the film is Kurt Thomas, a world class US gymnast. Thomas won a gold medal in floor exercise at the 1978 and 1979 World Championships, and was heavily favored to win a gold at the 1980 Summer Olympics until the US boycotted the event over the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, giving Thomas' rightful medal to that scoundrel Roland Bruckner of East Germany. His Olympic potential squandered, Thomas's legacy consists of a floor exercise move named after him ("the Thomas flair") and a movie in which he has a karate fight with a shirtless man in a pigpen. He now runs a gymnastics training facility in Texas.


I first saw "Gymkata" on a bootleg VHS acquired by my friend's father on a trip somewhere in Asia. It may as well have come from another planet; I had never and have since never seen anything like it. In many ways it is the ideal so-bad-it's-good movie: innocent yet silly, dopey yet exciting, dumb yet quirky, mundane yet (village of the) crazy. And it remains the ideal movie to convert nonbelievers to the joys of stupid movies — I've turned many a snob into a devout bad movie head with a single viewing.


The only thing keeping "Gymkata" from its rightful place in the cult firmament is availability. It rarely airs on television, and it's been out-of-print since well into the last century; as if it too has been subject to a worldwide boycott. Finally released this week as part of an Amazon.com's program designed to let online shoppers decide what titles Warner Home Video would release — a contest I'm proud to say I influenced by getting everyone I know to vote — it is ready for its moment in the sun. Here's hoping it sticks the landing.

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<![CDATA[Sundance Dispatch 7: Love is blind.]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/sundance-dispatch-7-love-is-bl.php Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Scasserra

IFC News


[Photos: "Crazy Love" - Magnolia, "Fido" - Lionsgate, "The Savages" - Fox Searchlight, "Broken English" - HDNet, "The Signal" - Magnolia, "Teeth" - Weinstein Co./Lionsgate, "Grace is Gone" - Weinstein Co., 2007]


Ah, love and romance in Park City. This year's Sundance hosted "Once," a whimsical musical from Ireland about a guitar-playing vacuum cleaner repairman who falls for a rose-peddling Czech immigrant; "Expired," in which a mild-mannered meter maid (wonderful Samantha Morton) gets intimate with a deeply troubled fellow parking officer; "Angel-A," Luc Besson's black-and-white ode to Paris, which provides a playground for two potential suicides who take a fancy to each other; and, of course, "Zoo," the buzzed-about documentary that examines the special love between a man and his horse, which ended up being (of all things) a bore.


But nothing topped the brazen-faced romantic dysfunction of "Crazy Love," a documentary that chronicles the nearly five-decade relationship between New Yorkers Burt Pugach and Linda Riss. Pugach, an egomaniacal, high-profile attorney with a taste for glitz, and Riss, a younger, vivacious beauty whose looks were often compared to Elizabeth Taylor, first met in the late 1950s. He fell madly in love and pulled out all of the stops in an effort to get her into bed. She was flattered by his extravagance, but refused to do the dirty until they were married. Their whirlwind romance ended, though, when he finally proposed — and she found out that he was already married. So Riss left him, reentered the dating game, and got engaged to a more handsome, less glamorous guy. But Pugach wasn't having it. If he couldn't possess Linda, no one would — so he hired three thugs to throw lye in her face, seriously impairing her sight for the rest of her life.


Wait, it gets better. Apparently, that acid ruined not only Riss's vision, but her judgment as well. When Pugach gets released after serving a 14-year prison sentence, she finally caves — and marries the guy. In this strangely compelling portrait of romantic obsession and serious co-dependence, Pugach and Riss come across as a pair of loopy trailblazers — the first couple to air their icky laundry in the tabloids, decades before the advent of Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer. This weird love story is all the more unsettling because, in the end, we're still not sure what motivated Riss to marry this creep. Did the incident wreck her emotionally? Did she consider herself damaged goods? Was she addicted to a misguided notion of celebrity? Or is it possible that she simply (gulp) loves the guy?


Set to a soundtrack of vintage love songs by the likes of Elvis Presley, Smokey Robinson, Jay Hawkins, and Johnny Mathis, "Crazy Love" is a surprisingly absorbing portrait of twisted passion pasted together from old photos, 16mm footage, newspaper headlines and talking-head interviews with the happy couple today (he's 79, she's 68) as well as a coterie of their old friends and associates. Watching them is like watching a gallery full of Diane Arbus grotesques come to life. Director Dan Klores ("Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story") and co-director Fisher Stevens (yes, that Fisher Stevens) take a refreshingly straightforward approach to the material by inviting these shameless loons to speak for themselves. The filmmakers never disrespect their subjects or the confounding emotions they express, never establish an ironic distance from which to mock these misguided folks. And why should they bother? Pugach and Riss do a terrific job all by themselves.


"Crazy Love" is small-scale filmmaking, but it's nonetheless oddly involving — and I'd like to send out my sincerest thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Pugach, for making my own romantic life seem as quaint as a Meg Ryan movie.


Magnolia Pictures bought North American rights for "Crazy Love" and plans to release it theatrically in the spring. Could this become the date movie of the year?



The Zombie Next Door.


As part of its Midnight series, Sundance hosted the U.S. premiere of "Fido," a new zombie comedy picked up by Lionsgate at last year's Toronto fest (despite failing to generate much buzz). Directed by Andrew Currie ("Zero Mile") from a script he co-wrote with Robert Chomiak and Dennis Heaton, "Fido" opens with black-and-white news reel footage that summarizes how a cloud of space dust caused the dead to rise with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. We learn that, following a devastating war with the monsters, the alarming situation was finally brought under control by ZomCon, an all-powerful mega-corporation that patented domestication collars to control the worst impulses of the undead — allowing them to be recycled, so to speak, as servants and pets.


Though grade-schooler Tommy Robinson (K'Sun Ray) and his mom Helen (the lovely Carrie Anne-Moss) want to keep up with the Joneses by getting a zombie of their very own, uptight husband and dad Bill (Dylan Baker, who we'll always remember as the pedophile in Todd Solondz's "Happiness") won't allow it. It seems that during his own childhood, Bill's parents were afflicted with the zombie plague, causing him no end of emotional trauma.


Against Dad's wishes, Mom gets Tommy his first zombie (Billy Connelly), a sensitive, Lassie-like monster called "Fido." Things start out okay, but when Fido's collar goes on the fritz, he gnaws off the arm of a cranky old lady and, on Tommy's orders, buries her body in the park. That, of course, raises the dead, as well as the suspicions of Jonathan Bottoms (Henry Czerny), a decorated war hero and zombie-control specialist at ZomCon who launches a formal investigation.


"Fido" is set in an idyllic, Technicolor version of the 1950s, where dads go off to work in hats and moms wear frilly daytime dresses — while rotting, docile zombies deliver the mail and do the gardening. If you're into retro chic and mid-century design, the movie's flawless, hyper-realistic depiction of the era, neatly photographed by Jan Kiesser (whose previous credits include everything from memorable schlock like "Fright Night" to memorable arthouse titles like "Choose Me"), will send you out of the theater and into the nearest thrift shop. Even when it lags, "Fido" is great fun to look at — it's George Romero meets Douglas Sirk — and lead players Moss and Baker (who was really born to parody the bland, suburban family man) provide a picture-perfect parody of the American dream.


Unfortunately, most of the time, I wasn't sure what the script was getting at... That the living are more programmed than the dead? That the dead are more sensitive than the living? Currie keeps the zombie gore to a minimum, opting instead to focus on the shifting family dynamics. Occasionally, the concept is funny. Helen, standing up to her controlling husband: "Just because your father tried to eat you, does that mean that we all have to be unhappy forever?" But "Fido" seems content to remain nothing more than mildly amusing eye-candy. Currie's intentions are mystifying, yet his film isn't even particularly weird. By the end, it's all bark and no bite.


In the production notes, Currie explains that "'Fido' is about the human heart and what it means to be alive, to be a human being in this world." Later, he classifies his zombies as "a non-specific metaphor." Frankly, I think his movie would have benefited from a little more specificity — and a lot more organ chomping. Regardless, Lionsgate plans to set "Fido" off its leash and into theaters on March 9.



Sundance Hall of Famers.


While Helen Mirren's Queen continues to kick the ass of every actress from L.A. to Manhattan and Peter O'Toole tries to grab the Oscar from Forest Whitaker's firm grasp, let's take a moment to celebrate the American film actor — well represented, as always, at this year's Sundance.


Case in point: the increasingly marvelous Laura Linney. In "The Savages" (screening out of competition), she and Philip Seymour Hoffman join forces in the best brother-sister act since...well, since Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo in the 2000 Sundance discovery, "You Can Count on Me."


By this point, no one expects anything less that brilliance from Hoffman, an everyman-as-leading-man who can make even the most stilted dialogue sound honest. And these days, Linney is doing the same for the distaff side. During the last few years, she's bounced with ease from pretty, perky blonde to common frump and back again in indies like "P.S.," "Kinsey" and "The Squid and the Whale." This year, she officially enters the Sundance Hall of Fame.


"The Savages," written and directed by Tamara Jenkins ("Slums of Beverly Hills"), casts a keen eye on the way we live today. Hoffman and Linney play the hell out of John and Wendy Savage, quarrelsome but affectionate siblings (he's a lit professor working on a book on Brecht, she's an office temp who fancies herself a playwright) forced to deal with their elderly father (Philip Bosco), a craggy curmudgeon suffering from dementia who hasn't bothered with them since they were kids. These are intelligent, fucked-up folks, self-involved and self-deluded, trying to do as close to the right thing as they can, just like you and me — confused by life's twists and turns, hoping for something better, and more than willing to pop a Percocet to make it through a tough day.


Jenkins' sharp script packs an emotional punch without histrionics; it's stuffed with smart dialogue, with astutely observed details, with scenes that are both hilarious and deeply moving. Hoffman to Linney, when she tells him they have to fly to Arizona to find their ailing dad: "We're not in a Sam Shepherd play." Linney to Hoffman, when she sees his messy, paper-filled apartment: "It looks like the Unabomber lives here."


Best of all, this beautifully acted drama is actually about something other than a director's pained and pimply youth, or some L.A. screenwriter's misguided idea of what's hip. "The Savages" is about death and dying, about middle-age ennui, about familial responsibility, the appalling way we treat our elderly and a whole lot more. Virtually every scene is infused with the kind of nuance and unexpected humor one expects from a good novel — here condensed into a tidy 113 minutes.


So what if Hoffman and Linney occasionally stray into studio fodder like his "Mission: Impossible 3" or her "Exorcism of Emily Rose"? If that kind of crap helps them pay the bills so they can continue to lend their talent to modestly budgeted projects like this, then so be it. They're the newest members of the American indie's own acting royalty.



The return of the queen.


It's 14 years since I first laid eyes on her in "Dazed and Confused" and I'd still kill for a date with Parker Posey.


The original indie queen returns to Sundance yet again (she ought to have regular digs in Park City by now), this time doing double-duty in two leading roles. I'm still waiting to see "Fay Grim," Hal Hartley's follow-up to "Henry Fool," in which she stars as the title character — a neurotic mom from Queens who gets entangled with spies and terrorists. But I did manage to see Posey bloom in her other Sundance title, "Broken English," a first feature written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes — daughter of late indie guru John, who now joins her brother Nick on the festival circuit. (He was at Sundance last year with "Alpha Dog," just now seeing the light of day at a theater near you.)


"Broken English" has just enough steam to keep the Cassavetes engine running — but barely. To its credit, the film unfolds in a real Manhattan, and it has a breezy, casual air that keeps it from imploding. It's a romantic comedy (sorry, there's no other way to classify it) that's a bit edgier than the ones Hollywood usually provides, but I suspect that the only folks who are going to enjoy it are Posey nuts like me.


Here, she plays Nora Wilder, a dissatisfied 30-something hotel manager with man troubles. Played out in three acts, "Broken English" begins with Nora's humiliating encounter with a two-timing film actor. Though Gena Rowlands shows up for a few blah scenes as Nora's nagging mother (anything that keeps her on the screen is okay by me), the first third is your basic whiney-single-girl-in-Manhattan comedy — think "Sex and the City," if Sarah Jessica Parker had no friends.


The middle section gets much livelier when Nora embarks on a romantic fling with Julian (Melvil Poupaud), a free-spirited Frenchman who's chased his disinterested girlfriend to the U.S. and has a few days to kill before his flight back to Paris. For a while, Cassavetes captures the heady buzz of tentative romance — that unexpected hook-up that just might be the real thing. But then Nora has a panic attack, and Julian heads back to France. Things really jump the track in act three, which sends Nora off to the City of Lights with a married buddy (Drea de Matteo, winner of Sundance Sidekick of the Year Award), where she searches, quite aimlessly, for her cute Frenchman.


One of the biggest problems with "Broken English" is a matter of...well, casting. To my eye, Posey is still the Party Girl. She's reason enough to buy a ticket to anything (I even forgave her "Superman Returns"), but she's still the same bitchy, adorable goofball she's always been. I still blush at her sarcastic glances, melt at her wicked grins — so not for one moment did I believe she'd really give a shit if she didn't have a date for Saturday night. I mean, what's happening here? Last year, in the lamentable "OH in Ohio," Posey was cast as an unhappy, non-orgasmic suburban wife. As if.


Attention, independent filmmakers: Do me a favor and stop pushing the still-reigning "Queen of the Indies" into mid-life crisis. She's not ready — and neither am I. Can't we all agree that 40 is the new 30?



This year's "Blair Witch"?


At least once each Sundance, I stay up late and make my way over to Main Street's Egyptian Theatre for one of the festival's Midnight screenings — a series that attracts Park City's most pumped-up audiences and provides a premiere showcase for potential horror hits and cult film wannabes of every variety. This is the birthplace of "The Blair Witch Project," "Wolf Creek" and the first "Saw," among others.


The highlight of this year's Midnight series has to be "The Signal." Most filmmakers will concur that scary movies are serious business — arguably the only genre in which a big budget guarantees nothing. But "The Signal," an underground-ish indie that comes screaming out of Atlanta, grabbed me by the throat and didn't let go for 99 furiously entertaining minutes. Written and directed by a collective of Atlanta-based writer-directors — David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry — "The Signal" is way scarier than any flick released theatrically in the last year.


Set in a contemporary city called Terminus, this high-octane horror show dramatizes what happens when mysterious signals invade every cell phone, radio and television — transforming the entire population into deranged, murderous psychotics. Suddenly, the world is literally kill or be killed — and everything changes (very bloodily) overnight. In its own demented way, "The Signal" is also a pretty effective love story, with a single narrative line focused on two illicit lovers trying desperately to reunite in the midst of madness.


Logic need not apply here. Riveting and relentless from start to finish, "The Signal" thrusts you headfirst into its own chaotic, distinctly hellish vision. Played out in three segments (titled "Transmissions"), each is directed from a different point-of-view; the second, for example, is set almost entirely in a single apartment and is decidedly comedic — yet it's no less terrifying than the other chapters. Tossing the ball back and forth with impressive cinematic dexterity, these three filmmakers managed to sent me back into the cold Utah night, freaked out and scared shitless. Kudos, too, to the entire cast for keeping the intensity level at code red from first scene to last.
Somebody smart at Magnolia Pictures just nabbed North American distribution rights. Here's hoping they usher "The Signal" into theaters rather than onto the DVD shelf.



Toothy.


Ever hear of vagina dentata?


When I landed in Park City a few days ago, neither had I. But after seeing "Teeth," screening as part of the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, I'll never forget it.


Written by sometime actor and first-time director Mitchell Lichtenstein, this comedic, feminist horror flick (not for the squeamish) is inspired by the myth of the "toothed vagina" — a deadly, fanged female genitalia which legend has it can only be conquered by a male hero. According to the press notes, vagina dentata is present in a variety of world cultures, both ancient and modern. Who knew?


In "Teeth," Lichtenstein uses that myth to spin the strange tale of pretty, all-American Dawn (Jess Weixler), a golden blonde, shiny-faced teen who leads her high school's sexual abstinence program. While many of her peers surrender their virginity without a second thought, Dawn is determined to hold out for true love and a wedding ring. She spends her nights at home, decorating t-shirts with sequined slogans like "I'm Waiting" — and fending off the advances of her creepy, over-sexed stepbrother (John Hensley of "Nip/Tuck"). But during one fateful date, her impatient boyfriend loses his cool and forces himself on Dawn, and finds out the painful truth: that his girlfriend's vagina hides potentially lethal teeth with a will of their own.


His is the first of several severed penises that punctuate the gruesomely amusing sex scenes in this sharp (literally) satire. "Teeth" raises gynophobia to new heights and takes a nasty bite out of the male psyche. Alternately gross and funny, Lichtenstein's vision is bold and in-your-face, but by the midway point, it starts to feel pretty juvenile.


Fortunately, there's nothing juvenile about Jess Weixler's performance as Dawn. A Juilliard graduate whose background includes classical theater as well as sporadic work on daytime soaps and episodic television, Weixler is pretty to the extreme — a heavenly composite of Winona Ryder, Heather Graham and Keira Knightley. Her multi-faceted characterization moves from wide-eyed innocent to confused adolescent to femme fatale without missing a beat. Not since Sissy Spacek's classic turn as "Carrie" has a portrait of burgeoning female sexuality been taken to such terrifying, hyperbolic heights.


Whether or not the movie-going public will bite when "Teeth" reaches audiences (Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company just joined forces to secure worldwide distribution rights) is anyone's guess. Skillful and original as the movie is, it feels like a cult-baiting, straight-to-DVD proposition — and might require some shrewd editing to make it past the ratings board. But even if "Teeth" eventually gets pulled, my guess is that Weixler is going places.



Politics or a lack thereof.


The first big bit of acquisition news at Sundance 2007 has been the purchase of "Grace is Gone," writer-director James C. Strouse's sentimental, small-scale drama starring a toned-down John Cusack as Stanley Phillips — a patriotic, middle-class American dad who has to figure out how to tell his two young daughters that their mother has been killed in Iraq. Stunned by grief, he responds by taking the girls on an impromptu road trip to their favorite amusement park. En route, he makes instinctive efforts to mature the girls (he allows them to get their ears pierced and lets one smoke a cigarette) before breaking the tragic news on (where else?) the beach after a painfully repetitive, dramatically wan 90 minutes. This is politics made palatable, but it's unimpressive filmmaking.


"Grace is Gone" is an all-to-easy pill to swallow — and as politically potent as a Lifetime weepie-of-the-week. The Sundance catalog describes it as "the freshest and best anti-war movie of this troubled time," but Strouse's drama is as non-committal as the current Democratic party — vaguely pro-military, vaguely anti-war and unwilling to take a stand. There's not a lot of complexity to "Grace," in the script or in the performances, save a brief visit with Stanley's leftist brother. Shélan O'Keefe and Gracie Bdenarczyk give the film a welcome touch of realism as bickering sisters, but Cusack (complete with nerdy eyeglasses) spends most of the movie channeling mid-career Dustin Hoffman.


As a tribute to the families of U.S. military casualties, "Grace" is a cinematic balm that is likely to move an undemanding audience more willing to mourn than protest — which probably explains why The Weinstein Company purchased it for a cool four million bucks. After inking the deal, Harvey Weinstein told Daily Variety that partisan politics would not find their way into the movie's marketing plan — that "Grace is Gone" "will work better as an antiwar film if we leave politics out of it." That won't be difficult, since Strouse already left politics out of it.


Thankfully, more radical views are (as always) represented in the impressive line-up of Sundance documentaries that take on the incompetence of the Bush administration. The festival's opening night selection, Brett Morgen's "Chicago 10," is a highly stylized study of the Chicago Seven trial that combines animation and archival footage as well as voice work by the likes of Nick Nolte, Jeffrey Wright and Mark Ruffalo, among others. A boldly contemporary look at that legendary opposition to the Vietnam War, "Chicago 10" might be a harbinger of things to come as Bush sets his myopic sights on Iran and Syria. Rory Kennedy's fierce "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," constructed from candid interviews with victims, witnesses and perpetrators, provides the most penetrating examination to date of the United States' embarrassing prisoner abuse scandal. And still to come is Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight," described as "the first film to examine comprehensively how the Bush administration constructed the Iraq war and subsequent occupation," promising to "expose a chain of critical errors, denial, and incompetence that has galvanize a violent quagmire."

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<![CDATA[Our Oscar Guesses]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/ifc-news-podcast-11-our-oscar.php Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Oscar nominations are announced on January 23rd -- we go on the record with our predictions for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress, and discuss why you should or shouldn't care about the Academy Awards race.

Download: MP3, 20:30 minutes, 18.8 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25369 2007-01-22 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_11_our_oscar publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025369 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Our Oscar Guesses (photo)]]> Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025369 2007-01-22 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_11_our_oscar_photo inherit 25369 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[On DVD: Robert Mitchum and Kenneth Anger]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/on-dvd-robert-mitchum-and-kenn.php Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Angel Face," Warner, 1952]


Robert Mitchum, whose 54-year career in American movies ended with his death in 1997, is never mentioned when movieheads gather and ponder the Great American Movie Stars or Great American Actors, and he's never included in the Oscar montages. It's as if this masterful, unflappable, unpretentious, iconic demi-god wasn't, in fact, the postwar years' most consistent and resonant leading man, and true noir's purest and coolest everyman. (Mitchum's heroes were never weathered, flawed romantics like Bogart's — he never thought that much about the past.) He may have also been the era's best line-reader — you'd search in vain through his massive filmography for a misstep or clumsy moment, which is not something you can say for Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando, John Wayne or Burt Lancaster. Mitchum knew how to be on film in a way that eludes most actors; his massive bulk, sleepy eyes and laconic voice disguised a quick, quiet intelligence that always seemed to surprise his co-stars.


He worked in virtually every genre that required a morally centered man of action (musicals were out, thank God), and his best films have only become recognized as some of the mid-century's all-out finest many years after they vanished from theaters: "Crossfire," "Out of the Past" and "Pursued" (all 1947), "The Lusty Men" (1952), "Angel Face" (1952), "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), "Cape Fear" (1962), "El Dorado" (1966). The new Warner Mitchum DVD box set comes with at least one now-classic Mitchum movie: Otto Preminger's "Angel Face," a beautiful meta-noir set in the blazing California sun, pitting Mitchum's guileless working-class driver against Jean Simmon's gorgeous but, it is slowly revealed, psychopathic poor little rich girl. The ending is a throat-catcher, even for those days thick with noirish bile and cynicism. The box also includes the fabulous exotic mishmash "Macao" (1952), Vincente Minnelli's "Home from the Hill" (1952), Fred Zinneman's sunny Australian sheep-drover epic "The Sundowners" (1960), the negligible western "The Good Guys & the Bad Guys" (1969), and, take notice, Sydney Pollack and Paul Schrader's "The Yakuza" (1974), in which the aging Mitchum plunges into the Japanese underworld and wreaks holy havoc.


Meanwhile, in another Hollywood, Kenneth Anger was growing up. Long considered the American avant-garde's pioneer mythopoet, Anger started, briefly, as a child actor (that's him as the Changeling Prince in 1935's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," alongside James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland), and began making non-narrative, proto-campy films as a teenager. By the time he made "Scorpio Rising" (1964) — a half-hour mood piece that essentially defined authentic American gay iconography and nascent queer culture for several generations of horny guys — Anger was underground cinema's dark prince. Hanging with Anaïs Nin and Mick Jagger, channeling Aleister Crowley, getting mixed up with the Manson gang (Bobby Beausoleil buried the negative of "Lucifer Rising" in Death Valley, forcing Anger to reshoot it from scratch) — these were the years to be a cool, counter-cultural experimental filmmaker. (Still, these were avant-garde shorts — he's still more popularly known as the author of the scandal-shop "Hollywood Babylon" books.) Anger's films range in palette from bedroom amateurishness to Victorian nursery daydream to epic black mass, but they're all frantic collages concerned more with your experience as a spectator than making conventional narrative order out of chaos. (Anger has agendas involving "magick" and so forth, but like most writing by and about experimental filmmakers, it's pure blarney.)


The inaugural Fantoma disc of Anger's scant oeuvre — hopefully there will be at least two more — saves the confrontational luridness of "Scorpio Rising," "Invocation of My Demon Brother" and "Lucifer Rising" for later, and instead presents his earlier, more glitzy stage, beginning with his incendiary masturbation symbol-fest "Fireworks" (1947), made when Anger was 19. The films are little half-myths that live in an entirely symbolic sphere, boiling down "normal" movies to a fetishized bank of dislocated gestures and images. For me, Anger's doomed "Rabbit's Moon" (1950) is his early triumph, a fully realized fairy tale starring a Pierrot le Fou figure in a cardboard glade under a completely fake moon. It was never finished, and has only been seen in a truncated version until now. Climactically, so to speak, "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome" (1954) is a grand, 38-minute, rainbow-candy costume party/pantomime, starring Nin, Anger, director Curtis Harrington, and "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" songwriter Joan Whitney. The lavish extras include wall-to-wall Anger commentary, supplements demonstrating the films' restorations, production art, excerpts from Nin's famous diaries, outtakes (!), and a sleek book of history and stills.



"Robert Mitchum — The Signature Collection" (Warner) and "The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume One" (Fantoma) will be available on DVD on January 23rd.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: January 26th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/opening-this-week-january-26th.php Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Smokin' Aces," Universal Pictures, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Blood and Chocolate"

The producers of "Underworld" present us with yet another female-fronted supernatural thriller, as "Dreamland"'s Agnes Bruckner must choose between her loving boyfriend or her family's secret society of werewolves. The trailer comes packed with brooding dark visuals, lycanthropian special effects and an Evanescence song.

Opens wide (official site).


"Catch and Release"

Kevin Smith in a chick flick? Though our irony meter may have just gone through the roof, somehow we're disappointed in Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Susannah Grant's feature directorial debut, which casts Jennifer Garner as a woman who finds comfort in her fiancé's friends after his sudden death. Now we love us some Garner, whether she's just having fun ("13 Going on 30") or kicking some serious ass ("Alias"), but a sad Garner is something we just don't want to see. Hopefully she can pull it off.

Opens wide (official site).


"Epic Movie"

We're sure we're not the only ones who request that these "_____ Movies" just..stop. Though some film spoofs may be guilty pleasures ("Airplane!" and "Spaceballs" still best many of the comedies today), "Epic Movie" appears completely lost on us, as the trailer implies that pretty much every major film released in the past two years will be spoofed somehow. Lazy, yes, but we're keen to see Crispin Glover spoofing Willy Wonka. If only Tim Burton had thought of it first.

Opens wide (official site).


"Nomad: The Warrior"

The nation of Kazakhstan regains some of its dignity following the political debacle of "Borat" with this historical epic set during the 18th century as it tells the story of a young boy who is destined to unite the three warring tribes of Kazakhstan against invaders and national enemies. "Nomad" stands as the most expensive film ever to be shot in Kazakhstan at $40 million and is the nation's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Seraphim Falls"

Also known as "James Bond vs. Oskar Schindler: The Ultimate Battle". Okay, maybe not so much, but this revenge thriller pits our third-favorite Bond, Pierce Brosnan, against Darkman himself, Liam Neeson, set in the American West following the Civil War. Our expectations for this film aren't very high, but judging by the film's trailer, frequent TV director David von Ancken's first feature promises to be a fun time. Plus, you can't go wrong with Pierce's mighty fine beard.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Smokin' Aces"

"Smokin' Aces" is the type of movie that Guy Ritchie probably would make if he were still allowed to make them. Fortunately, "Narc" director Joe Carnahan is clearly up to the task of directing a hyper macho action film about a group of assassins trying to kill a sleazy magician (Jeremy Piven); the rest of the cast includes Ben Affleck, Ryan Reynolds, Andy Garcia, Alicia Keys and many others. The film may not be one of the best of the new year, or even any good, but it looks like one of the most fun films of an otherwise drab January.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Eric Nicholas on "Alone With Her"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/eric-nicholas-on-alone-with-he.php Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 As any film student in need of a paper topic knows, cinema has always been at least a little bit about voyeurism, whether it stems from the enticements of seeing a scantily clad starlet or flashy explosion to something a little more abstract. Eric Nicholas' creepy thriller "Alone With Her," which premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and which opens in New York this week, takes the idea of someone liking to watch to an unusual extreme. The film follows Doug (Colin Hanks), a stalker who becomes obsessed with the unknowing Amy (Ana Claudia Talacón) and breaks into her house to plant cameras in each room. We see this disturbing relationship progress entirely through Doug's hidden cameras (including the one he wears), as he finds himself no longer content to simply sit back and observe, and starts involving himself in Amy's life. The director took some time to speak with me about the inspiration behind and difficulties of shooting the film.


So where did this idea of a surveillance film come from?


It came to me a couple years ago when I came across a web site selling dirty-cheap spy equipment to the general public — $50 hidden video cameras, digital telephone records, lock pick guns, a lot of scary shit — it really freaked me out. Any dirt bag with $50 could watch and listen to me inside my own home.


You start the film off with a quote on the statistics of stalking from David Wiseman [a U.S. Justice Department official] — do you see this as a cautionary tale?


I do, I've often described it as a cautionary tale. Obviously, as a thriller, I wanted it to scare people, but at the same time I hope people will sit up and take notice — you know, this equipment is out there, it's available and I think it's cause for a certain amount of alarm.


I know you shot the bulk of the film in high-def, but did you get any of your footage from actually surveillance equipment?


We didn't, actually — it was a very in-depth discussion during pre-production, and we ultimately decided to shoot it in high-def because we wanted to have as high resolution as possible. In post-production we degraded the image and desaturated the color to give it that grainy surveillance look.


There's actually four distinct looks to the movie — there's the camcorder footage, which Doug hides in a bag; there're the interior hidden cameras he has in Amy's apartment; there's the night vision; and there's the black and white bodycam that he wears at the coffee shop and when he's out in public.


From a logistical standpoint, was it tough to figure out have to get your narrative across with the constraints you'd given yourself?


It was a welcome challenge, but it was very difficult to tell a story that way. We purposefully tied one hand behind our backs. We came up with all sorts of great things, through, to make it interesting. The interior hidden cameras in Amy's apartment are locked off and have no zoom capabilities, so it became very much about blocking the actors in creative ways. In order to stress Doug's presence whenever he's watching Amy, I would compose the shots in an artless manner, to always remind the audience that they're watching surveillance footage — for example, Amy would be in the far left of the frame with her head cut off, or would walk out of frame for ten seconds. There's also all sorts of sound design we did to stress that as well. We have the picture occasionally break up, static over the image, we would have aural perspective changes as we switched from camera to camera. It was a lot of fun.


The perspective also means that some plot developments happened off camera and were only hinted at — like when Amy sells her paintings.


I'm hoping it opens the audience's imagination about what's happening behind the scenes. We do that with Doug, as well — we don't show him for a good half an hour. I liked the idea that the audience starts imagining what this guy looks like, and I believe that they'd imagine a kind of creepy-looking guy, given what he does. When he finally shows up, I think that people are surprised, because he's harmless looking. He even looks kind, and normal, and to me, that's scarier.


It doesn't hurt that he's played by Colin Hanks, who has his father's benign glow about him.


Colin was always on my wish list, and I was thrilled when I found out he liked the script. When we met, I found that we both shared the same vision for Doug and that we were both really excited about trying something new cinematically. Some people have asked me if I was trying to cast against type, but I don't think so. I think Colin was what I had in mind the whole time.


Do you think your film gains relevance as we seem to be more and more in an age of surveillance — as it becomes an everyday aspect of being in a public space?


I think it's a very topical film — I felt that way two years ago and feel even more so now with the prevalence of surveillance cameras. I think it's very timely, and hopefully very provocative. I want people to walk out of that theater and talk about it. When we screened the film at Tribeca, many young women came up to me after the screening and said "I'm never going to sleep the same way again!" And it sounds crazy, but I was really pleased to hear that, because I could tell the film was connecting and making an impact the way I always hoped.



"Alone With Her" opens in New York on January 17th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Eric Nicholas on "Alone With Her" (photo)]]> Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025401 2007-01-15 00:00:00 closed closed eric_nicholas_on_alone_with_he_photo inherit 25401 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Mafioso," "The Italian"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/mafioso-the-italian.php Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The Italian," Sony Pictures Classics, 2007]


"Mafioso"


The mafia and comedy genres mingle more comfortably than they have any right to in Alberto Lattuada's "Mafioso," the latest reclamation project from Rialto Pictures, who no doubt hope to recreate the success of their last discovery, Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows." They'll likely come up a little short: though "Mafioso" is arguably a more compelling film, Lattuada doesn't have Melville's following or critical standing.


Alberto Sordi plays Antonio Badalamenti, the foreman of a FIAT plant in Northern Italy who returns to his childhood home of Sicily for the first time in eight years to introduce his wife Marta (Norma Bengell) and their two daughters to the rest of the family. The scenes of Antonio's reunion with his kin is "Mafioso"'s comedic highpoint, a manic episode of wailing and crying and spontaneous singing punctuated brilliantly by moments of absolute silence, as when Marta awkwardly presents a pair of gloves as a gift to Antonio's father, who only has one hand.


Though Antonio's delights in his reunion with his parents and alarmingly mannish sister (whose moustache is far thicker than my own), his happy homecoming slowly turns darker. The island "of the sun and Cyclops" (as Antonio calls it) is also the home to many mafia dons, including Don Vincenzo (Ugo Attanasio), who helped Antonio start his career in the north. Don Vincenzo plans to make him an offer he, as they say, cannot refuse. "You cannot leave your old friends behind," one Sicilian tells Antonio.


Lattuada's view of home and family is comedic but ultimately bittersweet; Antonio is so excited to show Marta his old stomping grounds and running buddies he is slow to notice the Don's underhanded machinations (or his own family's complicity in them). By the time he does, it's too late to stop them. Antonio is the ultimate cog in the machine: at his job in the factory or amongst the picciotto in Sicily, he is a tiny part of an operation that completely controls his destiny. In the end, Antonio learns as much about Sicily as his wife does. "What can I say?" he tells Marta. "Everything's changed."


The existing high watermark for mafia comedies is probably that scene in "The Godfather" where Clemenza says "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." So to say that "Mafioso," a largely forgotten Italian production from 1962, is the funniest mafia movie I've ever seen isn't exactly shocking praise. But it is true.


"Mafioso" open in New York on January 19th (official site).



"The Italian"


Italian in title only, this arty Russian drama by director Andrei Kravchuk blends contemporary orphan politics with "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York." Six-year-old orphan Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov) is chosen for adoption by a wealthy Italian couple (hence the tile), but he reconsiders his good fortune when the mother of a recently adopted friend comes looking for her son. Instead of accepting the adoption, Vanya decides to find his mother, which means sneaking out of the orphanage, and hopping a train to a city he's never been, with little more than a street address and a name to go on.


The first half of the film is in the dreary details of Russian orphanage life: peeling paint, dripping water, secondhand clothes, and the double whammy of illiteracy and poverty. The weather is persistently gloomy — one establishing shot is so thick with fog you can barely see the orphanage fifteen feet in front of the camera — and the residents are gripped by an epidemic of seasonal affective disorder. In the second half, the focus shifts to a more conventional chase film, with Vanya's dogged and inventive attempts to find his mother and stay ahead of the orphanage trying to track him down and return him to the Italians.


"The Italian" rests entirely on Spiridonov's tiny, malnourished shoulders, and he gives a performance of such natural beauty that it would make child actors of the American variety bow their heads in collective shame. There isn't much more to Kravchuk's film than watching Spiridonov in action, but the kid puts on a JV master class. In another child actor's hands, the sentimentality could overpower the story, and the irritatingly simplistic score could take away the emotional impact, but you just can't take your eyes off that damn kid.


"The Italian" opens in limited release on January 19th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Gagging on the Kool-Aid: Cult Films We Just Don't Get]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/gagging-on-the-koolaid-cult-fi.php Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis, Michelle Orange, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: Rutger Hauer in the original "The Hitcher," a slasher cult favorite that inspired a remake opening this week. ®TriStar Pictures, 1986]


Cult movies and independent films are rarely grouped together, but let's drop the pretensions and face it — they're basically the same thing. Or at the very least, they grew out of same world; the fertile soil first tilled by the exploitation directors. These traveling hucksters, snake oil salesmen and genuine artists (sometimes all wrapped up in the same conflicted figure) did basically the same things that independent and cult films do today: produced a motion picture outside the Hollywood studio system and catered to an audience not satisfied with the tame product of said system.


Most figures of either movement could just as easily be appropriated by the other. John Cassavetes is as much a figure of cult adulation as he is a pioneer of true independent, artful moviemaking; Russ Meyer may have made pictures about the catfighting lifestyles of abnormally busty women, but he was as financially successful as any independent director of the 20th century. Many of today's biggest indie directors are also our biggest cult icons; consider Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez, whose upcoming collaboration "Grindhouse" is a direct callback to the heyday of cult films.


Indie movies always have a bit of cult to them. The best ones are still seen at film festivals, acquired at grungy video stores, or distributed on YouTube, well off the beaten path of mainstream respectability. Sal Piro, one of the architects of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" cult (more on it later) had a definition of cult films (as transcribed in J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's "Midnight Movies," an indispensable resource on this topic) that could easily apply to the indie world: "A cult film is a movie that has developed a following outside of the mainstream of popular films. The plots usually require a sustained suspension of disbelief. These films contain a sense of irrationality and nonconformity."


As fun as cult films are as part of a group, they're confusing, even frustrating, on the outside looking in. This culture of insiders and outsiders are crucial to cult films, because part of what makes them so appealing within their insular world is the way they've been rejected by everyone else. "They don't get it," the cultist says, "but I do."


IFC has always celebrated cult movies, but even dedicated cultists like the IFC News staff have cult blind spots, movies, both old and new, whose feverish appeal to a dedicated group of devoted followers completely baffles us. Here now, out of our own curiosity and an urgent need to belong to the collective, we voice our bewilderment:



"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975)


It is unquestionably the most famous, most watched and most celebrated cult film of all time. To this day, 30 years after its first release, it's still playing regularly in over 60 theaters all over the world. And I flat out don't get it. I've seen "Rocky Horror" a few times, and most times it’s a struggle to get through the picture, whether I'm by myself or in a group. It plays on a lot of the primordial ooze of cult that I love (monster movies, tacky dialogue, stilted acting), but it just doesn't resonate with me in this form. The problem may lie more in the cult than the film itself. My own excursions into cult are about the discovery of something lost or misunderstood; "Rocky Horror" is more about ritual. By the time my generation came to "Rocky Horror," the rules had been so rigidly established that to stray from them could cause "virgins," as they're called, public humiliation or bodily harm. There's a meanness to the "Rocky" cult; a few years ago, a roommate of mine got pelted with eggs at his first "Rocky Horror" screening, which sounds more like a frat house hazing ritual than a cheeky welcome for the uninitiated. "Rocky Horror" seems like a great cult to be on the inside of, but I'm still trying to figure out the secret handshake without getting egg on my face. Then again, if something is the most famous, most watched, and most celebrated cult film, can it still even be considered a cult film? —Matt Singer



"Waiting..." (2005)


I understand cult films, sort of, though I must admit the "so-bad-it's-good" argument has always eluded me. What I have also never gotten are films that become cult films largely on their merits when viewed under the influence of marijuana, weed, grass, ganja, schwag — especially when they're also about marijuana ("Half Baked," the Cheech and Chong oeuvre). Perhaps it's too early to call this one a cult film, but if it isn't already, I am betting, based on credible insider information, that it will be soon. "Waiting...," Rob McKittrick's 2005 service industry epic, stars Ryan Reynolds, Anna Faris, Dane Cook, Justin Long and Luis Guzman as employees at an Applebee's-type restaurant, and that's about all I've got for you in the way of plot. Long's character is on the brink of becoming a lifer (assistant manager) and has to face some choices about the direction his life is going in, all the while deftly avoiding the good look at their privates the line cooks keep trying to give him. The kid from "Freaks and Geeks" shows up as a new hire, and he takes a lot of shit before learning to stand up for himself…The End. I mean, it's not a horrible movie, but I will never understand why anyone would want to watch it more than once, even with herbal enhancement. That shit just puts me to sleep anyway. —Michelle Orange



"Wet Hot American Summer" (2001)


I've been a hopelessly devoted fan of the comedy troupe "The State" since their short-lived show on MTV (93-95) tapped into my adolescent love of absurdist humor that wasn't above the occasional poop joke. I've savored every project these men (and lady) have pursued since the group broke up after their CBS special tanked in 1995, from the silly improv comedy of "Reno 911" to the deadpan surrealism of "Stella." I even find myself watching those endless "I Love the..." VH1 specials simply because of the presence of Michael Ian Black. All of which is to explain why it pained me that "Wet Hot American Summer" failed to elicit the full-throated laughter of the troupe's other work. This parody of 80s summer camp movies piles on non-sequiturs at a tiring pace, failing to capture the spontaneous insanity of the MTV show. But the film caught on quickly, garnering great reviews and running for seven months in 2003 during a wildly successful NYC revival. It's the group's biggest hit, alas, while I still fruitlessly wait for those three seasons of "The State" to arrive on DVD. —R. Emmet Sweeney



"The Warriors" (1979)


Can you dig it? Because just I can't. I do get that themed gangs should equal all kinds of awesome, like themed parties, except with more violence. But "The Warriors," with its episodic trip through 70s goth-fantasy New York, always seemed oddly lifeless and deflated to me, like the sound had been turned down — I've never been able to make it through the film in one sitting. The Warriors, a Coney Island gang fond of wearing vests without shirts on underneath, are framed for the murder of another gang's leader and have to fight their way across the city to get home. They battle the bat-wielding Baseball Furies, the overall-sporting Punks, and on, and on, and it's no surprise that the film was eventually adapted into a video game — it was already halfway there to begin with. One of the more charming (if enigmatic) aspects of "Warriors" fandom is that the film, which is rife with camp and unintentional (barely) homoeroticism, seems more than ripe for co-option by the gay community, but continues to attract fans from all walks of life, even ones who would rather die than admit that the climactic battle is between gangs essentially modeled after two members of The Village People. —Alison Willmore



"Napoleon Dynamite" (2004)/"Little Miss Sunshine" (2006)


Plenty of backlash has come out against Wes Anderson's films by those getting their hate on for hipsterdom, but somehow their Sundance-born offspring have crossed over into mainstream cultural events with relatively none of the same disapproval. To me, "Napoleon Dynamite" is a vibrant tableau of forced whimsy that condescends to each of its cartoonish characters; it's a wannabe "Rushmore" with Jason Schwarzmann's insecure and eventually humbled know-it-all replaced by a charmless, self-important, mean-spirited jerk. Personal taste aside, I'd be willing to accept that it's for a generation younger than myself, one that shops at Hot Topic and finds 80s kitsch exotic, but then why are there so many older fans drinking the punch, eating the tots, etc.? I'm also totally baffled by the love-fest over "Little Miss Sunshine," a vibrant tableau of forced whimsy that feigns intelligence and realism from its poorly drawn characters; it's a less ambitious "Royal Tenenbaums" grafted over the dysfunctional-family road trip framework of "National Lampoon's Vacation," with less laughs. It peaks with an awkward dance sequence (as does "Napoleon Dynamite") and falls into unbelievable melodrama as if it didn't know how else to end, which explains the four alternate endings on the DVD. Why do people care about these fake personalities? The unashamedly stupid "Snakes on a Plane" featured a germaphobic hip-hop superstar, so how is that any less relatable than characters as superficial as their quirks, like the "junkie grandpa" or "suicidal gay Proust scholar?" "Napoleon" has the family-friendly vibe that's en vogue, so I suppose that fills a need, but "Sunshine" aims to be edgier than convention, though it's perfectly safe enough for the filmgoing meek. Whatever, I'll happily be the head-scratching curmudgeon on this matter, even if I find it troubling that arthouse-lite fluff like this is becoming synonymous with "indie film." —Aaron Hillis

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: January 19th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/opening-this-week-january-19th.php Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "The Hitcher," Rogue Pictures, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Alone with Her"

It can often seem like indie movies can be summed up as part of one of three categories: 1) the self-important road movie where everybody learns something, 2) the depressing story about a depressed person in a depressed town (sadness!), or 3) the supremely creepy low-budget thriller. Writer/director Eric Nicholas opts for door number three in this film about a young man who manipulates the beautiful young woman he's spent months stalking into a love affair. Colin Hanks stars as the film's resident voyeur and Mexican actress Ana Claudia Talancón plays his target.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Funny Money"

"Funny Money" may have been the biggest hit of last year's Sarasota Film Festival, but to us the film reeks a little of 1986. Based on the popular Ray Cooney play of the same name, the film stars Chevy Chase as a wax fruit factory foreman who mistakenly winds up with a briefcase holding five million dollars and must try to convince his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) to hold on to the money. Where's John Candy when you need him? Oh, right — dead.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Hitcher"

Sean Bean may be one of the great villainous character actors working today. Not to discredit his work elsewhere, but we don't think there's been a consistently great bad guy since Alan Rickman's "Die Hard" days. Bean chases after 20-somethings Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton in this remake of the 1986 horror film of the same title.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Italian"

This import from Russia tells the story of a five-year-old orphan's journey to find his birth mother, leaving his comfortable Italian family for a treacherous unknown world. The film won the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk Grand Prix prize at the Berlin International Film Festival two years ago and is Russia's submission for this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Mafioso"

Rialto Films offers up a reprint of Alberto Lattuada's 1962 comedy about a happy-go-lucky Sicilian man who returns home for a holiday with his family and is asked to fulfill a favor for the local Don.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA["La Moustache," "Mouchette"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/la-moustache-mouchette.php Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "La Moustache," Cinema Guild/Koch Lorber, 2006]


You could down a trough of Gogol, Kafka and Buñuel and still not come up with an absurd domestic apocalypse as simple and disconcerting as that of Emmanuelle Carrère's "La Moustache." It begins with a banal bathroom question: should I shave my mustache? Marc (Vincent Lindon) asks his wife this as he's lathering up in a bath before a dinner party; "Never seen you without it," Emmanuelle Devos's Agnes shrugs. He does the deed, hides his face coyly, and then the unimaginable happens — she says nothing. His friends don't notice, his co-workers (at a storefront design firm) are mute. Every conversation is a spit in his eye, because it's a denial of the obvious. Does anyone ordinarily notice him? Agnes soon flips out — her husband never had a mustache. At first, Marc thinks it's all an elaborate joke, then he wonders if he's having delusions, both of which are happier scenarios than the last stop on this existential rail line to nowhere: that Carrère's hero is in fact invisible, incorporeal, present but somehow irrelevant, a Kafkaesque non-person.


Is this psychology, or something scarier, something cosmic, like "It's a Wonderful Life" and its psychosis-evoking penultimate act? Is it science fiction? "La Moustache" is all the more chilling because what happens to this couple happens every day — every marriage as its seizures of cognitive dissonance, and every middle-ager wakes up one day to a life and self he or she doesn't recognize. As David Byrne used to holler, my God, what have I done? The acting is peerless: Devos, she of the relentlessly fascinating Picasso face, never wavers in her conviction, but it's Lindon's film. Thick-faced but lipless, with a natural frown and the worried eyes of an old dog, he is perfectly cast as an average semi-macho schmo caught in the ultimate pre-menopausal nightmare.


French nightmares are almost by definition mundane — like Robert Bresson's "Mouchette" (1967), a wounding, epochal analysis of a neglected and abused teenage girl on her blank-faced way to the grave. An inarticulate country girl with a dying mother and an alcoholic father, Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is almost ritually humiliated, insulted and exploited by everyone around her — an all-too-common paradigm for poverty-stricken, post-agricultural social settings, which was surely original novelist Georges Bernanos's point. In Bresson's no-nonsense hands, this grim fable becomes a pantomime stations of the cross, so completely focused on sensuous details, ethical interrogation and the fastidious lasering-away of movie bullshit (like acting and action) that it comes close to the simple thrust of a medieval Christian icon. That the film is a saint's passion doesn't mean it's overtly Christian — Bresson is far less a spiritualist than a precision pragmatist, with a holy man's crystal-clear moral vision. (This goes for Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest" and "Au Hasard Balthazar" as well, making up a kind of trilogy of the down-trodden.)


Bresson shoots tragedy with an unblinking, unpunctuated lens — he corners you into empathy without making it easy or easily forgotten. Still, however you read the Bresson experience, he arguably stands as the most mysterious and elusive master filmmaker, demanding and repaying patience like no one else. The large library of critical scholarship on him still hasn't fully sussed him out, or fully translated his intensely particular strategy into a relatable idea. He's a tough cookie, and it may be that his movies cannot be written about eloquently, but only watched. Nonetheless, this Criterion disc comes lugging exegesis, including an audio commentary by old-school scholar/critic Tony Rayns, two TV docs about Bresson and the making of "Mouchette," an essay by author Robert Polito, and the original theatrical trailer, edited by Jean-Luc Godard.



"La Moustache" (Koch Lorber) and "Mouchette" (Criterion) will be available on DVD January 16th.

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<![CDATA[Five Graphic Novels Every Movie Fan Should Own]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/five-graphic-novels-every-movi.php Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 01082007_torso_article.jpgBy Matt Singer

Movies have always borrowed ideas and stories from other mediums, from literature to theater to television. But in the last decade one medium has surpassed all the others in influence and importance: comic books.

It's certainly not the first time comics have found a second home in Hollywood. During the first comic book boom of the 1940s, when titles like "Action Comics" routinely sold millions of copies a month, many of the medium's most popular characters became the subjects of their own movie serials. Super-hero stories, with their outsized protagonists and outlandish villains, proved ideal subjects for the serials. And it didn't hurt that the two shared an overlapping audience of dime-spending youngsters.

Even after the success of the first "Superman" movie and Tim Burton's "Batman," it still took moviemaking technology a few decades to catch up with the inventive imaginations of the men and women who spawned Spider-Man, the X-Men and the rest of their four-colored brood. But the world of comics has provided the inspiration for more than tent-pole theatrics: they've provided the spark behind documentaries ("Crumb"), biopics ("American Splendor"), indie self-loathing ("Ghost World"), vampire movies (the "Blade" series) and more.

Just as comics have inspired movies, movies have proven a fruitful inspiration for many comics. And, admittedly, most of the comic book movies that make their way to multiplexes barely scratch the surface of the diversity of styles and genres available in any good comic book store.

Here, then, are five choices particularly well-suited to movie fans. This is not a list of the greatest graphic novels of all time, or anything like that; it's rather a list of five standout books in five different genres that deserve a wider audience amongst the moviegoing public, and all five are currently in print; most should be available just about anywhere in the country.


"Torso" (Image Comics, $24.95)

Written by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Andreyko; illustrated by Bendis

Genre: Police drama

For Fans Of: "L.A. Confidential," "The Big Heat"

This black-and-white comic book noir based on a true story — and what's more movieish than that phrase? — follows Eliot Ness on one of his largely forgotten cases, on the trail of one of the world's first recognized serial killers.

Movie Fans Will Particularly Appreciate: Bendis' cinematography, for lack of a better term. Like a really good D.P., Bendis plays with light and shadow, and his innovative panel layouts beautifully translate film's editing rhythm to the page.

Cinematic Connections: Ness is also the subject of Brian De Palma's memorable cop drama "The Untouchables."

Further Reading: Both Bendis and Andreyko have gone on to high-profile work in mainstream super-hero comics including "Ultimate Spider-Man," "Daredevil," and "Manhunter"; Bendis has also created several other crime novels in the style of "Torso" — his massive "Jinx," a noir take on "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly," is also highly recommended.


True Story, Swear to God: Chances Are... (AIT/Planet Lar, $14.95)

Written and illustrated by Tom Beland

Genre: Romantic comedy
For Fans Of: "Sleepless in Seattle," "An Affair to Remember"

Thousands of miles from home on a free vacation, newspaper cartoonist Tom Beland falls in love with a beautiful stranger named Lily he meets at a bus stop.

Movie Fans Will Particularly Appreciate: Beland's shamelessly — at times embarrassingly — romantic storyline. Rom-com and chick flick fans take note: you have never seen a more clichéd love story than this one: from the meet cute to the impossible coincidences to the wisecracking friends and relatives dispensing folksy advice, they're all here. And, of course, it's all true.

Cinematic Connections: In the midst of his magical first night with Lily, Tom compares himself to George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," and, in a somewhat less flattering reference, admits his childhood crush on Lady from "Lady and the Tramp."

Further Reading: The ups and downs of Tom and Lily's ongoing love story continue in another collection, and now each month in a new series.

[Photos: "Torso," Image Comics, 2001; "True Story, Swear to God: Chances Are...", AIT/Planet Lar, 2003]

]]> 8378 2007-01-08 00:00:00 closed closed five_graphic_novels_every_movi publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008378 <![CDATA["God Grew Tired Of Us," "Tears of the Black Tiger"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/god-grew-tired-of-us-tears-of.php Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "God Grew Tired of Us," National Geographic Films, 2007]


God Grew Tired of Us


When hiring someone to direct his rags-to-riches hit "The Pursuit of Happyness," star Will Smith selected Italian Gabriele Muccino after the filmmaker suggested that to fully understand the American Dream you need to be a foreigner, a notion also explored in the new documentary "God Grew Tired of Us." It follows three young men exiled from their home in Sudan by a brutal civil war who, after ten years spent in a refugee camp, are given the opportunity to come to the United States and earn a living. The men are largely unfamiliar with the US and its customs before they arrive; they don't mention the American Dream and are almost certainly unfamiliar with the term. But their journey to America illustrates and in some ways deflates that ideal.


Directors Christopher Dillon Quinn and Tommy Walker meet these "lost boys" — John, Panther, and Daniel — at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Their horrific childhoods are told through interviews (all three speak English) and a narration from Nicole Kidman. No person should have to suffer one of the hardships these boys endured, and they endured many, from losing their families and homes, to walking a thousand miles to escape persecution, to having to eat mud or drink urine when they had no food or water. Despite their personal tragedies, John, Panther, and Daniel are friendly, introspective interview subjects.


Panther and Daniel travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As if he hadn't suffered enough already, John is sent to Syracuse, New York (an earlier documentary called "The Lost Boys of Sudan" followed a group of refugees who moved to Houston, TX). For the lost boys, who've never used electricity or a shower, their first days and weeks in America are filled with discovery and confusion, as they see and use things like escalators, light switches and hoagie rolls for the first time. Quinn and Walker balance on the razor's edge of documenting their befuddlement and simply exploiting it for laughs; watching "God Grew Tired of Us," it's sometimes frustrating to see the filmmakers watch idly as one of the refugees grinds his Ritz crackers with a mortar and pestle (though, to their credit, they do explain the intricacies of an airplane bathroom instead of letting their subjects wing it).


Life in America for the lost boys is vastly better than their African existence, but far from ideal. The men need to work two or three menial jobs at once to support themselves and their friends and family back in Africa while they also study to get college degrees. It's to the United States' credit that it's so accommodating to the lost boys, but their talents as educators and humanitarians could be put to far greater use than packing gaskets in a factory or as a produce clerk at a supermarket (in a bitter irony Daniel himself might not see, he travels from Kakuma, where he is chided for his cooking abilities, to Pittsburgh, where he winds up stocking tomatoes for a living). In some ways, this movie is a fulfillment of that promise.


The lost boys' success in America varies: some begin to acclimate while others maintain a stricter sense of African tradition and culture; some are reunited with their families, others keep searching in vain. Some seem to climb the economic ladder; others do not. To a degree, that is the most frustrating part of the elusive American Dream: that opportunity does not always turn into achievement.


Their own perspective on our country and its promise remains as insightful as Muccino believed it to be. Panther and Daniel are discouraged to learn that Americans "aren't friendly." In Africa you could simply walk up to a stranger or enter someone's house unannounced and strike up a conversation. That simply doesn't exist here, and for all the possibilities life in the U.S. affords the lost boys, it also comes at a price. In Kakuma, the refugees sat under, around, and in a massive tree while holding parliament meetings and entertaining each other with stories and song. In a quiet moment during "God Grew Tired of Us," John sits beneath a tree in Syracuse. But this time, he sits alone.


Opens in limited release January 12th (official site).



Tears of the Black Tiger


Emigrating from another part of the world is the Thai genre pastiche "Tears of the Black Tiger," a cowboy-gangster-romance that premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, then sat on a shelf for half a decade before Magnolia Pictures rescued from Miramax's bottomless vault. This print, the press release notes, is the original, uncut version.


It's easy to see why Miramax acquired the film: the movie is heavily on cartoonish, ironic action of the sort that would no doubt delight Quentin Tarantino fans. And it's also easy to see why they shelved it: "Tears of the Black Tiger" is one giant (and, at times, difficult to swallow) homage to a film culture no one has ever seen. Magnolia's press notes say the film is inspired by the work of filmmaker, Rattana Pestonji (1908-1970), "the original Thai independent film-maker. Unknown outside Thailand, he is now largely forgotten at home, where there is no tradition of repertory or archival screenings of vintage films." Expecting an audience prereq in a national cinema virtually impossible to see even in its country of origin is not exactly a marketing slam dunk. Most of the country didn't like Soderbergh's 1940s Warner Brothers pastiche "The Good German." Imagine what the reaction would have been if they had never seen the movies he was referencing.


Thai film aficionados will bring a lot more to the table than run-of-the-mill moviegoers, or even nerdier-than-the-run-of-the-mill cinephiles. I'd place myself in the latter category and call myself fairly unqualified to render a proper verdict: I enjoyed "Tears"'s campier elements but felt my patience strain under what felt like an endless supply of ooey-gooey romantic flashbacks which are no doubt a great deal more insightful when you fully understand the culture they contain insight about. It's like trying to read a book in a foreign language you don't speak.


Opens in limited release January 12th (official site).



Alpha Dog


Nick Cassavetes' follow-up to and departure from "The Notebook" premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, which is where I saw it. In the intervening year, I've seen some three hundred other movies, so memories of the film are fuzzy at best: my most vivid recollection of it is a wild scene where Sharon Stone has a complete emotional breakdown while wearing a fat suit. If memory serves, it's even better than it sounds.


The story is barely fictionalized version of a true crime, and the barely is important: the real criminal in the case Cassavetes recreates sued the distributor, Universal, to prevent its release until after his upcoming trial, arguing that seeing "Alpha Dog" (which paints Jesse James Hollywood, a.k.a. Emile Hirsch's Johnny Truelove, in an unflattering light) could taint potential jurors. The case was eventually dismissed, clearing the way for this week's release.


If Cassavetes hasn't edited the film since I saw it, moviegoers who follow any "From the director of 'The Notebook'" advertising will be caught off guard, not only by the dark subject matter but the complex structure, which incorporates flashes both back and forward and a quasidocumentary style that includes time-stamped scenes and interviews with the cast members in character (that's where the befat-suited Stone scene fits in). When I saw it, tone was an issue, but there was at least one additional surprise: the impressive performance from Justin Timberlake as one of Truelove's dim-witted accomplices. The guys brings sexy back and he can act. Amazing.



Opens in wide release January 12th (official site).

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<![CDATA[What's Up In January]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/whats-up-in-january.php Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Sacco and Vanzetti," Willow Pond Films, screening as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival]


Recent Acquisitions: Universal Pictures

Jan 1—31

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City presents this contemporary retrospective of films produced by Universal Pictures. Some highlights include the Hugh Grant comedy "About a Boy," the Matt Damon thriller "The Bourne Identity" and Steven Soderbergh's "Out of Sight"


Overlooked and Unverrated

Jan 4—Feb 8

The Egyptian Theater in Santa Monica, California presents this retrospective on the films of the past that either failed at the box office or received negative critical reception during their initial release. From classical Hollywood to foreign films, film noirs to westerns, nearly all of the titles in this series are not yet available on DVD. This is a rare chance to see some classic Michael Powell films, so be sure to check out this month-long series.


An Artist and a Gambler: Robert Altman Remembered

Jan 5—23

In honor of the late, great director, this month-long retrospective at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village showcases Altman's work, from his Oscar-nominated films "Nashville" and "Gosford Park" to underrated gems "Thieves Like Us" and "California Split."


8th Annual New York Film Critics Series: Great Documentaries

Jan 6—Feb 11

This yearly series presents a select group of films presented by the New York Film Critics Circle. This year's selections include great documentaries from the past 70 years, including Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb," Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" and the influential Dziga Vertov silent "The Man with a Movie Camera."


2007 New York Jewish Film Festival

Jan 10—25

This annual film festival enters its 16th year as it showcases films about the worldwide Jewish experience. Takes place at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City.


Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World in Person

Jan 12

Director Mary Lance will be on hand for a question and answer session following a screening of this documentary about the reclusive female artist Agnes Martin, filmed alone in her New Mexico studio as she reminisces about the New York City art scene of the 1950s.


Helen Mirren in Person

Jan 12—13

British actress Helen Mirren made history this past year with three separate Golden Globe nominations and stands as the forerunner for the Best Actress Oscar for her work in "The Queen." Mirren will be available for both days at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and will take part in discussions following screenings of some of her earliest works, including Michael Powell's "Age of Consent," Pat O'Connor's "Cal" and the Terry George film "Some Mother's Son."


2007 Golden Globe Awards

Jan 15

The Diet Pepsi of award shows hits the Beverly Hills Hilton this year, honoring the year's best in film and television. Warren Beatty receives this year's Cecil B. DeMille Award for all of his pre-"Town & Country" work. The Golden Globes will be broadcast live on NBC.


Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

Jan 17—22

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston presents this film festival that screens socially-conscious documentaries; highlights for this year include Peter Miller's "Sacco and Vanzetti," about the infamous Red Scare case of the 1920s and Gaston Biraben's "Captive," about the 1976 military coup in Argentina.


Slamdance Film Festival

Jan 18—27

The festival that is commonly referred to as "by filmmakers for filmmakers" begins alongside the ever-popular-but-declining-in-credibility Sundance Film Festival. This year's festival made headlines following the removal of the video game "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" from the program, the first game or film ever to be removed from the festival.


Sundance Film Festival

Jan 18—27

The most influential American independent film festival is back at Park City, UT. This year's festival includes new films from favorites David Gordon Green, Justin Lin and Hal Hartley, and will also feature new directorial features from actors such as Steve Buscemi, Sarah Polley and Justin Theroux. We're hoping this year's festival will return to a focus on the films instead of the celebrity culture its recently been known for because...well...we really don't want to see Paris Hilton there again.


In a Lonely Place: Akira Kurosawa Retrospective

Jan 18—31

The American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica presents this retrospective on one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, the legendary Akira Kurosawa. Highlights for this series include "Stray Dog," "Rashomon," "Throne of Blood," "Yojimbo"....we really can't lie. They're all masterpieces.


Barbara Stanwyck: A Centennial Salute

Jan 26—Feb 27

Let's face it, Barbara Stanwyck still remains as one of the most iconic figures of the film noir genre, immortalized through her role as Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity". Throughout her career, Stanwyck would continue to challenge the studio system in non-traditional female roles, later earning her four Best Actress nominations and an Honorary Oscar for her screen work. Be sure to catch some of her best films at the Silver Theatre and Cultural Center at the American Film Institute in Hollywood for this monthlong retrospective.


2007 Screen Actors Guild Awards

Jan 28

The countdown to the Oscars continues as the Screen Actors Guild awards the greatest film and television performances of 2006. The SAG awards will air live on TNT.

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<![CDATA[The Worst Films of the Year]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/the-worst-films-of-the-year.php Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Never ones to turn away from a so-bad-it's-good film, we find themselves mourning the lack of truly dismal releases as we pick the films that most disappointed them in 2006.

Download: MP3, 20:30 minutes, 18.8 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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25368 2007-01-08 00:00:00 closed closed the_worst_films_of_the_year publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10025368 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Worst Films of the Year (photo)]]> Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 10025368 2007-01-08 00:00:00 closed closed the_worst_films_of_the_year_photo inherit 25368 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: January 11th, 2007]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/opening-this-week-january-11th.php Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News



[Photo: "Tears of the Black Tiger," Magnolia Pictures, 2007]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this weekend.


"Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story"

Courtesy of executive producer and director of "The Piano" Jane Campion comes this documentary, co-directed by Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim, about a Japanese couple's search for their daughter 30 years after her abduction by North Korean spies.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Alpha Dog"

Justin Timberlake's first foray into acting premiered at Sundance back in 2006. A whole year later, "Alpha Dog" finally gets released in the dumping grounds of early January. Controversy surrounded the battle between director Nick Cassavettes and studio heads over the tone of the film, and the film's real life inspiration Jesse James Hollywood attempted to stop the release with claims it would interfere with his trial, but recent advertisements of the "SexyBack" star seem to suggest that the suits won.

Opens wide (official site).


"Ever Since the World Ended"

If Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men" is too Hollywood for you, head to the Pioneer Theater in New York City for this low-budget post-apocalyptic "social science fiction" film that documents what would happen if a plague wiped out the inhabitants of Earth, sans Clive Owen and Julianne Moore.

Opens in New York (official site).


"God Grew Tired of Us"

National Geographic is distributing this documentary, which tells the story of three Sudanese boys who travel to America after years of wandering around Sub-Saharan Africa in search of safety, courtesy of director Christopher Dillon Quinn.

Opens in limited release (official site)


"Guru"

The latest from Indian director Mani Ratnam tells the story of the rise of the wealthy textile merchant Dhirubhai Ambani, who moved from a small village to the city of Bombay in this quite literal rags-to-riches story about making textile dreams come true. Hey, we don't poke fun of your aspirations.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Primeval"

It may only be the second week of 2007, but we're already sick of studio horror films. TV director Michael Katleman makes his feature debut with this gorey schlock about a news team that gets attacked by a South African warlord while searching for a 25-foot crocodile. Though the prospect of watching Orlando Jones get attacked by a giant reptile certainly entices us, we stopped caring a long time ago.

Opens wide (official site).


"Stomp the Yard"

This film does feature Meagan Good, who delighted us in the past year in the high school indie noir "Brick" and the Tyrese mediocrefest "Waist Deep." Other than that, think "Drumline" but with step-dancing.

Opens wide (official site).


"Tears of the Black Tiger"

This neo-Spaghetti Thai Western, courtesy of director Wisit Sasanatieng, is getting a statewide release nearly seven years after it completed production. The story may be as familiar as a Sergio Leone flick, but the film's bombastic style and flamboyant visuals already leave us excited. Looks like it's time to Netflix some old Lee Von Cleef films this weekend…

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Verdict on Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1964"

This film documents the first Auschwitz trial, which remains one of Germany's most important legal cases of the 20th century as 22 Nazi conspirators were convicted of mass murder charges during World War II. The filmmakers use excerpts from over 430 hours of original audiotapes of the trial, including material in which some of the survivors of the concentration camps confront their perpetrators for the first time since the end of the war.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[On DVD: "Street Fight," "The Weeping Meadow"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2007/01/on-dvd-street-fight-the-weepin.php Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Street Fight," Red Envelope/Netflix, 2007]


We Americans have difficulty regarding elective politics as much more than a wrestling match between loudmouths, the citizenry's needs, rights and welfare be damned — a situation that, if you cornered me on my darker days, I would suggest is a deliberately contrived state of affairs, and has been at least since Woodrow Wilson created the ingenuously labeled Office for Public Information in 1917. Marshall Curry's unpretentious and absorbing video doc "Street Fight" doesn't diagnose the disease so much as record its outrageous symptoms, documenting the 2002 mayoral race in Newark, a city terminally plagued with poverty, unemployment and racial tension. It has enough cultural crosscurrents to fill out a novel: the challenger Cory Booker is a young, studly, articulate, Yale-educated lawyer hollering for change; longtime incumbent Sharpe James, who in die-hard Republican fashion (both candidates are officially Democrats) has created his mini-empire by bleeding the poor for the profit of developers and business, bluntly maintains that he's "the real deal."


Neither talk about policy; both are African-American, a fact that comes into question in James's version of Huey Long-style skullduggery. In fact, as his title suggests, Curry lucked into an old-school ratpit of electoral crookery and violence. James is apparently a compulsive liar, at various times asserting that Booker is white, Republican, gay, Jewish and a KKK benefactor. Curry's camera is routinely assaulted by Newark police (who are caught on video performing other crimes), and the film's reigning visual motif is a huge close-up of a lens-gripping palm. "I'm in over my head," Curry narrates at one point after a cop breaks his camera "in broad daylight, in front of reporters," warranting no reaction. The passing of a few years, an Oscar nomination last year and the outcome of 2006's election (Booker won, finally) may all seem to take the edge off Curry's film as a piece of reportage, but if you worry less about Newark and more about American politics in general, it's a sobering experience.


And there's politics by way of breathtaking mise-en-scene wizard Theo Angelopoulos, who's been exploring the vast, bloody arena of Greek and Balkan social upheaval for more than 35 years, in a filmmaking style that takes Tarkovsky-Tarr traveling-shot poetry and ups the ante into the stratosphere. Maybe it's a cultural thing: American movies favor control-crazy brevity, but for cineastes in Eastern Europe, where memory of the past weighs on life like cloud cover, the syntax of the long, spatially expressive tracking sequence is the way movie time should be constructed. For Russian long-take pioneer Mikhail Kalatozov, the whole world captured in a single motion meant our righteous empathies had nowhere else to look; for Hungarian master Miklos Jancso, breadth and length were ways to understand the canvas of war. Andrei Tarkovsky's moody set-ups were metaphysical questions, growing less answerable the longer they became. For Angelopoulos, whose most recent film "The Weeping Meadow" is the first film in a projected trilogy, his stock-in-trade mega-shot is a translation of history into visual experience. Time grows gargantuan, landscapes change, masses of people engage in epochal social phenomena. It's not a strategy dilettantes should entertain; Angelopoulos, one of Europe's most demanding film artists, stands as the master of monumentalism.


The movie shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with Angelopoulos's "The Travelling Players," "Landscape in the Mist" and "Ulysses' Gaze," but it's a lighter film than usual, more musical and folktale-ish, more indulgent of old-school melodrama. The story is never fed to us pre-chewed, but instead occurs continuously on- and off-camera, passing before us like the steam engines that incessantly interrupt scenes and divide characters. It's 1919, and a crowd of émigré Greeks return from Odessa after the Bolshevik Revolution; among them, a family with one son brings with it a young orphan girl, Eleni. Years pass in an unceremonious cut; a near-comatose teenage Eleni is brought home after having given up illegitimate twins. Another cut and the young woman is fleeing her own wedding — married not to the grown son, who loves her and helps her escape, but her aging stepfather.


Literally trailing after these scrambling souls as they follow each other into the crossfire of the mid-century — world war, the revolution, the fascist junta, civil war — Angelopoulos's massive real-time moviemaking keeps the mad tragic-Greek drama at a dreamy distance. Often, the director seems capable of coordinating entire landscapes, and weather, too — how did he manage to flood an entire plain, scores of square miles we'd already seen dry and supporting houses, for a single scene? (Sleight-of-hand F/X are not in Angelopoulos's tool kit.) No less astonishing is an uncut, nine-minute sequence that begins with an impromptu beer-hall dance and climaxes with a death. The construction of emotional moments via editing and montage doesn't interest this man — instead, he'll do what it takes to move a mountain and make a vision or drama happen for real.



"Street Fight" will be available on DVD January 9th (Red Envelope/Netflix); "The Weeping Meadow" is now available on DVD (New Yorker).

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<![CDATA[2006's 15 Best DVDs to Never See an American Projector Beam]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006s-15-best-dvds-to-never-se.php Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Eric Rohmer's "Triple Agent," Koch Lorber]


There's no shortage of speculation and analysis among maddened cinephiles about what is wrong with the American film distribution industry and why it is that way, but what's certain is that every year scores of films that might have, and should have, gotten honest projector time instead get their first "release" in the U.S. on DVD. Once that happens, they just vanish in the fog — presently, a legal DVD disc cannot qualify for inclusion in critics' polls and award systems, despite the fact that often the receipts are higher than those a "specialty" theatrical run would garner, and the rentable/buyable indie or import in question is far more accessible and is seen by more people. How could the new Eric Rohmer film not be awardable, simply because distributors have lost their nerve and/or their ability to market to an increasingly dumbed-down populace? Born to kvetch, I offer up my favorite dozen-plus-three straight-to-disc U.S. debuts this year, the likes of which would fill up my year's top ten list if we were playing fair.



"The Power of Kangwon Province" (Tai Seng Video)
The second film from despairing Korean New Wave structuralist Hong Sang-soo, this 1998 ballade is surely the movement's most critic-revered work, a sly diptych with a wounded heart. Shot with Hong's symptomatic rigor, the film unfurls like a haunting memory, replaying itself but always failing to find an elusive truth. In the end, Hong's clinical interrogation of modern love and its discontents holds at the center, more heartbreaking in its way than any tale of passion crippled by fate or society.


"Triple Agent" (Koch Lorber)

In his 87th year, Eric Rohmer is finally sent straight to video — but this historical drama, which revisits the Miller-Skoblin affair, a mid-30s Euro-tangle of reckless espionage and collateral damage that had White Russian émigrés in Paris double-dealing the Nazis, the Soviets, French Reds and each other, is a gabby, lucid head trip, sometimes as boldly theatrical as a 1950s teleplay, sometimes volleying between visual homages to Rockwell and Vermeer.


"The Wildcat" (Kino)

In his Berlin days, Ernst Lubitsch was honing his comic rapiers with silent torpedoes like this 1921 farce, a masterful ditty set in a militaristically absurd frontier fort beset by a girl-magnet playboy lieutenant (the impossibly deft Victor Janson) and a marauding band of bandits led by a wild-haired Pola Negri.


"The Desert of the Tartars" (No Shame)

A fascinating whatsit never released here, Valerio Zurlini's 1976 adaptation of the revered 1938 Dino Buzzati novel of the same name is a massive post-Lean epic — a colonialist drama, shot in widescreen on location in Iran with an international cast including Jean-Louis Trintignant, Max Von Sydow, Fernando Rey and Philippe Noiret — that's actually about the absence of event and consequence. It may be the grandest and most lavish existentialist parable ever made — it was shot in the Bam Citadel, which has since been leveled by the 2003 earthquake.


"A Trick of the Light" (Anchor Bay)

Between episodes of American jukebox sentimentality, Wim Wenders returned to Germany in 1995 to film this utterly lovely and wise meta-semi-silent-docudrama about the brothers Skladanowsky, German inventors who ran neck and neck with Edison and the Lumières in the race to invent the movies. It stars, as herself, the younger's 91-year-old daughter Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky, and her cache of memorabilia.


"The Secret Glory" (Subversive)

A fascinating, self-aggrandizing mythmaker and gadfly, South African-born Richard Stanley is famous for his boggled fiction film projects, but this is his best feature, a dizzying archival montage (freely using classic film footage) detailing the extraordinary rise and fall of SS officer Otto Rahn, the troubled Nazi in charge of searching for the Holy Grail. The film's included on the extra discs for Stanley's "Dust Devil" (1993).


"Fuse" (First Run)

Good old-fashioned anarchy, this 2003 Bosnian farce — the first feature by director Pjer Zalica — plops us down into a corrupt, rancor-poisoned village on the Serbian border just two years after the civil war, as it scrambles to create the illusion of law-abiding togetherness and democracy on the eve of a visit from President Clinton: smugglers, white slavery, land mines, martyr ghosts, relentless renditions of "House of the Rising Sun," guns everywhere.


"Phantom" (Flicker Alley)

An archival film-geek event, this long-neglected 1922 detour in German master F.W. Murnau's tragically brief career (it was one of three movies he made between 1922's "Nosferatu" and 1924's "The Last Laugh") is a reverent morality play and an object lesson in Murnau's subtle reinvention of visual expression.


"Damnation" (Facets)

This 1988 film by Hungarian dyspeptic Béla Tarr, one of the planet's great cinematic formalists, was the artist's long-take turning point, and first discovery of a classic cinemanic space: apocalyptically run-down, dead-or-dying villages on vast Mitteleuropan plains of mud, poverty, crushed will, delusionary behavior and charcoal skies, all observed by a point of view that stalks silently and patiently through the ruins like a ghost. It's a serotonin-depleted ordeal — catnip to Tarrians — with some of the most magnificent black-and-white images shot anywhere in the world.


"Zigeurenwiesen" (Kino)

However much it may have seemed so to us, genre berserker Seijun Suzuki didn't just kill time between his famous Nikkatsu Studio firing in 1966 and his comeback with "Pistol Opera" decades later. His most defiant resurgence came in 1980 with "Zigeurnerweisen," the first chapter in a loosely-knit trilogy all set during the affluent, decadent 1920s, and all intensely, drowsily tripped out on reflexive slippage, narrative Dada and gender-combat ambiguity.


"Johan van der Keuken: The Complete Collection Vol. 1" (Facets)

The late, great Dutch documentarian/freeform personal filmmaker is virtually cineaste non grata on these shores, but now he's DVD'd in this three-disc set, which five features and four shorts, all of them eloquent and moving expression of JVDK's aesthetic, which is fastidious only in its refusal to prioritize moviemaking over the spontaneous textures of ordinary existence.


"Farewell, Home Sweet Home" (Kino)

Otar Iosseliani, the Paris-stationed, Georgian-expat master of human ceremonies, has been building one of the world's most sublime filmographies largely out of American purview. Call him the heir to Renoir and Tati and a contemporary of Tarkovsky's, with a vision of contemporary life that is scathing and yet warm and wry. This hypnotic 1999 farce about French class envy observes its characters' folly and fate (and the masterful performance by a giant Marabou stork) like a patient boulevardier on his second glass of Pernod.


"The Seventh Continent" (Kino)

Austrian director Michael Haneke has had quite an autumn-years run lately, so finally we get access to his first feature, "The Seventh Continent" (1989), a droll, methodical, deeply discomfiting portrait of inexplicable nuclear-family auto-destruction. Based in some detail upon a real incident, and never exploitative.


"Culloden" (New Yorker)

The overdue DVDing of Peter Watkins's long-marginalized, cry-in-the-wilderness corpus continues with this long-unseen debut feature, made for the BBC in 1964 and structured in Watkins's trademarked mock-doc mode, with appalled cameramen witnessing the English suppression of Jacobite highlanders in 1746 (a parallel to the escalating "peace actions" then under way in Vietnam is clear as glass). On the same disc with Watkins' first brush with notoriety, 1966's "The War Game."


"Videograms of a Revolution" (Facets)

Czech-German doc pope Harun Farocki, working with Andrei Ujica, assembles video footage shot by scores of sources during the week of riots that culminated in the Ceausescu overthrow of 1989, and what results is not only an hour-by-hour history of the revolution but also an exploration of how it was conceived and seen as a televised event.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 30th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/opening-this-week-december-30t.php Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "The Tiger and the Snow," Strand Releasing, 2006]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Arthur and the Invisibles"

So Luc Besson, director of "The Professional" and the cult fav "The Fifth Element," plans on retiring from directing following his latest film, which is a... children's animated feature? It features a mixture of CGI animation and live action as Arthur (Freddy Highmore) goes in search of his grandfather in a mystical land to save his house from eeeeeeeeevil real estate developers. The highlight? David Bowie as the voice of the antagonist Maltazard. Nice.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Black Christmas"

For those who don't want to see a Christmas or potential Oscar film this week, check out this unnecessary remake of the classic 1974 cult film "Black Christmas." The gore factor's been upgraded since the original, but early reviews call the film lazy and uninspired. Courtesy of "Willard" director Glen Morgan.

Opens wide (official site).


"Children of Men"

Alfonso Cuarón's latest might go down as one of the best films of the year, but its bleak tone and near absence of ad campaign might turn the film into a box office failure. So see it. Please.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Dead Girl"

Actor/director Karen Moncrieff follows up her 2002 Sundance success "Blue Car" with an effort that's netted a few Spirit Award nominations. The talented cast includes Toni Collette, Marcia Gay Harden and Mary Beth Hurt. The film describes how a young woman's murder affects the lives of inhabitants of a small town; think "Twin Peaks" meets Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only Kevin Bacon's dead and being played by Brittany Murphy.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Factory Girl"

Sienna Miller, tabloid star and on-off girlfriend of Jude Law, has become a major name despite having yet to have acted in a film anyone can remember. In a fabulous twist of casting, she managed to land the starring role in this biopic of counter-culture icon Edie Sedgwick, also famous for nothing in particular. The film may have both Lou Reed and Bob Dylan pissed off, but Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol? We're there.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Fast Track"

One would think that a film starring TV comedy veterans Zach Braff and a wheelchair-bound Jason Bateman vying for the affections of a woman would have the possibility of being funny. Unfortunately, the film seems to be embarrassing to just about everyone involved. It makes a one-week limited run in major cities before being released wide in the middle of January, exactly where it belongs.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Miss Potter"

The last time Renee Zellweger went British on us, we were treated to that awful "Bridget Jones" sequel. The 'wegs goes family (and awards) friendly in this romantic story about Beatrix Potter, the author of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit," and her quest for love, happiness and success in early 20th century England. Ewan McGregor and Emily Watson provide supporting duties, and it's good to see Chris Noonan of "Babe" back directing.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Notes on a Scandal"

Dame Judi Dench reunites with her "Iris" director Richard Eyre in a film that's got Oscar written all over it. Cate Blanchett plays an art teacher who enters into an affair with one of her students, causing upheaval in both her personal and professional lives. Mmmmm...melodrama...

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Pan's Labyrinth"

Guillermo del Toro's latest is being proclaimed as his best work yet as a young girl falls into her own imagination to escape the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. The film has been hailed by critics and fans alike as one of the year's most imaginative and already has been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer"

A tortured genius in 18th century France feels that in order to make the ultimate perfume, he needs to sacrifice many a young virgin. "Run Lola Run" director Tom Tykwer performs the unimaginable, as he somehow brings the world of smell to the big screen. We expect a lot of close-ups of noses...

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Tiger and the Snow"

After delighting a few and annoying many more at the Oscars after winning Best Foreign Language Film, Roberto Benigni seriously creeped us out with his adult version of "Pinocchio." Now he tackles the latest conflict in Iraq through the prism of a sweet romance about a guy trying to woo his ex-girlfriend, who just so happens to be unconscious and in a coma. Somewhere, Pedro Almodóvar is weeping.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Unconscious"

Speaking of — frequent Almodóvar collaborator Leonor Watling and Goya Award-winner Luis Tosar star in Joaquín Oristrell's period comedy about the sexual revolution in early 20th century Barcelona. Check out the witty trailer.

Opens in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[Karen Moncrieff on "The Dead Girl"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/karen-moncrieff-on-the-dead-gi.php Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: "The Dead Girl," First Look Pictures Releasing, 2006]


Those of you still hungover from all that Jennifer Hudson buzz on Christmas might be too bleary-eyed to notice this week's real dreamgirls: Mary Beth Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Toni Collette, Kerry Washington, Rose Byrne, Piper Laurie and Brittany Murphy (stop snickering) all help breathe life into writer-director Karen Moncrieff's "The Dead Girl." In her follow-up to 2002's justly praised debut "Blue Car," Moncrieff's pitch-black ensemble drama about loss and isolation centers around the murder of a prostitute (Murphy). Structured into five vignettes, each part sketches a portrait of a troubled soul with some connection to the eponymous victim, including her mother (Harden) and the stranger who finds her body (Collette). As poignant a kick in the chest as any film about women discovering they're each a little dead inside should be, "The Dead Girl" was recently nominated for three Spirit Awards — including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Mary Beth Hurt), and Best Director — which only proves it's the most wonderful time of the year... to have a short chat with Moncrieff.


Congrats on all the Spirit Award nominations. Was there any sort of marketing push, or was this is a complete surprise?


There was a push insofar as getting screeners to the committee who makes the decisions, but that's as far as it goes. Honestly, I hoped that we would get a Best Supporting Actress nomination, so I wasn't surprised that they recognized Mary Beth Hurt. Of course, I wanted them to recognize more of our ladies, too, but I had no expectations that we would get a Best Picture or Best Director nod at all. That was a wonderful surprise. First Look is a small-ish company and can't compete with these huge studios that have tons of money to pour into campaigns. We're just not in that world. "The Dead Girl" is a four-million dollar, fiercely independent movie, and I feel they're doing a really great job with it so far.


You're up against "Little Miss Sunshine" for Best Picture, a film that probably has the backing for a potential Oscar campaign. Does "independent film" still mean what it should nowadays, or has it become a studio term for niche product?


I'm sure other people have definitions. For me, I see myself as an independent director because I'm not just examining the lives of supermodels, super-lawyers and athletes. I want to tell stories that are perhaps a little off of the beaten path, with people who maybe exist on the fringes of society, and I'm interested in examining their lives more deeply than a run-of-the-mill Hollywood film might. This movie consists of portraits of six women, most of whom by Hollywood standards aren't camera-ready, their lives aren't perfect enough, they don't wear enough make-up, or they're "not beautiful enough." They're not all searching for love, I don't know. [laughs] I expect independent films to illuminate a part of humanity that is often left out. I try to write from some personal place inside me; not autobiographical, but personal in terms of what's troubling or interesting me. That's usually where I get the stuff that's ripest for my exploration.


Do you typically find yourself taking from experience and figuring out themes later, or do you begin with personal ideas you'd like to explore and work outward?


The former. I really couldn't have imagined that I'd be writing a story that had serial killing and a drug-addict prostitute at its center. You might think that's the stuff of generic films, but I had this unique experience of being a juror on a murder trial. When it was over, I felt like I knew this young woman who was the victim. Over time, each of the witnesses had offered up a different little detail about who she was. I pieced together a portrait of her, and her life really sprang into bold relief for me. After we convicted the guy, I was still left with this weight that I couldn't shake, and the way I deal is to write about it. So I started taking notes, thinking about all these other people who were there, how none of us had known one another before we were pulled into this courtroom, and how murder creates this kind of community. In structuring the movie, I tried to do that. Each of the five sections is a portrait of a different woman, their lives each profoundly changed by the murder, and each offers a bit of the puzzle. By the end, the audience has to work to create this idea of who she once was.


There's obviously a connective thread, but it's almost like you're directing five standalone shorts in an omnibus. Were you ever concerned that some of these segments might not work as well as others?


Yeah, I still worry. [laughs] No, honestly, I fulfilled my intentions, but I know it requires a lot of flexibility from the viewer because you become invested in each of these characters. Each vignette is such an intimate view of a life that when I then say, "Okay, you're done looking at this person, now look over here," it can be jarring and upsetting to an audience member: "No, I want to stay with Toni Collette and Giovanni Ribisi and see how that works out. I don't want to move onto someone else!" I understand that it's a challenging format, but I hope by the end, it will be satisfying and open enough that you're left with some questions about what the connections and themes are. Ultimately, that's what I love in movies.


How do you approach dark subject matter so that it's not misconstrued as sensationalism?


I try to be careful about the images that I provide so that people are paying attention to the right things. For instance, if I lingered on a certain view of the dead body... I'm not interested in adding more images of women being beaten, sexually molested, abused or killed. Even though this is the arena in which these stories take place, I wasn't trying to be coy in terms of skirting the issue. This woman is killed brutally and it's bloody and nasty. I wouldn't feel any need to show that for purely pornographic interests. At the end of the day, I always trust my own barometer to know when something is too much because I'm a woman and very sensitive to this. If I'm watching a film and a woman is being raped so that her boyfriend can go off on a killing spree and get vengeance, I'm very aware of how sexual assault is used as a plot point. I try not to be gratuitous and use only those things needed to tell my story.


As a former actress, why do you think there's still a shortage of great women's roles today?


I think it's because there's still this assumption that men won't go to see women's stories, but women will go see men's stories. That, and the fact there aren't that many female writers and directors compared to how many men are out there telling their stories. Women are definitely an underserved audience. They want to see stories about themselves, portrayed in all the complexity that is inherent in women's lives. Kieslowski, he used to tell some beautiful women's stories. But he's dead now, so... [shrugs]



"The Dead Girl" opens in New York and L.A. on December 29th (official site).

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<![CDATA[2006: The Year in Blurbs]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006-the-year-in-blurbs.php Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michelle Orange, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "The Departed," Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006]


As the year-end wrap-ups and round-ups roll in, they all seem to groaningly agree that it's been a pretty mediocre year at the movies. Not that there weren't plenty of notable losses, highlights, events, performances and screenings — here, we look back at some of the personal bright spots and other memorable moments of the year in film we don't want overlooked.


The Alamo Drafthouse

For those of you who've heard about it but haven't been, I'm here to tell you: you haven't seen a movie until you've seen it Alamo Drafthouse-style. A small but growing Texas chain, the Alamo — which also created the ingenious Rolling Roadshow, where classic movies are shown in the locations that inspired them — shows movies the way God intended, assuming God is a very lazy film nerd who likes to eat and drink while watching his movies. The Alamo's presentation involves the most important innovation to moviegoing technology since the stadium seat: food and drink served to you via waiter throughout your movie. No having to miss parts of the movie to hit the concession stand and, more importantly, lots and lots of booze. Once you've seen "Talladega Nights" at the Alamo you'll never want to see it any other way. I'm waiting for a New York branch with bated breath. —Matt Singer


Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg in "The Departed"

Stealth move of the year: while Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon fretted and fumed and furrowed their smooth movie-star brows as a cop-turned-mob mole and a mob mole-turned-cop in Martin Scorsese's long-awaited return to the crime epic, two former leading men-turned-scene stealers walked off with their movie. Alec Baldwin, who's been so much fun to watch since he's been freed from Hollywood jawline roles, plays Captain Ellerby, the head of the Special Investigation Unit and the only character who seems to have not been informed that the weight of the world is resting on his shoulders — thrilled to have cell phone surveillance ability in their first big attempt to nab Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello, he seizes shoulders in glee: "Patriot Act, Patriot Act! I love it, I love it, I love it!" And I would happily watch a movie that simply followed around Mark Wahlberg's Sergeant Dignam, the foulest-mouthed Statie in New England with, deservedly, all the best lines. The two have one hilarious back-and-forth in front of Ellerby's squad ("Go fuck yourself." "I'm tired from fucking your wife."), while everyone watches and wonders why they aren't getting to have such a good time. —Alison Willmore


"United 93" opens the Tribeca Film Festival

When it was announced in March that "United 93" was not only going to have its World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival but have a place of honor as the opening film, a queasy debate, fueled by emotion and anxiety, was sparked. That a film could provoke such a reaction is the hope of any festival programmer, but in the case of Paul Greengrass's attempt at a faithful recreation of the hijacking of United flight 93 on September 11, 2001, the circumstances were without precedent, and the heated anticipation was extremely conflicted. Tribeca, which celebrated its fifth anniversary this year, was created in the wake of 9/11 in an attempt to revitalize the devastated lower Manhattan neighborhood; almost all of the screenings take place within blocks of where the buildings fell, and as the opening drew closer, festival-goers had to ask themselves whether they were ready for the experience. The fear, of course, was that the movie would be badly handled, but even the best-case scenario was a wrenching one. Filled with trepidation, many attendees to the April 25th opening set up meeting places with their companions in advance, in the seemingly likely event that one of them would leave what is now being hailed as one of the best movies of the year before it ended. —Michelle Orange


Betty Comden, 1915-2006

On November 23 of this year, Betty Comden passed away. Along with her artistic partner Adolph Green (who died in 2002), she wrote "The Barkleys of Broadway" (1949), "On the Town" (1949), "Singin' In the Rain" (1952), "The Band Wagon" (1953), "It's Always Fair Weather" (1955) and "Bells Are Ringing" (1960). Read those titles again and try not to crack a smile at any number of Technicolor memories. Have any screenwriters/lyricists ever had a run like this? Comden-Green wrote "Moses Supposes" from "Singin' In the Rain" and the similarly cadenced "Saturation-Wise" for "It's Always Fair Weather," both tunes building up a rhythm by repeating the conversational patter of gasbag experts, a speech therapist in the former, an ad executive in the latter. They turned callow business-speak into joyous, destructive art. She and Adolph had the luck to be paired with Vincente Minnelli on many of their scripts, as his sharp and colorful compositions were a perfect fit for Comden-Green's cutting wit. The duo had a much longer and successful career as lyricists on Broadway, winning five Tony awards, but my memories of her will be forever tied to Astaire and Kelly getting' their shoes shined and acting the clown. —R. Emmet Sweeney


Mexico rules

There they were at the Gotham Awards, arms around each other on the red carpet. There they were on Charlie Rose, discussing which of them is the best looking. Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu are the casual filmmaking kings of the year, each arriving with a film that effortlessly combines genre sensibility with arthouse intelligence. Cuarón's "Children of Men" is a bleak and brilliant vision of a dystopic future; del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" weaves fantastical imagery with historical horrors; "Babel" spans the globe to paint its portrait of a humanity both splintered and united. Over a decade ago, when the 29-year-old del Toro's debut "Cronos" opened in scattered US theaters, the director told the Washington Post that there was no "New Mexican Cinema." One wonders if he'd say the same thing now. Cuarón, del Toro and González would doubtless rather present themselves as three good friends than as the forerunners of a national New Wave, but this is also a year in which Carlos Reygadas' controversial "Battle in Heaven" astonished and/or infuriated the few who saw it, and Fernando Eimbcke's delightful debut "Duck Season" combined a Jarmuschesque deadpan tone with fresh, and, yes, Mexican sensibilities. —AW


Coming round to HD

I've always been a hard-liner against digital video, bitterly muttering about the muddy ugliness of DV efforts like "Dancer in the Dark" and "Timecode." Film was still the future of the art, for could video ever produce the colors of "The Band Wagon" or "On the Town"? I thought not. But 2006 softened my stance. Dion Beebe's work on "Miami Vice" and Gokhan Tiryaki's on "Climates" is crisp and often stunning. Both utilize the extreme depth of field offered by the new HD cameras, allowing Beebe to frame Colin Farrell's oily locks flopping in a speedboat in the foreground while the dusky night sky appears with astonishing clarity in the background. Tiryaki's work is less showy but just as impressive, as director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's setups are stationary, choreographing action inside the frame: a break-up is revealed by a character leaning backwards, revealing his quizzical lover in sharp focus. The most extraordinary effect is achieved in photographing falling snowflakes, which are weighty, detailed, and tactile — and whose dissolve into the ground brilliantly foreshadows the heartbreaking final fade out. —RES


"Borat"'s Naked Wrestling Scene

From the sacred to the profane we plummet, and indeed it was disbelieving profanity that was muttered under the breath of many a "Borat" viewer when the buck-naked Sasha Baron-Cohen took a faceful of his traveling companion's balls. In one of the film's many, let's say, "echoes" of Cervantes' "Don Quixote," the tall, thin Borat and short, blubbery Azamat get into it after the former finds the latter "borrowing" an image of his Rushmore, his Dulcinea, his Pamela Anderson. Both are naked-not nude-as jaybirds, and the sight of their hairy asses (to start) flailing and floundering through their obscenely ridiculous tussle is a classic "are you in or are you out" moment in a comedy built on its audacity; if you were on the fence, this scene was almost definitely going to traumatize you into a free fall on one side or the other. Most of us, it seems, were in, though the scene itself indicated there was no way to know what we were signing on for: exhilaration is a tricky animal, as many dazed "Borat" viewers found; if there was any doubt, the naked wrestling scene made it clear that, along with clothing, and that last shred of dignity, all bets were off. —MO


"Inland Empire" opens in New York

It may seem like a minor thing (or full-on corporate whoring) but few movie moments this year filled me with as much excitement as the lines down the block outside New York City's IFC Center not one but two weekends in a row for late-night screenings of David Lynch's "Inland Empire." Back in the days of big movie houses and twins, lines for movies were commonplace in New York; in today's multiplex world, not so much. And while that's not necessarily a bad thing in some ways (i.e. the ones that mean you'll get a seat for the movie you want), it gave this cinephile a genuine rush to see people waiting, patiently, in the freezing cold, for the chance to see a three-hour art film that doesn't even make sense to its own lead actress. Take heart nerds: film culture isn't as dead as advertised. Last week, the IFC Center box office posted a sign: see "Inland Empire" nine times, they'll let you in a tenth time for free. To the poor soul who does it: kudos and time to reassess that life plan you wrote out in eighth grade. —MS

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<![CDATA[Awesomely Inappropriate Holiday Fare]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/ifc-news-podcast-9-awesomely-i.php Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Sincerity is for suckers -- at least when it comes to picking holiday flicks. It's been over two decades since someone's pulled off a Christmas movie expressing any remotely genuine warm emotion. But whatever holidays you may or may not celebrate, there's no way around the fact that it's never easier to spend time with your family than when you're all in front of a film. With that in mind, we discuss some of our favorite holiday film picks -- ones that are either blithely against all holiday spirit or just totally inappropriate to the season.

Download: MP3, 20:30 minutes, 18.8 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20653 2006-12-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_9_awesomely_i publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020653 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Awesomely Inappropriate Holiday Fare (photo)]]> Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020653 2006-12-26 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_9_awesomely_i_photo inherit 20653 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Perfume," "Pan's Labyrinth"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/perfume-pans-labyrinth.php Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Oh the horrible things we will do in order to smell good. Tom Tykwer's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" reveals that the natural order of the world is nasty and stinky. Its main character, as the title suggests, is a homicidal perfumer who creates the world's most intoxicating scent by killing beautiful women, covering them in a viscous liquid, cocooning them, then placing them in a weird pickling device that distills them into "their essence." Think about that this holiday season when you're at the fragrance counter.

Based on the bestselling novel by Patrick Süskind and narrated by John Hurt, "Perfume" follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), born into the muck of a Parisian fish market, abandoned by his prostitute mother and saved only by his remarkably talented nose: the overpowering funk of the market causes baby Jean-Baptiste to cry out, alerting a passersby to his presence and implicating his mother in child abandonment (she's the first of many who will die as a result of an association with Jean-Baptiste). After a catalogue of the degradations offered by 18th-century poverty — from the orphanage to indentured servitude to an apprenticeship for a master perfumer (played with zest by a powdery Dustin Hoffman) — Jean-Baptiste sets about on his life's work: discovering a way to preserve scent, which he believes contains a person's soul, even at the expense of killing the owner of that aroma.

Art direction nuts will flip their lids over Tykwer and production designer Uli Hanisch's creation of 1700s France, but their world is so meticulously designed — even the filth looks pretty! — that they inadvertently generate an atmosphere of realism that clashes with "Perfume"'s second half, when Jean-Baptiste sleeps in a cave for months, and later creates an aroma with supernatural effects. The resultant fluctuations in tone might turn off viewers who aren't familiar with Süskind's source material.

Tykwer's camerawork is frequently witty: through the use of clever lighting, Jean-Baptiste is introduced nose-first, and a shot of a door with two keyholes suggests a nostril's eye view of the world. But there seems to be a fundamental flaw in the film version of "Perfume," in its focus on a sensory experience that is wholly absent from cinema: smell. A movie could captivatingly portray a person gifted with exception vision or hearing, but smelling is quite different. Without a "Polyester" Smell-O-Vision-style gimmick, Tykwer must somehow approximate Jean-Baptiste's olfactory prowess, which leads to a lot of close-ups of his nose, flash frames of objects (flowers, fruit, entrails, dung) and a lot of heavy breathing on the soundtrack. The result is not entirely satisfying.

After spending months sleeping in a cave (long story), Jean-Baptiste discovers that though he is acutely aware of every odor around him, he himself has none of his own and, in a way, neither does the movie, not least of all because it is incapable of having one, as all movies are. Where Süskind could call to mind a tang with flowery prose, Tykwer has to rely on visuals to suggest smells, an inherently distanced technique in spite of its often beautiful presentation. It stinks, but that's the way it is.


The world of Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" is just as bleak as "Perfume"'s and even more sumptuously adorned. Its frame is infused with equal parts beauty and death, and sometimes the two blend together in fantastic creatures that are amongst the most terrifying I've ever seen in a movie. The worst, the Pale Man, is an albino beast with droopy skin and eyeballs in his hands. Ick.

A young girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her mother (Ariadna Gil) travel to a new home with her cruel new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), a member of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Ofelia moves between two worlds: the spooky landscape of her imagination (where characters like The Pale Man lurk) and the terrifying reality of the fascists, whose brutal assassinations and tortures suggest that the horrors of the real world far outweigh anything in a child's imagination.

Del Toro has a knack for truly original movie monsters — his "Blade II" provided one of the first innovations on celluloid vampires in decades — and all of the supernatural beings in "Pan's Labyrinth" brim with visual invention. Whatever his budget was (and it couldn't have been much) del Toro's technique seems totally uninhibited by monetary concerns. His effects are as seamless as his imagination is boundless. He takes classic kid fears like the monster under the bed or in the closet and invests them with a palpable sense of reality.

The film, which has the feel of a live-action "Spirited Away," does suffer from some tired story twists; I, for one, have had enough of movies with seemingly responsible child protagonists who are explicitly told not to do something they then immediately do. But "Pan's Labyrinth" graphic creativity outweighs any of its narrative hang-ups. It's as ornate as a child's fantasy and as dark as a nightmare.


"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" opens in limited release December 27th (official site); "Pan's Labyrinth" opens in limited release December 29th (official site).

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<![CDATA["Perfume," "Pan's Labyrinth" (photo)]]> Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 1008367 2006-12-26 00:00:00 closed closed perfume_pans_labyrinth_photo inherit 8367 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[An 80-Year Backstage Pass]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/an-80year-backstage-pass.php Tue, 26 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: "Dreamgirls," DreamWorks, 2006]


The advent of sound in cinema made the movie musical possible, but also created a vexing question: how to have characters burst into song without causing the audience to burst into laughter? What was fine on stage became an unexpected problem on screen — some degree of realism was needed to keep the viewer focused on the plot instead of on the incongruity of an off-screen orchestral swell (audiences quickly tired of revue-style films which, like a vaudeville show, ran act after act with no connective narrative tissue). The simplest answer was to film the lives of Broadway performers, so that stage numbers could be folded in as an organic part of the story. The template for the backstage musical crystallized in "The Broadway Melody of 1929," which told the story of a sister vaudeville act that hits it big and then breaks up because of a love triangle. The film was a massive hit that spawned countless imitations. The backstage musical has gone through plenty of mutations since then, but it's really the only remnant of a once dominant genre to survive the demise of the studio system. The latest iteration is the early Oscar favorite "Dreamgirls," which follows a strikingly similar story arc to the "Broadway Melody" of 77 years earlier.


Instead of a vaudeville act, "Dreamgirls" is focused on a Motown girl group whose rupture also comes about because of a man and his fickle heart (and thirst for power) — the manager played by Jaime Foxx. It's not just the tried and true story formula that "Dreamgirls" has inherited from its forebears, but a whole history of technical and directorial innovation. According to Richard Barrios in his loving history of early musicals "A Song in the Dark," "Broadway Melody" was the first musical to use pre-recorded sound and playback. Producer Irving Thalberg demanded a re-take of the big musical number, "The Wedding of the Painted Doll," the only scene shot in Technicolor (the rest of the film is in black and white). Thalberg, wary of the costs in hiring the orchestra again, decided to re-use the recording of the first shoot and play it back over the re-take. Before this, orchestras played live into microphones right next to the stage. This created far more freedom for the director in terms of camera angles and movement, and saved a hunk on the budget.


By early 1930, theaters were saturated with backstagers, and audiences were tiring of the device. In March 1930, as Barrios notes, a headline at Billboard magazine proclaimed "Back-Stage Stories Bane to Exhibitors." Studios scrambled to cut out musical sequences from completed films in order to avoid the backlash. The cycle seemed to have run its course in a remarkably short amount of time.


The genre didn't bounce back until 1933, with the success of "42nd Street" and "Gold Diggers of 1933," a remake of "Gold Diggers of Broadway" (1929) made by Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley (who directed the numbers). The major difference in these films is the increasingly artificial (and spectacular) musical sequences that strained the realism of the stage setting to the breaking point. Berkeley's use of bird's eye views, for example, was a perspective impossible for the filmed audience to see. The injection of frank depictions of sexuality (until the Hays Code buttoned up everyone's brassieres) didn't hurt either.


That year the groundwork was also being laid to move the musical sequences off the stage and into the world of the performers, the baby steps of which were taken in "Flying Down to Rio," where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were first teamed up in a minor role. Their subsequent decade-long box office dominance altered the landscape, with films now gaining boldness about where to insert the spectacle. Musical numbers were still firmly integrated into the plot, usually spurred on by the flirtatious one-upsmanship of Astaire-Rogers, but no longer confined by the absolute verisimilitude to which "Broadway Melody" had clung, and at which Berkeley had slowly chipped away.


Enter MGM. The studio responsible for "Broadway Melody" in '29 went on to exemplify the genre through the 40s and 50s, with their vaunted "Freed Unit", manned by the producer (and former lyricist) Arthur Freed and a roll call of talented collaborators including directors Vincente Minneli and Stanley Donen, and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Their lavish productions attempted every kind of musical, from folk ("Meet Me In St. Louis," 1944) to historical pastiches ("The Pirate," 1948). Their biggest successes, though, were of the backstage variety with "Singin' In the Rain" (1952) and "The Band Wagon" (1953). The genre had evolved to the point of self-referentiality and self-parody, those early attempts at filmed song and dance now looked at with nostalgia and humor. No more needs to be said about the former, but "The Band Wagon," which takes Broadway as its setting, looks back even further than the advent of the sound film, pining for the days of unpretentious vaudeville performance, where star Fred Astaire got his start.


With the fading of the studio system in the 60s, the musical was doomed. Its lifeblood was in the trained hands of backstage artisans working with factory-like precision. With the breakup of vertically integrated studios, it was impossible to muster all the manpower needed and make it affordable. The days of the musical as a popular art form were numbered. Adaptations of big Broadway hits were trotted out once in a while to modest returns — but original material was hard to come by. Dramas with musical elements returned to prominence, with the success of films like "Saturday Night Fever" (1977) and "Flashdance" (1983). The full-fledged musical survived only in a variety of animated features.


With the success of "Moulin Rouge" (2001) and the film adaptations of "Chicago" (2002) and now "Dreamgirls" (2006), there's been a mini-resurgence of the backstage form financially, if not artistically. The hyper-stylized "Moulin Rouge" runs with the self-reflexive form of backstage musical initiated by "Singin' In the Rain." The latter two works are more aligned with the "Broadway Melody" school, stage-bound works content to ape their original Broadway productions. But with the massive success of Disney's TV movie and album "High School Musical," along with the musical-inflected spectacles of "Drumline," "You Got Served," "Stick It" and "Step Up," it's the teen dance genre that seems the place to look for a "42nd Street"-style resurgence.

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<![CDATA[The 2006 Best-of Lists]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/ifc-news-podcast-8-the-2006-be.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 We discuss our lists of best films of the year, as well as what our choices might mean (does Matt have daddy issues?).

Download: MP3, 21:38 minutes, 19.8 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20651 2006-12-18 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_8_the_2006_be publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020651 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The 2006 Best-of Lists (photo)]]> Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020651 2006-12-18 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_8_the_2006_be_photo inherit 20651 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 22, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/opening-this-week-december-22.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "The Good Shepherd," Universal Pictures, 2006]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"The Case of the Grinning Cat"

Everyone's favorite French documentarian Chris Marker is still making films at the ripe old age of 85, and his latest is as politically concerned as any of his groundbreaking films from the New Wave years. Shortly following the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, portraits of grinning yellow cats began popping up throughout Paris. In this exposé on the nature of art, politics and freedom of expression in this post-9/11 world, Marker remains as sharp and witty as ever as he hopes to find an answer to the mysterious grinning cat.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Curse of the Golden Flower"

Zhang Yimou follows up his earlier 2006 film "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles" with another wuxia film that is noted as being the most expensive production from mainland China to date. As with "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Yimou's latest is visually stunning while suffering in the story department. Be warned: the film is a lot more interested in plot than action, so if you're expecting lots of fight scenes ala "Hero," you'll be disappointed.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Good Shepherd"

We can probably all agree that Robert De Niro is one of the greatest American film actors ever, though his roles over the past decade may have made us forget that ("Analyze This" franchise, anyone?), so we're excited that his latest film will also feature him directing for the first time since "A Bronx Tale," a film that we're fond of. Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie join the cast alongside De Niro in this story of the formation of the CIA, but we're most excited to see Joe Pesci's first screen appearance in eight years for. Joe, it's about damn time.

Opens wide (official site).


"Letters from Iwo Jima"

Clint Eastwood's companion piece to this fall's "Flags of Our Fathers" came out of nowhere to snag the National Board of Review's film of the year and has been praised by numerous critics' circles, putting it at the forefront of the awards season race. Simply put, we're excited to see this following the disappointing "Flags," and Eastwood's decision to film the characters completely in Japanese rather than the forced English of last year's "Memoirs of a Geisha."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Night at the Museum"

Director Shawn Levy directs this family-friendly action adventure film based on Milan Trenc's popular children's book about a bored museum security guard who accidentally releases an ancient curse that causes the animals and insects to come back to life. Ben Stiller goes everyman in his role as the security guard and Robin Williams plays a president for a second time this year, this time diminishing the good name of our favorite rough rider Teddy Roosevelt.

Opens wide (official site).


"No Restraint"

Alison Chernick's documentary chronicles the latest project from performance artist Matthew Barney, the film "Drawing Restraint 9," which included the use of 45,000 pounds of petroleum jelly, a factory whaling vessel and traditional Japanese rituals and which came out in theaters earlier this year. The weird gets a whole lot weirder when "Dancer in the Dark" actress, world-renowned Icelander and Barney-SO Björk enters the project.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Painted Veil"

Naomi Watts reteams with her "We Don't Live Here Anymore" director John Curran in this 1920s period film that tells the story of an adulterous married woman whose life undergoes drastic changes when her husband moves them to a remote village in China undergoing a health epidemic. The film's already nabbed screenwriter Ron Nyswaner the Best Adapted Screenplay award from the National Board of Review and Edward Norton an Independent Spirit Award nomination. Early reviews say it's a spectacular production, but to us, it looks a bit like your average Merchant/Ivory film.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Rocky Balboa"

Cinephiles everywhere muttered a resounding "What the fuck?!" when news broke last year that Sylvester Stallone was reviving his "Rocky' and "Rambo" franchises. We here at IFC News are in love with all things retro, and nothing spells "so bad it's good" better than a throwback 80s film for the VH1 generation. Repeat after us: "'Rocky V' plus 'Rocky II' equals 'Rocky VII: Adrian's Revenge!'"

Opens wide (official site).


"Venus"

Remember a couple of years ago when Peter O'Toole reluctantly accepted that honorary acting Oscar after saying he still had a chance at earning his first after eight nominations? Well, it seems like O'Toole may have another shot this year, as he's been getting heaps of praise for his latest film in which he plays an aging, forgotten actor who develops an obsessive friendship with a teenager. A bit creepy, maybe, but here's hoping that this will finally lead to an O'Toole Oscar win.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"We Are Marshall"

Personally, we've reached out limit on uplifting sports movies. We tolerated this summer's "Invincible," but "We Are Marshall" has a lot more adversity to overcome. First off, it's directed by McG, best-known for the painful-to-watch "Charlie's Angels" franchise, and here making his bid for Seriousness. Second, its tragic premise and inspirational story about fortitude and courage are marred by tired football movie clichés. Third, Matthew McConaughey. 'Nuff said.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Glory That Is Gong Li]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/the-glory-that-is-gong-li.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Curse of the Golden Flower," Sony Pictures Classics]


Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg. Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard. Carmen Maura and Pedro Almodóvar. Cinema history is filled with famous pairings of directors and their favorite actresses. From silent cinema's Griffith and Gish to Woody Allen and whoever is his latest muse, the cinema will always home to these working relationships — as Godard once said, "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun."


This week marks the release of Zhang Yimou's latest film, "Curse of the Golden Flower," notable not only for being the most expensive film to be shot in mainland China to date, but also for its reteaming of Zhang with one-time love Gong Li for the first time in over a decade. Gong, regal as she's ever been, plays a Tang-era empress for whom the intrigues of the court are a matter of life and death.


For years, Gong served not only as Zhang Yimou's favorite actress to film, but also as the central figure of the Fifth Generation filmmakers, working with award-winning directors like Chen Kaige and Wong Jing and establishing herself as the most prolific and best-known Chinese actress in the West, displaying a potent combination of explosive talent and exceptional beauty. In honor of her latest, long-in-coming collaboration with Zhang Yimou, here's an essential Gong Li film guide telling you pretty much everything you need to know about her film career, from her earliest works on mainland China to her latest foray into Hollywood.



"Ju Dou" (1990)


Gong Li plays the title character, a woman who's bought by and married to a brutal owner of a dye mill in rural China during the 1920s, and who enters into an affair with her husband's nephew. Her role as a strong female character rebelling against her abusive husband was the first in a string of similar characters Gong would play in her career. In an iconic scene, Ju Dou, knowing full well of her husband's nephew's voyeurism, strips as she begins to bathe, as a slight head turn towards the camera showcases the tears streaming down her face and the bruises against her body.


"Ju Dou" is one of the last films to be shot in original Technicolor, both in China and throughout the world, as increasing costs and decreasing popularity killed off the format. Zhang's beautiful cinematography and luscious colors don't translate on the film's current DVD release, as the lousy print used for the video transfer dilutes the film's beautiful technical achievements. Somebody start an internet petition for a new DVD transfer!



"Farewell My Concubine" (1993)


Chen Kaige's Palme d'Or winner (it tied with "The Piano") is no less than an epic tale of friendship and Chinese opera spanning the Japanese occupation, the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution. It seems impossible that anyone could upstage stars Zhang Fengyi (as the hot-headed Xiaolou) and Leslie Cheung (as the bitchy Dieyi), yet Gong Li, as the manipulative prostitute Juxian, somehow manages to do it, scene by scene, until her final frames in the film. Her introduction remains sublimely sweet, with Xiaolou saving her from a group of raving drunks at a brothel, but as she insinuates herself into Xiaolou's life, Dieyi, who has long harbored a crush on his stage brother, becomes infuriated. Their love triangle continues as a push-and-pull between the three until the Cultural Revolution violently forces the them to betray each other and admit personal secrets to the public. After her husband betrays her and denounces their relationship, Juxian gives Dieyi a haunting half-smile during her last moments before her death, at once telling and subtle, a statement that she simply will not stand for any more bullshit.


Premiere recently included Gong Li's performance as Juxian as one of the Top 100 Greatest Performances in the history of cinema. The film also earned her the Best Supporting Actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle in 1993.



"To Live" (1994)


Zhang Yimou's "To Live" chronicles the experiences of a husband and wife (Ge You and Gong Li) who struggle to keep their family going through repeated hardships in the mid-20th century. The feisty, proto-feminist characters of Gong's past are put aside for a less melodramatic and more realistic turn that is powerful not for theatrical histrionics, but its subtle revelations about the burdens of the burgeoning Communist society. Gong's mother character undergoes physical aging as the poverty and tragedy of her family continues to burden her; her dewy beauty at the beginning of the film gives was to gray hairs and weariness; the ease with which she was able to work as a water carrier earlier becomes more difficult as her aging prevents her from being as productive as she used to be. Though bedridden and still suffering from the loss of her two children by the end of the film, Gong Li's sublime performance remains one of her most simplistic yet most powerful, showing that she can play realism as well as melodrama.


Though "To Live" won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, it was banned in mainland China for questionable depictions of the nation's history and its portrayal of the Communist regime. A total of seven Gong Li films were banned at one time or another in her native country, though she still remains one of China's most beloved actresses.



"Memoirs of a Geisha" (2005)


Though some controversy surrounded the pan-Asian casting of Rob Marshall's film, it does seem that the role of bitter and jealous head geisha Hatsumomo was custom built for the talents of Gong Li. Though she could've played the character as mere camp (Richard Corliss at Time compared her turn to Bette Davis), Gong manages to present Hatsumomo as yet another female who must struggle for her own way against the restrictions of society. Her inability to both marry her long-time lover and become the heir to the geisha house leads her to a jealous rage that causes the breakout of a fire. As Hatsumomo stares at burning flames and realizes that she will no longer be the star geisha, she proceeds to knock over lamps and pour gasoline, fueling the demise of both the geisha house and her own career. Her difficulties with the English language and a lousy screenplay be damned, Gong's performance is one of the few highlights to this otherwise misfire of a film.


Though "Memoirs of a Geisha" signals the start of Gong's Hollywood career, it is in fact her second English-speaking film following 1997's little-seen "Chinese Box," which co-starred Jeremy Irons and Maggie Cheung and was directed by Wayne Wang. Her recent English-language films include this past summer's "Miami Vice" and the upcoming "Silence of the Lambs" prequel "Hannibal Rising."



"2046" (2005)


Though Gong Li's role in Wong Kar-Wai's long-awaited "In the Mood for Love" follow-up "2046" is minor in comparison to those of fellow actresses Zhang Ziyi and Faye Wong, it stands out as one of the most mysterious and compelling performances in the film. Gong plays Su Li-Zhen, a professional gambler who reminds Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) of the woman he once loved, but who refuses to reveal anything about her past to him. The enigmatic allure of Gong's character not only piques the interest of Chow, but also this reviewer; she plays Su as distanced yet nurturing, helping Chow earn enough money to return to Hong Kong while not letting him get any closer emotionally. An intensely passionate kiss between the two, however, showcases Gong's brilliant talents; the two are framed in a tight close-up, and as Chow's head moves away from Su's, her lipstick appears smeared across her face as two tears fall and the previously icy Su melts as another love is lost.


"2046" is Gong's second collaboration with Wong Kar-Wai — she starred alongside Chang Chen in his short "The Hand," the best part of the 2004 anthology film "Eros" and a similar story of unrequited love between a beautiful high-end call girl and a young tailor in 1960's Hong Kong.



"Curse of the Golden Flower" opens December 21st in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[2006 Top Ten: Michelle Orange]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006-top-ten-michelle-orange.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michelle Orange

IFC News


[Photo: "Volver," Sony Pictures Classics]


1. Volver

2. Shortbus

3. Fateless

4. Notes on a Scandal

5. Deliver Us From Evil

6. The Departed

7. Half Nelson

8. The Science of Sleep

9. The Queen

10. The Painted Veil

I don't have any themes to point out or grand sweeping statements to make about my list, and if I had to do it tomorrow the order, or even the films themselves, might be rearranged completely; for someone with list-making in her blood (hi mom), ranking my 2006 favorites was remarkably nerve-wracking. 2006 was a strange year, in which the movies I liked best snuck up on me, and the ones I expected to love perhaps suffered from the tyranny of high expectations. This list went through several iterations (Is it tough enough? Nerdy enough? Does its hair look right?) before I decided to start fresh and go with pure gut feeling. These are movies that had me walking out of the theatre elated, or heartbroken, or on a movie cloud that takes at least a few blocks to dissipate. Gut reactions are why I go to the movies; they are not necessarily why I always love or appreciate a film, but this year they seemed to carry the day. Special mention to "Inside Man" and "The Prestige," both excellent thrillers made with warmth and a wink.

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<![CDATA[2006 Top Ten: Michael Atkinson]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006-top-ten-michael-atkinson.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Battle in Heaven," Tartan Films]


1. Battle in Heaven

2. 4

3. United 93

4. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

5. Woman Is the Future of Man

6. The Departed

7. Cavite

8. La Moustache

9. My Country, My Country

10. The Wild Blue Yonder

A dire year, all tolled, appearing from where I'm sitting to have been dominated by the publicity surrounding a handful of tiresome studio films rather than the films themselves or anyone's genuine enjoyment of or satisfaction in them. The smaller and/or imported whirligigs on my list should've generated their own kind of cultural hoopla, but they couldn't afford to buy it; buzz, an increasingly rare resource, doesn't occur naturally anymore. Ah well: when the source-wells for a top ten list include the Philippines, Romania, Mexico and outer space, things can't be all bad. A breakdown: two debuts, three sophomore films, four American (including the Herzog, since he and NASA are both U.S. residents), one doc, three shot on digital video, and seven utilizing, in one form or another, unprofessional actors.


Runners-up (in order): "The Hidden Blade" (Yoji Yamada, Japan), "Lady Vengeance"
(Park Chanwook, South Korea), "The Science of Sleep" (Michel Gondry, France),
"Army of Shadows" (Jean-Pierre Melville, France), "Looking for Comedy in the
Muslim World" (Albert Brooks, US), "A Scanner Darkly" (Richard Linklater, US),
"Mongolian Ping Pong" (Hao Ning, China), "Overlord" (Stuart Cooper, UK), "49 Up"
(Michael Apted, UK), "Old Joy" (Kelly Reichardt, US), "Lemming" (Dominik Moll,
France), "Workingman's Death" (Michael Glawogger, Austria/Germany), "Kekexili:
Mountain Patrol" (Lu Chuan, China), "Brick" (Rian Johnson, US), "Letters from
Iwo Jima" (Clint Eastwood, US), "The Troubles We've Seen" (Marcel Ophuls,
France).

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<![CDATA[2006 Top Ten: Thom Bennett]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006-top-ten-thom-bennett.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Thom Bennett

IFC Programming Department


[Photo: "Marie Antoinette," Sony Pictures]


1. Marie Antoinette

2. United 93

3. 49 Up

4. Lady Vengeance

5. Dead Man's Shoes

6. The Proposition

7. The Road to Guantanamo

8. Old Joy

9. Little Miss Sunshine

10. Wassup Rockers

Another year draws to a close with the requisite share of surprises and disappointments, cinematically speaking. I would be hard-pressed to find a movie that was the recipient of more misguided criticism than "Marie Antionette," but Sofia Coppola once again proves that she's one hell of a filmmaker — a historian would have probably made a far less interesting film. The latest edition of Michael Apted's "Up" series continues to build upon what is one of the great documentary works of all time. While vastly different films, "United 93" and "The Road to Guantanamo" both provided the needed political punch. Also a great year for revenge, what with Park Chan-wook's stunning "Lady Vengeance" and Shane Meadow's little-seen but amazing "Dead Man's Shoes." And lest we declare once more that the western is dead, the Nick Cave-scripted outback parable "The Proposition" goes to show that there are still great ones to be made (just not in "the west"). Another musician making his cinematic contribution was Will Oldham, whose performance in the mesmerizing "Old Joy" is a thing of simple beauty. Outstanding performances by Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker in "The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland" respectively gave weight to otherwise above-average films. Then there was the baffling praise heaped upon "The Departed". As a Scorsese fan, I too was hoping for the next "Goodfellas." This was not it. (Then again, would even "Goodfellas" have been so great with Jack Nicholson hamming it up?)

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<![CDATA[2006 Top Ten: Alison Willmore]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006-top-ten-alison-willmore.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 1. Inside Man

2. Children of Men

3. Brick

4. 4

5. Pan's Labyrinth

6. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

7. Old Joy

8. Three Times

9. The Proposition

10. Don't Come Knocking

The top two films on my list are supposedly mainstream releases that knocked me flat. If you told me last year that a Spike Lee joint, even an underplayed one, would by my favorite film of the year, I would have laughed in your face (that's the kind of obnoxious person I am). But darling Spike, who even at his best can be overwhelmingly abrasive, has had a hell of a year, with his four-hour Katrina requiem breaking hearts on TV whilst in theaters, unbelievably, he landed a mainstream hit. "Inside Man" is technically a heist film, but really it's a love letter to post-9/11 New York, the warmest and wisest I've ever seen. As the film's leisurely rhythms play out, it recalls "Dog Day Afternoon," but also that even the grandest genre feats can be submerged in the irrepressible bustle of humanity. "Children of Men" is thrilling, a brilliantly envisioned near-future that's the most believable dystopia ever brought to screen. Other films were boldly imperfect, worming their way back into my head months later — Ilya Khrjanovsky's indescribable "4"; John Hillcoat's "The Proposition," which, unlikely as it seems, actually manages to make the western seem like something new; Wim Wender's "Don't Come Knocking," minor but strangely and stubbornly moving. "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," "Old Joy" and "Three Times" were all films that needed to be seen in the theater to be appreciated — all operate in cadences best relished in a darkened cinema where they could command your senses. And Rian Johnson's brilliant debut "Brick" is possibly the most purely enjoyable film of the bunch — at the very least, I'm sure it's the one I'll most remember a few years down the road.

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<![CDATA[Tom Tykwer Stops to Smell the "Perfume"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/interview-tom-tykwer.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Since exploding onto the international film scene with 1998's beloved techno-beat thriller "Run, Lola, Run," German writer-composer-director Tom Tykwer has demonstrated a natural flair for the hyperkinetic in such titles as "The Princess and the Warrior" and "Heaven." Many years in the making, Tykwer's new hotness is "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," an adaptation of the monstrously popular novel by Patrick Süskind. Set in 18th-century Paris (but surprisingly without the anachronistic flash in which Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" bathed), the film stars Ben Whishaw as a peculiar orphan named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the anti-hero who discovers from an early age that he possesses the most powerful nose in, perhaps, all the world. Bought out of slavery by Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), a fading perfumer who recognizes his gift for scent-making, Grenouille's raw talent is honed to that of a genius craftsman, yet it still can't satisfy the gaping hole blackening his very soul. Without proper parenting, Grenouille grows up to develop a skewed sense of ethics and morality, and soon begins to leave behind him a trail of destruction as he attempts to capture the greatest smelling perfume... derived from the flesh of freshly killed virgins. Nothing says Christmas like the murder of innocent girls, but even if you think that premise stinks, the film continues to prove Tykwer is one of the most intriguing visualists working in film today.

You've said before that you feel a proximity to Grenouille, but I'm guessing you're not the first to admit that. How does one relate to a serial killer?

I think it must be one of the big secrets of the novel's success. You feel close to this guy and connected with his problems, desires, and needs because he's very lonely and not skilled in social terms. He tries to overcome that by putting something on him, which is what we all do; we all choose our shoes, trousers, haircut, anything in order to say something about us. I could completely connect with that, that the more inexperienced you feel in how to behave to other people, the more difficult it gets for you. The only problem is that if you create something that people are really attracted to, they don't meet you. They just meet the curtain, the disguise, and that's the ironic tragedy of this entire story. I love that contradiction, that it's both scary and heartwarming. Very understandable and totally amoral. [laughs]

The film is such a balancing act between the vibrant modernity of your filmmaking and the classicism of the era it takes place. How did you approach this?

We had a very specific idea about how to show and shoot this movie in a way that doesn't have an attitude of presenting. It's through our rich art direction, using decorations as backdrops and having a throwaway attitude to make it feel like it has a deep connection to its reality; a film that really tries to recreate a world the way it was, and not the way we imagine or idealize it when we think of paintings. We were influenced most by our research, reading everything by people from the 18th century that actually wrote down street life. We didn't want to end up with one of those films where you are forced to admire a set decorator's achievements, totally overproduced. You need to be a master of proportion, and I wanted it to be completely driven by the narration and protagonist.

To me, so much of this adaptation is hinged on conveying the sense of smell in a medium with only sight and sound. How did you approach this task?

My first thoughts were simply, you know, the book doesn't smell. The book was very successful in describing the olfactory world through the means and potential of literature, so it's now the challenge for cinematic language to do so with its potential. I thought the solution was lying in many multi-faceted phenomena because you had to approach this problem through the character, experiencing everything the way he experiences it. He's a compulsive collector, okay, so let's try to imitate and find a way of representing this physical activity, his greedy picking of singular smells, and see how he adds them up. All these notes become smelling chords, then those chords become a composition, and suddenly you end up with your wide shot after you've started with a detail. We wanted to show progressions of intensities of smells by changing the degrees of colors and saturations. And I think my major way in was by writing the music at a very early stage, which helped enormously to understand what the atmosphere would be like. We connect the music to this guy's emotional reference system, basically triggered by the way he smells the world. If books can do it, films can do it. You still have to translate colors, movements, and images. It's more concrete in a way, but at the same time, it offers so many more possibilities to become abstract on another level. Kubrick said that if it can be thought of, it can be filmed. I thought it was a wonderful challenge for me to go somewhere not many have been yet.

And you didn't even have to hand out Smell-O-Vision or Odorama cards to the audience. This may sound strange, but smell is an undervalued sense because it's so intangible.

Smells are very profound stimulation for connecting us with our past. You enter a room, and there are smells that come from the carpet, the furniture, the wallpaper, and maybe somebody cooking something. All these elements mixed together, and suddenly you're brought back to standing next to your grandmother cooking, you're six years old, and you have a three-dimensional memory of that.

What could you sniff right now and instantly be transported to the past?

Not particular smells, but the whole combination of wet asphalt from rain, industrial smells from chemical factories, lots of cars, lots of simple foods, more meat than vegetables... you get a combination of that together and I'm back in childhood, on my way to school, and wandering around the city of Wuppertal, where I come from. My favorite smells are these kinds of compositions of normal daily life that still capture this very secret world that's deeply rooted in our emotional memory.

When I visited Berlin recently, I noticed the city has a very distinct composition of scents. Having lived there for 20 years, can you identify what that is?

It's deep, I don't know myself. I love the smell of Berlin, it's one of the major reasons why I moved there. I think it's difficult about cities in general. You could also blindfold me, send me to New York, and I would know immediately I was in New York. It's a combination of the food, the way cars are built here, and I think the subway has a very particular smell.

You mean body odor and stale urine?

I don't really judge smells myself. It's the same in Berlin, which people always forget is the greenest capital in all of Europe. There's no city that has more vegetation, so you obviously get a lot of photosynthesis, beautiful forests that the winds come through, and there's a lot of water that people never think about; the Spree river is like the nerve system that the city is laid upon. It moves in little canals, and there are a lot of smells coming from that. And then again, it's a city with a lot of tiny industrial things, with a subway and a very eccentric kitchen. I can't identify it, but if you blindfolded me in Berlin, it would take me less than a second to know where I was.

If you were forced to give up one of your senses, which would it be?

That's a fascist question. I have absolutely no idea, I need them all. That's why I'm a filmmaker, because I can use them all in film... No, you're not getting any of them, you'll have to find someone else to take them from.


"Perfume" opens in limited release December 27th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Tom Tykwer Stops to Smell the "Perfume" (photo)]]> Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 1008357 2006-12-18 00:00:00 closed closed interview_tom_tykwer_photo inherit 8357 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[2006 Top Ten: Aaron Hillis]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006-top-ten-aaron-hillis.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: "Inland Empire," 518 Media Inc/Absurda]


1. Inland Empire

2. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

3. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

4. Children of Men

5. Old Joy

6. Battle in Heaven

7. 49 Up

8. The Fountain

9. The Case of the Grinning Cat

10. Edmond

Compiling year-end lists is meant to be for kicks, a fun way to let film journalists unwind, take temperature readings on their tastes, help consumers make informed decisions about what's worth their hard-earned dough and in the process — hopefully — enlighten readers to overlooked works that deserve love. By no means do these lists substantiate quality, much like all those boring-ass award shows, so everyone needs to chill out and stop taking them so seriously. As the number of reviewers grows exponentially (which is not meant to fuel the inane "print vs. online critics" rift I involuntarily straddle), a scary new trend has emerged: the film critic as rock star (mind you, more They Might Be Giants dorky than LCD Soundsystem hip), calculated showboaters who flex their subjective worth as more important than cinema itself. There's no point naming egos, nor is it hard to spot the poseurs, but it surely does a disservice to include arcane or contrarian choices simply for the sake of having an "original" outlook. This, in part, is my defense of "The Fountain," the most ambitious film to reach multiplexes this year, a sobering romance that probably seems ridiculous to so many because it offers no emotional cushion of humor or irony as yoga master Hugh Jackman zooms around inside a cosmic soap bubble in the name of passion. Maybe it's because I got married this year that I was so sensitive to its themes (which was also thrown in my face for why I was largely disappointed with "Climates"), but at least I'm willing to own an unpopular opinion without trying to play politics. Regardless of how incomprehensible or ugly so many people have pondered David Lynch's consumer-grade DV opus to be, no other film in 2006 has twisted up in my brain and refused to leave like "Inland Empire," which I've deemed the most artful, uncompromised, challenging film of the year.

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<![CDATA[2006 Top Ten: R. Emmet Sweeney]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/2006-top-ten-r-emmet-sweeney.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: "Inland Empire," 518 Media Inc/Absurda]


1. Inland Empire

2. Climates

3. L'Enfant

4. Pan's Labyrinth

5. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

6. Breaking News

7. Clean

8. Inside Man

9. La Moustache

10. Stick It

"Inland Empire" and "Stick It" would make a canny double bill. In their own ways, through muddy nightmare and candy-colored dream, they examine the use and abuse of the female body (by Hollywood and the gymnastic-industrial complex) while gleefully celebrating the performers' reclamation of their own agency. Both are love letters to their actresses — with Lynch's howling ode lifting Laura Dern to cinematic sainthood, while Jessica Bendinger's sprightly hiccup of a movie turns Missy Peregrym into more of a sassy film girl scout leader.


Any of the following could have slipped into the bottom three depending on my mood: "Three Times," Dave Chappelle's "Block Party," "Volver," "The Proposition," "The Hidden Blade," "Miami Vice," "Flags of Our Fathers," "Borat," "Running Scared" and "A Prairie Home Companion."


The film event of the year, hands down, was the American Museum of the Moving Image's screening of "Out 1," Jacques Rivette's legendary 12 1/2 hour whatzit. Only the sixth time it's been shown in theatres since 1971, it pits two rehearsals of Aeschylus against a rapidly expanding conspiracy plot traced back to Balzac's "The History of the Thirteen." The fiction multiplies like a fungus and lingers in the brain for weeks.


What I'm looking forward to in '07: Jia Zhangke's "Still Life" (if any distributor is brave enough to pick it up) and "The Bourne Ultimatum."

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<![CDATA["Children of Men"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/children-of-men.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Children of Men," Universal Pictures, 2006]


I am jealous of you, reader. You haven't seen "Children of Men" yet, and you don't have any idea what's in store for you. "Children of Men" is a great movie and I plan to see it again, soon and often. But nothing will compare to my first viewing, when I didn't quite know what to expect and didn't realize the raw power of the movie I was about to watch. You still have the opportunity to have that rush of excitement that comes so rarely at the movies, when you truly and totally fall in love with a film, and for that I envy you. The way in which surprise and shock factor in on the impact of "Children of Men" makes my job here somewhat difficult: the more I reveal about the film, the less effective it will be. Even hinting at its ability to shake up a viewer diminishes its potential to do so. So I will step lightly.


Directed by Alfonso Cuarón and shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, "Children of Men" is at once one of the most technically complex and emotionally charged movies in recent memory. Rather than subverting character or story to the whims of his effects team or resigning himself to a talky, unimaginative intellectual exercise, Cuarón and his four co-screenwriters fashion a complete world, both of action and of thought. Their chillingly relevant future world contains the one crucial ingredient necessary to all effective dystopia: an air of inevitability which suggests that we're already on the road to the damnation depicted but we don't yet know it.


To that end Cuarón name-checks a potpourri of issues of the day, from flu pandemics to immigration rights to refugee camps to human rights violations in wartime prisons. The central sci-fi element of this dystopia, that at some point in the near future humankind will lose the ability to procreate, is really just the icing on the cake of what was already a pretty shitty world to begin with. As our reluctant hero, Clive Owen's Theo Faron, notes, "It was already too late before the infertility thing." The apathetic Theo — who's taken up smoking to try to hurry up the dying process — gets roped into helping an immigrant woman by his ex-wife, played by Julianne Moore. Quickly all of their lives are threatened by a variety of forces.


Cuarón peppers "Children of Men" with violence, not to titillate or entertain, but to keep the audience in a constant state of dread. He and Lubezki further ratchet up the air of paranoia by filming much of the movie in long takes where seemingly innocuous events are interrupted by explosions or gunshots. Soon the audience is as paranoid as Owen's Theo — I began wondering who, if anyone, could be trusted, from Moore's activist to Michael Caine's kindly old pothead scientist.


Lubezki's long takes, particularly during the film's two major set pieces, will astonish you, not only for their pure skill and audacity but for the way they enhance and enrich the drama. The climactic sequence, which follows Theo through a battlefield, is like an embedded dispatch from the frontlines of Iraq or some other war zone. Few science-fiction films have ever been as committed to inventing a true sense of earthy realism, though that is always the secret to getting an audience invested in a fantastic premise.


Saying any more endangers the film's ability to blow your mind, so I'll stop. Even though I want to compare "Children of Men" to specific films — including one by Alfred Hitchcock — I can't, for fear of revealing too much. Go have that great first screening. Then we'll talk. I'll be happy to; I haven't shut up about it since I saw it.



"Children of Men" opens in limited release December 25th (official site).

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<![CDATA[On DVD: Two from Bertolucci; "Little Miss Sunshine"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/on-dvd-two-from-bertolucci-lit.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Conformist," Paramount]


Forget the Bernardo Bertolucci we've come to know since the '80s — the suave, literate Parmesan who has been far too focused on disrobing his actresses and who seems, keeping in mind the box office lessons of "Last Tango in Paris," to think having sex, or trying to have sex, or deciding when to have sex, is a grown-up narrative idea. (This goes even for Oscar-winner "The Last Emperor," if not 1993's "Little Buddha," which is on an astral plain all its own.) His international rep would be many steps closer to the top shelf today if, in fact, he'd stopped when he was ahead, at 35, with seven features already under his belt, two of which — "The Conformist" (1970) and "1900" (1976) — are rapturous masterpieces.


At least two other early films — "Partner" (1968) and "The Spider's Stratagem" (also 1970!) — would be peaks in another European director's canon. But the eminence of "The Conformist," in particular, is unassailable. Fleshing out novelist Alberto Moravia's shadowbox of political compliance and personal shame with arguably the most bewitching mise en scène ever concocted for any movie, set entirely in rainy Euro-city afternoons and indigo evenings, the movie follows Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a would-be sophisticate lining up with Mussolini's Fascists in the 30s for his own, very private reasons — as the title makes clear, this is participatory politics seen as psychosocial dysfunction. Being "normal" is an ideal the fiercely closeted Marcello talks about a lot, his desire to belong spiraling out to include marriage (to the fabulously pliable and obnoxious Stefania Sandrelli) and insinuating himself into the Party by framing up his old university mentor (Enzo Tarascio) and, by extension, the prof's sexy, testy trophy wife (Dominique Sanda). "The Conformist" is both a bludgeoning indictment of fascistic follow-the-leader and an orgasm of coolness, ravishing compositions, camera gymnastics (the frame virtually squirms around, like Marcello) and atmospheric resonance. The actors vogue, Vittorio Storaro's magical lens transforms every street and room into a catalytic baroque-ness, the clothes grip the characters like iconic mantles, the leaves blow with the roving camera across Marcello's mother's seedy estate. What a movie for a young man (only 29 at the time) to have made.


"1900" is a more troublesome creature, a true behemoth that runs over five hours and suffers the handicaps of being politically ironic, internationally cast (with multiple dubbing versions), more rueful than factual about class war, messy and subject to distributors' whimsical cuts all over the world. But for those of us who care less about neatness than about bellying up to an endless banquet of melodrama, history, revolutionary fervor, food, sadism, Brueghel tableaux, war, peasant partying, and Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu and Dominique Sanda nude (yes, together!), "1900" is a savorable experience, with a poetic heart and a swoony Ennio Morricone score that rescue it from kitsch. The long-awaited Paramount DVD sets for both films come clotted with several making-of featurettes each.


That's your weekend right there, so you'd have no pressing need to rent "Little Miss Sunshine" and see it all over again, except perhaps to suss out if in fact it's the dependie wonder-comedy it's been cracked up to be, or if the backlash against the acclaim and the stunning box office (more than 1000% return on budget, in a year when "M:I:III" didn't manage to break even) is more on the money. But maybe you will in any case, knowing as you do that hype is prone to cut on the back-swing, and that Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's movie is modest in conception — eccentric family hits the road to participate in that most revolting of American rituals, the preadolescent beauty pageant — but executed with consummate wit and Swiss timing. It might boil down to the cast: give pros like Alan Arkin, Steve Carrell, Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear open road, and they will race like the devil.




"The Conformist (Extended Edition)" and "1900 (Special Collector's Edition)" (Paramount Home Video) are now available on DVD; "Little Miss Sunshine" (20th Century Fox) will be available on DVD December 19th.

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<![CDATA[The Training Montage: A Love Story]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/the-training-montage-a-love-st.php Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Variety ain't always the spice of life. Just look to the "Rocky" films, which for three decades now have been a testament to the fact that you can build a franchise on the exact same formula. Rocky's down and out. He struggles. He finds encouragement from Adrian. He trains. He fights.

Oh, he trains. The "Rocky" films have defined the training montage — from the first tootings of Bill Conti's horn-heavy theme to the inevitable moment when a grey-sweatsuited Sylvester Stallone climbs something and lifts his arms in triumph, the endlessly parodied and beyond-iconic training segments have defied irony, sneering and accusations of intense cheesiness. Arriving with unnerving accuracy an hour into almost every "Rocky" installment, the montages get the job done like some form of celluloid freebase — one whiff and you're on your feet, cheering. As a boxer, Rocky has never met an bizarre training method he didn't like — he punches meat! He does lunges with a log! "Rocky Balboa," the latest and last (and I can't imagine otherwise) film in the series finds Stallone comfortably slipping back into the character the way one would toe on a favorite pair of shoes — sure, he looks worse for the wear, but who doesn't? As he chugs raw eggs, does one-armed pushups and takes a (canine-accompanied!) run up the stairs of Philadelphia Museum of Art, questions like "Why did this movie get made again?" fade from the mind. The world could always use another training montage. Here's a look at the ones in "Rocky"s through the ages.


Rocky (1976)

Song: Bill Conti - "Gonna Fly Now"

Trainer: Mickey Goldmill
Definitive moment: Rocky beats up a side of beef.

Shots of opponent training? No — Apollo Creed is mostly shown schmoozing.

Company on the climatic stair-run: No one — the first time, he goes it alone.

A good portion of original recipe "Rocky" is spent setting up the elements that will make up the definitive training montage. In a series of pre-montage moments, Rocky pulls himself out of bed in the pre-dawn, tosses back five raw eggs and take a jog through the quiet streets of Philly, gasping his way up the museum stairs. He visits Paulie, who in a fit of rage ("It is cold in here!") pummels a nearby meat slab, inspiring him to do the same and prompting the eternal question from a visiting reporter: "Do other fighters pound raw meat?" "Nah, I think I invented it," he replies.

The montage itself, set to Conti's Rocky theme, starts with Rocky running through the streets of his run-down neighborhood (a trashcan is on fire; someone throws him an apple) and down towards the water — cuts show him at the speed bag, doing one-armed and clapping pushups, getting mysteriously but, one presumes, therapeutically punched in the stomach, pounding more lumps of meat, and finally, back to the run, accelerating to take the stairs at dawn, one of the first uses of a Steadicam. Rocky raises his arms and jumps up and down, and...freeze frame.


Rocky II (1979)

Songs: Bill Conti - "Going the Distance"/"Gonna Fly Now"

Trainer: Mickey Goldmill

Definitive moment: Rocky catches the chicken.

Shots of opponent training? Yes — Apollo Creed, newly serious, punches bags, skips rope, and beats up a flunky.

Company on the climatic stair-run: Masses of children and grown fans.

In the pre-montage portion of the movie, we see a droopy Rocky half-heartedly training without Adrian's approval — Mickey employs the dubious 1920s technique of having Rocky chase a chicken around ("I feel like a Kentucky-fried idiot"). Later, empowered by Adrian's command to "Win!", Rocky embarks on not one but two training montages — the first finds him doing one-armed pushups in silhouette at dawn, using a sledgehammer in a scrap yard, doing squats and lunges with nothing less than a log on his shoulders, lifting weights, skipping rope and finally catching that chicken ("Speed Speed! Speeeeed!" Mickey screeches). And...freeze frame. Then unfreeze frame, and after a quick interlude with his newborn son, Rocky sets off down the train tracks to Conti's familiar theme. As he runs through the streets of his neighborhood, people are considerably friendlier (though the trashcan is still on fire). Rocky starts gathering a crowd of kids and others who run along with him — one imagines just to show they could, as there was trouble wrangling extras in the first "Rocky" — going faster and faster until he takes the stairs and the masses, catching up to him, cheer "Rocky! Rocky!" And...freeze!


Rocky III (1982)

Song: "Gonna Fly Now"

Trainer: Apollo Creed

Definitive moment: Rocky outruns Creed.

Shots of opponent training? Yes — we see Clubber Lang training furiously by himself.

Company on the climatic stair-run: No stairs! Instead, Creed runs with him on the beach.

In the most unintentionally romantic of the training montages, Rocky, in LA with once-opponent, now-friend Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) labors to get his groove back. The two jog on the beach and dance in the ring and in front of a mirror together ("practicing footwork" — hah!) in a series of 80s-victim outfits that include short-shorts and cut-off shirts. One of the biggest pleasures of this montage is that we get to see Rocky taking a playful swing at the awful Paulie and pulling him into the pool. At the climax, Creed and Rocky gallop across the sand while the camera pulls in for a double crotch-shot (you think I'm joking, but no). Rocky pulls ahead — finally, the two jump up and down in the water and hug — and...freeze.


Rocky IV (1985)

Songs: Vince DiCola - "Training Montage"/John Cafferty - "Heart's On Fire"

Trainer: Duke, Paulie

Definitive moment: A crawling Rocky pulls Paulie on a sled.

Shots of opponent training? Yes — the Aryan cyborg force that is Dolph Lundgren grimaces through exercises in state-of-the-art facilities under the observation of a cluster of scientists and computers, and also submits to steroid injections.

Company on the climatic stair-run: Once again, no stairs. Instead, Rocky eludes his Soviet minders and climbs a snowy mountain ridge.

In what many would consider the finest of the montages, Rocky undergoes a makeshift training regimen in Siberia that includes running in the snow past peasants and horse-drawn sleighs (when one overturns, he, never one to harbor Cold War resentment, stops to help). He also saws logs, lifts rocks, crawls through the tundra pulling Paulie in a sleigh, stalks through the drifts with a log over his shoulder and chops wood. Then, to John Cafferty classic "Heart's On Fire," a now bearded- and Adrianed-Rocky does sit-ups off a barn-rafter, works a speed bag next to someone milking a cow, lifts rocks in a pulley, hoists a cattle yoke and, eventually, a wagon loaded with Adrian and company. Out on his run, he evades the Soviet agents assigned to keep an eye on him and climbs an inexplicable mountain range where, at the top, he raises his arms in triumph (naturally).


Rocky V (1990)

Song: Joey B. Ellis - "Go For It! (Heart And Fire)

Trainer: Rocky Balboa

Definitive moment: Rocky and Tommy take the stairs together.

Shots of opponent training? Tough one — if you consider Tommy the opponent, then yes.

Company on the climatic stair-run: Tommy, and, eventually, Rocky Jr.

People like to pretend "Rocky V" doesn't exist for many reasons — the lousy training montage is but one. Rocky, now a manager, instills in mulleted boy wonder Tommy Gunn the lessons he's been taught by his various mentors. The song, from the artist formerly known as M.C. Breeze, could have also used some work. Kicking off with Tommy fighting, as Rocky once did, in a church, the montage includes shots of Rocky and Tommy doing one-armed pushups in tandem and playfully wrestling together while Rocky Jr. (played by Stallone's real son, Sage) sulks, neglected, and then takes up his own training with Paulie. But before you can yell "What you were looking for was right in front of you all along, you punch-drunk moron!", Rocky and Tommy take the museum stairs together. Tommy pulls ahead and performs a show-offy flip in the air next to Rocky's statue, which you think Rocky would realize is a bad sign. Conti's theme does eventually make an appearance, but not until the climactic street fight scene.


"Rocky Balboa" opens wide on December 20th (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Training Montage: A Love Story (photo)]]> Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10025392 2006-12-18 00:00:00 closed closed the_training_montage_a_love_st_photo inherit 25392 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Home of the Brave," "Venus"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/reviews-home-of-the-brave-venu.php Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Home of the Brave," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2006]


All the words we like to think apply to our nation's servicemen — honorable, noble, courageous — can also be applied to Irwin Winkler's "Home of the Brave," a coming home drama about a group of National Guardsmen back from a tour of duty in the current Iraq war. But plenty of other, less desirable words — patronizing, heavy-handed, clumsy — apply as well. The film's heart is in the right place. Its mouth, not so much.


The four combat-shocked veterans Winkler follows upon their return to Spokane, WA seem cast less for their performances than the potential for metatextual irony. Samuel L. Jackson, the only contemporary actor whose screen presence is super-heroic enough to believably survive a bout with snakes on a plane, plays a battlefield surgeon devastated by his inability to fix his patients. Jessica Biel, an actress with an entire persona based around her complete physical perfection, plays a driver who loses a hand after a mine explodes under her truck. Cheekiest of all, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, a rapper whose reputation rests on the number of gun battles he's survived, plays a character who loses his mind after accidentally shooting a civilian in a botched raid. That's great stunt casting for sure, but not great acting; none convincingly bring to the screen a sense of real emotional or mental trauma.


The entire ensemble is loaded with pretty people who don't look, sound, or act like real soldiers, let alone ones crippled (both literally and figuratively) by their experiences. The crucial Guardsman who dies "over there" is played by "One Tree Hill"'s Chad Michael Murray, and the final major character is played by actor Brian Presley, who looks like Jim Caviezel but prettier, with perfectly mussed hair (particularly impressive in the oppressive, moisture-destroying heat of the Iraqi desert).


Winkler wants his audience to acknowledge there is more to being involved in the Iraq War than simply remarking that you "support the troops" when someone asks you your stance on it. These soldiers we're so supportive of with our lip service sympathy return from this brutal war where, arguably, no amount of good work can undo the bad that's already been done, shattered by what they've done. They deserve better, from the war and from us.


But they also deserve better than a film like "Home of the Brave" which exploits their pain by turning Iraq War veterans from real people to mouthpieces. "You want us to come back like nothing happened!" one of the veterans remarks at one point. The key word there is "us" — the screenplay by Mark Friedman doesn't even attempt to disguise its didacticism by trying to personalize the experiences of its protagonist. So it's "us" who come back, not "me."


The sour taste of such blatant sermonizing is accentuated by Winkler and Friedman's holier-than-thou attitude, most noticeably in a scene where Presley's character bumps into Biel's at his new job, selling tickets at a Spokane multiplex. After comparing anti-depressants, Presley launches into a thinly veiled anti-Hollywood rant. "I sell these stupid tickets to these stupid movies!" he grumbles and Biel agrees. "It's like they don't care what's going on over there!" she replies. A fair point, but the potential accuracy gets lost in the utterly tactless storytelling. It's difficult to successfully educate people when you're actively and openly insulting their intelligence. More importantly, should the director of "At First Sight" and "The Net" really be pointing fingers at bad moviemaking?


Jackson's triage unit is a far cry from Altman's in "MASH" and 50 Cent's combat shocked meltdown doesn't even rate with Sylvester Stallone's in "First Blood." The first really great fictionalization of the Iraq War experience, at home and abroad, is yet to be seen.



"Venus" is a movie both sweet and sour, one likely to warm your heart at times and chill you to the bone at others. Rarely I have been so equally touched and repulsed by a film. Basically a British "Grumpy Old Men" with a heaping dash of "Lolita," the new film by director Roger Michell offers aging superstar Peter O'Toole a showcase for his chops, both comedic and dramatic, and whatever else you think about it, there's no denying the 74-year old actor still has a spring in his step and a mess of charisma.


In a storyline eerily similar to the much less heartwarming and somewhat less creepy "10 Items or Less," O'Toole plays a famous actor who chances into a life-affirming pairing with a younger woman. But "Venus" diverges from that path in the details of the relationship between O'Toole's Maurice and teenage Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), which takes on an additional sexual dimension. Initially, lonely Maurice takes up with Jessie simply to get her away from his good friend Ian (Leslie Phillips), the uncle who can't stand her. But he's quickly entranced by Whittaker's sad, beaten-down beauty. He takes to calling her Venus after the painting the two discuss during an afternoon at the museum.


Though the screenplay by Hanif Kureishi (working with Michell a third time following "The Buddha of Suburbia" and "The Mother") plays their partnership for laughs, the pairing strikes me as an altogether disturbing one, and not simply for the vast gulf between their ages. Once Maurice reveals his feelings for Jodie, "Venus" settles into a rhythm of his lecherous glances and her demurring rejections; that is, until she wants something from him, whereupon she humors him until she draws out whatever it is she desires. The she treats him poorly again, then asks for more. Her comment by way of a hello upon missing one of their dates, "I'm sorry I didn't come and meet you. You can smell my neck," characterizes a lot of their interactions. Despite "Venus"'s air of wistful nostalgia, the material strikes me much darker than Michell implies. If Maurice and Jodie's story is superficially one of education and happiness, it's not far removed from one about a kindly old man whose ill-advised attraction to a young, callous woman proves his undoing.


In a way, that makes O'Toole's performance even better. No matter how discouraged you are by the film or his character's behavior, you want to keep watching where O'Toole will take you. To call the performance fearless is cliché and understatement: the physical stunts O'Toole is called upon to do are remarkable all by themselves, without even taking into consideration the Maurice's erotic appetites. He and "Venus" are both at their best when they're not bogged down by his obsession with Jodie. A brief, wordless scene where Maurice visits an outdoor theater covered in fallen leaves and silently returns to some moment in his past says more about him than all his monologues put together. O'Toole, standing there alone with the cold and his memories is a window into a far better movie than the one Michell wound up with.



"Home of the Brave" (official site) opens in limited release December 15th; "Venus" (official site) opens in limited release December 21st.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 15th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/opening-this-week-december-15t.php Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "The Good German," Warner Bros., 2006]


A round-up of the best (or worst) $10 you'll spend this week.


"Automatons"

New York City-based genre filmmaker James Felix McKenney's latest film depicts a future in which one woman is left alive after a generations-long war with robots nearly eliminated the human race. The film was shot on an extremely low-budget and will be at the Pioneer Theater in NYC for a two-week run.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Breaking and Entering"

Anthony Minghella puts the epics aside in order to direct his first original screenplay since 1991's "Truly Madly Deeply," good news for us, as "Truly Madly Deeply" remains our favorite Minghella film. "Breaking and Entering" reteams the director with Jude Law yet again; he plays an architect whose professional and personal lives are thrown into turmoil following a robbery at his office located in the seedy inner-city section of King's Cross in London. Juliette Binoche co-stars as a Serbian immigrant and Robin Wright Penn does some of her best acting in years as Law's longtime girlfriend. Now this is the Minghella we all know and love.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Brooklyn Rules"

More miss-than-hit director Michael Corrente directs this film set in mid-1980s Brooklyn about three friends whose lives change completely after one of them becomes enamored with a mafia lifestyle. The film is written by Terence Winter, a longtime "Sopranos" contributor and writer of that awful 50 Cent film from last year, so expect some serious tough-guy scene-chewing from everybody. And Freddie Prinze Jr. playing mean? Not buying it.

Opens in limited release (IMDb page).


"Charlotte's Web"

We're tellin' ya, talking pigs are a serious goldmine. The "Babe" series managed to garner over $250 million worldwide and since talking animals are all the rage these days, Paramount is probably going to be in for another winner this holiday season. "13 Going on 30"'s Gary Winick is tapped for a Hollywood-studded romp through the barn as the voices of Julia Roberts, Steve Buscemi, John Cleese, Oprah and many others voice the many talking animals in the film. Plus, the film has rich source material in the classic E.B. White book, which has sold over 45 million copies since it was first published in the 1950s. Oh, and lest we forget, there's also Dakota Fanning at her most irascible, so it's fun for the whole family.

Opens wide (official site).


"Dreamgirls"

Okay, so let us get this straight: Beyoncé Knowles plays the Diana Ross-like diva, Jamie Foxx actually gets to sing, and Eddie Murphy tries to make us all forget about "The Haunted Mansion" in a role that many are saying may earn him an Oscar nom and, for once, establish his credibility as a serious actor. Directed by Academy-friendly "Kinsey" filmmaker Bill Condon, "Dreamgirls" will likely garner a slew of nominations but it will likely fail to further resuscitate the musical genre (see "The Phantom of the Opera," "Rent") and probably will be forgotten by this time next year. Hey, that's Oscar for ya.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Eragon"

Fanboys and fifth graders from all across the country can stop foaming at the mouth as the long-awaited first feature based on Christopher Paolini's popular fantasy novel finally comes to the big screen. "Eragon" tells the story of a young boy who befriends a dragon, and Jeremy Irons who goes on a quest to find his dead uncle's killer. Call us nostalgic fools, but dragons ain't got nothing on flying dog creature things.

Opens wide (official site).


"The Good German"

It seems like the George Clooney-Steven Soderbergh romance of the past decade or so isn't ending any time soon. Regardless, it's a relationship that just can't seem to do anything wrong (except, of course, "Solaris"). Soderbergh goes the classical Hollywood route as Clooney, tapping his inner Bogart, plays an American war correspondent investigating the death of his murdered driver and his relationship with a mysterious woman in post-World War II Berlin.

Opens in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto (official site).


"Home of the Brave"

Long-time successful producer Irwin Winkler really lost us with his past few directorial efforts, from lousy musical biopics ("De-Lovely") to tired melodramas ("Life as a House") to films starring Val Kilmer ("At First Sight"). Winkler continues to raise our questioning eyebrows with his latest film about soldiers returning from their tours in Iraq, most notably over the film's casting of Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Biel and Mr. Fiddy Cent. Somehow, we're expecting another dud.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"The Pursuit of Happyness"

You know, we must admit, we don't want Will Smith to get all sappy on us. He really seems like too much of a fun guy. But in his latest, the Fresh Prince gets all melodrama-y in this film that seems perfectly suited for Italian director Gabriele Muccino (who Smith sought out personally) in this story about a down-on-his-luck salesman who struggles to make ends meet for his five-year-old son after he scores a prestigious yet unpaid internship at a stock brokerage firm. Expect lots of tears and possibly an Oscar nom for Smith.

Opens wide (official site).


"Reminiscing in Tempo"

Nobody knows how to party like a documentarian! But seriously, folks, filmmaker Gary Keys documents the spectacular parties thrown by Ruth Ellington for her jazz musician brother Duke every year, even after his death in 1977. This film includes classic footage of the Duke Ellington Orchestra from 1968 and includes interviews with Bobby Short, Al Hibbler, and Billy Taylor.

Opens in New York (IMDb page).

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<![CDATA[Interview: Sarah Polley]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/interview-sarah-polley.php Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: "The Secret Life of Words," Strand Releasing, 2006]


If Sarah Polley isn't a household name by now, it surely isn't for a lack of talent, critical acclaim or exposure. Since she was a little girl, the expressive-faced Canadian actress' projects have been carefully chosen for their integrity and sociopolitical awareness (that "Dawn of the Dead" remake is totally justified!), which has allowed her to shine in collaborations with notable filmmakers like Terry Gilliam, Atom Egoyan, Wim Wenders, Kathryn Bigelow, Michael Winterbottom and David Cronenberg. In "The Secret Life of Words," her second collaboration with Spanish director Isabel Coixet (after 2003's "My Life Without Me"), Polley plays a hearing-impaired factory worker named Hanna, an enigmatic loner who finds herself literally adrift after a forced vacation sees her venturing out on an oil rig to nurse a burn victim with temporary blindness (Tim Robbins). As the story unfolds, Polley's character slowly transforms from a complete stranger to someone profoundly troubled, yet another impressive notch in the filmography of a woman who won't even turn 28 until January... the same month that her directorial feature debut "Away from Her" (adapted from Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain") screens at the Sundance Film Festival. As busy as she is gifted, Polley still had time to call me from her home in Toronto.


Why did you want to work with Isabel Coixet again?


To be honest with you, I think it was by far my best experience as an actress. She has such a distinct, original voice and I really wanted to be part of that again. I feel like we have a kind of shorthand at this point, like we don't need to talk that much anymore. I can understand just from her body language what she's looking for; we have this oddly telepathic communication. It's an incredible thing to walk into a project knowing that you have that with a filmmaker.


For most of the film, Hanna is so guarded that she's nearly unknowable. How did you approach making your portrayal believable and compelling without being allowed to reveal what drives her personality?


Well, that was definitely the daunting part, the idea that you're in every frame of the film and the audience doesn't know anything about you until the very end. There's a sense in the story of a relationship, a connection between two people, and how unbelievably healing that can be. You can feel them knowing each other without really knowing anything about each other. But it was really, really terrifying to figure out how to stay in that place where you're still engaging. At some point, it was about trusting Isabel. I felt like she was going to create so much about the character through composition and the way things were constructed that I trusted that that would be taken care of in some way.


Most of the film takes place on an oil rig. You weren't that far out at sea, were you?


Yeah, the one that we were on was right by the dock. The fact is we were never ever in the middle of the ocean, which part of me was really happy about, part of me kind of regrets. I think I would have loved it, but it would be a nightmare for production. It's a really specific place, its own kind of completely bizarre and very cinematic world.


Tim Robbins' character is a mess, but his coping mechanism is a wonderfully playful sense of humor. Was he ever too funny that it caught you off guard?


He's one of the funniest people that I know, generally, so I don't know if I ever laughed that hard in my life. If I look back on the films I've done, the ones that are the saddest and involve the most damaged characters were the most uproariously funny and hysterical. I think that must just be a way of getting through it.


Late in the film, there's a heartbreaking scene that requires you to be topless in candid close-up. Was that hard for you, in terms of modesty or the gravity of the moment?


It was really difficult in terms of how emotionally draining it is. It's weird because I've never done nudity, but in the context of that scene, it was the least of my worries or what caused me discomfort. It was such an intense experience, I don't know if I even noticed there was nudity going on.


"The Secret Life of Words" costars Julie Christie, with whom you also worked on Hal Hartley's "No Such Thing." What makes her special to you, enough so that you then cast her in "Away from Her"?


I think she's just one of the most compelling people I've ever met. There's something kind of magical about her and not of this earth. She's been a huge influence on me in every aspect since I met her at 21. Just talking with her is one of the great joys of my life, so I really wanted that to continue. Then when I read this short story by Alice Munro, it was obvious to me that she should play this part. She was really one of the main motivations for me adapting the story.


Now that you've finished your first feature, can you think of any tricks or techniques that you've picked up from some of the incredible filmmakers you've worked with?


In the last few years, since I started making short films, I've treated going to work as an actor as a kind of film school. With Atom [Egoyan], I learned about having a sense of where you're going, and the organization and preparation that goes into something very constructed. Then someone like Isabel, you learn to let go; she's interested in letting things happen and learning things about the story as it goes along. So I'm picking up small things from all these disparate voices, and they come together, but I'm not sure in what way they end up in my films. But I've obviously learned everything I know from these people.


What made you decide you wanted to direct?


I sort of found out by doing it. I always wanted to write, but not screenplays. I had an idea for a short when I was 20, and I made it, sort of just as something to do. And in the process, I just discovered how much I loved it. It wasn't the realization of some lifelong ambition.


Now that you know this about yourself, would you rather direct or act more?


I think I'd like to keep a pretty equal balance. I learn so much from one about the other that it would be crazy to not keep my hand equally in both. And I love the fact that it uses such completely different parts of my brain and personality. Because I'm so new to it and have so much to learn, I think a lot more of my energy will be focused on writing and directing in the next two years, but I'd like it to even out.


Are you working on a new project already? Is "Itchy," about your experiences as a child actor, still a possibility?


I do have something that I'm at the beginning stages of writing. If I manage to make a couple more films, "Itchy" might end up as something I'd like to do down the road. I went through a very different few years trying to get that film made and got beaten up quite badly, so before I return to that, I'd like to have a lot more confidence.



"The Secret Life of Words" opens in New York on December 15th ((official site).

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<![CDATA[2 Good 2 B 4Gotten]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/ifc-news-podcast-7-2-good-2-b.php Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 It's that season when a critic's fancy turns to thoughts of the year end top ten list. This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look back at some of their favorite titles from earlier in the year that deserve to be remembered come listmaking-time.

Download: MP3, 21:38 minutes, 19.8 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20645 2006-12-11 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_7_2_good_2_b publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020645 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[2 Good 2 B 4Gotten (photo)]]> Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020645 2006-12-11 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_7_2_good_2_b_photo inherit 20645 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[On DVD: "4," Lubitsch in Berlin]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/on-dvd-4-lubitsch-in-berlin.php Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "4," Red Envelope/Genius]


Chances are, you never got a chance to see first-timer Ilya Khrjanovsky's film "4" when it was ever so briefly, ever so tentatively "released" earlier this year in a handful of cities for a single week, and to a largely dumbfounded critical community. It's difficult to blame the tabloid reviewers for being clueless — this is a raging, unsettling, rule-incinerating monster of a movie, treating the rules of orthodox narrative like toilet paper and engaging in irreverent structuralist hijinks that'd be hilarious if in fact the film wasn't chilling to the bone. The screenplay is by notorious avant-garde novelist Vladimir Sorokin, who has been attacked and censored in Russia by neo-nationalist groups looking to suppress "dangerous" culture. Even "dangerous" isn't too strong a word for "4," which begins with the static shot of a nightened street where four very tense dogs are sitting, when from outside of the frame, giant hydraulic demolition hammers — four of them — attack the asphalt and send the dogs fleeing. The dogs, in fact, never stop wandering for the rest of the film.


But then we cut to an after-hours bar in which a hooker, a meat wholesaler and a skinhead piano tuner meet (the film does have the structure of a prolonged joke) and proceed to spin fabulous lies to each other; one extraordinary thread involves cloning. But who's lying? At home, the hooker gets a cryptic message and embarks for the post-Soviet frontier, back to a prehistoric village where dolls are made of chewed bread, pagan burial chaos still reigns and only two of the hooker's three identical sisters are still alive.


And so friggin' on. Only 30 during filming, Khrjanovsky is fearless in his devotion to ridiculous ambiguity, possibly meaningless metaphor and long, breath-holding takes. However berserk and bedeviling it might seem on first viewing, "4" has a way of implanting itself in your reptile brain and haunting your daydreams for months afterward. I'll go out on another limb: if you don't face up to the film's quadripartite patterns, betraying subnarratives, drunken techno-dread and derelict Russian wastelands, you have little idea what world cinema is up to lately.


Flashback to Weimar Republic-era Germany, where everyone was nursing the monumental losing-side wounds of WWI and soused with joy over its ending, and where Ernst Lubitsch, future Hollywood studio manager and master-director of American screwball comedies, strode from German theater into the light of world cinema. The new Kino set "Lubitsch in Berlin" contains five films on four discs, each as beautifully designed and wittily executed as the next. This is what comedy looked like during the era of German Expressionism — positively Burtonesque (split the difference between "Beetlejuice" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"), satiric of Art Deco and teeming with startling compositions, none of which ever impedes on the yucks. The famous Lubitsch "touch" hits you in the eye in the best films, which are acted with a distinctly unsilent eloquence, and which may be the funniest silent movies made anywhere without a central clown-star to carry them.


"The Oyster Princess" (1919) — a year before "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" — and "The Wildcat" (1921) are masterful home runs, each set in a slightly off Ruritanian nowhere and each bristling with screwball nuance and sex-farce outrageousness. (Lubitsch always made movies for grown-ups.) The former, a rip on both nouveau riche Americans and Old World royalty, features what must be the greatest musical-comedy number in the history of silents. The latter is set in a militaristically absurd frontier fort beset by a girl-magnet playboy lieutenant (the impossibly deft Paul Heidemann) and a marauding band of bandits led by a wild-haired Pola Negri. "I Don't Want to be a Man" (1920) is a contemporary cross-dresser in which a pissed-off teen (Ossi Oswalda, zaftig queen of Weimar burlesque) puts on a tux and experiences the world as a man. The remaining two films, both made in 1920, are ostensibly serious, though epic and silk-smooth: "Sumurun" is an Arabian-harem dramedy in which Negri plays a renegade sex slave and Expressionist icon Paul Wegener is the seedy old sheikh, while "Anna Boleyn" is a straight-out, big-budget historic tragedy that gives Emil Jannings the destiny-designated opportunity to portray Henry VIII. They may have been the most fecund two-plus years of his career, but in 1922, Lubitsch went to California, and never looked back.




"4" (Red Envelope/Genius) will be available on DVD on December 12th; "Lubitsch in Berlin" (Kino) became available on DVD on December 5th.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 8th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/opening-this-week-december-8th.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Apocalypto," Buena Vista Pictures, 2006]


A round-up of mainstream and indie films opening in theaters this week.


"Apocalypto"

Mel Gibson just can't seem to escape controversy. Following his visually torturous 2004 megahit "The Passion of the Christ" and his drunk driving arrest this past summer in which he slurred the Anti-Semitic Remarks Heard Around the World comes the release of his latest film, in which he details the fall of the Mayan empire through the eyes of a young warrior. Gibson's lost some serious credibility marks in the past few years, so we'll see if "Apocalypto" will be the critical and commercial success he seriously needs.

Opens wide (official site).


"Blood Diamond"

Edward Zwick follows up his extremely mediocre 2003 film "The Last Samurai" with this thriller detailing the illegal diamond trade in Sierra Leone. Expect this film to be entertaining at best (mixed in with some decent Oscar-grubbing) with skilled acting courtesy of Leonardo Di Caprio, Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connelly. The diamond industry's already launched a counter-PR campaign in anticipation of the issues raised by the film.

Opens wide (official site).


"Days of Glory (Indigènes)"

This World War II film details the story of a group of North African soldiers enlisted to fight for the French as a part of an "indigenous" unit. Director Rachid Bouchareb is said to employ every war film cliché in the book for this film, but critics have generally found that the film's modest budget and culturally diverse ensemble cast (which shared the acting prize at Cannes) allow the filmmaker to explore racial conflicts in a war-time setting.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Family Law"

Argentinean director Daniel Burman ("Lost Embrace") directs this family dramedy in which an attorney undergoes an identity crisis when he realizes he's following in the same line of business as his father. Sitcom-like premise aside, the film won the Audience Award at the Mar del Plata Film Festival earlier this year.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Hermanas"

Julia Solomonoff's debut feature tells the story of two Argentinean sisters who meet in 1984 after being separated for nine years. They discover a lost manuscript, written by their father, which details life in Argentina during the dictatorship and reveals numerous family secrets.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Holiday"

It's the holidays, which we guess means another Nancy Meyers rom-com. This time, she enlists Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet as women who are unlucky in love, and who switch their respective houses in time for the Christmas holiday. After their exchange, Diaz makes company with Jude Law in a winter cottage while Winslet finds humor in Jack Black and, in the end...you know what happens. With a serious dearth of Oscar-caliber films this winter, it looks like one of these two leading ladies might pull a Diane Keaton on us and nab a nomination. Our money's on Winslet.

Opens wide (official site).


"Inland Empire"

David Lynch goes digital in his first feature since "Mulholland Drive" and casts Laura Dern, in what's been called a monumental performance, as a married actress who starts an affair with her co-star Justin Theroux. Standard melodrama be damned — reports on the film call it bizarre even by Lynchian standards. Reviews were mixed on the festival circuit, but expect Lynch fans to rave as they usually do while the rest of us just scratch our heads.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Mr. Leather"

Premiering more than two and a half years after its first screening at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Jason Garrett's documentary on South Californian leather culture finally gets a theatrical release. This documentary charts the journeys of nine contestants in the Mr. L.A. Leather contest. Expect bears. Lots and lots of bears.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Off the Black"

Just reading the plot summary for this film gave us the heebie jeebies, but here goes: James Ponsoldt's feature debut is a coming-of-age story about a young teenager (Trevor Morgan) who, unable to forge a relationship with his own distant father (Timothy Sutton), befriends his school umpire, a (disheveled), irascible drunk (Nick Nolte), who wants the boy to pose as his son at a high school reunion. We...just can't picture Nick Nolte playing role model to any young person. Four years later and that mugshot still gives us the creeps.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Screamers"

Let's face it, genocide is ripe fodder for films. From "Schindler's List" to "Hotel Rwanda," massive human murder is just ripe for melodramatic storylines and John Williams scores. International documentarian Carla Garapedian goes the "Night and Fog" route in her latest film about the Armenian genocides of the early 1900s and enlists the help of rock band System of a Down as they tour Europe and the US to spread the message. The film includes numerous musical tracks from the band and images of war-torn Armenia.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"Unaccompanied Minors"

A group of kids are stuck in an airport following a snowstorm on Christmas Eve without a single parent in sight. This year's holiday movies have been awful (think "The Santa Clause 3" and "Deck the Halls," or don't) but this latest is in the careful hands of director Paul Feig, known as the creator of the fantastic "Freaks and Geeks" and the director of numerous episodes of "Arrested Development." Stand-up comedian and "Daily Show" correspondent Lewis Black plays an airport official (and comedic foil), Wilmer Valderrama is a reluctant flight attendant.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[Throwing Out the Book]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/throwing-out-the-book.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: "Yaji + Kita: Midnight Pilgrims," Media Blasters, 2006]


"You know," editor Alison Willmore said to me when I told her about "Yaji + Kita: Midnight Pilgrims," the self-proclaimed "gay samurai biker" film that had a nanosecond-long release in New York and is now available for your pleasure and befuddlement on DVD, "that's actually based on a classic Edo-era story."


No, actually, I didn't know that, but keen as I am on Japanese culture, my knowledge of source materials is spotty — particularly if that material doesn't somewhere incorporate a teenage girl in a tight uniform. No surprise, then, that "Tokaidochu Hizakurige," the actual inspiration for director Kankuro Kudo's manically comic adaptation, was way beneath my radar.


The original novel, written in the early 1800s, follows the comic adventures of two rogues avoiding their wives, debts and responsibility by taking off for a trip down the main road between Edo and Tokyo. Kudo grabbed author Jippensha Ikku's ball and pushed toward the end zone, turning the travelers into gay lovers; plunking them on a motorcycle; peppering the proceedings with song and dance numbers; throwing in references to video games, dinner theater, and cocktail lounges; and breaking the fourth, fifth, and sixth walls in his narrative (at one point, one of the characters winds up in a screening room complaining about the very story he's participating in).


At 124 minutes, it's almost too much weirdness, but Kudo's zeal in breaking past the constraints of his inspiration is infectious. Faithfulness may be fine for human relations, but it's generally murder for films — there's no point in adapting a work if the adapter can't bring his/her own insights, skills and outright quirks to the proceedings. People steadfastly attached to a book have the book, after all — why shouldn't they get out of the way of those who might turn the material into something bigger than the original and better suited for the screen? (Here's looking at you, J.K. Rowling.)


A filmmaker boldly following his/her muse can be a good or a bad thing, but it at least makes for lively conversation as the closing credits roll. Consider:


"Forbidden Planet" (1956): Well, if you're going to do "The Tempest," why not recast Miranda with Anne Francis (she talks to animals!), get your Caliban courtesy of Walt Disney, and turn Ariel into the coolest damn robot what ever clumped across the silver screen? Turns out the Bard cozies up quite comfortably with 1950s spaceships and ray guns, even if the ending speaks more about Cold War anxieties than Elizbethan fantasy.


"Zatoichi" (2003): Original actor Shintaro Katsu turned the adventures of a blind, yet quite lethal, Edo-era traveling masseur into a franchise as dependable (and predictable) as a Big Mac. When Takeshi Kitano took over both acting and directing chores, it was to turn the project into a tightrope act that salted a standard, Ichi-cleans-house scenario with transvestite geishas, a half-naked samurai wannabe, and liberal doses of Three Stooges mayhem. Hang in for the last half hour, when Kitano completely throws caution to the wind, unraveling a key element of the Ichi mythology, intercutting the final defenestrations with a way-anachronous tap-dance number, and orchestrating a final pratfall for the noble warrior.


"The Legend of Bagger Vance" (2000): Hard to tell whether director Robert Redford was being too respectful to the original novel by Steven Pressfield, or just wanted to forget that the tale of a depression-era Southern golfer counseled by a mystical, black caddie was actually based on Hindu text the "Bhagavad Gita" (the DVD's supplemental material, which consistently references a generic mythology, suggests the latter). But if Redford had engaged one-tenth the wit that Pressfield did in naming his protagonist Rannulph Junah (R. Junah — get it?), this film might have risen above its crushing sentimentality to become the golfing movie that even non-golfers could groove on and meditate over.


"The Company of Wolves" (1984): It isn't as if director/co-writer Neil Jordan and writer Angela Carter were the first to discover the psycho-sexual aspects of "Little Red Riding Hood" (you think Tex Avery and Friz Freleng kept dipping into that well because kids would like it?), they just dared to lay it all out in its nocturnal, bestial glory. Setting a fairy tale within a werewolf myth within a fever dream, Jordan just keeps pushing the unhinged imagery (a wizard shows up in a Rolls Royce; bird eggs crack open to reveal tiny, weeping, stone fetuses) until it all seems as wild and instinctual as the adolescent urges the film seeking to portray.


"Yojimbo" (1961) Kurosawa always claimed that his story of a canny samurai pitting two crime clans against each other to deadly results was based on the film version of Dashell Hammett's "The Glass Key." You can't convince me (and many others), that he wasn't also lifting liberally from Hammett's "Red Harvest," which tells almost the same story with a private detective as its protagonist and rum-runners as his targets. Kurosawa was the master of throwing source material into medieval contexts, showing how everything from Shakespearian treachery to hard-boiled violence could easily balance upon a katana blade. There's not a motorcycle or cocktail lounge in sight, but in the cross-fertilization of periods and ideas, the director managed, as do all those who successfully dare to reach beyond the bonds of their inspirations, to show how universal and pertinent a story can become.

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<![CDATA[What's Up In December]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/whats-up-in-december.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Repo Man," Universal Pictures, 1984]


"Babel" with Alejandro González Iñárritu

Dec 1

Mexican director Iñárritu will be on hand at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens for a screening of his latest starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Iñárritu loves movies with multiple, connected storylines, as demonstrated in his two previous films (also screening in the following weeks), the highly underrated "Amores Perros" and the grossly overrated "21 Grams."


The Tenth Annual Festival of New French Cinema

Dec 1-10

This film festival, an annual Chicago tradition, presents up-and-coming French directors and stars in films that will most likely never make it to American shores again. This year's highlights include "Gentilles", the latest from Sophie Fillières; an aging lounge singer played by Gérard Depardieu in "The Singer"; and the brother comedy "Dans Paris" starring Romain Duris, last seen in "The Beat That My Heart Skipped."


Walter Mirisch

Dec 1-31

The Museum of Modern Art in New York presents this retrospective on prolific Hollywood producer Walter Mirisch, who's been in the film business for over sixty years and helped create some of the most memorable American films in history. Films to be screened during this retrospective include "In the Heat of the Night," Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot," and one of Anthony Mann's last Westerns, "Man of the West."


2006 British Television Advertising Awards

Dec 1-30

This long-standing tradition of the Twin Cities continues for another year, presenting the best in British commercials from 2006. One of the highlights for this year's showcase includes Garrison Keillor's (of "A Prairie Home Companion" fame) spots for Honda, the top ad of the past three years. Opening night is expected to sell out as usual.


"Repo Man" with Zander Schloss

Dec 1

Legendary punk icon Zander Schloss, bassist for the Circle Jerks, appears live at the Alamo in Austin, TX for the screening of Alex Cox's "Repo Man," a comedy about repossession, cars, aliens, televangelism, and all things punk rock. Think "SLC Punk," but a bit more in-the-moment and a lot more Harry Dean Stanton.


17th Annual Washington Jewish Film Festival

Dec 2-3

D.C.'s AFI Silver Theatre once again hosts this screening of important films by Jewish filmmakers. This year's films include "Nina's Home," the final film from the late Richard Dembo; the female comedy "You're So Pretty"; and "Steel Toe," starring Oscar nominee David Strathairn as a Jewish lawyer assigned to the case of a racist skinhead.


"Inland Empire" with David Lynch

Dec 2

First screened there during the New York Film Festival, "Inland Empire" returns to the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, followed by a discussion with filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch hopefully will help us answer our questions about his foray into high-definition video, his direction of the fantastic Laura Dern, and what the hell this film is about.


Mondovino: The Series

Dec 2-10

Documentarian Jonathan Nossiter expands upon his 2005 film "Mondovino" with this ten-hour series developed from the cuts of his film. The series chronicles his forays into the world of winemaking and the people behind the industry. Takes place at NYC's MoMA.


Salute to Will Smith

Dec 3

Queen's Museum of the Moving Image presents this black-tie affair and future Bravo telecast highlighting the career of prolific actor, musician, and second-favorite Man in Black Will Smith, just in time for the release of his latest "The Pursuit of Happyness."


A Century Ago: The Films of 1906"

Dec 6

The Academy presents this retrospective on the year of film in 1906, the year when nickelodeons expanded the increasingly popular new entertainment medium and filmmakers continued to push the boundaries of storytelling. In Beverly Hills.


Robert Altman's "California Split"

Dec 6

The late and great Robert Altman's offbeat gambling comedy starring Elliot Gould and George Segal will screen at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford, CT as a part of their Critic's Choice program. Altman sadly passed away late last month; be sure to catch one of his most underrated films.


A Salute to Lupita Tovar

Dec 7

Popular Mexican actress Lupita Tovar receives this salute courtesy of the Academy as they honor one of the most popular Mexican actresses of the silent and early sound days. Tovar starred in the Spanish-language versions of "The Cat Creeps" and "Dracula," conducting their filming at night while their English counterparts filmed during daylight, and, most notably, the Mexican sound film "Santa," the first popular sound film produced in Mexico using the newly developed Rodriguez Sound System. Tovar would go on to start a family of filmmakers, including producer son Pancho Kohner, actress daughter Susan Kohner, and writer-director grandsons Paul and Chris Weitz. Takes place at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.


Spanish Cinema Now!

Dec 8-26

Following the popular reception of Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" and Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth", 2006 appears to be the Year of Spanish Cinema. NYC's Film Society of Lincoln Center presents the year's best films in Spanish cinema, sans Almodóvar and del Toro, with this month-long program. Highlights include Agustín Díaz Yanes' "Alatriste" starring Viggo Mortensen in yet another swordsman hero role; Antonio Chavarrías' update on the film noir in "Celia's Lives," and Esteve Riambau and Elisabet Cabeza's Spanish Civil War-set fantasy adventure "The Magicians."


Peter Mintun's Movietone Follies of 2007

Dec 11

We love the combination of live music and film. Pianist and pop culture historian Peter Mintun conducts the history of the Fox studio's music and song from its earliest Movietone scores for silent movies to the Golden Age of the Fox musical — expect this one to be fun. At New York's Film Forum.


An Evening with Oliver Stone and "World Trade Center"

Dec 11

Oliver Stone will be at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to discuss what some have called his most controversial film to date, citing a strictly conservative filmmaking style that counters many of his previous radical works. Hopefully Stone will explain exactly why he believes "respectful" filmmaking also includes heavy-handed melodrama.


The Pink Panther Films

Dec 15-16

Forget that dreadful Steve Martin film from last year that sullied the reputation of the Pink Panther. The American Cinematheque at Santa Monica's Aero Theater presents the original (and far more humorous) Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers Pink Panther films of the 1960s and 70s. Sellers' Inspector Clouseau is still one of the greatest characters to ever grace, slip, stumble, and fall over the cinematic screen.

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<![CDATA["Breaking and Entering"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/review-breaking-and-entering.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Breaking and Entering," Weinstein Co., 2006]


Like a lot of movies lately, Anthony Minghella's "Breaking and Entering" proposes that all rich, successful white people are, in fact, wildly miserable, and that the criminals who intrude on their seemingly perfect (but secretly terrible) lives are a great deal more complex than they imagine them to be. But this discouragingly "Crash"-ian premise slowly develops into an impressively un-"Crash"-ian film of subtle acting and surprising humanity.


Since films like these work on equivalences, the story is perched between two symmetrical immigrant families living in London. Swedish-American Liv (Robin Wright Penn) struggles to relate to and understand her possibly autistic 13-year-old daughter Bea (Poppy Rogers), while Serbian-Muslim Amira (Juliette Binoche) can't control her slightly older son Miro (Rafi Gavron). Social status determines whether poor behavior manifests itself in unacceptable ways: Liv and Bea live in interior-decorated splendor, and Bea receives therapy, gymnastic lessons and all-around coddling to cope with her disorders; Amira's job as a seamstress and tailor barely provides for her son, and she has neither the time nor the energy to follow through on her threats when she suspects Miro is falling in with a Serbian gang of thieves.


Will, played by Jude Law, brings the two families together when his plush architecture firm's new offices in seedy King's Row are burgled by Miro. His home life with Liv and her daughter a constant struggle, he becomes obsessed with the break-in as a means of escape — he pays a prostitute (classy-but-sexy supporting actress du jour Vera Farmiga, who occupied a similar place in the narrative of Scorsese's "The Departed") to act as a low-rent therapist. "Are you happy?" she asks. "Happy enough," he replies with pouted lips. Will's attitudes are subconsciously embedded in his architectural designs, which cover over social problems instead of fixing them.


Thus is the way of what may as well be called "malaise porn," where audiences who feel guilty about their own financial success can wallow in the misery of people who work too hard while desperately searching for love and happiness while ignoring the love and happiness right in front of them all along. No one in malaise porn ever enjoys their work, or their spouses, or children, until they royally screw up all of those things and suddenly realize the errors of their ways. "Breaking and Entering" adheres to all of those tenets, particularly early in the film, but Will's dilemma gets particularly interesting once he catches Miro in the act of raiding his office and follows him home. Though it makes little sense why he wouldn't turn the robber in, he doesn't, and instead begins to insinuate himself into Amira's life.


At that point we expect melodrama to follow, but Minghella has other, better ideas. Actors are often described as being cast "against type." The phrase is never used for directors but, in this case, it should be: "Breaking and Entering"'s final act is far more effective than it otherwise might be, simply because of Minghella and our expectations about how an "Anthony Minghella film" should look and sound. He teases tawdry outcomes like blackmail or murder, but settles instead for understanding and honesty. Out of the malaise porn comes something refreshingly truthful.



"Breaking and Entering" opens in New York and L.A. on December 15th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Daniel Burman on "Family Law"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/daniel-burman-on-family-law.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Family Law," IFC Films, 2006]


According to Argentine director Daniel Burman, most of life's problems originate with our parents — more specifically, our fathers. "When I started to date, I realized that all the relationships that didn't go well were ones where on the first date, the girl would talk about her father," he says. "The woman I ended up marrying didn't talk about her father until maybe six months after we met."


Burman's latest film, the warm comedy "Family Law," talks a lot about fathers and sons and the ways in which generations of men struggle to relate to one another. Daniel Hendler plays Perelman, a young attorney and law professor grappling with fatherhood and living in the shadow of his more successful father (played by Arturo Goetz). Burman — who cast his own 2-year-old son as Perelman's precocious offspring — took a break from writing his next film to speak to us about his own struggles as a father and a director.


Where did the idea for the film originate?


It came from my own experience of becoming a father, when I was watching the way that the bond between the mother of my child and my son formed so quickly. It was a physical bond and a spontaneous bond. It makes it seem like a woman has always been a mother her whole life, whereas fathers have to work to form the link with our sons.


This is your third film [after "Waiting for the Messiah" (2000) and "Lost Embrace" (2005)] on the subject of fatherhood. Why is this subject so important to you?


I could make films about this topic for my whole life. This film is about the search for one's own identity, and building a bond with our parents and with our children is the first step towards that. It's very difficult to know who we are if we don't know who our parents are. It's something that I didn't invent — Freud discovered it a long time ago.


You've made several films. Does making films get easier or more difficult as your career progresses?


It's easier to do the movie in some ways, and harder to do the movie in some ways. It's easier to get the resources, but when everything is ready and you have fifty people asking you questions, it makes each movie harder, because people tell you less about what they really think. It's something you always have to work on; you could be working with someone who knows that you've done five different films and they might think you're doing something wrong, but they won't say it to you, because they're going to think "Well he knows what he's doing," but many times I don't!


How does the film industry in Argentina differ from that of the United States?


It's much easier to make a movie in Argentina than in America, because there are no lawyers, agents, or managers. You just have the movie. That's the good side; the bad side is that the market is very small. In the U.S., you have the risk of whether the film will be a success, but you have a potential for success that is limitless. In Argentina, the difference between a success and a failure is very subtle. If it goes well for you, you can maybe paint your house and maybe get a new car. If you have success in the U.S., it changes your life and the next generation's life.


Your film is one of several from Argentina to be released in the United States in 2006, including "The Aura" and "The Holy Girl." Is this a particularly exciting moment for cinema in Argentina, or has this culture always existed and Americans are just realizing it now?


This is a moment of a lot of energy and movement in Argentina, but it's also because we've been able to get past some of the hurdles to putting movies out in the U.S.


Americans are not used to reading when they see a film. It's something that's very hard to get past. When you go to the movies in Europe, everyone's reading the film — it's normal in Europe. It's not something that's going to stop you from seeing a film. But here it is.


Why do fathers and sons have such a difficult time communicating?


It might sound scandalous to say, but I don't think paternity is a natural bond. It's very much a social bond, a more cultural bond than that of the mother. It's difficult because we look at the women and we see how they do it so easily even without thinking about it, and we're over there reading books and talking to our children and we always do it wrong. Whatever you do, you're going to be a bad father! My objective is to be the least bad father that I can be.



"Family Law" opens in New York on December 8th (official site).

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<![CDATA[A Lynchian Line-up]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/a-lynchian-lineup.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis, Michelle Orange, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "Eraserhead," Absurda/ Subversive, 1977]


[Listen to our podcast on "Inland Empire"]


David Lynch's latest film, "Inland Empire," may be the first film that greets the auteur of oddness' legacy with a wink and a self-acknowledging nod. For years, Lynch has made a career of defying expectations with a determinations that's lead him to make films that are startlingly opaque (see "Lost Highway") or even more startlingly accessible (see the first entry below). Most memorable may be his characters — beautiful freaks, larger-than-life ingénues and inexplicable entities that immediately lodge themselves in your memory. Below are some of our favorites from the Lynchian line-up.



Alvin Straight

"The Straight Story" (1999)


It's hard for me to pick a favorite David Lynch character, not because there are so many to choose from but because so many of them are less characters and more squirming snippets of our subconscious made walking, talking flesh; it almost seems too revealing.
I considered Laura Palmer, the ubiquitous corpse of "Twin Peaks" fame, and though I can't deny she's right up there (has a plastic shroud ever worked so hard?), ultimately that choice seemed too cheeky, too Lynchian. In my heart of hearts, it's Alvin Straight who's my favorite, the cranky, proud, heartbreaking Iowa widower who rides his '66 John Deere tractor across state lines to visit his dying brother and end their ten year feud. "The Straight Story" was released by Disney (!) in 1999, and Richard Farnsworth's performance as Alvin Straight was hailed as a marvel of strength, understatement, and warmth — of character; he almost managed to overshadow Lynch's departure from form, a stylistic z-turn that almost zagged right back around to subversive (again: Disney!). 80-year-old Farnsworth was nominated for an Oscar for his role, and it came to light that he had been fighting terminal cancer all the way through the shoot; the poor man shot himself six months later. —Michelle Orange



The Baby

"Eraserhead" (1977)


To this day, David Lynch refuses to describe how he created the monstrous infant that's dropped unceremoniously into the dystopic bachelor life being led by Henry Spencer (Jack Nance). Embalmed cow fetus or not, the baby has always been for me the most indelibly Lynchian character, a nightmare vision of the perils of parenting, sex or maybe just human contact in general. The baby, at once a ridiculous phallic symbol and a parasitic mutant, appears after Mary's (Charlotte Stewart) alarmingly brief pregnancy ("Mother, they're still not sure it is a baby!"). Given that Henry greets the world through a fog of mild bemusement, it takes a lot to shake him out of his stupor, but his constantly crying, pustule-covered deformed child does eventually manage it, chasing Mary away and driving Henry to make the unfortunate discovery that the bandages in which it's swaddled are actually holding its organs in. It's a gruesome metaphor: parenting as both a hazard-filled path down which one must blindly make one's way, and as a trap that leaves you hovering in a permanent purgatory of responsibility. "Eraserhead" was supposedly inspired in part by Lynch's impending first-time fatherhood — if that's so, it's amazing he managed any offspring at all. —Alison Willmore



Cousin Dell

"Wild at Heart" (1990)


Sticking Elvis, "The Wizard of Oz," and other Americana under the wheel of a road trip to Hell, Lynch's underappreciated Palme d'Or winner (and in my opinion, his masterpiece!) begat nearly as many wonderfully warped characters as the whole "Twin Peaks" prime-time run. There's snakeskin-tailored hound dog Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and his star-crossed trash kitten Lula (Laura Dern); her wicked mommie dearest (real-life mama Diane Ladd); the disturbingly sleazy yet funny sociopath Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe); Laura Palmer herself as the ethereal Good Witch (Sheryl Lee); and we'll never know what the hell is up with Double-O Spool (the late Jack Nance), a twitchy fella who caustically proclaims a non-existent dog is always with him. So it's a true feat to stand out as the most memorable in a cast this collectively outlandish, and cult-hero hellion Crispin Glover pulls it off with less than two minutes of screen time, one line of dialogue, and a whole lot of screaming. In bed with Sailor, Lula narrates a post-coital "story with a lesson about bad ideas," prompting flashback snippets to her cousin "Jingle" Dell (Glover), first seen being escorted home in a filthy Santa suit by the police. When his mother tells him that it's summer and nowhere near Christmastime, Dell twists his feet into the bathroom mat and shrieks like something alien. He squirms in awkwardly precise slow-motion after putting cockroaches in his underwear, gets caught squishing dozens of sandwiches in the middle of the night (when the light comes on, Dell double-pounds the counter: "I'M MAKING MY LUNCH!"), and cries from the living room corner while poking what he thinks is a sinister rubber glove with a yardstick. As Glover recalls in a vintage featurette on the DVD, "David said if I let that glove go, it would be really, really bad. And I understood what he meant by that." Don't let anyone convince you Glover's nervous eccentricity is a Lynchian calculation; that guy's the real deal. —Aaron Hillis



The Cowboy

"Mulholland Dr." (2001)


"The Cowboy" (Monty Montgomery) is a straight shooter. Inviting hotshot director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) to join him for an intimate rendezvous at the local abandoned corral, he gently forces him to hire one Camilla Rhodes as his lead actress — or else. Deathly pale, donning an oversized ten-gallon hat, and speaking in a disconnected monotone, he's a ghost of Hollywood past, a shriveled (but still powerful) representative of old-time studio strong-arm tactics. Skewering Kesher's "smart-aleck" attitude, he diplays the moral certitude of a Randolph Scott hero, here used to nightmarish effect as an agent of a shadowy producer's cabal. Lynch then lifts his influence to the metaphysical, as The Cowboy's whisper "Time to Wake Up" marks Naomi Watts' identity swap of the gold-hearted Betty for the conniving jealousies of Diane. Interestingly, Montgomery was an associate producer for the "Twin Peaks" pilot as well as for "Wild at Heart," so his character speaks with self-reflexive authority. —R. Emmet Sweeney



Jeffrey Beaumont

"Blue Velvet" (1986)


Though he would later become one of Hollywood's most sexually adventurous actors (not for nothing does he appear as the male lead in Paul Verhoeven's "Showgirls"), there is something downright wholesome about Kyle MacLachlan when he arrives in Lumberton at the start of "Blue Velvet." Like a Hardy Boy who doesn't realize he's in the middle of an adventure (possibly one guest written by the Marquis de Sade), he stumbles into town after his father's collapse and finds the severed ear that turns the whole plot on its, er, ear. Every time I watch "Blue Velvet" I marvel at MacLachlan's air of innocence: he not only seems impossibly pure of body and spirit, he seems (as we are) totally unaware of where the story is going. All actors are supposed to act as if they've never read the film's screenplay; MacLachlan's the rare one who convincingly pulls it off. When he's hiding in Isabella Rossellini's closet and he starts watching, really watching her, there's no telling what will happen next. And Dennis Hopper hasn't even showed up yet. —Matt Singer

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<![CDATA["Symbiopsychotaxiplasm," the Wim Wenders Box]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/on-dvd-symbiopsychotaxiplasm-t.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One," Criterion]


A legendary but unreleased phantom from the crazy, hazy summer of 1968 that finally got a nominal theatrical release last year, William Greaves' "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One" may be the ultimate paradigm of self-reflexive cinema, eating Godard's tail for him and one-upping the classic Chuck Jones anti-cartoon "Duck Amuck" by submitting to a natural entropy and a self-inquiry so relentless the movie never moves from square one. The suave, implacably jovial Greaves plays Greaves playing a vague indie filmmaker shooting a film about marital rupture in Central Park. With three mutually interrogating cameras going at all times, the set and surrounding passersby (including cops) get folded into the meta-vérité mix, which is often prismed out for us as a split-screen triptych. Eventually, the discontented and cerebral crew begin filming themselves complaining about Greaves (and his script) when he's not there, scenes that are sometimes cut up by Greaves later on — in entire chunks of the film, shooting and editing are actions in deep conflict with each other. Or so it's made to seem, or made to seem possible. "Stop acting!" someone hollers early on; the magical moment when we see two simultaneous shots get refocused on distractions (a squad car, the actress' legs) is trumped only by the sound team's scathing critique of Greaves's "acting" — on and off-camera.


Was it life, Memorex or something else? Bewitched by the process of turning our perception of movies and the priorities of a viewer's "knowledge" inside out, Greaves had no intentions of stopping: as the title implies, "Take One" was supposed to only the first of up to five movies derived from the same pool of '68 footage, of which there is presumably a great amount. The project never happened that way; instead, Greaves spent the decades on smaller films (many of them educational), and only in 2005 did a second "take" emerge at the Sundance Film Festival ("2 1/2," actually), produced by Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi, adding the passage of time to its hall of mirrors, and featuring contemporary footage about the history of the first film folded into the batter. Aptly, Criterion rescues both "Symbiopsychotaxiplasms" for good from the dark vault of moviegoing amnesia, on two discs, with additional interviews, docs and Greaves's own production notes.


Another veteran of the Nixon-'Nam postwar culture tussles, Wim Wenders was once a legitimate rival for the New German Cinema kingship alongside Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He has since spent over a decade in Hollywood, falling in love with California, Sam Shepard, noir clichés and roadhouse jukebox music, only to return to Germany last year, but if one need be reminded of Wenders's once prodigious talents, or if one remembers acutely where they were when they first saw "The American Friend" (1977) or "Wings of Desire" (1987), then one could do worse, at holiday gift time, then to cunningly mention the new eight-disc Wenders box to your shopping-crazed loved ones. Adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, "Friend" is a masterful, oddly epochal tale of criminal doom (starring Dennis Hopper as the titular, untrustworthy acquaintance, and Bruno Ganz as a principled frame craftsman sucked into underworld business) that is at the same time bouncy with in-jokes and cinephilic references. But the box also rolls out with Wenders's deeply strange and confrontational adaptation of "The Scarlet Letter" (1972); the Peter Handke-scripted (from Goethe!) "Wrong Move" (1975); the ailing-Nicholas Ray-codirected semi-doc and homage "Lightning Over Water" (1980); the famous non-fiction essays "Tokyo-Ga" (1985) and "Notebook on Cities and Clothes" (1989), and more. Supps include a shotgun spray of deleted scenes, commentaries, new interviews and trailers, as well as a videotaped lecture by Ray and a booklet on all eight films by critic Godfrey Cheshire.




"Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One" (Criterion) and "The Wim Wenders Collection, Vol. 2" (Anchor Bay) will be available on DVD on December 5th.

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<![CDATA[Deep into "Inland Empire"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/12/ifc-news-podcast-6-deep-into-i.php Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we delve into "Inland Empire," the new, three-hour, digitally shot film from director David Lynch. "Inland Empire" opens in New York on December 6th and makes its way around the country from there -- Lynch is distributing and promoting the film himself with the help of a...cow.

Download: MP3, 18:37 minutes, 17 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20636 2006-12-04 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_6_deep_into_i publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020636 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Deep into "Inland Empire" (photo)]]> Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020636 2006-12-04 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_6_deep_into_i_photo inherit 20636 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["The Nativity Story"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/ifc-news-podcast-5.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look at "The Nativity Story," the Christian-themed film from director Catherine Hardwicke, best known for her gritty debut "Thirteen." "The Passion," the prequel? "The Nativity Story" attempts to bridge the gap between the churchgoing crowd and the arthouse crowd.

Download: MP3, 18:08 minutes, 16.6 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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<![CDATA["The Nativity Story" (photo)]]> Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020635 2006-11-27 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_5_photo inherit 20635 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Turistas" and Fox Atomic]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/turistas-and-fox-atomic.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michelle Orange

IFC News


[Photo: "Turistas," Fox Atomic, 2006]


In a recent piece about the "torture porn" trend in horror films, New York magazine critic David Edelstein had a great line about the ever-escalating attempts to shock an audience, writing that "in the quest to have a visceral impact, actual viscera are the final frontier." One would hope, one would hope; but now that "Shortbus" has worked explicit sex into a pseudo-romantic comedy, the third installment of the "Saw" franchise ($350 million and counting) has been banned to minors in France, of all places, for its beyond-the-pale depictions of torture and dismemberment, "Hostel 2" is on the way, and "Jackass Number 2" has done its business, could the mainstreaming of snuff films be next? After all, if the actual viscera actually belongs to a chicken or a mountain goat, isn't there still one frontier to go?


Let's postpone that gruesome question for a moment and consider the endeavor of "Fox Atomic," 20th Century Fox's new teen-oriented film studio. Lionsgate's marketing chief Tim Palen has been quoted as calling the current torture genre craze "a gold mine" and Fox Atomic was created with the expressed intention of cashing in; their first release, "Turistas," opens this week, their second release, the Wes Craven-penned "The Hills Have Eyes 2" in March and "28 Days Later" sequel "28 Weeks Later" in May. Peter Rice, the head of the division, has made his mandate clear: low-budget teen comedies and torture flicks that rely almost exclusively on online and "viral" marketing to create a brand around not just the films but the studio itself. You know a trend has reached saturation point when a whole studio is devised in its service.


"Turistas," a fairly standard teen slasher flick that splices in (forgive me) the now de rigeur scenes of slow and steady unanesthetized surgery, also caters to the new xenophobia (with "Hostel" as its advent and apotheosis) wherein the risks of travel include not just losing your luggage but one or two of your major organs. "Go Home" is the tag line on "Turistas"'s movie poster, and it works as either an ominous threat from Ugly American-loathing foreigners or a word of advice from Americans — i.e. the filmmakers — who know better. The "hero unveils a drawer full of passports" scene is a loaded and usually chilling trope in any number of genres — the spy movie, sci-fi thriller, historical drama, um, "Fletch" — and when it makes an appearance in "Turistas," the effect is familiar but offers a new and naive twist of dread: if only they'd just stayed put.


When three young and underclothed Americans (Josh Duhamel, Olivia Wilde, playing brother and sister, and Beau Garrett) are stranded after a bus accident in rural Brazil, they make a series of bad, lemming-like decisions that ultimately lead them into the home of a very angry Brazilian surgeon who deals in human organs on the black market. One of the first bad decisions is made by Garrett, when she blithely unharnesses her bodacious ta-ta's on a public beach and inevitably marks herself, in the fine teen slasher, sex-equals-death tradition, as the first one to die. The Americans pick up a couple of Brits and an Australian from the bus and decide to stay on a secluded beach for the night, but they are drugged and robbed by what seems like an entire village of crafty Brazilians — even the little children — in preparation for their delivery to the doctor.


The two Brits — ogle-eyed and dopey, hoping to engage in a little harmless sex tourism — chose Brazil because it has the highest per capita ratio of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, and all of the clichés are in place (Spanish, Portuguese, whatever), as the bumbling gringos make cutesy faces over air kissing and offend the locals by taking snaps of their kids. Relatively harmless offenses, but when two lily-white turistas are carted through the jungle, strung up on stakes like pigs, the image panders to an American's worst fears not only about what foreigners think of them, but what they would do, given a clean shot and a couple of roofies.


Those fears are of course made explicit by the doctor, as he is gutting the breast-barer and waxing acidic on his calling to punish Americans for their greed, their temerity in coming to his country to dance and drink and have sex. Though he relishes the idea of "the heart of an arrogant, gringo tourist" beating in a Brazilian, the ticker doesn't travel so well, so he has to stick mainly with the liver and kidneys. Don't ever tell your mom the plot of this movie.


Of course all of the messages are mixed and muddled and crude; Brazil's ministry of tourism won't be toasting any caipirinhas over the film, though there is a brief shot of some nice Brazilians pretty much as the credits roll. While cleaving to both the key elements of teen horror and the genre's new fascination with torture, "Turistas" is a relatively tame entry on the gag-scale — it certainly doesn't bring us any closer to the snuff frontier than its predecessors — and is more explicit in its depiction of Americans floundering outside of their comfort zone, almost completely hapless at the mercy of foreigners who hate them by default. Lest this be a dishearteningly heady assessment to the torture porn-mongers at Fox Atomic, let me also say that "Turistas" has finally won an endorsement from bloody-disgusting.com, and believe it or not, that's a good thing.

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<![CDATA[The Long Goodbye]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/the-long-goodbye.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis, Michelle Orange, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore


[Photo: "A Prairie Home Companion," Picturehouse, 2006]


When Robert Altman passed away last week at the age of 81, it put an end to one of the most innovative and diverse careers in the history of American film. Though he made movies that became cultural touchstones — 1975's "Nashville" and his breakthrough, 1970's "M*A*S*H" — Altman wasn't afraid to make a movie just for himself if he believed in it passionately enough. Even die-hard fans have Altman movies that leave them scratching their heads, be they his death-by-apocalyptic-board game boondoggle "Quintet" or his goofy Max Fleisher homage "Popeye" (to name a few of mine). But Altman's unpredictability made him more lovable and made being an Altman fan exciting: you never knew what was coming next. He was just as likely to chronicle a year in the life in a ballet troupe (in "The Company") as he was to adapt a John Grisham novel ("The Gingerbread Man").


In my review of "A Prairie Home Companion" a few months ago, I called Altman "the cinema's greatest tourist," in that he would test a new genre or an unusual topic, make his mark, and move on. He redefined the Western ("McCabe & Mrs. Miller"), the private eye story ("The Long Goodbye") and the parlor game mystery ("Gosford Park"), and tried everything from musical to sci-fi to romantic comedy to biopic. He wasn't too much of a snob to work in television, and with his landmark political mock-doc series, "Tanner '88" he practically reinvented it. For any other filmmaker, that could have defined a career. For Altman, that might not make his personal top five.


In Altman's final film, 2006's "A Prairie Home Companion," Virginia Madsen, who plays a radiantly beautiful angel of death, says "the death of an old man is not a tragedy." The IFC News team begs to differ. Because Altman's filmmography is so variegated, everyone has their own favorite. Here, we present ours. —Matt Singer



"California Split" (1974)


Bill (George Segal) and Charlie (Elliott Gould) bet on everything: poker, horses, fights, even their respective knowledge of the complete cast of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" ("Sleepy, Grumpy, Doc..." says Bill. "That's four," says Charlie. "That's three," says Bill). The stars are so utterly charismatic, their free-flowing and largely improvised conversations so irresistibly charming, that we've fallen in love with them before we realize that they are basically degenerates who enable each other's compulsive gambling. "California Split," eternally overshadowed by Altman's next picture (that'd be "Nashville") is one of the most powerful movies ever made on the topic of luck, both good and bad, and how one can quickly slip into the other. The idea begins with the title itself, which appears in the credits along with a graphic that shows a diamond flush draw spoiled by a spade. And while our heroes' luck waxes and wanes, Altman offers us glimpses of how their good or bad fortune impacts seemingly minor characters around them, whose brief but powerful appearances suggest whole lives that exist beyond their few scenes (one of the director's particular specialties), like the woman Charlie talks out of betting on a horse that eventually wins its race, or the girl who innocently interrupts Bill's once-in-a-lifetime shoot at the craps table to bet on her birthday. Altman, at his most self-consciously playful, repeatedly toys with our emotions and subverts our expectations. The movie builds to a high stakes poker game in Reno — Altman barely shows it. And the climax is so beautifully and poetically tragic not because Bill and Charlie lose, but because they get everything they've always wanted and discover that everything they've always wanted simply isn't enough. —MS



"The Long Goodbye" (1973)


Wherein the title of my favorite Altman film conveys the cinephile's healing process. Maybe "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" or "Nashville" or even "3 Women" is his masterpiece, but nothing in his honest-to-god oeuvre makes me giddier than this sunny California anti-noir, starring Elliott Gould as an anachronistic reinvention of Raymond Chandler's private dick Marlowe, one foot still in the 40s and the other in the Sexual Revolution. Exhaling line after brilliantly thrown-away line through a half-mumble and a cloud of cigarette smoke, Gould's trademark "that's okay with me" could almost be happy-go-lucky if he weren't always on the chump's end of an ass-kicking, crackin' wise 'til his deadpan bleeds. What's great about rewatching vintage Altman is that it's always through his camera eye and reel-to-reel ear. Clearly, Gould was in peak form as an improviser this decade (see also: "M*A*S*H" and "California Split"), but it's the director who provides the bounce, that easygoing momentum that allows his cast to be so loose and nimble. Then his instincts decide where to focus, revealing happy surprises that feel precise: The film starts, Marlowe's hungry kitty jumps on his chest while he's asleep, and I laugh every time. A vicious gangster suddenly slashes his girlfriend's face with a Coke bottle to prove a nasty point ("That's someone I love, and you I don't even like"), and though I know it's coming, I flinch every time. When an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger turns up as a henchman, wearing only a porno moustache and yellow man-panties, well... I laugh AND flinch every time. —Aaron Hillis



"Nashville" (1975)


To say that "Nashville" is the movie that made me love Altman is ridiculously flimsy, like saying "Let It Bleed" is one of the Rolling Stones' better albums, or that Arthur Miller is one of the top 50 most important American playwrights. But there's a reason that "Nashville" is canonical — it is the essential Altman sprawl, one that's almost aggressively unwelcoming at the beginning in its unwillingness to settle into a narrative. There are dozens of characters, each drawn in with strange, sharp strokes — Lily Tomlin's gospel-singing, adulterous housewife; Ronee Blakley's brittle country star; Shelley Duvall's vacant-eyed visiting groupie; Keith Carradine's sadistic ladies' man — and not one of them afforded more sympathy or focus than the next. And yet, halfway through, what seems a somewhat removed portrait of a time and place becomes something greater and remarkably warmer. Maybe it comes with the realization that we, as the audience, are as enfolded in the film as any of its characters, all but one of which seem ready to willfully bustle on long after the credits have rolled. Maybe it's that the wide-angle take turns from observant to completely caught up, as if it were all the camera could do to keep up with the teeming minutiae of moment-to-moment living. Or maybe it's that the chaos converges marvelously into one of the greatest endings ever given to a film. When Barbara Harris launches into "It Don't Worry Me" (an anthem more appropriate now than ever), it's hard to imagine a scene that more perfectly, reprovingly, lovingly and joyously encapsulates America. Just writing about it gives me goosebumps. —Alison Willmore



"A Prairie Home Companion" (2006)


"A Prairie Home Companion" is the sweetest of elegies, mourning the death of an art form and it's creator with wit and pratfall. It's the final performance of Garrison Keillor's romanticized Midwestern radio variety show, and Altman orchestrates his patented multi-character tableau with generous expertise, his elegant backstage tracking shots and sprinkles of magical realism (in the person of a haloed Virgina Madsen) uniting the actors' manic maneuverings. The warm gold tones of Edward Lachman's cinematography envelops the performers in a frame of ready-made nostalgia, their performances an instant memorial to a time already past. Each song becomes a folksy, bouncy dirge. It's a set-up that could turn sickly sweet, as Keillor's stock in trade is broad caricatures of small town types, but the cast is uniformly superb, enriching each stock figure with sharp humor and deep wells of pathos. Maya Rudolph creates a complete character through the chewing of gum, Kevin Kline acts the fool with suave buffoonery, and Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin trade loving gibes between cracked harmonies. Altman's final work may be his most optimistic, shedding much of his previous cynicism and embracing a pragmatic and deeply hopeful view of the resiliency of popular art. —R. Emmet Sweeney



"Short Cuts" (1993)


With "Short Cuts," Robert Altman revisited the interwoven narrative structure that brought him so much success with "Nashville," and yet it's the former film's moment, story, and setting — combined to create a perfect storm of style serving subject — that sets directors imitating to this very day. From "Happiness" to, perhaps most notably, "Magnolia," on to Iñáarritu' s "Amores Perros," "21 Grams" and "Babel," to "Traffic" and "Me and You and Everyone We Know," this month's "Fast Food Nation" and television's "Six Degrees," the stylistic shorthand of overlapping narratives as a reflection of the irony and bittersweetness of pre- and post-millennial alienation has only gained momentum since Altman made what is certainly one of the best examples of the form.


L.A. plays itself in "Short Cuts," though the Raymond Carver stories that inspired it were set in the Pacific Northwest. It's a very specific choice, and the 22 principal characters (the film won a special ensemble Golden Globe), whose stories smoothly intersect or reluctantly collide, suggest both the urban sprawl of Los Angeles as a symptom of the country's larger loss of community, and the private fiefdoms Americans were getting better and better at creating. Indeed, only a year or two after the film was released, our computers were where an ever-increasing number of us truly lived. That's the most remarkable thing about "Short Cuts": how prescient it feels now. Altman pinpointed a collective malaise and disaffection, after the L.A. riots and on the cusp of an economic boom, that evolved into entitlement (to "happiness" and fame, if not money), loneliness and rage — a new holy trinity of the American psyche. —Michelle Orange

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: December 1st, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/opening-this-week-december-1st.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "3 Needles," Wolfe Releasing, 2006]


A round-up of the indie and indie-ish films opening in theaters this week.


"10 Items or Less"

Stop the presses. Morgan Freeman moves on from that same supporting role he's been cast in for the past decade or so and plays the lead in this small indie about a... well... major movie star whose pickiness for screen roles lands him in Paz Vega's small ethnic supermarket for research. Vega offers Freeman a ride home, the two learn about lots of stuff on the car ride back, and we continue to miss the Freeman of the "Shawshank" days. Challenge us, Morgan!

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"3 Needles"

"The Hanging Garden"'s Thom Fitzgerald directed and wrote this film containing three stories revolving around the theme of global epidemic — the film's release coincides with the anniversary of the World AIDS Day. Shawn Ashmore stars as a Canadian porn star suffering from HIV, while Lucy Liu plays a reckless blood buyer in China, and Olympia Dukakis, Chloe Sevigny, and Sandra Oh are a trio of Catholic nuns trying to care for those infected in Africa.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"National Lampoon's Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj"

One of the lamer college comedies of recent years gets an unnecessary sequel this week, but with "Harold and Kumar"'s Kal Penn as the film's main character, Taj Mahal Badalandabad might be more than a one-note stereotype (amidst all the beer and boobs and farts, of course).

Opens wide (official site).


"The Nativity Story"

Nevermind the fact that Catherine Hardwick previously directed a film about boozin' and druggin' teenage girls and that star Keisha Castle-Hughes is sixteen and pregnant, "The Nativity Scene" is expected to be sugar and fluff all the way through. The film chronicles the journey of Mary and Joseph as they give birth to a baby boy who may or may not be the son of God. We're still not sure, but we're expecting it to be a lot more pleasant to sit through than "The Passion."

Opens wide (official site).


"Turistas"

Director John Stockwell is used to filming hot people in wet and sweaty environments, as he did recently with "Into the Blue" and "Blue Crush." Apparently, now he gets to kill those people in his latest. As a terrifying bus accident maroons a group of young travelers in the Brazilian jungle, they start to discover that the jungle hosts a terrifying secret. It's kinda like "Hostel" meets "Lost," except for the part where we care.

Opens wide (official site).


"Two Weeks"

Writer and director Steven Stockman casts Ben Chaplin, Thomas Cavanagh, Julianne Nicholson and Glenn Howerton as siblings who gather at their dying mother's house for one quick, last goodbye but wind up trapped together for two weeks. Somewhere in this comedy is a tad bit of melodrama, I'm expecting, but with Sally Field playing the mother of the family, this film looks promising. It releases this week for Oscar competition in LA before a wider release next March.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA["Tribulation 99," the Superman serials]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/on-dvd-tribulation-99-the-supe.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Tribulation 99," Other Cinema/Facets]


A subterranean poet of paranoia, bricolage wizard Craig Baldwin makes movies out of yesteryear's garbage celluloid that are half radical firestorm and half psychotic poppycock. The mixture is virtually self-defining: cheap cultural flotsam emerging from Frankenstein surgery with a boggled head of Freudian free-associations and an insurrectionary temper. Each time he redefines a chunk of educational film or government agitprop or Mexican horror flick, he is questioning what the images mean, how absurd their original intentions were, and how their political power can be used not for oppressive evil but for good — or, at least, sardonic hijinks.


A radical anti-establishmentarian, Baldwin is less pedantic than he is pulp-satiric, and the movies are endlessly unpackable. His most famous film, "Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America," is also his masterpiece: a breathless, fevered screed in 99 chapters that details the tapestry of 20th century history as it has been influenced and manipulated by the inner-earth-dwelling Quetzals. The story, illustrated by pirated sci-fi movies, military PSAs, TV commercials and school-science reels, intersects with the CIA, Howard Hughes, Fidel Castro (seen as a skid-row Bible-class Jesus), Manuel Noriega, Ronald Reagan, Atlantis, Pinochet, Kissinger, E. Howard Hunt, the Mayan empire, United Fruit, the Bush family, Oliver North and many more.


Only 48 minutes, Baldwin's film packs in enough loony ideas and sly comedy for four features; every cut and snippet is a layered joke, about American paranoia as well as the very real conspiratorial establishment that has dominated politics in the postwar era. For purists, just the harried repurposing of orthodox film footage (always without permission) is enough of a rebel yell, and with this film Baldwin had raised the bar on an entire school of experimental filmmaking: the kind that doesn't use cameras. "Tribulation 99" is sci-fi avant-garde intellectualism as action film, and perhaps unique among "underground" films, it can be and should be seen several times, with each viewing paying off like a broken slot machine.


Or you can return to the image bank itself — with the old matinee sweetmeats "Superman" (1948) and "Atom Man vs. Superman" (1950), 15-chapter theatrical serials released as a sweet DVD box in order to multi-promote the dreary "Superman Returns" disc. In a pre-television world, film series like these were the weekly gasoline poured on the imaginative flames of Cold War kids, one of which was the apparently impressionable George Lucas. Punctuated with mushroom clouds, charmingly set-bound, and unscrupulous in their use of archive footage (by way of freeze-frame, Superman actually halts the whip-wobbling of the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge in mid-collapse, in order to evacuate a bystander), these vintage mini-movies (or four plus-hour marathons, depending on how you take them) are blissful gray heavens, child-like yet haunted by nuclear dread.


They're also faster-moving than the later George Reeves TV show or Christopher Reeve movies, not wasting a frame and breathlessly comfortable with replacing star Kirk Allyn in mid shot with a zooming cartoon figure, shooting out of office windows like a cannonball. This is rentable ur-cinema, an entrancing place to retreat to, perfectly suited for a rainy or hungover winter Sunday afternoon. The supplements — new making-of interviews with cast and historians, a doc about the S-man's trajectory through the 20th century — push the box total to well over nine hours.




"Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America" (Other Cinema/Facets) and "Superman - The 1948 & 1950 Theatrical Serials Collection" (Warner Home Video) will be available on DVD on November 28th.

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<![CDATA[Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/video-christopher-guest-and-eu.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


"Basically, an actor has no place to play unless they're in a film or in a play. Who are they, during the day? That's why you see people acting strangely in the street."


Director/writer/actor/metal legend Christopher Guest and his co-writer/co-star Eugene Levy talk "For Your Consideration."


Watch the video.

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<![CDATA["The Architect," "10 Items or Less"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/review-the-architect-10-items.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "The Architect," Magnolia, 2006]


A lot of movies feel too long. "The Architect" is the rare one that feels too short. These characters, and the emotions they stir up, can barely be contained in a movie just 81 minutes long. Filmmaker Matt Tauber may have bitten off more than he can chew for his directorial debut — or at least more than he can chew in such a short amount of time — but that doesn't make watching him mull things over any less interesting.


Anthony LaPaglia, who also serves as the film's co-executive producer, plays Leo, an architect and college professor living in quiet, upper middle-class splendor in suburban Chicago. But the veneer of a happy, successful marriage, family and career hides a darker truth (doesn't it always?). Leo's wife Julia (Isabella Rossellini) is distant and moody and seems perched on the verge of a mid-life crisis, and his two kids (Hayden Panettiere and Sebastian Stan) are bored by their static lives and confused by their emerging sexuality.


Leo is largely oblivious to his family's problems and equally unaware that a housing project he built has, in part because of his designs, fallen into disrepair while becoming a breeding ground for crime and gang activity. A proactive single mother living in the project named Tonya (Viola Davis) is campaigning to have the buildings, ironically named "Eden Court," demolished, and she comes to Leo hoping to get his signature on the petition, believing that the builder's acknowledgement of Eden Court's failures will lend her extra credibility.


In his lectures, Leo teaches that humanity shapes its environments and, in turn, environments shape their inhabitants. When an environmental turns sour, who is to blame? The people who created that environment, or the people who lived in it, were shaped by it, and perhaps spoiled it? "The Architect" doesn't know for sure.


Tauber seems to suggest that Leo's work in Eden Court leads to disaster because of the architect's fundamental misunderstanding of human beings, up to and including his own family, which falls into ruins much like a decaying building. The ways in which our lives are related to our surroundings, and vice versa is easily the first-time director's most fruitful element, and his treatment of the two parallel families, Leo's and Tonya's, offers many useful points of comparison and intersection, though Tauber might have been better served to include more imagery of Chicago and its architecture to further support his arguments.


When "The Architect" drifts into subplots about white suburban malaise, suicide and sexual identity confusion, it assumes a perspective and tells stories it feels like I've seen hundreds of times this year alone. Ten years ago, it was a radical idea to suggest that the American dream of the big house and the white picket fence was meaningless. Now it would be radical to suggest the opposite.


The film raises questions it doesn't and, in some ways, can't answer. But that's fine. It's worth seeing the film to consider them and trying to answer them yourself. "The Architect" is the starting point, not the end result.


At the other end of the spectrum lies "10 Items or Less," a film that feels heavily padded at just 82 minutes — it's just one minute longer than "The Architect" but that minute feels like it lasts at least a half an hour. This self-indulgent piece of heavily manufactured sentimentality and poignancy features Morgan Freeman goofing off around the Los Angeles suburbs. He's the only one laughing.


He plays an unnamed movie star, one of the biggest in the world, who's taken a self-imposed exile from his success for several years. He's preparing to return with a small independent film in which he'd play a grocery store manager. Since Freeman's character hasn't shopped retail in years, he needs to do some research. He gets dropped off at a place that could never be mistaken for a supermarket, Archie's Ranch, and when his ride never returns, he bums a ride from cashier Scarlet ("Spanglish"'s Paz Vega). Eventually, she reveals that she has a big job interview later in the day, so Freeman hangs around, wearing out his welcome by and helping Scarlet prepare by teaching her the wisdom he's accrued as a rich, carefree actor.


Freeman's nameless celebrity (he appeared in "that Ashley Judd movie") is intended as a benevolent force for heartwarming good, but comes off a creepy and unwelcome intruder. His "research" involves mimicry that borders on outright mockery. His lessons ("We've got to get this to wardrobe!") are worthless, and his attempts to become a man of the people by slumming with the lowly proles who work for a living devolves into disturbingly sincere "branded entertainment" showcases for Target (where Freeman marvels at the remarkably low prices) and Arby's (where the two stars have a — wait for it — burping contest!). The movie is as out of touch with reality as its subject.


The jokes are so unfunny and the drama so uncomfortable, it's shocking that the film was actually written and directed by an established filmmaker, "Moonlight Mile"'s Brad Silberling. Though Silberling's made numerous Hollywood entertainments, this film amounts to little more than pandering and meandering. And at just 82 minutes, there aren't enough compelling ideas for something half as long. In this case, it's "10 Items or Less" ...much, much less.



"The Architect" (official site) and "10 Items or Less" (official site) open in limited release December 1st.

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<![CDATA[Robert Altman, 1925-2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/robert-altman-19252006.php Mon, 27 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: Altman on the set of "A Prairie Home Companion," Picturehouse]


The great gray recalcitrant lion king of the American New Wave has finally shuffled off the mortal coil — years after many of us were surprised to realize he'd hung in there this long. The Academy may have waited too long to pelt him with an Oscar, but at least they did it, genuflected at his massive body of work less than a year before he died (rather than, say, yet again piss away a Lifetime Achievement slot on the likes of Michael Kidd or Blake Edwards). For the postwar generations, only Stanley Kubrick maintained as lofty a station in the public forebrain for as long as Robert Altman. It's been a uniquely scattershot career, as rife with textural innovations and astonishing rigor as it was with pariah loathing and crash-landings — 2001's "Gosford Park" was merely his sixth or seventh comeback in almost 50 years of professional movie-making. Who knew, ever, if an Altman film would turn out rippling with silk-smooth sublimity or howling miscarriage? His lapses in judgment seem to flow from the same source as his wisdom. Compare the surgeon's grace inherent in "Gosford Park" to the soused baboonery of "Prêt-à-Porter" (1994), and you glimpse a restless and conflicted intelligence plunging into the combat of cultural intercourse without the benefit of superego.


He began in the 50s, making promotional and educational shorts for a small Kansas City outfit, before branching out in 1957 into indie teen exploitation ("The Delinquents") and feature docs ("The James Dean Story"), the two of which steered him toward steady network-TV paychecks doing grunt work for two dozen series, including "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Peter Gun," "Sugarfoot" and "Combat." He reentered the feature world in the late 60s, coming quickly upon the assignment that continues to be his branding product: "M*A*S*H" (1970).


The 70s turned out to be also Altman's one summer of semi-consistency, a time when Hollywood's new-wavey thaw on formula, cliché and pap was precisely what the maturing journeyman had been waiting for (at 45 when "M*A*S*H" was released, he was a full generation older than contemporaries Scorsese, Lucas, Coppola, Bogdanovich, Rafelson, Hellman, et al.). Altman's halcyon decade has had plenty of laurels laid upon it, but today some of them wilt badly — "M*A*S*H" is an unfocused anti-war farce better remembered than freshly seen, and "Nashville" (1975), a fabulously detailed dose of Americana-mania, is at closer look constructed from simplistic vignettes. The famous Altmanic textures — spontaneous narrative collage, Babel-like aural chaos, superbly evoked off-screen space, focus-challenged compositions, foreground foofaraw — are indelible, but the jokes and caricatures can be shockingly cheap.


Good thing the masterpieces yowl louder than ever. The '70s were a wise era kind to satire, and Altman's best films are Lasik cuts into American mythology, starting with "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971), a seminal, foggy frontier odyssey that looks like it was shot in a muddy 1830 mining town and that has come to occupy its own exclusive sub-genre: the neo-realist anti-northwestern. One of cinema's wittiest and savviest deconstructions, "The Long Goodbye" (1973) transposes Chandler to the 'Nam era and ends up an anti-noir anthem, with Elliott Gould as a beleaguered, slovenly Marlowe slumming around glitzy 70s L.A. like an old dog who's lost his sense of smell. "Thieves Like Us" (1974) is a still-underrated, wide-eyed adaptation of Edward Anderson's slackjawed-outlaw-lovers novel, capturing the Depression-era landscape with dusty fidelity and remaining an underseen American New Wave incarnation of nostalgia reflux. "California Split" (1974) is even more bitter, tracking a contemporary Gould and George Segal into a maelstrom of obsessive gambling. In many ways, "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson" (1976) caps off Altman's 70s project, cynically boiling down his accomplished naturalism into a death march of commodified suffering. This grim parade of mutated history — which focuses almost entirely on the eponymous Wild West show and its heroic depiction of Native American subjugation — barely acknowledges the requirements of dramatic narrative in its disgusted litany of showbiz prevarications.


His subsequent disasters were truly disastrous — few filmmakers could emerge from the landfill of "H.E.A.L.T.H." (1979), "Quintet" (1979), "Popeye" (1980), "O.C. and Stiggs" (1987), "Prêt-à-Porter," "Dr. T and the Women" (2000), and "The Company" (2003) with their honor intact. He spent the best part of the 80s making lean theatrical filmizations which were only and exactly as interesting as the play they adapted, which were in any case always lackluster. His last few decades were a coin toss — no director has veered so alarmingly from cretinism (that includes, for me, the smirky-comic rape of Raymond Carver in 1993's "Short Cuts") to bedazzlement (including 1992's "The Player," of course, and "Gosford Park") in such short spans. "A Prairie Home Companion" (2006) is no kind of career testament, but by this time we'd learned that the ever-tetchy Altman would always follow his own temperamental star.

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<![CDATA[Dysfunction Junction]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/dysfunction-junction.php Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis, Michelle Orange, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," Bryanston Distrib., 1974]


Ah, Thanksgiving. The time of year where unchecked family issues come home to curdle in stress and congealed cranberry sauce. We're just kidding — love you, Mom! In honor of the holiday, the IFC News team presents a look back at some of their favorite dysfunctional family moments in film. After all — your drunken uncle has nothing on Werner Herzog.



"Grey Gardens" (1975)

Directed by David and Albert Maysles


Having spawned a Broadway stage adaptation, an upcoming Hollywood drama with Drew Barrymore and a 2006 pseudo-sequel that seems as dubious as a brand new Tupac album, the O.G.G. (in hip-hop terms, "Original Grey Gardenz") carries a somewhat rare honor as a documentary with cult-classic rewatchability. Not so much a portrait of dysfunctionality as it is eccentricity in squalor, the Maysles brothers' 1975 milestone documents the bizarro living conditions of Jackie O's aging aunt and first cousin, both named Edith Bouvier Beale. Alone in a rapidly decaying East Hamptons mansion with a multiplying number of cats, raccoons and flies, the fashionably head-wrapped "Little Edie" continually makes threats about separating from her 77-year-old mother, "Big Edie," which come to a head in one sequence where both are fully aware of the camera immortalizing their confessionals. "I just have to leave for New York City and lead my own life. I don't see any other future," says the younger, bickering with Big Edie (who responds with "Will you shut up, it's a goddamn beautiful day!") that she left behind a perfectly happy existence to live with her mom for 25 years. But when David Maysles misunderstands and asks who the man was that tended to her, Little Edie re-focuses her target: "Dare say my mother was ever taken care of by any man but my father, and I'll push you under the goddamned bed!" —Aaron Hillis



"Julien Donkey-Boy" (1999)

Directed by Harmony Korine


Exasperating iconoclast Harmony Korine ("Gummo," writer of "Kids" and "Ken Park") virtually disappeared from the indie landscape after directing this mesmerizing 1999 eyesore, the first American film to pretentiously bear a Dogme 95 certificate instead of opening credits. Inspired by Korine's real-life schizophrenic uncle, "Julien Donkey-Boy" chronicles a few weeks' worth of fragmented moments in the lives of a seriously unhinged family, mainly the mentally ill Julien (Ewen Bremner), who spends the film burbling incoherently, loogies dripping from the gold grill that hides his rotted-out teeth. One night, while listening to harp music played by the sister he may have impregnated (Chloë Sevigny), Julien is confronted by his overbearing German father (master filmmaker Werner Herzog, relishing earlier moments where he dances alone in his boxers and a gas mask, slurping cough syrup from a bedroom slipper). "Why don't you tell your sister she's a dilettante and a slut," commands Herr Herzog in his brilliantly enunciated drone, berating his son as "utterly and completely and irrevocably stupid." Dark comic absurdity turns quickly to jarring horror as Herzog violently plucks the strings off Chloë's harp, then coerces his son to repeatedly slap and punch himself. Ain't nothing but wholesome fun for nihilistic hipsters, Will Oldham cameo and all. —AH



"The Lion in Winter" (1968)

Directed by Anthony Harvey


In Harvey's just-the-right-side-of-camp masterpiece, the splendid cast gnaws on the scenery to such an extent that you have to wonder how many backdrops they burned through in a standard day of shooting. Even the most nightmare family gathering looks benign next to the film's holiday gathering of venomous medieval royals vying for power. Katherine Hepburn, as the aging but still impossibly regal Eleanor of Aquitaine (imprisoned for years by her husband Henry II, played by Peter O'Toole), gets the best lines of her career — posing in front of a mirror, she informs a piece of jewelry "I'd hang you from the nipples, but you'd shock the children." But no scene is as bitterly funny and appalling as when Eleanor taunts Henry with details of her affair (real or manufactured) with his father until he runs out of the room and vomits. In their vicious but half-fond banter, they reveal they know each other so well that it's effortless and hopelessly tempting to twist the knife, even if it gets them nowhere. Watching him run out of the room, already regretful, she sighs in a magnificent understatement: "What family doesn't have its ups and downs?" —
Alison Willmore



"The Night of the Hunter" (1955)

Directed by Charles Laughton


The kids gather 'round the table, piled high with fried chicken, sweet potatoes, corn bread and apple cobbler. The preacher/step-father, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), asks the young moon-faced Pearl if she wants to see something cute. She waddles forward as he brandishes his switchblade. A huge glycerine tear streaks down her face after he bellows, "You poor, silly, disgusting little wretch." There's no place like home. The kind preacher has just sliced their mother's throat in pursuit of the cash hidden somewhere in the house — and he turns his interrogation towards the trembling offspring. It's a scene of primal fear and unexpected humor, all contained in Mitchum's extraordinarily theatrical performance. His incantation of "Where's the money hid?" peaks with malevolent force as he pops his eyebrows at the recalcitrant son John, while minutes later he nimbly executes a pratfall and squeals like an agitated Jerry Lewis. Scary stuff. —R. Emmet Sweeney



"The Squid and the Whale" (2005)

Directed by Noah Baumbach


From the opening line — "Mom and me versus you and dad" — "The Squid and the Whale" is basically one long dysfunctional family scene. Noah Baumbach knows whereof he directs, and the drab implosion of a 1986 Brooklyn family, depicted largely from the perspective of the two kids, reaches an awkward crescendo about an hour in. By the time we get to the "burgers" scene, the Berkmans are living all over each other, even as their isolation causes each of them to act out; it's been a while since they've been in the same room, and the familiarity is a little overwhelming. Bernard (Jeff Daniels) comes to the old house to re-appropriate younger son Frank for the evening, but is thwarted when Joan (Laura Linney) arrives. Eventually older son Walt shows up, Bernard catches Frank swilling beer, storms back into the house — interrupting Walt's questioning of his mother about why she got married in the first place — and begins talking, incredibly, of reconciliation. Citing some burgers he was forced to make when Joan had pneumonia as part of the effort he made to save their marriage, Bernard's version of a rapprochement triggers hysterical laughter in Joan, and as the boys look from their parents, to each other, and back, trying to figure out what this moment will mean for them, the dysfunction reaches critical mass: the marriage is irretrievable — the cat is out of the bag, and indeed will in moments bolt out of the house — and the way Linney mutters "Burgers," with rue and wonder, makes that gloriously, heartbreakingly clear. —Michelle Orange



"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974)

Directed by Tobe Hooper


There are scarier sequences in Tobe Hooper's original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" but none more gut-churningly repulsive than the classic scene where the sole surviving non-people eater in the film, Marilyn Burns' Sally, wakes to discover herself surrounded by Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his demented brethren enjoying a wholesome family dinner of assorted human vittles and tasty man-meats. As if it wasn't bad enough to be force fed sausages made out of your friends — and they weren't exactly lean friends to begin with, if you catch my drift — Sally's hand is cut open so that the patriarch of the family, the cadaverous Grandpa (John Dugan), can sup on her delicious bodily fluids. With this obvious metaphor for the draining, depressing, and altogether disgusting nature of family interactions, Hooper reminds us that as bad as your Thanksgiving might be, it could still be a hell of a lot worse. Think about that when you're eating your mom's dry turkey. Wait, that's not cranberry sauce! —Matt Singer

]]> 8331 2006-11-20 00:00:00 closed closed dysfunction_junction publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008331 <![CDATA[The Year of Kamikaze Auteurism]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/ifc-news-podcast-4-the-year-of.php Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we discuss "The Fountain," the latest film from Darren Aronofsky ("Requiem for a Dream"), and look at some of this year's other films that, for better or for worse (usually worse) seem to have made no artistic compromises.

Download: MP3, 18:28 minutes, 17 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20634 2006-11-20 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_4_the_year_of publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020634 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The Year of Kamikaze Auteurism (photo)]]> Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020634 2006-11-20 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_4_the_year_of_photo inherit 20634 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 24th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/opening-this-week-november-24t.php Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Backstage," Strand Releasing, 2006]


A round-up of the indie and indie-ish films opening in theaters this week.


"Backstage"

French filmmaker/actress Emmanuelle Bercot writes and directs this film about an obsessed fan whose life is turned upside down when her life crosses with her favorite pop idol. The film screened to some acclaim at Tribeca earlier this year, and now settles in at the Film Forum.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Deck the Halls"

A film about the extreme human materialism of the year's most excessive spending season, "Deck the Halls" gets special mention because of Danny DeVito. The movie looks like pure crap, but his turn in the recent television show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is comedic gold. Actually, forget this movie, just watch "It's Always Sunny."

Opens wide (official site).


"Déjà Vu"

Director Tony Scott should be congratulated for keeping the production of this film in New Orleans following the Hurricane Katrina disaster, but judging from the trailer, it's going to be another visually tedious headache with Scott relying on lightning-quick edits and saturated colors to deliver a story about a cop (Denzel Washington, who King Kong's got nothin' on) who continuously experiences déjà vu until he can prevent a ferry explosion. Ice, the Hebrew Hammer, and Jesus Christ are all cast in supporting roles (er... Val Kilmer, Adam Goldberg, and James Caviezel, respectively).

Opens wide (official site).


"Dhoom 2"

Anybody expecting a sequel to that video game movie starring The Rock will be sorely disappointed by this Bollywood thriller about cops and art thieves and car chases and hot girls and all that jazz. It's like a Bruckheimer film, but in Hindi.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Fountain"

Finally. That's all I have to say. Finally. Darren Aranofsky follows up 2000's "Requiem for a Dream" with this often-delayed film that lost $40 million from its budget along with its two original stars, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Billed initially as an time-spanning epic, the film was reportedly booed at its world premiere in Venice in September. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz took pay cuts to play lovers whose courtship lasts 1000 years. People, just give Aronofsky a break and see this movie; I'm just glad he's finally getting something released.

Opens wide (official site).


"The History Boys"

This Alan Bennett play about an unruly class of history students who attempt to navigate the college admissions process comes courtesy of theater director Nicholas Hytner, who retained much of the play's original cast for this film adaptation. Hytner has a history of filming adaptations of successful plays, though his films range from good ("The Madness of King George") to really awful ("The Object of My Affection").

Opens in limited release (Official site).


"Opal Dream"

"The Full Monty" director Peter Cattaneo goes the family route in this children's movie about a young girl's relationship with her two best friends (both imaginary) in the Australian Outback.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Our Daily Bread"

Nikolaus Geyrhalter directs this documentary about the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming. The film, which consists of wide-screen tableaus in which animals are borne, bred, fed, and gutted, apparently has no narration or dialogue in order to allow the images to simply speak for themselves. This film follows on the heels of "Fast Food Nation." We haven't eaten in weeks.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny"

We don't understand the cult status behind Jack Black. Outside of his humorous turns in "School of Rock" and "High Fidelity," we just don't see why people think Black is funny. His latest film details the origins of Tenacious D, the self-proclaimed "greatest band on Earth", as Black and his partner Kyle Gass go searching for a magical guitar pick housed in a rock-and-roll museum some 300 miles away. We continuously get the feeling Tenacious D is one big inside joke we're not in on — 'cause, why aren't we laughing?

Opens wide (official site).


"Valley of the Wolves: Iraq "

Serdar Akar and Sadullah Senturk generated a huge amount of controversy with this Turkish film, written off in the media as both "anti-Semitic" and "anti-American." The film is about a group of eleven Turkish soldiers stationed in Iraq who are imprisoned by an allied American squad, who aim to be the only power in the region, and are subsequently tortured as a result. For once, America is not "the good guy", a theme American studios seem reluctant to portray these days. Catch it if you can find it, if only to see ol' Gary Busey playing "Doctor."

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Wild Blue Yonder," "Pandora's Box"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/on-dvd-the-wild-blue-yonder-pa.php Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "The Wild Blue Yonder," 518 Media Inc./Subversive Cinema]


These days, to be a Herzogian — a devotee of and eager participant in German master Werner Herzog's lifelong quest for the mythopoetic image experience — is like being a beer-lover during Oktoberfest. This year there were three new films released here ("Grizzly Man," "The White Diamond," "Wheel of Time"), revivals of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Kasper Hauser," and now two more new movies, each dancing in that no man's land between documentary and fiction: "Rescue Dawn," a fictionalized remake of the Herzog doc "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" starring Christian Bale, and "The Wild Blue Yonder," coming straight to DVD.


The latter film, which has been hitting festivals since last year, is the braver freak-out. A mock-doc in format, but a film that actually finds its strangest epiphanies in genuine non-fiction footage, "Yonder" is science fiction, and not all that different from Herzog's apocalyptic tone poem "Fata Morgana," filmed 35 years earlier. We meet Brad Dourif, aged and wild-eyed and pony-tailed, glaring directly into Herzog's camera from a ghost-town streetcorner, and recounting in a fuming rant the story of his race — aliens from the edge of Andromeda who landed here years ago after their world had been ruined, and failed miserably to either establish a cooperative kingdom on Earth or even assimilate. "We suck," he spits, as he also recounts the parallel story of a human space voyage sent to locate an inhabitable world as ours devolves into polluted chaos. Ironically, the humans locate the alien's abandoned planet, and explore its murky depths.


The story obviously came second — what came first was the unseen, real-world footage illustrating the human sojourn: life aboard the NASA shuttle mission STS-34, sent into orbit in 1989 for purposes of launching the Galileo craft at Jupiter. Here's Herzog at play in the fields of absurd physics, rapt as the astronauts float in no-gravity space, attend to personal hygiene with surreal difficulty, and sleep strapped to the wall. We've seen astronauts floating in spacecraft interiors before, and we've seen the epic emptiness of space, but we haven't seen them until Herzog shows them to us. Along the way he invents alternate poetic stories for their bizarre behavior, all of it attending to the emotional tribulation of space-lost loneliness. The crowning flourish is the arrival at the alien planet: Herzog uses breathtaking footage shot in the waters of the Antarctic to depict a barren, blue world with a liquid atmosphere and a sky of ice. Vital to each of these visual orchestrations is the achingly mournful soundtrack mass, a fugue arranged by Herzog between Dutch jazz cellist Ernst Reijseger, Senegalese vocalist Mola Sylla and a five-man Sardinian shepherd choir. It's a Herzog thing — if you're fortunate, you'll understand. The DVD has a making-of featurette and, naturally, a Herzog commentary track.


Another kind of German sine qua non — G.W. Pabst's Expressionist landmark "Pandora's Box" (1929), restored, retitled, polished and retooled for digital eternity in a Criterion package that'll surely be a holiday-gift ubiquity. A brooding whorl of shadow, menace and sexual manipulation based on Wedekind's stories, Pabst's film introduced — and for the most part epitomized — Louise Brooks, who as a man-eating Berlin prostitute immediately became one of cinema's most enduring icons. (That black bob wig still shows up in films, whenever a female character is masquerading as a demimondaine.) From society-skewering slut-triumph to bad date with Jack the Ripper, Brooks' Lulu may be a femme fatale paradigm, but Brooks herself remains one of the most mesmerizing — not merely beautiful — actresses to ever meet celluloid. To see her is to experience movies almost on a chemical level. Criterion's package includes four different musical scores, two documentaries about Brooks, interviews, commentaries and essays by Kenneth Tynan and J. Hoberman.




"The Wild Blue Yonder" (Subversive Cinema) was released on DVD November 14th; "Pandora's Box" (Criterion) will be available on DVD on November 28th.

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<![CDATA[Nicholas Hytner on "The History Boys"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/nicholas-hytner-on-the-history.php Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: "The History Boys," Fox Searchlight, 2006]


It's a new spin on the phrase "no child left behind." In "The History Boys," based on the Tony award-winning play by Alan Bennett, a group of British teachers in the 1980s — the idealistic Hector (Richard Griffiths); the pragmatic Mrs. Lintott (Frances de la Tour); and the ambitious newcomer, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) — debate the purpose of art, education and history, even as they prepare eight young students of an industrial-region public school for an unprecedented opportunity to enroll at one of England's two top universities. Nicholas Hytner, who directed the original London performance and also directs the whole of England's National Theatre, shot the film, with original cast intact, while the play was prepping for its world tour.


You essentially have all the plays of the National Theatre at your access. What made you say, "Yes, this is the one that deserves to go to film?"


Well, I'd only done it once before, which was also with an Alan Bennett play, "The Madness of King George." I think most plays aren't going to gain anything different through the exploration of the camera. But this is character-driven and dialogue-driven — not a fashionable kind of filmmaking, but a kind of filmmaking that I like. It's talky and literate and articulate. I felt that getting a camera to participate with these twelve actors as these twelve characters would reveal something more about them. And, finally, it's just a really, really marvelous play — good writing is good writing.


Why set the film in this time period?


It's not about the 80s. It's set in the 80s, though to me the sensibilities are a little more contemporary. But it's set in the 80s because that's the last time a teacher like Hector could teach the way he does. The big debate at the center of the film is about the purpose of education, whether it's idealistic and romantic (in Hector's mold), about the expansion of the mind and the addressing of the soul, or whether it's utilitarian, whether it's about the achievement of targets, the getting of results, the getting on in life, which is the headmaster's [Clive Merrison] version. It's why the headmaster hires Irwin, although Irwin's more complex than simply representative of a utilitarian education.


What happened in the 80s was that schools changed in England. The national curriculum was imposed, the target culture was imposed, and you just can't teach like Hector anymore. To dramatize the conflict, you have to have a Hector, as well as a headmaster and an Irwin. The conflict, the debate, still rages, because teachers, parents, and kids feel that something has gone missing. You have to set the film in the 80s to show, to embody, what it is that's gone missing.


Is there a subtlety to the class issue that might not be readily perceived in America?


It's exactly the same [in America]. You can buy an education [in the U.S.] as you can in England. This school, though, is not a school where the education is bought. It's a selective school, but it's a state school. They're bright kids, but they're from humble backgrounds, ordinary backgrounds. It's touched on, but it's not important to them. For them, the class issue is only that they'll be competing against kids who have been expensively educated and will therefore be more cultivated than them, and maybe more self-confident in interviews. But there's no essential difference between an American private education and an English one.


Making this film character-based and dialogue-based runs the risk of turning it into a straight transcription. How did you avoid that pitfall?


There are lots of different kinds of stage-to-screen adaptations. With "The Madness of King George," where the world of the play was England, where the central character was the king and his world was his country, there was obviously the opportunity to take the camera all around the country and give an intimate story a big, sweeping backdrop. Therefore, the experience of the film was physically more spectacular than the spirit of the play. But this felt like a different kind of movie, a kind exemplified by — I'll mention three really great movies, not because "The History Boys" compares to them, but because they show a way of adapting from stage to screen — "The Philadelphia Story," "[A] Streetcar [Named Desire]," and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" They're all based on plays, and the films retain the closed world of the plays, they don't venture far and wide. What you're trying to do in that kind of film is use the camera to get closer, to participate in the action, to get behind the eyes and under the skin. That, to me, is very cinematic. It's not the current fashion of commercial filmmaking. Used to be — I'd be very happy to say that "The History Boys" is, in that way, a throwback.


You've mentioned that you and the cast essentially had a year of rehearsal in performing this play on-stage. There's a risk to that, though: becoming so entrenched in the material that the life goes out of it. How did you avoid that danger?


It's not really for me to say whether we managed that. It was all [the cast] as far as I was concerned, the fact that they knew themselves, each other, the material so well. There are a series of devices that I use all the time — questions to ask, new ways of looking at little things — to try and keep actors fresh over a long run. I think just the fact that they were able to do it for each other, rather than including 2000 people in the conversation, and do it in the concrete surroundings of a school was a great liberation.


"The History Boys" opens in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on November 21, adding additional cities starting on December 8, and going into wide release on December 22 ((official site)

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<![CDATA["Essential" Moviegoing]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/essential-moviegoing.php Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: "Cléo From 5 to 7," Janus Films]


Seeing the Janus icon before a movie builds the same kind of anticipation for the art-house crowd that the hopping lamp of the Pixar logo elicits from amped-up children (and some adults). Janus has acquired the cream of the world's art cinema for 50 years, cultivating a large library while adapting to each advancement in viewing technology, from 16mm to laserdiscs to DVD. The repertory houses in NYC have filled their schedules with Janus gems this autumn, from the Walter Reade's comprehensive series that ran alongside the New York Film Festival to the IFC Center's upcoming year-long Weekend Classics tribute. For those of you in the rest of the world, Criterion has released a handsome 50-film set entitled "Essential Art House," the discs nestled alongside a 240-page book of comprehensive background notes. The ideal way to view these masterworks, though, is on the big screen. These are films to lose oneself in — pausing them to eat dinner or scold the kids could easily disrupt their subtle rhythms.


The IFC Center begins their series on November 22 with a new 35mm print of Agnès Varda's "Cléo From 5 to 7," a French New Wave wonder from 1961 — also the year of Francois Truffaut's "Jules and Jim" and Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad." "Cléo" hasn't established a foothold in the pantheon like those two, but it should. Corinne Marchand plays Cléo, a vain Yé-Yé pop singer (like Chantal Goya in Jean-Luc Godard's "Masculin Féminin"), who impatiently wanders the Paris streets for two hours until she calls upon her doctor for the results of an unnamed medical test. She believes she has inoperable cancer. Taking place in an approximation of real time (it runs a little over an hour and a half), the film follows her encounters with friends, lovers and strangers as the clock winds down until she discovers the result. Considering the subject matter, it is improbably buoyant, as Varda expertly employs the language of the New Wave, from location shooting to jump cuts to multiple narrative digressions (most famously, Godard and Anna Karina act in a silent comedy short that Cléo watches at a theater).


Early on it's not clear if she's simply being dramatic — Varda packs the early scenes with mirrors: Cléo eyes herself at every diner, haberdasher, and shop window. This illness could be a childish ploy for attention — a conclusion her composer and lyricist come to when they crash her place, donning fake hospital attire complete with oversized syringe. Their arrival marks the first tonal shift, from mournful soul-searching to a light-hearted musical comedy. Scored by the great Michel Legrand, it soars with clever wordplay, hummable tunes, and an elegantly tracking camera. Then the lyricist suggests she sing his latest work, "Cry of Love," whose opening piano trills foreshadow the swooping melodrama of Legrand's work on Jacques Demy's "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (Demy would marry Varda in 1962). The camera pans past the two guests and tilts up towards Cleo, framing her against a black background as she laments the death of a relationship. It's a stunning moment — for me and for Cléo, as afterward she rips off her wig and stalks out, hiding her moment of self-realization underneath a tantrum. Her façade is breaking down.


The final third of the film completes her transformation, as she bends her will for the love of another — and there's no more romantic meet-cute scene in history than when the hyper-articulate Antoine seals their fate over a bridge. The test result comes in — but by then it's beside the point — the final shot of euphoric union could make any hardened pseudo-intellectual's heart go pitter pat.


After "Cléo," the IFC Center offers up the Japanese horror story "Kwaidan" (1964), Carlos Saura's "Cria Cuervos" (1976), Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" (1957), and Jean Cocteau's enchanting version of "Beauty and the Beast" (1946). More is promised, so happy viewing.

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<![CDATA["49 Up," "Pocket Money"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/on-dvd-49-up-pocket-money.php Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "49 Up," First Run Features]


Recent studies have demonstrated that no, your entire body does not get "renewed" on a cellular level every seven years (skin cells get batched every few days, while some brain cells never change). But Michael Apted's famous and beloved "Up" films, which have chronicled the lives of 12 Brits since they were precocious second-graders, keeps returning to these cross-sectioned citizens every seven years as if to see if they are in fact the same people. They are and they aren't — people age, lose the fire of their youthful ambitions, marry, spawn, grow more peaceful and complacent, fatten, settle into routines.


Almost by definition, this epic project — "49 Up" is the seventh in the string, stretching over more than four decades — keeps getting larger, more expansive and more profound with each entry. And yet, nothing cataclysmic happens. Apted's 12 subjects (two of the original 14 dropped out in their 20s) sit for the camera, disclosing the details of their lives (or some of them, anyway), and Apted continues, as he always has, cutting to the older footage, as if daring us to think we know these people after having seen them grow up from tykes into adults looking at the business-end of middle age. A class-consciousness notion was in place in the first 1964 film, but preexisting agendas couldn't survive the films' real-time historical reach — life takes over, in all of its banality, private pleasures, employment struggle and divorce hurt.


Of course, with age, the relationship between the interviewee and the project they'd signed on for in their naive youth becomes more complex. The cabbie, the housewife, the librarian, the lawyer, the physicist, the near-homeless outcast — all are used to the invasion of filmmaking crews into their homes, but today they're no longer entertained by the quasi-celebrity and tend to bridle and rebel. Approaching 50 now, several of them understandably bellyache about being forced again and again to evaluate their lives for an international audience. Here's both the original model for and the antidote to contemporary reality television.


Will Apted (or his associates) press on until they're all dead? Even if they don't, the films have acquired an existential chill. The 12 participants move in the blink of the eye from being fresh-faced schoolkids to being weathered dinosaurs, typically beset by obesity, alcohol, emotional erosion, bad English dentistry and the savagery of time. It can get only scarier with subsequent entries, by which time the series may be the most thorough and leveling portrait of ordinary humankind ever committed to film.


Reality took other shapes in the American New Wave of the 60s and 70s, and here comes a forgotten honey: Stuart Rosenberg's "Pocket Money" (1972), a conscientiously low-key dawdle written by "Terry" Malick and featuring Paul Newman as an unapologetically dopey and penniless Arizona livestock freelancer who accepts a shady deal to buy Mexican cattle and march them up across the border. Helping him is boozy, hedonistic negotiator Lee Marvin, in a filthy suit jacket and leather gloves; together, they spend most of the movie driving around in a shellshocked T-bird, wondering why the world doesn't understand them. Sometimes the movie is so faithful to the characters' reality that it loses track of its plot, but the Nixon-era, south-of-the-border sun-scorch is palpable, and the actors are clearly having a royal ball (you envy Newman, sharing a lazy film shoot in Mexico with Marvin).


Remembered today only for "Cool Hand Luke," Rosenberg was awake to the New Wave's gritty, symbolic possibilities, and remains underrated. (He and Newman made a total of four films together.) "Pocket Money" comes in Warner's Paul Newman Collection, one of those ubiquitous studio crate-releases designed to maximize the lesser titles in a longtime star's library (here, that means 1958's "The Left-Handed Gun," 1959's "The Young Philadelphians" and 1975's "The Drowning Pool"). But the box, packed with audio tracks and featurettes, also includes the seminal neo-noir "Harper" (1966) and the boxing biopic "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956), the commentary on which features Newman, co-star Robert Loggia, director Robert Wise, and all-around gabber Martin Scorsese.




"49 Up" (First Run Features) and "Pocket Money" (part of Warner Home Video's "The Paul Newman Collection") are both available on DVD on November 14th.

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<![CDATA[Interview: The Brothers Quay]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/interview-the-brothers-quay.php Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 You may not know about Stephen and Timothy Quay, but you're probably familiar with their work — they're identical twin animators best known for stop-motion shorts that bring together the strange, the beautiful and the grotesque, and that have been ripped off by countless music video and art directors. Though not always the most accessible of artists, the brothers Quay have plenty of fans among critics, cinephiles and the other filmmakers — Terry Gilliam selected their 1986 "Street of Crocodiles" as one of the ten best animated films of all time.


"The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" is only the second feature-length film from the Quays — it tells a Jules Verne-inspired story of the mad Dr. Droz (Gottfried John), who abducts a beautiful opera singer (Amira Casar) and takes her to his island filled with Victorian-style automatons. A piano tuner (César Saracho) summoned to care for the mechanisms becomes obsessed with rescuing her. I spoke to the Quays on the phone from London, where they live — the two tend to speak for one another and finish each other's sentences, and so have been treated as one entity below.


So "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" is your second film, and like your first film (1995's "Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life") it's mainly live action. Is this for practical reasons?


Oh, we would never enter into doing a feature-length animation. You know, you need a team of people for that. We don't invite people to animate for us, it'd be a labor of love and it'd be foolish, too big for us. It's like three, four, five years out of your life. I don't think anyone would trust us with a [full-length] film that wasn't live action — with live action they're willing to give you the benefit of the doubt now and then. Well, two times in our lives.


How was this experience versus "Benjamenta"? Do you feel like you've come in any wiser?


Well, "Benjamenta" took eight, nine years to get off the ground. Then this one took another eight, nine years...it's not like you stay in practice. You have to start all over again. It's a shame — we really like going between animation and live action. We work in the theater, we work in the opera, we work in the ballet, on décor, so it's very nice to move back and forth between these difference disciplines. It's something that we find very important and you bring all those elements to bear when you make a feature film.


Clearly, working with actors is a different experience...


Well, when we do a puppet film, we impose the performance upon that puppet, it's our performance. We have a kind of secret collaboration with the puppet — we bring out what's living inside it, what its potential is. With an actor, we invite the collaboration. We do not impose a performance, nor do I think do they impose a performance upon us. It's a kind of woeful collaboration, where each is trying to divine each others secrets.


How did you approach the narrative process with "Piano Tuner"? Did you feel a need to shape the film differently than you do the shorts?


You do try to shape it in some way — a lot of people say they're not happy about the way we work with narrative, but you know, that's always going to be something of personal taste. We don't make classical Hollywood narratives; otherwise we'd be in Hollywood making them. And life doesn't follow Hollywood narratives, so either way, you know, it's kind of irrelevant.


In the US, your work is constantly grouped with Jan Svankmajer's. You've never hidden your admiration of his work, but how close of a relationship do you have with him?


We made a documentary, and basically this documentary [1984's "The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer: Prague's Alchemist of Film"] delivered him to the West. We never studied with him — in fact, apart from the documentary, we've only met him a handful of times. Our greatest influence has been a Polish animator, Walerian Borowczyk, which everybody seems to ignore. It's easier for people to traffic us with Svankmajer because we made that one little documentary for Channel 4. We have the greatest admiration for this man's work, but he's not the only one, and people tend to forget that.


Do you consider yourselves Surrealists, à la Svankmajer?


The thing about Svankmajer is that he's a militant surrealist, he claims it, and it's very important to his entire body of work. We've never subscribed to being a part of the Surrealist school. We talk about poetry — the way a poet uses his language doesn't just make him a Surrealist. You use a much kinder work, you might say it's poetic or lyrical, but everything is put into this easy camp of the Surrealists, it's a good catch-all phase. We've never said we're Surrealists, never once in our lives, and I don't feel that we could qualify for that club. I think there are genuine Surrealists, and Svankmajer's one of them. I don't think David Lynch would subscribe to Surrealism either. People just see him as dark, nightmarish, but you never see people really throw the word Surrealism at him. It seems to overweight the situation.


You've managed to fold some stop-motion animated sequences into "Piano Tuner," for the automatons. What's the enduring appeal of the medium for you?


I think what we like is that it's just the two of us here, we're on our own in the studio. It's a long journey; you're using the stop motion because it has fantastic control. You build the puppets, you build the décor, you do the lighting, you do the editing, you do the animation, you animate the camera. It's a very humbling process — you get down on your hands and knees and you push the camera one little millimeter, it's all part of trying to equip the idea you have about what each film can be. I think we like that journey, that sense of control. We very much think of our studio as a laboratory, it's there to make discoveries. It's a thing that you miss on a live action set, that sense of freedom to discover. With the animation films, they just leave you alone, they forget you: "Oh, when was that film supposed to be ready?" One and a half years roll by, and it's for us to make the decisions of when that film is ready.


With films like Richard Linklater's rotoscoped "A Scanner Darkly" at Cannes, this seems to be a new age for animation to be taken seriously, to be intended for a grown-up audience.


That's not exactly our notion of animation; you can see the motion, and it's like putting a blueprint on top of something and pushing the render button. Those people aren't animators. It's an appearance; I wouldn't be duped by that. It's just another effect. I mean, no offense to them.


Do you feel the same way about CGI?


You know, when it's good, it's great, the same thing with traditional animation. When it's good, it's fabulous, when it's bad, it's crap. Each has its greatnesses and each has its miserablenesses. We're great admirers of what can be done with CGI.


So is there anything you've seen lately, animated or not, that you've liked?


There's this Hungarian film called "Twilight" [1990] by György Fehér — it's absolutely stunning, it knocked us for a loop. In terms of animation, we're both very impressed by the Miyazaki films, "Princess Mononoke" and the like, we finally got a chance to see them and they really hold up...


You know, we haven't really been to the cinema recently.



"The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" opens in New York on November 17th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Interview: The Brothers Quay (photo)]]> Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10025404 2006-11-13 00:00:00 closed closed interview_the_brothers_quay_photo inherit 25404 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[The Many Lives of James Bond]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/the-many-lives-of-james-bond.php Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: "Casino Royale," Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2006]


"Nobody does it better," Carly Simon sang famously in 1977, but who she was singing about has changed over the years. Presidents, wars, and actors have all come and gone, but British secret agent James Bond has endured for over four decades, remaining one of cinema's most bankable attractions. This week's "Casino Royale" marks the debut of a new Bond (the sixth, officially), Daniel Craig. Months before anyone had seen a frame of his performance, the actor's every feature (even his blonde hair color) was subject to rigorous scrutiny.


Walking in the footsteps of some very famous actors and some very memorable performances is never easy, and every new Bond has faced his own unique dilemmas. I would know, I wasted an inordinate amount of time watching all five previous Bond's debuts. What I found may shock you.



"Dr. No" (1962)


Synopsis: James Bond (Sean Connery) travels to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of a government agent. Eventually, Bond uncovers the culprit: a half-German, half-Chinese, all-mad scientist with powerful metal hands named Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman). Dr. No plans to sabotage an American missile launch with the help of a nuclear reactor; Bond stops him with the help of a buxom seashell enthusiast named Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress).


Making a Good First Impression: Connery's Bond is introduced at the baccarat table, a frequent locale for actors starting out on their careers as 007 (both George Lazenby and Pierce Brosnan would play baccarat in their first Bond pictures). The most famous entrance in movie history — "Bond. James Bond." — is actually Connery's introduction as the character. They're the first words he utters when we see his face on camera. Bond's frequent trips to the baccarat table will in no way affect the fact that no one on earth knows how to play baccarat.


What Connery Brought to the Role: A brutality and an unapologetically lusty sexuality. No other Bond would be so convincing slapping a girl around one second and making out with her the next. No other Bond could probably get away with it, and for good reason.


High Action, Low Action: James Bond movies eventually came to be known for cutting-edge fight scenes, chases, and stunt work, but "Dr. No" was actually a fairly low-budget affair. It shows in one laughable sequence when Bond is chased down a mountain road by some of the worst rear projection special effects in history. Later, the climactic battle between Bond and Dr. No is carried out with both men inside bulky radiation suits; the resultant fight looks like it was shot in slow-motion by stuntmen who were drunk and seasick.


Oops: Original "Dr. No" co-screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz took his name off the project, fearing the film would be a disaster. Later, Mankowitz worked on the Bond parody-slash-total-cinematic-disaster "Casino Royale"(1967) and decided to keep his name on the film. Double oops.


James Bond seems a lot less cool once you learn: That the classic James Bond theme was originally written by composer Monty Norman for a musical called "A House for Mr. Biswas." As if being a hand-me-down was bad enough, it turns out the song, formerly called "Bad Sign, Good Sign," had its own wretchedly uncool lyrics ("I was born with this unlucky sneeze/ and what is worse I came into the world / the wrong way 'round").



"On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969)


Synopsis: Bond (George Lazenby) is once again on the trail of the head of the evil terrorist organization SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas). He infiltrates Blofeld's lair in the Swiss Alps, where the fiend is trying to destroy the world's food supply. Bond stops him with the help of the bosomy daughter of a crime lord, Tracy Draco (Diana Riggs). Shockingly, Bond marries Tracy instead of discarding her.


Making a Good First Impression: Lazenby's Bond first appears on screen saving Tracy from an attempted suicide by drowning. His rescue is interrupted by a few thugs, who distract Bond long enough to allow Tracy to make a quick getaway in Bond's car. Lazenby turns to the camera and cries, "This never happened to the other fellow!" — the ultimate shaming for the poor schlub who had to follow one of the most popular actors of the 20th century.


What Lazenby Brought to the Role: The notion that the role was much bigger than any one actor. Though Connery would return for one final picture, Lazenby, hounded and ridiculed before and after the film's premiere, bit the bullet so that all future actors could take on the role in relative peace.


Suspend Your Disbelief: Much of the film hinges on Bond sneaking into Blofeld's lair to spy on his foe disguised as a nerdy genealogist. Taking a page from another superhero, Bond's entire disguise consists of a pair of glasses. Though Bond and Blofeld had met face-to-face in 1967's "You Only Live Twice" and presumably Blofeld would know his enemy's face like the back of his kitty-stroking hand, he has absolutely no idea 007 is right under his nose until Bond makes some kind of obscure genealogy mistake. More likely, he was just surprised Bond didn't look like Sean Connery.


Ah, Romance: Most Bond pictures have a rather skewed view of love, but "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" might have the skewiest. After Bond saves Tracy, he's approached by her father, a crime boss named Draco, who thinks that Tracy's case of the crazies could be solved by the right man and a good stiff bout of the old how's-your-father. In the most singularly creepy dialogue exchange in any 007 movie, Draco proposes marriage on behalf of his daughter. "What she needs is a man!" he explains. "To dominate her! To make love to her enough to make her love him! A man like you!" Aw, thanks Dad. Can I call you Dad? I mean I haven't dominated your daughter yet, but you know I will!


Oops: This is one of the few Bonds whose big title song doesn't actually involve the title (likely because "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" doesn't really rhyme with anything). Instead, Louis Armstrong sings the ballad "We Have All The Time In The World," which plays under the montage that shows Bond and Tracy falling in love. The film ends with Tracy's murder by Blofeld. Louis Armstrong is a cruel, ironic bastard.


James Bond seems a lot less cool once you learn: That Lazenby turned down the chance to star in the next Bond picture "Diamonds Are Forever" because he was convinced that the character was too of the 60s to survive in the transition to the next decade. Nobody ever envied James Bond for his brains.



"Live and Let Die" (1973)


Synopsis: Bond (Roger Moore) travels to New York City after the deaths of several British agents. He uncovers a plot by a Harlem drug dealer named Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto) that concerns pure heroin grown on the Caribbean island of San Monique by its dictator, Dr. Kananga (Kotto also — in a none-too-shocking twist, they're the same person). Bond stops him with the help of Kananga's busty tarot card reader Solitaire (Jane Seymore).


Making a Good First Impression: Moore's Bond debuts in bed with a gorgeous woman. So far, so good, until Bond's boss M (Bernard Lee) arrives and Bond greets him in a canary yellow bathrobe. Excuse me, sir, have you seen my masculinity?


What Moore Brought to the Role: The delicate touch of a dandy fop. By Moore's own admission, he wasn't well-equipped to handle the character's rougher side, so the series quickly focused on his strengths: his refined sense of style and his cheeky sense of humor. And bathrobes. Lots of bathrobes.


Ah, Romance: Bond goes to incredible lengths to sneak into Kananga's headquarters undetected, hang-gliding in under cover of darkness (in keeping with Moore's sartorial obsession, when Bond lands, he rips off breakaway pants and busts out a reversible suit jacket for no reason whatsoever). But instead of arresting or killing the villain, he just steals his lady, deflowering Solitaire and inadvertently robbing her of her fortune-telling abilities.


Race Relations: In retrospect, the filmmakers probably regret some of the more racist elements, in which it appears that every African-American in the world is part of the same massive criminal conspiracy that stretches from Harlem to the Caribbean. The most sympathetic black character in the film is Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry), a duplicitous CIA agent who is, at best, a coward and, at worst, a traitor. As the icing on the cake, she's quickly murdered.


James Bond seems a lot less cool once you learn: That in this picture Bond never receives a visit from gadget master Q (Desmond Llewelyn). Instead, Moore's 007 takes time out from his mission to meet with his tailor ("Don't forget the double vents," he warns). For a character with a "license to kill" in a movie named "Live and Let Die," he's an awfully domesticated chap.



"The Living Daylights" (1987)


Synopsis: Bond (Timothy Dalton) heads to the Soviet Union to aid in the defection of a Russian general (Jeroen Krabbe), who then double-crosses the British in order to play both sides to the advantage of his employer, a mad arms dealer named Whitaker (Joe Don Baker). Bond stops both of them with the help of a curvaceous cellist-slash-assassin named Kara (Maryam D'Abo).


Making a Good First Impression: Dalton's Bond gets a dynamic entrance that involves skydiving and runaway trucks. He eventually finds his way parachuting onto the deck of a yacht manned by a lonely woman in a bikini. Dalton introduces himself as "Bond, James Bond" but says it so uncomfortably it almost sounds like Bond is both his first and last name. He'd get better.


What Dalton Brought to the Role: A heretofore unprecedented level of vulnerability. After more than a decade of Moore's Teflon-coated jokester, Dalton introduced a much-needed touch of humanity. Moore's Bond casually uses women; he's always in control. Dalton's Bond is a romantic who can't resist helping women out of warped sense of chivalry — they're his Achilles heel, not his hobby. The result is a more relatable, sympathetic protagonist. But I guess people don't want relatable and sympathetic from their Bond: Dalton frequently gets lumped in with poor Lazenby as the two "unsuccessful" 007s, though "The Living Daylights" is one of the two or three best in the whole series.


Race Relations: When Bond makes his trip to Q's laboratory, he witnesses a display of the inventor's latest creation, a boom box that hides a rocket launcher. With a gleam in his eye, Q dubs it "The Ghetto Blaster!" Audiences everywhere cringe.


Oops: Bond and Kara's adventures take them to Afghanistan, where they run afoul of the Mujahideen, the local freedom fighters defending the country from Soviet invasion. In a scenario similar to the contemporary "Rambo III," Bond aids the heroic Mujahideen in their fight against the Russians, unaware that in later years, groups like it would mutate into the Taliban (Osama Bin Laden was affiliated with both groups). As a result, "The Living Daylights" includes what, in retrospect, is a truly uncomfortable moment. After the inevitable Bondian victory, Kara returns to her day job as cellist. After her performance, the Mujahideen arrive at the opera house to congratulate her. "I'm sorry we missed the concert," one announces, "We had some trouble at the airport!"


James Bond seems a lot less cool once you learn: "The Living Daylights" includes one of the few glimpses of nudity in the entire Bond series — but it's some nasty dudes' butts on display instead of some gorgeous lady's, after a raid on a Russian airbase knocks over some showers.



"GoldenEye" (1995)


Synopsis: Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is on the trail of a stolen helicopter and a dangerous satellite named GoldenEye in the possession of a former compatriot and 00-agent, Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean). He destroys GoldenEye and kills Alec with the help of a sassy Russian computer technician named Natalya (Izabella Scorupco).


Making a Good First Impression: Brosnan's Bond introduces himself by plummeting off a dam in an impressive bungee jump, but that's all done by a stunt double. The actor himself debuts in the men's toilet peeping on a Soviet soldier. Perv.


What Brosnan Brought to the Role: A real sense of cool. Connery may provide the definitive portrayal, but Brosnan's is the first that seems to contain all his predecessor's strengths in one impossibly handsome package: Connery's ruthlessness, Moore's dashing style, Dalton's vulnerability. Brosnan adds little touches everywhere you look: only he would pause during a tank chase through the streets of St. Petersburg to adjust the knot of his tie, a very Bondian gesture indeed.


True Villainy: Bond movies are famous for outlandish, eccentric villainy. "GoldenEye"'s General Ourumov (Gottfried John) is relatively low on the totem pole of Bond villains, but he does have one of the single most villainous scenes in the entire series. On the run from Bond in his tank, desperate to escape, he orders his driver to run over the pedestrians in his way. "Use the bumper! That's what it's for!" he screams as the bodies go flying. Now that's mean.


Oops: Befitting the bombastic action movies of the 1990s, "GoldenEye" is easily the most combustible Bond movie of the series to that point. Seemingly inert objects always have habit of exploding in Bond pictures, but director Martin Campbell takes things to hilarious extremes, even acknowledging on his commentary track after a train goes boom, "Everything in this film seems to explode at the end of scene, and this is no exception." Silliest example: Bond tosses Q's pen grenade, it magically lands near some mines and leaking gasoline and in one fell swoop our hero has destroyed an entire underground base.


James Bond seems a lot less cool once you learn: Brosnan,who could have been the best Bond ever, never matched his promising debut in three thoroughly mediocre subsequent outings.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 17th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/opening-this-week-november-17t.php Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Neil Armfield's "Candy," ThinkFilm, 2006]


A round-up of the indie and indie-ish films opening in theaters this week.


"After Dark Horrorfest: 8 Films to Die For"

Apparently nothing spells "autumn" like horror films. Arriving a few weeks late for Halloween, the folks at After Dark Films are releasing this horror film collection for one weekend only. Directors to be featured include the Butcher Brothers, Craig Singer, and Takashi Shimizu, who, thankfully, will finally direct a non-"Grudge" related film.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"The Aura"

Argentian director Fabián Bielinsky follows up his excellent 2000 film "Nine Queens" with this story about a deluded epileptic taxidermist whose plan for the perfect crime goes awry. The cinema world lost a promising director in Bielinsky, who passed away of a heart attack in June: "The Aura" is his final film.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Bobby"

Gordon Bombay...I mean, Charlie Sheen...wait, no, Emilio Estevez, yeah, that's right, wrote and directed this film documenting the story of the assassination of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy. "Bobby" centers around 22 people who were at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his death. The ensemble cast includes Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, Sharon Stone and Christian Slater. So...can somebody tell me again why this film is drawing such Oscar buzz?

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Candy"

November just seems to be the month for Australians; following Nicole Kidman's "Fur" and Russell Crowe's "A Good Year" is this romantic drama from acclaimed Australian theater director Neil Armfield, starring Abbie Cornish (of "Somersault" fame) and Heath Ledger (from that gay cowboy movie). Cornish plays an art student who meets a poet (Ledger) and falls in love with his bohemian lifestyle. Oh, and the heroin. She loves the heroin. Geoffrey Rush also co-stars in the film, because, really it can't be an Australian film without Geoffrey Rush.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Casino Royale"

Finally, Daniel Craig will attempt to quell all of his critcs in this cinematic re-telling of the first Ian Fleming novel to feature Bond, James Bond. Much controversy surrounded the casting of Craig, who will be the first Bond to sport blonde hair (*gasp*!), but early reviews are claiming that Craig has one thing that all previous Bonds lacked: the ability to act. Expect this film to make lots of money; it's the only big blockbuster of the holiday season.

Opens wide (official site).


"Dance Party, USA"

25-year-old Aaron Katz wrote and directed this little indie that garnered a lot of praise back in March at SXSW and a couple of compliments from fellow directors Andrew Bujalski and Jay Duplass. The film is set in Portland, OR, and details the relationship of Jessica and Gus, two aimless teenagers who connect with each other at a fourth of July party before going their separate ways (worlds apart) when a dark secret is revealed. Catch it while you can, it will be at the Pioneer Theater for one week only.
Opens in New York (official site).


"Fast Food Nation"

Just in time for the Thanksgiving season, Richard Linklater attempts to make us all go vegan in this fictionalized film based on the book of the same name about the ins and outs of the fast food industry. The ensemble cast includes Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ethan Hawke, and annoying pop singer Avril Lavigne (making her film debut).

Opens wide (official site).


"Flannel Pajamas"

Director Jeff Lipsky directs this indie tracking the relationship of Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) from their initial blind date up to their break-up. Or do they? This will-they-or-won't-they film feels really early 90s to us, but it's got a good cast in Kirk and Nicholson, so if the chemistry is there, this might be a gem. Or it could really suck. Either one.

Opens in New York (official site).


"For Your Consideration"

The master mockumentarian Christopher Guest is back with his latest ensemble comedy, though he sheds his traditional style for a straight narrative in this hilarious Hollywood lampoon...okay, we haven't seen it yet, but any film from Guest and Co. promises to be a good time. The movie-title-with-the-movie "Home for Purim" already had us laughing. Ricky Gervais of "The Office" fame joins the usual regulars this time around.

Opens wide (official site).


"Happy Feet"

Director George Miller ups the cute factor to 11 in this animated family film about penguins who like to sing and dance. Joining Miller are the nauseating voices of Robin Williams, Elijah Wood, and Brittany Murphy. We swear this is the last computer-animated talking animals picture to be released this year (maybe).

Opens wide (official site).


"Let's Go to Prison"

"Mr. Show"'s Bob Odenkirk directs this prison comedy about a career criminal's plan for revenge against his intended victim's son and ruining his life while incarcerated. The film stars Dax Shepherd and, more importantly, Will Arnett (of "Arrested Development" fame) in his first starring role. Rumors circulate that White Power Bill's scenes have been cut.

Opens wide (official site).


"Lies and Alibis"

First-time directors Matt Checkowski and Kurt Mattila direct this indie film starring "A Cock and Bull Story"'s Steve Coogan and "X-Men"'s Rebecca Romijn (she dropped the Stamos, right?) about a man who runs an alibi service for adulterous husbands, and who gets into a jam when he receives a mysterious new client and must seek the services of an alluring woman to get him out of said jam. The film compares itself to "The Thin Man" — that's a pretty high bar to set, considering Romijn (-Stamos?) is no Myrna Loy.

Opens in Los Angeles (official site).


"The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes"

The latest from the Brothers Quay is a dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale. The film premiered at last year's Locarno International Film Festival and garnered numerous awards for its directors, but while critics praise the film's dark and moody visual experience, they say the film's story is sure to dull the mind.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror"

"It AIN'T all good in da hood." Well, we suppose we don't really need to expand on the film's tagline to explain exactly what this movie is, but we'll try anyhow. America's favorite gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg, seen in such American classics "Soul Plane" and "Bones," hosts this three-film horror anthology of three short tales set in an urban milieu, à la the "Tales from the Crypt" series. Ernie Hudson, Danny Trejo, and Lando Calrissian are just a few of the actors featured in this film.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Who the $#%& is Jackson Pollock?"

What would happen if you bought a painting from a thrift store for $5, only to discover that it's a missing masterpiece from one of the 20th century's most famous artists? Well, you'd most likely have a documentary film crew follow you around as you attempt to sell the painting for $50 million. Or at least that's what happened to Teri Horton, a 73-year old former truck driver with only an eighth grade education, whose attempts to sell the painting were rebuffed by members of the art establishment who claimed the painting was nothing more than worthless. Harry Moses directs.

Opens in New York (official site).

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<![CDATA[The New Didactic Film]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/ifc-news-podcast-3-the-new-did.php Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we talk about the recent surge in didactic films, from "Fast Food Nation" to "V for Vendetta."

Download: MP3, 16:23 minutes, 15 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20633 2006-11-13 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_3_the_new_did publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020633 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[The New Didactic Film (photo)]]> Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020633 2006-11-13 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_3_the_new_did_photo inherit 20633 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Where Have All the Biopics Gone?]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/ifc-news-podcast-2-where-have.php Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 This week on the IFC News podcast, we wonder where the big biopics are this Oscar season, and look at a few films that go against the typical genre grain.

Download now (MP3: 15:49 minutes, 14.4 MB)


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20632 2006-11-06 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_2_where_have publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020632 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[Where Have All the Biopics Gone? (photo)]]> Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020632 2006-11-06 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_2_where_have_photo inherit 20632 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Steve Anderson on "Fuck"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/steve-anderson-on-fuck.php Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: One of Bill Plympton's animated interludes, ThinkFilm, 2006]


"What's the big deal? It doesn't hurt anybody. Fuck-fuckety-fuck-fuck-fuck."

—Eric Cartman, as quoted in "Fuck"

Here's one reason to become a film journalist: It's not likely that Cat Fancy will be featuring the word "fuck" as often as you're going to see below. The fact that this word — in its strictest definition a simple synonym for the act of sex, but in its broader usage a term that stands for so much more — still raises hackles, giggles and the occasional libido is very much the issue tackled by director Steve Anderson in his documentary, "Fuck." To explore the social, sexual and just plain fun aspects of the term, Anderson gathered a broad range of experts, from comedians Billy Connolly and Drew Carey, to moral icons Miss Manners and Pat Boone, to a not-surprisingly uninhibited Hunter S. Thompson. What the director winds up with is a snapshot of a word trapped between the wave of growing sexual and artistic expression and an opposing tide of government-backed, social repression.


The reasons for doing a film about the word "fuck" are pretty self-evident. But what convinced you that a documentary could be built around any single word?


There were some real concerns. When I first thought of it, it literally came out of my mouth as an off-hand joke: "Hey, we should do a movie about the word 'fuck.'" The second I said it, I realized that, hey, that could be a really good idea. We could use this word that's still scandalous — it's probably lost a little bit of its power to shock, but it's still at the center of the debate about free speech — and it could be funny and entertaining, and at the same time we could talk about these issues.


I was concerned at the beginning: Are we going to have enough material? And I was also asking myself the question whether "fuck" was over. Was it shocking anymore, would this film be the least bit provocative, since it's everywhere, now — it's on TV, it's in the movies, it's in music, Dick Cheney uses it, Barbara Streisand uses it. I don't think you can get two people on the farther ends of the spectrum than those two. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that the word really still does have power. And by the time the film was well into production, I realized I had to scale back, because there was so much stuff to talk about.


Despite all the fun that's had with the word in this film, there is a serious context to the project: Confronting the growing dominance of government-sanctioned censorship in this country.


In its broadest context, the film is about something that divides us. I think, as good citizens and people of this country, we like to think of things that will bring us together. I don't like divisions of society — in popular culture; Democrats and Republicans — I like to try to figure out ways that the country could come together. And oddly enough, this word that typically divides people, in this film they come together to talk about it. I think that's important. I think that we can show that even if there are differences of opinion, people can come together in the same room to talk about things.


Freedom of speech is so important. It's the First Amendment, it's not the third or the fifth. And I think there's a trend in this country right now, with Bush in office and the rise of the religious right and conservatives, they're sort of having a heyday now. The Family Research Council, the Parents Television Council figured out a way to flood the FCC in-box with thousands, maybe millions, of complaints about the Janet Jackson incident. Suddenly, senators here on the floor of Congress are saying, "Hey, there are 500,000 complaints." And if I were a senator, I'd sit up and take note of that, too. But it really bears out that it was really just one organization hijacking the process.


I don't think that's fair, so in a small way, this film is hopefully trying to combat that. It's saying, "Look: Yes, you can be against 'fuck' and you might not want to say it and you might not want to hear it." I can honestly respect that. But I do want to say it. I do want to hear it. I like Howard Stern; I love watching "Deadwood." I don't want those choices taken away from me.


Has the film been through the MPAA?


It has not. We decided to release it unrated. I honestly harbored a desire to let the MPAA see it — we did hear through some intermediaries that they wanted to rate it. I was kind of hopeful that it would get an NC-17, because it had a chance of getting an NC-17 for language, and it would have been the first film ever that got it specifically just for language. But cooler minds prevailed — it's much more troublesome marketing a film that's NC-17 than one called, "Fuck," and I think if you have both on there, it would be very difficult.


Sorta throws a monkey-wrench into the fact that it's all verbal.


In MPAA language, you get one "fuck" for a PG-13 film, and it has to be in a non-sexual way. We would've been rated R in the first thirty seconds. But our film goes on to talk about it, and in the first five minutes you're very used to the word, and you're talking about the word in the context of using the word, so I don't really view it as obscene in any way. It's a literate and hopefully entertaining discussion of a word that can be considered obscene, but I don't think the film can be considered obscene.

It's odd — at one point, Pat Boone rather proudly explains how he uses his own last name as a substitute swear word. Then you run a clip where Ice T turns it into "getting Booned," and I sort of felt empathy for the fact that Pat never considered that possible permutation.


I actually have a lot of respect for Pat Boone — he was one of the first two people who signed on to do an interview. I don't agree very often — almost never — with his points of view, but I do respect them for what they are. You know what you're getting when he walks into the room, and the film really deserved to have that point of view in there.


What was it like getting Hunter S. Thompson to participate?


We got his phone number, one of my executive producers talked to him briefly, and I called him at his home phone number up in Woody Creek. I have to say it was a really wild experience even getting him on the phone. Hunter, in my mind, was almost a myth. He was kind of out there — I know he was a real person — but even when he appeared on media or the TV, he kind of embodied that. He liked the idea right away — it piqued his interest right away. The first thing he said was that he'd do it if I could bring Anne Coulter up to Woody Creek so he could debate her on-camera. I actually tried to get hold of her, tried to do it through intermediaries, but she politely declined.


Near the end of the film, there's some conjecture about a possible sequel. So, can we be expecting "Cunt" in the near future?


I don't think I'll be making the "Cunt" documentary anytime soon. I don't think you could make the same kind of movie. You can make a movie about anything, but "cunt" is not funny. It's a word that's worse, that's more obscene, than "fuck." Also, racial epithets are more obscene and hurtful than "fuck." So I don't think "Cunt" will be coming anytime soon. Maybe "Bullshit." Bullshit's fun.



"Fuck" opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 10, with additional cities starting November 17 (official site).

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<![CDATA[What's Up In November]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/events-whats-up-in-november.php Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: Chia-Liang Liu's "Dirty Ho," part of BAM's series Heroic Grace II: Shaw Brothers Return]


AFI Fest

Nov. 1-12

Returning for its twentieth year, L.A.'s biggest and brightest film fest continues promoting domestic and international, mainstream and independent, feature-length and short, narrative and documentary and, well, pretty much all things cinema. This year's highlights include the US premiere of Emilio Estevez's directorial Oscar-run "Bobby," the world premiere of Zhang Yimou's glitzy "Curse of the Golden Flower" and a 24-hour movie marathon to support charity.


A Centennial Tribute to Otto Preminger

Nov. 2

Director Peter Bogdonovich hosts this one-night celebration of influential filmmaker Otto Preminger's 100th birthday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. A selection of film clips from Preminger's films will be screened alongside a discussion with colleagues, family and friends, and the event kicks off a month-long retrospective that includes screenings of the great "Laura," "The Man with the Golden Arm" and "Anatomy of a Murder."


Chicago Filipino Film Festival

This film festival promotes, clearly) the work of Filipino filmmakers. The highlight of the festival will be Auraeus Solito's Sundance favorite "The Blossoming of Maximos Oliveros," which is this year's Filipino candidate for Best Foreign Language Film.


New Czech Films

Nov. 3-5

The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents its yearly display of new films out of the Czech Republic. Safe bets include Jan Svankmajer's "Lunacy" (love that stop-motion meat) and Ivan Trojan's "Wrong Side Up."


Machinima Festival

Nov. 4-5

What, you may ask, is Machinima? Where the hell have you been? Machinima is an art form that combines video game production, animation, and filmmaking to present a new style of storytelling — think "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" without the crushing disappointment. The Machinima Festival returns for its fourth year to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.


Polish Film Festival in America

Nov. 4-19

One of the premiere film festivals to highlight Polish filmmakers hits the city of Chicago for two weeks. We're intrigued by the Jan Jakub Kolski film "Jasminum" and the retrospective on silent film star Pola Negri.


Isabella Rossellini: Illuminated

Minneapolis' Walker Art Center presents this retrospective on the acting career of international star Isabella Rossellini to coincide with the release of her directorial debut, "My Dad is 100 Years Old," about her father, the underrated Italian neo-realist director. Phew. Other highlights include "Wild at Heart," "The Saddest Music in the World," and, of course, "Blue Velvet." Pabst Blue Ribbon!


Wilder's Picks!

Nov. 6-20

Mr. Wonka himself, Gene Wilder, will be available to discuss his favorite films at the Avon Theatre in Connecticut throughout the month. His films of choice are Ernst Lubitsch's "The Merry Widow," 1938's "Topper Takes a Trip," and his very own "Young Frankenstein."


Heroic Grace II: Shaw Brothers Return

Nov. 6-28

Last year's Shaw Brothers retrospective was one of the best series to run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Now BAM takes another look at the legacy of the influential Hong Kong production company, showcasing further kung fu and wuxia highlights.


Jacques Rivette

Nov. 10-Dec. 24

The Museum of Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, presents this retrospective on the little-known French director who emerged during the New Wave of the 1960s. This series includes a rarest-of-the-rare screening of his 743-minute 1971 film "Out 1," presented over two days, with breaks for dinner.


Stockholm International Film Festival

Nov. 16-26

This Swedish film festival introduces Europe to many of the hottest films of the fall. This year, director Lasse Hallstrom will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from his native country. We wish we could tell you more, but alas the website is in Swedish.


Modern Urban Mythology — The Superhero

Nov. 17-22

Superheroes seem to be all the rage these days. Recent hits like Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" series and the "X-Men" trilogy pleased critics and reignited superhero interest, while the new series "Heroes" is one of the few successes of this year's TV season. All things caped and masked hit the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica for this five-day retrospective of the superhero films of yesteryear. Hollywood's original "Superman" (directed by Richard Donner) and "Batman" (directed by Tim Burton) will be screened, along with their initial sequels. Also screening will be the artsy 1960s caper "Danger: Diabolik" and the unappreciated comedy "The Specials," about a group of loser superheroes headed by Thomas Haden Church.


Gotham Awards

Nov. 29

This year's Best Feature nominees include such indie classics as, er, "The Departed," "Little Children" and "Marie Antoinette." Oh well, at least the red carpet will be good.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 10th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/opening-this-week-november-10t.php Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Come Early Morning," Roadside Attractions, 2006]


A round-up of the indie and indie-ish films opening in theaters this week.


"The Cave of the Yellow Dog"

A young girl must choose between her family and her pet, after she decides to adopt a dog against her father's wishes. This is the sophomore film from Mongolian filmmaker Byambasuren Davaa, who previously directed 2003's "The Story of the Weeping Camel."

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Christmas at Maxwell's"

Just reading the synopsis for this movie made me throw up in my mouth a little, but at least it's good to know someone is still making Christmas movies without Tim Allen. The rich and successful Austin family begins to fall apart as mother Suzie is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The Austins decide to spend their last Christmas as a family in a tiny lake town, learning that community and love will keep them together. Schmaltz is really difficult to stomach.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Come Early Morning"

Ashley Judd returns from whatever rock she's been hiding under the past few years in one of her two indie-ish films to be released this fall ("Bug" being the other). Joey Lauren Adams of "Chasing Amy" fame makes her directorial debut telling the story of a Southern woman named Lucy (Judd) whose search for love leaves her with far too many one-night stands. Early reviews seem sorta mixed; critics find it doesn't set itself apart from all those other indie movies that are just like is.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Copying Beethoven"

Ed Harris dons the year's most ridiculous wig in this fictionalized account of the last year of composer Ludwig van Beethoven's life directed by Agnieszka Holland, who made 1991's Academy Award-nominated "Europa Europa."

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Fuck"

Filmmaker Steve Anderson documents the many wonderful ways in which the title word has impacted our society, from Hollywood films to stand-up comedy, the schoolyard to Congress, to its constant redefinitions in the English language. The doc including interviews with news anchor Sam Donaldson, author Hunter S. Thompson, filmmaker Kevin Smith and many others, but without an interview with Samuel L. Jackson, we have to wonder how it could do "the F word" justice.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus"

Nicole Kidman returns to form for the first time since "The Hours" in Steven Shainberg's first film after his debut "Secretary" in this biopic about famed photographer Diane Arbus. Though this film's seemingly got "OSCAR" slapped all over it, early reviews call the movie pretty mediocre. It still might be an interesting film, as Shainberg has been hailed for straying from the standard biopic fare.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).


"A Good Year"

Russell Crowe tries to make America fall in love with him again in this sweet movie directed by his former "Gladiator" collaborator, Ridley Scott. Crowe plays an Englishman who inherits a vineyard in Provence following the death of his uncle, only to find conflict when an American woman claims the property is hers. Neither Crowe nor Scott seem prime for such lighthearted work; hopefully no hotel clerks were harmed in the making of this film.

Opens wide (official site).


"Harsh Times"

We've said this before and we'll say it again, but Christian Bale is one of the best working actors in film today. After turning in highly underrated performances in "American Psycho" and "The Machinist", Bale stars as an ex-Army Ranger who cruises the South Central streets of Los Angeles with his best friend, played by "Six Feet Under"'s Freddy Rodriguez, as they encounter the violence and horror of everyday street life. David Ayer, the film's director and also co-creator of "Training Day", takes a page from "Taxi Driver" in his portrayal of Bale's unsympathetic yet complex protagonist.

Opens wide (official site).


"Iraq in Fragments"

Filmed over two years, documentarian James Longley's film tells stories of modern day Iraq from the perspective of the people who live there. The film is divided into three acts, telling stories of a fatherless 11-year-old's quest for survival, a town's struggle for political democracy, and the liberation of a Kurdish village by American soldiers.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Last Atomic Bomb"

This documentary follows the activism of nuclear survivor Sakue Shimohira, a woman who survived the Nagasaki bombing of 1945. The film charts Shimohira's international travels as she meets with Presidents Bush and Chirac and Prime Minister Tony Blair, inviting the world leaders to visit Nagasaki and understand the lasting effects of nuclear power.

Opens in New York (official site).


"The Return"

No, this is not a re-release of the far superior Andrei Zvyagintsev 2003 film of the same title, but yet another horror film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. The former "Buffy" actress stars as a traveling business woman who begins receiving nightmares of a murder that happened fifteen years ago and is drawn to an old farmhouse where the murder may have taken place. The film is helmed by "The Warrior"'s Asif Kapadia, so there's some promise there, at least.

Opens wide (official site).


"Stranger Than Fiction"

Will Ferrell continues his onslaught on the senses in this new film by Marc Foster, though this time with the support of a promising cast including Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson, and the ubiquitous Maggie Gyllenhaal (not that we're complaining). Screenwriter Zach Helm takes a cue from the Charlie Kaufman school of filmmaking in this blend of reality and fiction in which an IRS auditor played by Ferrell suddenly finds himself the subject of narration only he can hear, affecting his entire life from his work to his death.

Opens wide (official site).

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<![CDATA[CMJ Does Movies. Really.]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/cmj-does-movies-really.php Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 So you've got this well-known music festival that swamps its hometown with an astounding array of shows, while its lesser-known film program is still developing an identity and following of its own. No, not SXSW (which at this point has successfully established itself as a formidable film festival in its own right) — I'm talking about the CMJ Music Marathon, which for years has sent New York-based indie music fans barreling around the city trying to talk their way into shows that are invariably already sold out.


CMJ's FilmFest, which this year ran from October 31 to November 4, is often overlooked in the shuffle, in part because the films in the line-up already have theatrical distribution, and in part because no one's really figured out what a music festival's taste in film should be like. Do you show films about music? Or just films that would appeal to people who like music? Who doesn't like music? This year, the FilmFest had its share of big, shiny preview screenings — "Borat," with Sacha Baron Cohen appearing, naturally, in character; "The Fountain"; "Stranger Than Fiction" — but also has other, more intriguing concert titles tucked away inside. Sam Erickson's "My Morning Jacket: Okonokos" captures the jam band live on stage in as prime a location as you could imagine: The Fillmore in San Francisco, California. Making its world premiere at the FilmFest was Baillie Walsh's "Oasis: Lord Don't Slow Me Down," which catches up with the famously mercurial Britpop band, following them for seven months on their Don't Believe the Truth world tour. Noel Gallagher appeared after the screening for a Q&A to placate whatever stalwart Oasis fans are left in the world.


Most interesting of all were the two side programs highlighting the most maligned of film-related genres, the music video. Northern Transmissions at Scandinavia House offered a range of not-often-shown Nordic music videos, and Chuck Statler: Before MTV, at the Museum of Modern Art, took a closer look at "the godfather of the music video." Statler, whose music films for DEVO led to his making what were essentially music videos for artists like Nick Lowe and Madness long before MTV, appeared in conversation with Jeff Krulik of the cult classic short film "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," a combination that seems that include the best conflation of music and filmmaking. Sadly, "HMPL" was not shown — the documentation of fans waiting for a Judas Priest concert has always said more about music to some of us than a million beautifully shot live shows.

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<![CDATA[CMJ Does Movies. Really. (photo)]]> Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10025405 2006-11-06 00:00:00 closed closed cmj_does_movies_really_photo inherit 25405 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Wordplay," "The Fountainhead"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/11/on-dvd-wordplay-the-fountainhe.php Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Wordplay," IFC Films]


There are far too few avenues in the pop-cult arena for the glorification of higher brain functions — almost by definition, the flexing of intellect and education makes the masses feel like a lower life form in a way that watching "American Idol" doesn't, even if the high-minded exercise in question is meaningless tosh. So, when a doc like 2003's "Spellbound" or Patrick Creadon's "Wordplay" appears on the horizon, a certain percentage of literate Americans go to it like desert animals to an oasis spring.


It'd be easy to dismiss Creadon's homage to crossword puzzlers, craftsmen and publishers as a full-on brown-nosing for The New York Times — it's a movie about fandom, and if you're not a fan, it could easily seem to be much ado about a lot of masturbatory nothing. But if you are, and you harbor an ardor for the engaged mind at play in the fields of language, culture and memory, then this is all you. Creadon sweetens the pot by interviewing virtually every celebrity that's ever been known to prefer the tougher, end-of-the-week Times puzzles to the easier early ones, including Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina, Bob Dole, Ken Burns, et al. Since there's not much to talk about, Creadon has them solve on camera, a spectacle that in itself can make you feel as stupid as a grouper.


Times puzzle editor Will Shortz and his freelance cronies properly take center stage, and while they manufacture the networks of numbered clues and dish out dollops of historical trivia about when and how the habit/hobby got started, the movie builds up to the 28th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. (The clue-empty space-ticking clock action is arranged with digital graphics, making DVD backups profitable.) The cast of reference-section puzzle geeks may take their competition too seriously, but Creadon doesn't, and it's a sweet thing to see the members of this uncelebrated, unglamorous mob taste stardom thanks exclusively to what's between their ears. The DVD comes with commentaries, featurettes, deleted scenes — and five specially designed DVD-ROM puzzles.


Talk about big brain: it's a wonder that America ever made a bestselling author out of Nietzschean philosopher/mega-novelist Ayn Rand, but we did, and Hollywood even stepped up and adapted her elitist, demagogic masterpiece "The Fountainhead" into a movie back in 1949. It's more than just a respectful filmization of a popular message-tome that still speaks to readers who see themselves as victims of society's monobrow — it is itself an act of Übermensch modernism.


Restless director King Vidor tells the tale about a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque architect (Gary Cooper) battling the world for the right to his own integrity, and raps out, in thick paragraphs of dialogue, Rand's caught-somewhere-between-capitalism-and-socialism "objectivist" doctrine. But he's also managed to make the only true Futurist film in American cinema, with a distinctive cement-and-bleached-beam veneer and a maniacally didactic narrative style. Little effort is made to persuade us that these are real characters, not just walking, ranting points of view, and in fact the film seems to have been made in an alternate universe where architecture is the country's most imperative public concern, architects are thought literally heretical if they experiment, and hordes of citizens riot if a newspaper supports (on its front page) an untraditional building.


As with all utopia-building, and with most anything Rand stamped her sensibility on, this film is sweeping, hopeful nonsense; the final image of Cooper's Howard Roarke standing atop the world's tallest structure, hands on hips, is a poster for a revolution that never happened. There's a crazy, innocent beauty in that. Predictably, mass audiences in the postwar 40s didn't know what to make of this humdinger, but its rep has ballooned over the decades, and it has been one of the most eagerly awaited DVD titles malingering in the Hollywood vault. Supplements include a new making-of documentary.




"Wordplay" (IFC Films/Genius Products) and "The Fountainhead" (Warner Home Video) are both available on DVD on November 7th.

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<![CDATA[On "Borat"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/ifc-news-podcast-1-on-borat.php Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 IFC News' inaugural podcast finds us looking over two of this week's releases, wondering at whether "Borat" is half as offensive as its studio hopes and why Penélope Cruz's cleavage didn't get its own place in the credits of "Volver."

Download: MP3, 22 minutes, 20.2 MB


Subscribe to the podcast: [XML] [iTunes]

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20631 2006-10-30 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_1_on_borat publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 10020631 _entry_authors Alison Willmore , Matt Singer ]]>
<![CDATA[On "Borat" (photo)]]> Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10020631 2006-10-30 00:00:00 closed closed ifc_news_podcast_1_on_borat_photo inherit 20631 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Opening This Week: November 3rd, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/opening-this-week-november-3rd.php Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Romanticó," Meteor Films, 2006]


A round-up of the indie and indie-ish films opening in theaters this week.


"Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"

"Jagshemash!" Sacha Baron Cohen returns to the big screen in this controversial mockumentary that made a huge splash at the Toronto Film Festival. The racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic Borat might draw protests from the Kazakh government, but we doubt that will prevent audiences from flocking to see this biting satire on American culture.

Opens wide (official site).


"Flushed Away"

Our favorite British animators at Aardman Studios return for their first fully CGI feature film, opting to abandon their signature style of clay animation. The film's synopsis seems to be pretty standard for animated animal fare (this time: they're rats!), but the Brit celebrity voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, and Gandalf himself, Ian McKellan, are far more appealing than this recent animated entry. Plus, rumors abound that Gromit makes a cameo appearance, which just made this movie five times cooler.

Opens wide (official site).


"Romanticó"

Mark Becker's first documentary feature since 2003's "Lost Boys of Sudan" chronicles a Mexican troubadour's return home following a failed music career in San Francisco. The film premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Shottas"

Described in the media as "the Caribbean 'Scarface,'" this Jamaican thriller was filmed in 2002 and has been awaiting release ever since. The film tells the story of two young men and drugs in both Kingston and Washington D.C. DJ Spragga Benz and reggae musician Ky-Mani Marley (yes, son of Bob) star.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Soap"

This tragicomedy focuses on the relationship between a 32-year old owner of a beauty clinic and a reclusive transsexual as their personal lives begin to reflect the transsexual's favorite soap opera (Get it? "Soap"?). Pernille Fischer Christensen, the film's director, was awarded the Best Debut Film and Silver Berlin Bear Awards at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Umrao Jaan"

J.P. Dutta adapts the classic Urdu novel "Umrao Jan Ada," about the life of a courtesan in turn of the century India.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Unknown"

First-time director Simon Brand enlists Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Joey Pants and Mel Gibson's Jesus in this new thriller about five men who awaken in a warehouse with no recollection of how they got there. Think "Memento," except now there are five guys and no Sammy Jankis.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Volver"

Ah, Almodóvar. It's been nearly two years since your last masterpiece ("Bad Education"), and now the entire film community is crazy about your latest Cannes-winner. Carmen Maura stars in her first Almodóvar film since 1988, as a ghost who returns to the home of her two daughters to help restore order to their unstable lives. Plus, it's always nice to see that Penélope Cruz does in fact know how to act (We're still trying to get over "Sahara").

Opens in New York and Los Angeles (official site).

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<![CDATA["Babel," the new "Crash"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/babel-the-new-crash.php Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: Paramount Vantage, 2006]


It's the scariest time of the year, and not only because of the healthy release of arterial spray in "Saw III." Yes, Oscar season is upon us, where Hollywood's self-important social conscience rears its bloated head for a few looks toward relevance. After the embarrassing Best Picture victory for "Crash" (the funniest movie of 05), the question arises of what "issue" film will bear the middlebrow crown of improbable success this year: Philip Noyce's "Catch a Fire," Ed Zwick's "Blood Diamond" and Todd Field's "Little Children" all have (or did have) a shot, but the film best positioned to repeat "Crash"'s success is "Babel," Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga's latest multi-character network narrative. Iñárritu won the Best Director prize at Cannes, and Rex Reed has already deemed it a masterpiece. With the wrinkly visage of Brad Pitt, a seemingly resonant theme about inter-cultural miscommunication and the imprimatur of two hip Mexican auteurs, the Academy will adore it. Put it in the pantheon!


Unfortunately, it's a massive failure as a film, despite being markedly better than "Crash." Director Iñárritu and screenwriter Arriaga have cornered the market on the multiple overlapping stories structure ever since "Amores Perros" racked up festival awards in 2000. They've suffered diminishing returns since, with the flaccid "21 Grams" and now the dispiriting "Babel." This latest film takes place in four countries and follows four different tales. Cate Blanchett is accidentally shot on a vacation in Morocco with her husband Brad Pitt; the two young shooters are chased across the desert by local police; in California Blanchett's children are being watched by a nanny (Adriana Barraza) who takes them to her son's wedding in Mexico; and a teenage girl, Chieko, (Rinko Kikuchi) mourns the death of her mother in Japan by rebelling against her morose father (Koji Yakusho).


The first three stories are directly linked, in plot and theme: they are concerned with the barriers of language and borders, and the violence rendered because of them. Pitt calls for medical help, no one comes, the nanny tries to reason with the Border Patrol, tragedy awaits. The fourth section's narrative connection is tangential and revealed late in the film, and is also thematically separated, as Chieko represses her grief at the loss of her mother and channels it into acts of reckless sexuality. There's no border of language or nation — just that old sentimental saw "the borders of the heart."


It starts off well enough in the Pitt-Blanchett segment, the arbitrariness of violence framed by two bored Moroccan youths just shooting a little target practice. Inside of the bus where Blanchett is felled, a genuine sense of panic erupts as dust-caked Pitt rages impotently at uncomprehending passersby. Here the theme is organic to the action — something which becomes increasingly rare as the film rolls on. Arriaga and Iñárritu soon privilege grand statements over believable human behavior. As the shooting steamrolls into an international incident, "Babel" descends into self-parody (spoilers ahead).


Gael García Bernal, the nanny's nephew, races past customs into the U.S. (because the guard was getting a little pushy) and dumps Barraza and the two children by the side of the road. This gives Iñárritu the opportunity to barrage the viewer with low-angle slo-mo shots of Barraza tottering in the desert sun, wailing and looking for the presumably starving kids. It's completely over-the-top and a huge tonal shift from the relative social realism of the rest of the segment. Here action services theme, but what use is it if it detaches itself from the world we live in? The characters become automatons acting out rote scenarios (there's no time to add depth with all of the cross-cutting) so Iñárritu can film garishly nihilist climaxes to prove his rather trite point — which runs something like: Rich Americans are miserable, Moroccan kids are miserable, Mexicans are miserable, and the Japanese are miserable and tremendously horny. Note the lack of elaboration — it's the filmmakers' fault, not mine.

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<![CDATA[The Rise of the Fanumentary]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/the-rise-of-the-fanumentary.php Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: "95 Miles to Go," ThinkFilm, 2006]


Halfway through a screening of "95 Miles to Go," the video diary of comedian Ray Romano's performance tour through the south, I thought I saw the future of documentary filmmaking, and it scared the shit out of me. I saw comedians, rock stars, actors — anyone with the self-possession to offer themselves up to the spotlight and the inclination to jam a camcorder into a subordinate's hands — capturing the tiniest minutiae of their lives for the camera. I saw distributors, motivated by star names and low, low budgets, snapping up 90-minute draughts of real-life esoterica better fit for the bonus features of a concert DVD. I saw a new breed of vanity filmmaking gone mobile: Every Holiday Inn a studio! Every personal assistant a de facto documentarian! And I steeled myself for the tide of ego-fueled effluvia that I felt was sure to come.


It hasn't gotten that bad, but the threat still looms. "95 Miles to Go" should be the cautionary lesson that puts filmgoers on their guard. Much as I enjoy Ray Romano's comedy, a hour and fifteen minutes of him whining about hotel rooms and rest-stops is certainly more than anyone should be asked to endure (imagine what the full, eight-day journey was like). This is pack-yer-camcorder filmmaking at its most basic, and most tedious. Watching it, you get the sense that the biggest difference between such road-documentaries and your average home movie is the amount of Velcro mounting material that gets packed.


Ray Romano is not the only target of filmmakers who seem to think the world spins on their subject's merest breath. Take, for instance, "The Outsider," Nicholas Jarecki's adoring profile of gadfly director James Toback. As the brother of nonfiction helmers Eugene and Andrew Jarecki and the author of "Breaking In: How 20 Film Directors Got Their Start," Jarecki's managed his own break-in by corralling a who's who of cinematic talent — Woody Allen, Barry Levinson, and Robert Towne amongst them — to sing Toback's praises. And for about 45 minutes, it sort of works. There's a certain, perverse fun in watching Toback ply his craft (the sum of his direction to model Bridget Hall is, "You are yourself, and you stop me and tell me you're fascinated by my book"). The more you observe, though, the more you may be reminded that, while some regard Toback's work as masterpieces of free-form filmmaking, others see only formless rehashings of his obsessions with desperate gamblers and two-on-one sex. By the time Jarecki starts sitting Toback down in the same frame with the people who are supposed to be talking about him — always a bad idea — the mutual stroking becomes as oppressive as the knowledge that any twenty-something actress in a Toback film will inevitably wind up naked in a clinch with Robert Downey Jr.


There's even more star-power in Sidney Pollack's "Sketches of Frank Gehry," but of a distinctly Forbesian pedigree: Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, Mike Ovitz, Philip Johnson. They're all here to bear witness to the architect's inarguable genius, yet what may lodge most indelibly in your mind is not their testimony, nor the shots of Gehry's mammoth, undulating structures, but the sight of Pollack wielding a camcorder as he interviews the man. The prevalence of such footage is curious — it's as if the Hollywood stalwart wanted as much to immortalize his own embrace of new media as to celebrate the work of his subject. (The self-consciousness becomes all the more conspicuous when you realize that Pollack's gone to the trouble of having another cameraperson there to record his foray into film-it-yourself production.) It doesn't work, of course — much as Pollack wants to display his blossoming as an indie filmmaker, the industry roots still show (viz those mover-and-shaker interviews). But at least he brings in critic Hal Foster for an opposing viewpoint, and, since I seriously doubt I'll ever set foot in Bilbao, I have to welcome any opportunity to explore Gehry's dazzling, radical style in this kind of detail.


As for the celebrity list of "Wrestling with Angels," how about Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, and Marcia Gay Harden? The plus side here is that these stars feel more in proportion to the real world, maybe because the film's subject, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, feels rather grounded himself. I only wish director Freida Lee Mock had taken her stylistic tip less from Kushner's down-to-earth personality and more from the bold imagery of such plays as "Angels in America" — her straightforward treatment pays off in such moments as when Kushner visits his Louisiana home, but devolves into something like a succession of making-of videos while the film catalogues the creation of some of Kushner's recent work (a sense only emphasized as Maurice Sendak, through no fault of his own, briefly wrests the spotlight away from the film's putative subject). Still, the passion and social concern of the man overcomes the bland treatment — any person who can create a piece in which Laura Bush reads "The Brothers Karamazov" to a group of dead Iraqi children has earned, in my estimation, whatever adulation falls his way.

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<![CDATA["Down to the Bone," "Hands Over the City"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/on-dvd-down-to-the-bone-hands.php Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Atkinson

IFC News


[Photo: "Down to the Bone," Hart Sharp Video]


As any goggle-eyed witness to Scorsese's "The Departed" knows, Vera Farmiga — she played the police psychologist who improbably slept with both Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon — has a face that can haunt your dreams. We first saw her in the odious Richard Gere-Winona Ryder romance "Autumn in New York," and Farmiga's unusual aquiline visage, with its startling moon-blue cat eyes and a toothy smile that breaks like glass under pressure, made the rest of the film vanish from sight. She's a formidable actress, too, as she proved last year in "Down to the Bone," a raw indie in which she plays an upstate-New York supermarket cashier with a working-class husband, two kids, a small suburban house, and a jones for cocaine she thinks she can control. Farmiga's Irene does, in fact, keep her habit under wraps most of the time — hunting for inebriation opportunities with her looming eyes even as she dresses her boys for trick-or-treating and cooks dinner. As the season gets colder, Irene gets more desperate — and then, surprisingly, and because she seems a little too smart to get lost in complete irresponsibility, checks into rehab (much to the chagrin of her co-snorting hubby).


Doper melodramas can be repetitious and dull, but Debra Granik's movie stays so close to Farmiga you can hear her breath accelerate when cocaine is near. Irene's plight is in any case far from a smooth ascent out of or descent toward junkiehood — in the 70s style, the film respects the struggle between clean sanity and polluted self-satisfaction, and comes as close as any film in its strange subgenre to suspending judgment. (If you had Irene's dire low-rent life, you'd want to get high, too.) Farmiga is a show onto herself — and the suspense from here on in lies with what Hollywood will do with this brilliant, disconcertingly beautiful siren now that they have her. The new DVD comes with audio commentary by Granik and Farmiga, and Granik's original 1997 short "Snake Feed."


Another kind of clear-eyed essay on inequity, Francesco Rosi's masterful 1963 "Hands Over the City" takes on an entire political system, Italian neorealist-style. A poison-pen rendition of a polluted urban bureaucracy, Rosi's film comes off as a "Syriana" for the city of Naples, more interested in the textures of power and corruption than in individual psychology. It's a tough kind of movie to make, and nobody has done it as well as Rosi — his "Salvatore Giuliano," released the year before, chronicles the career of the titular Sicilian insurrectionist-cum-bandit without ever making him a character in the film. Instead, the sociopolitical hellfire erupting around him, from both sides of the law, is documented and dissected. "Hands Over the City" begins with a rampaging developer (Rod Steiger) hawking the city's northern ghettos for profitable gentrification to Parliament members. Then, on the eve of an election, a building in the project collapses, killing two and crippling a child. (Rosi shoots this cataclysm in a breathless montage that leaves you wondering how the cameramen survived.)


From there, a tapestry of molten social conflict is crafted, as Leftist politicians insist on an investigation and attempt to head off the backroom collusion between Steiger's all-business moneymen and the government's "center" faction. There's nothing dry or pedantic at work here — it's feverish, vital drama with essential political morality at stake. (The Parliament sessions come close to blows.) Steiger's presence may've sold the film in 1963, but he's merely a single figure in an ensemble that sometimes seems to include all of Naples. The upshot is an expansive and tumultuous community portrait in which the lives and welfare of real people are decided by flabby, middle-aged men in expensive suits. (Rosi is not above cutting from the now-legless ghetto urchin on crutches to a rotund politician exercising on a rowing machine beside his built-in pool.) The film is fiction, but, Rosi tells us in an ending title, "The Context Is Real." And universal, and timeless, he could have added. The Criterion supps include several new interviews with Rosi and several European film critics, and Rosi's "Neapolitan Diary" (1992), a feature-length documentary about the city, the film and Rosi's life making movies.




"Down to the Bone" (Hart Sharp Video) is available on DVD on October 31st; "Hands Over the City" (Criterion) went on sale October 24th.

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<![CDATA[Bobcat Goldthwait on "Sleeping Dogs Lie"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/bobcat-goldthwait-on-sleeping.php Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2006]


When you think of Bobcat Goldthwait, chances are what comes to mind is that anxiously pubescent growl he adopted for such '80s-defining staples as "One Crazy Summer" and the "Police Academy" series, but that voice is a stigma he'd like to overcome. After starring alongside Dabney Coleman and a talking horse in "Hot to Trot," an experience he says made him feel as powerless as a "cog in the machine," he retaliated by making his first short film. In 1992, he made the directorial leap to features with his drunken-bozo extravaganza, "Shakes the Clown," a hilariously irreverent cult classic that even Martin Scorsese has admitted he loves. Goldthwait's latest effort as writer-director is "Sleeping Dogs Lie" (formerly titled "Stay" when it premiered at Sundance), which could almost be a mainstream rom-com if it weren't for its premise... When a young woman (Melinda Page Hamilton) is egged on by her fiancé (Bryce Johnson) to reveal her darkest secret, their relationship is forever distorted after he learns that once, out of curiosity in college, she gave her dog a blowjob. More shocking is that the film is hardly a gross-out comedy, but a straight-faced exploration of honesty in relationships. I sat down with Goldthwait before the film's release, half-expecting to hear that excitable voice, but was instead charmed by his soft-spoken, self-deprecating demeanor.


I thought the original title, "Stay," had a far more poignant double-meaning.


I loved that title a lot more myself, actually. It was the decision of whomever owns the other "Stay," the Marc Forster film, that won out. That's the reality of it. You know, I bummed out a little bit over it, and then I realized that in making the movie, I didn't really have any restrictions for good or bad. It's what I had in mind, so if I had to compromise on one thing, at least I can live with that.


The film certainly has a homegrown, do-it-yourself spirit.


Yeah, it was real guerilla. We shot in 16 days and stole... uh, borrowed things from various productions. I always knew if we were going to make it, it was going to be a really tiny budget. Even in the indie world, if you have people giving you millions of dollars to make a movie, you have other people you need to listen to. And making a movie as small as I did, there were no notes. The thing that really exceeded my expectations was Melinda, who is such a great actress. If she wasn't as strong as I believe she is in this, it would've been a whole different movie and really corny.


Everyone will probably focus on the bestiality, but there's nothing really subversive beyond that. You've made a surprisingly sweet dramedy out of something entirely offensive.


Well, thanks. That was the experiment, the overall kind of big cosmic joke for me, if I could make a heartwarming dog-blowjob movie. It does have serious beats in it, and the upbeat ending is still kind of... well, I don't want to ruin it. I remember when I was writing the [ending], it made me really happy. (laughs)


What ran through your mind when you chose this particular taboo? Like, why not incest?


The reason is because that involves other people. I wanted it to be something she did alone, that was really it. And it's about a woman because it's a fact that men are kind of disgusting. If it was a guy, people would go, "yeah, whatever." You know what I mean?


Especially after the success of "Jackass: Number Two." Much worse has hit multiplexes.


It's funny that you bring that movie up, I know all those fellas. Sarah de Sa Rego produced our movie and did the costume design; everybody had nine jobs. But she just came back from traveling all around with those guys, doing the costumes and things on "Jackass 2." PJ... uh, Johnny Knoxville was like, "Hey, come over here." He's just showing me raw footage and you know the horse [semen-drinking] scene? I threw up. If I had a bigger meal in me, there would've been vomit in the room. But it was a chunky dry heave, definitely. It was just like, bam! Dude! I didn't know that that was coming, so I got sucker-punched.


You've kept a fairly low profile since "Shakes the Clown." What were you up to prior to "Sleeping Dogs Lie?"


I was directing [TV's "Chappelle's Show" and "Jimmy Kimmel Live"] for a while, that was a lot of fun, and I just wrote this script. It wasn't like, "Oh, I'm going to write this movie and it's going to get into Sundance." About a year later, Sarah read it and said, "This is pretty good, we should make it." I had no agenda or plan. I made another movie in-between, "Windy City Heat," that was on Comedy Central and just came out on DVD [last month]. I think all three of my movies have different tones. "Shakes" is kind of like my take on a John Waters comedy, you know what I mean? Even though "Windy City Heat" is part reality, the other part is very improvisational, so it's my stab at — and I'm not saying I'm as good as these guys — what Christopher Guest does. Then this was my attempt at a grown-up movie, like Woody Allen or Neil LaBute. If I'm lucky enough to keep directing, I don't have much interest in doing the same kind of movie over and over again. Until any one of them is a success, then I'll just do nine versions of that one. (laughs)


If it does become a crossover hit, what would you ideally like to work on next?


You mean, would I make "Stayin," or actually, it'd be "Still Sleepin"? If this does well, it means that we could possibly make another small movie without breaking and entering. If you had me on a graph, I keep making movies for less and less money. The last script I wrote is probably even smaller than this movie. I have the inverted Hollywood career.


The trade-off is creative freedom and not having to use someone else's material.


That's the thing, I certainly didn't do this to be the poster child for indie films or anything. People can say, "Well, you have connections," but this really does go to show that in 16 days, anyone can make a movie. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but I hope other people get inspired to go do it, y'know? It's almost like the equivalent of what the web has become for musicians and people who make shorts. You can actually make a feature for... well, this movie cost less than a mid-life crisis sports car.


Years down the road, what would you like to be known best for?


I would love someday if I was lucky enough to keep making movies and people say, "He was in 'Police Academy'? What were those movies?" I know that if I drop dead, my obituary photo is going to be me in a police uniform. But I'd be really happy if I was also known as someone who made movies. I don't really want to act, and I think fortunately, Hollywood has spoken and nobody is hiring me. (laughs) It's good that those two things are in sync.


I'm getting married this weekend. Do you have any advice of what I shouldn't say to my bride-to-be, besides that time I blew a dog?


Yeah, I think you should definitely, uh... lie to your spouse. I think that's important. Don't push people to tell the truth, it's just emotional blackmail. I think you should keep all deceptions going. Lying is very important to a healthy relationship. (laughs)



"Sleeping Dogs Lie" opened in limited release October 20th (official site).

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<![CDATA["The Marine" vs. "Flags of Our Fathers"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/the-marine-vs-flags-of-our-fat.php Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 That there could be two movies in theaters simultaneously of such similar bases and such divergent content is a testament to cinema's enduring versatility, and its capacity for both brilliance and stupidity. "Flags of our Fathers" and "The Marine" are so perfect in their symmetry, they seem designed to inform each other.

Both present dueling views of life as a member of the United States Marine Corps. Clint Eastwood's "Flags of our Fathers," about the impact of Joe Rosenthal's photograph "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" on the war effort, contrasts the individual heroism of the men in the corps with the propaganda machine of the armed forces brass. It shows us the real men behind the carefully controlled images presented to the men and women on the home front in 1944. "The Marine," on the other hand, is all image, of the sort of red-blooded, blue-eyed American machismo that hasn't existed in action films since Reagan left office. Ironically, the film set in the past feels far more contemporary than the one set in the modern day.

It's hard to even believe the real men portrayed by Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, and Jesse Bradford belong to the same species as John Cena, let alone the same organization. Cena, a popular professional wrestler is all beefy hands and tree-trunk neck; as WWE-icons-turned-movie-stars go, he fares a little better than Hulk Hogan but pales next to the versatility, wit and natural charisma of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. After receiving a discharge from the Marines for disobeying a direct order in order to single-handedly rescue P.O.W.s from an al-Qaeda stronghold in Iraq, Cena's John Triton struggles to adapt to a life that doesn't involve assault weaponry. Though he lives for nothing but the Marine life, he's married to a Barbie doll made flesh (Kelly Carlson). "You married a Marine, Kate," he tells her by way of apologizing for his behavior. Fortunately, Triton's job search is interrupted by a gang of jewel robbers (led by Robert Patrick) who kidnap his wife at a gas station, and — at last! — Cena is thrust into action.

John Triton returns home from war and wants nothing more than to get back on the front lines. The soldiers of "Flags of our Fathers" get a free ticket back to the States for their appearance in Rosenthal's photo, but find themselves trapped on the blackened beaches of Iwo Jima, if only in their minds. As they travel through the U.S. to encourage war bonds sales, Eastwood returns repeatedly to the hell in the Pacific. Surrounded by imagined images of triumph, they flashback to real moments of terror.

The movies don't just come from different genres, they come from different worlds. In one explosion shells spread shrapnel and death. In another, they create super-cool explosions that present little danger to our nigh-impervious hero. Every time Triton took a gorgeous, slo-mo swan dive out of the teach of yet another fireball, I kept thinking of Phillippe's Doc Bradley, a Navy Corpsman who survives a Japanese shell with shrapnel in his legs. Unable to walk, ordered to stay down until a stretcher can arrive, he crawls over to another injured serviceman, medicating him even while he himself continues to bleed.

As Eastwood's narrator observes, we need heroes. But what kind of heroes do we need; ones imagined by screenwriters and PR men or ones lived by ordinary, selfless men and women? The WWE has one idea, Eastwood has another. Curiously, Eastwood's studio, DreamWorks (now part of Paramount) sides with the wrestlers; their marketing campaign for "Flags," replete with war drums and action shots while title cards hype the Battle of Iwo Jima's Medal of Honor winners, essentially sells the movie as the sort of patriotic spectacle Eastwood spends two hours critiquing and "The Marine" spends 90 minutes being.

"Flags" is unquestionably the better film but "The Marine" may be, perversely, the more watchable. It's an unabashed throwback to the elegantly dumb action movies of my youth; the knowing homages begin with a prologue straight out of "Rambo" and a storyline not far removed from Schwarzenegger's symphony of cartoon violence, "Commando" (both share a villain named Bennett, too). It could have been a great guilty pleasure, if only Cena looked like he was having a bit more fun — granted, he's trying to rescue his wife, but that never stopped Schwarzenegger from cracking lines like "Don't wake my friend, he's dead tired," after snapping a dude's neck. Even without the requisite jokes, the movie is utterly ridiculous (not to mention highly flammable). Wrestling is known as sports entertainment — not genuine sport, but rather a simulation. "The Marine" may be the first "movies entertainment" — false to its core, but damn fun to watch.

Eastwood doesn't hit a false note, and he's made a real movie. "The Marine" is required viewing too, for at least one reason: it makes Eastwood's point for him.

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<![CDATA["The Marine" vs. "Flags of Our Fathers" (photo)]]> Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 1008308 2006-10-23 00:00:00 closed closed the_marine_vs_flags_of_our_fat_photo inherit 8308 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA["Slither"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/on-dvd-slither.php Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Universal Pictures, 2006]


"Slither"

Directed by James Gunn


The most shocking thing about "Slither" is not something onscreen, it's how poorly it did at the box office. I hear complaints all the time — especially at this time of the year — from self-proclaimed horror fans bemoaning the lack of smart, scary movies outside the tired slasher formula. People, where were you when "Slither" opened last March and grossed just $7.8 million dollars? People, do you realize how difficult it is to gross that little in this day and age? "Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector" made more. "Just My Luck" made more (here half of you are probably going "What the hell was 'Just My Luck?'"). Granted, "Slither" lacked big name stars or directors, and if it had come out in October, audiences may have been more amenable. But it didn't lack in quality scares.


Nathan Fillion, the most underrated leading man in genre films at present, plays Bill Pardy, sheriff of a small town overrun by an alien menace equal parts zombie and The Blob. If you think there's subtext behind a film that transforms middle America into an insatiably hungry, brainless horde of cattle, well then, good work, you're paying attention.


"Slither" marks the promising directorial debut of James Gunn, who got his start at subterranean indie horror studio Troma Films, where he co-wrote "Tromeo & Juliet." His first Hollywood work, writing the two live-action "Scooby-Doo"s, didn't take advantage of his talents — for a glimpse of them, you're better off looking in his published work, co-writing Lloyd Kaufman's memoir "All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger" and his own twisted novel "The Toy Collector." Gunn helped make 2004's "Dawn of the Dead" surprisingly not terrible, and he's applied his clear love of the genre to "Slither"; clever homages to past horror greats are nearly as frequent as the spooky stuff. He's funny too: Gunn understands that good horror comes from a place of social satire, and exploiting our human flaws for terror rather than humor. It's worth noting as well that Gunn's not a snob: he loves horror movies in all their cheesy, messy, bloody, occasionally semi-nude glory, and he isn't ashamed about appealing to our baser instincts.


Though Universal would disagree, "Slither"'s box office thud might be the best thing that could have happened to it. So many of Gunn's idols found their audiences and developed their cults on home video. This week he gets his chance to do the same. The DVD includes commentary by Gunn and Fillion, plus deleted and extended scenes, a gag reel, and several featurettes on the production.


"Slither" is available on DVD October 24th.

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 27th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/opening-this-week-october-27th.php Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: "Babel," Paramount Vantage, 2006]


A round-up of the indie and indie-ish films opening in theaters this week.


"20 Centimeters"

Director Ramón Salazar taps into the "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" formula in this film about a narcoleptic transvestite hoping to rid herself of eight inches of junk to become the real woman she's always dreamed of. Instead, she falls asleep and dreams up elaborate musical numbers in English, Spanish, and French. Stars the ballsy (er, no pun intended) Mónica Cervera of "Crimen Ferpecto."

Opens in New York (official site).


"Absolute Wilson"

Katharina Otto-Bernstein documents the life, work, and creative genius of avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, best known for his work with composer Philip Glass (particularly "Einstein on the Beach"). The film includes interviews with David Byrne, Susan Sontag and Tom Waits.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Babel"

Cate Blanchett takes a bullet to the stomach in the final installment of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "death" trilogy in which fate, destiny, and other stuff are linked by a horrific tragedy. The film premiered at Cannes to critical acclaim — if it gets the same reception when it arrives here, expect heaps of awards for the director and stars Brad Pitt, Blanchett, and (we hope) Gael García Bernal.

Opens in New York and L.A. (official site).


"The Bridge"

Eric Steel filmed the Golden Gate Bridge for a year, catching almost two dozen of the jumpers who make the bridge the world's main suicide landmark. Steel's is the second documentary this week to offer actual footage of death; it has generated it's fair share of controversy, but other critics have spoken of its humanism.

Opens in limited release (trailer).


"Catch a Fire"

Our favorite Australian filmmaker (sorry, Baz) returns for his first feature in nearly four years, this time staging a political thriller set in 1980s and post-apartheid South Africa. Derek Luke (of "Antwone Fisher") dons his finest African accent for a role that's already getting Oscar buzz, as an oil foreman wrongly accused and tortured. Tim Robbins plays the cop attempting to protect himself and his family from a society unraveling at the seams.

Opens in wide release (official site).


"Climates"

Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan cast himself and his real-life wife in his latest film as a couple whose relationship begins to disintegrate while on vacation along the Aegean Sea. Ceylan's film, which won the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes, has been both praised and mocked for its throwback arthouse themes; still, it's one of the year's most beautiful films.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Cocaine Cowboys"

Cocaine has been in our pop cultural lives for quite some time now, and Miami in the early 1980s was (as chronicled in a certain TV show) home to the American cocaine trade. In this documentary, director Billy Corben chronicles the development of the illegal drug trade with interviews of both law enforcement and organized crime leaders. "Miami Vice" composer Jan Hammer developed the film's score, which is just awesome, mang.

Opens in New York and Florida (official site).


"Conversations with God"

Director Stephen Simon adapts Neale Donald Walsch's popular books of the same title in which a man asks God some tough questions and becomes a spiritual messenger after hearing God's answers. Not one of the Tarantino crowd.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Cruel World"

Edward Furlong of "Terminator 2" fame and Jaime Pressly from "My Name is Earl" star in this horror comedy about a deranged runner-up from a reality show who holds a group of sexy co-eds hostage on the set of his own fictitious show in which the losers suffer a deadly fate. Plot be damned, I believe this picture roughly embodies the spirit of the film.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Death of a President"

Perhaps the most controversial film to premiere at Toronto this year ("Borat" makes it a tough call), this fictional documentary by British filmmaker Gabriel Range hypothesizes what would happen following an assassination of George W. Bush in 2007 — stronger racial profiling of Arab-Americans, stricter limits of the newly-passed Patriot Act 3, and the three most frightening consecutive words in the English language: President Dick Cheney.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Exit: The Right to Die"

Fernand Melgar's documentary looks into one of the most taboo subjects in the United States today: legally assisted suicide. The film follows a group of volunteer "escorts" responsible for visiting clients and preparing the lethal solution in Switzerland, the only nation in the world to allow legally assisted suicide, and reportedly includes actual footage of a death.

Opens on Wednesday in New York (official site).


"The Genius Club"

Timothy Chey directs this film in which a group of the world's seven smartest geniuses are forced to solve the world's most important problems in a single night, including, and I quote from the film's website, "hunger, war, cancer, terrorism, rush hour traffic, jerks, and finally the meaning of life." The film stars the Baldwin from "Bio-Dome," so there you go.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Romeo and Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss"

It's that oh-so familiar story of two lovers whose love (or lust?) cannot be...but this time, they're seals. Yes, seals. In this animated tale for families or just family members who are dying for anything to plop their offspring in front of for an hour or two, William Shakespeare's condemnation of social mores are thrown out the window for a cuddly romp with Romeo, Juliet, Friar Lawrence and Kissy the kissing fish.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Shut Up and Sing"

The Dixie Chicks turn badass in this documentary by Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple ("Harlan County, U.S.A."). The film follows the band after lead singer Nathalie Maines' infamous Bush-bashing comments in Europe in 2003, tracing the lives and careers of the members as they faced political attacks, death threats and the question of the meaning of freedom of speech in post-9/11 America.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[Phillip Noyce on "Catch a Fire"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/phillip-noyce-on-catch-a-fire.php Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: Focus Features, 2006]


Give director Phillip Noyce this: The man knows how to distill injustice and oppression into compelling tales of individual action. Having previously tackled Australia's attempt at institutional genocide in "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and adapted Graham Greene's examination of corruption in pre-quagmire Vietnam in "The Quiet American," Noyce has now turned his sight towards South Africa and the final, brutal throes of apartheid in "Catch a Fire." Scripted by Shawn Slovo, daughter of the former head of the African National Congress' military wing, the film focuses in on the real-life story of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), an apolitical refinery worker who's radicalized after suffering torture at the hands of the government's Police Security Branch. Pursued by his tormentor, Colonel Nic Vos (Tim Robbins), Chamusso volunteers to aid the cause of liberation by staging a single-person sabotage run on his former employer, an odds-defying attack that became the stuff of legend. I got a chance to sit down with Noyce in New York:


There's no shortage of high-profile heroes in the fight against apartheid. Why focus in on someone like Patrick Chamusso?


When I was a kid, my grandfather was a preacher, an Episcopalian, or Church of England, preacher. And, for better or for worse, my parents would give me to him to baby-sit me. So I went on his rounds. It's enlightening to go on a preacher's rounds, because he generally visits people who are in distress, and when people are in distress, they are most revealing of themselves — sometimes in personal crisis, sometimes in sickness. That was when I became fascinated with just ordinary people, the extraordinary stories that are behind all of us, and that we all keep and often don't tell, except to the confessor, to the preacher. Or we take them to the grave.


You've managed to work both sides of the fence in the industry, doing major commercial work and following up with these recent, more personally-invested films. What do you get out of the likes of a "Catch a Fire?"


It's more segmented than that. Before I went to work in America in 1990 as an immigrant worker, I was making films just like this in Australia. Since I returned to Australia in the year 2000 to make "Rabbit-Proof Fence," I've been living mainly there. So it's like two different me's. As much fun as I had with my family in Los Angeles as a migrant guest worker, I was just that: making genre films that are about the universality of experience, but thrillers, essentially. Returning to Australia allowed me to make a film whose true story ran in my veins, to make films about subject matters, issues, characters that I really cared about.


It was "Rabbit-Proof Fence" that reminded me why I wanted to make films in the first place: to reach out to people; to touch them. I think that stories like "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and "Catch a Fire," stories about ordinary people who are faced with extraordinary circumstances and find unexpected resources — these kinds of stories are very inspiring.


You seem to keep coming back to the idea of colonialization and legacy of violence it creates. Why?


Probably in some ways, it's the extremity of black/white relations in Australia, which is a puzzle that I just can't get my mind around. It's a very sad story. What these films have in common are the characters of Alden Pyle, played by Brendan Fraser [in "The Quiet American"], the chief protector of Aborigines, played by Kenneth Branagh [in "Rabbit-Proof Fence"], and the Nic Vos character, the white police officer: three white men who think that they have the answer for the indigenous people that they are missionaries to.


Do you see Vos as essentially a compromised...


...person? Yes, very compromised. I've never met a policeman or policewoman who didn't join to do good. But the job can sometimes be corrupted, and perhaps no more so than when, as in this movie, the character is faced with an extreme circumstance. A police officer swears to uphold the status quo, the rule of law, of the land. When the laws are corrupt and the system is evil, you've still got to uphold it. What do you do?


Talking to those police officers as I did — to many of them, ex-police officers in South Africa — I realized that they all saw themselves as Africans. That was a strange concept to me: How could a white person think of himself as African? And yet many of them lay claim to 300 years or more of continued residency in southern Africa. Some of them said, "Well, I've been here longer than Patrick Chamusso, than his forefathers. I'm African." Others said, "We were fighting a vicious, determined enemy, who was determined to destroy everything that we'd fought to build up here."


The scenes of Patrick's interrogation really seemed to blur that line between the real world and the world you're recreating in front of the camera. Did you feel compelled to intervene at any point?


It was necessary for Derek to go into a zone during those scenes, and he did. He may not be aware of it, but he lost contact with reality. He was having to go through a process of incarceration, of destabilization — you could call it torture or call it interrogation... extreme interrogation, deprivations of food and sleep and water, physical coercion, mental torture... During that period, which I guess was over about three weeks, he really did start to levitate emotionally. He was floating, and he became particularly vulnerable, especially to Tim. They started to play up perpetrator and victim on and off the set. You can see this process going on, and you try to stay out of it, because it's an alchemy that you've actually set up. You want the characters to be possessed by the emotions and the extremities of the situation. I only stepped in a few times — I didn't have to do much.


Judging from what the cast members have said, I gather there was a dynamic building between the on-set advisors representing the police and those representing the freedom fighters.


There was, but one of the more remarkable scenes was to see Patrick Chamusso, who was on-set at the police headquarters, and Hentie Botha, the police advisor who himself had been in the Special Branch and had admitted to knowing of the use of torture techniques in interrogation, to see them conspiring with each other — which I only saw when I saw the making-of documentary. There's this scene that's captured there when they're in the back room as they talk about how the rehearsals were very soft and gentle, and they're both agreeing: "{Tim Robbins has] gotta be tough if he's gonna play a Special Branch policeman."


But this is the story of South Africa: You can have, on the one hand and for those sequences, someone who'd suffered incarceration, interrogation and torture, and he's working with Derek and training him, and on the other hand someone who had supervised extreme interrogation techniques and torture, and they're like two soccer coaches — one of them over in that corner and one of them in this corner. Only in South Africa could that happen, could the two of them be standing side-by-side, working together to tell this story.



"Catch a Fire" opens nationwide on October 27 (official site).

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<![CDATA[Guy Maddin's "Brand Upon the Brain!"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/guy-maddins-brand-upon-the-bra.php Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


[Photo: The Film Company/Celluloid Dreams, 2006]


Guy Maddin's latest fever dream of a film, "Brand Upon the Brain!," descended upon the Walter Reade Theatre on October 15 to close out the Views From the Avant-Garde section of the New York Film Festival. In tow were an orchestra, a team of foley artists (for live sound effects), and Isabella Rossellini, who would perform the narration for the film, which was, as you may have guessed, silent. It went out with a bang, or to be more precise, a bang! No director today is as fond of the exclamation point as Maddin, the Canadian cinephile and creator of strange celluloid objects. His works are borne out of a mixture of silent movie melodrama and self-conscious camp — a mix of Frank Borzage and John Waters. The subjects range from incestuous psychodramas in the Alps ("Careful," 1994) to Depression-era musicals starring beer-filled glass legs (attached to Rossellini in "The Saddest Music in the World," 2003). The often outrageous material is played with absolute conviction, and is always tied to themes of family strife (recently it's been missing fathers) and sexual repression, lending his films an unexpected emotional heft amid their giddy excesses.


His new film is no different. In the Fall issue of Cinema Scope, Maddin describes how the Seattle-based "The Film Company" offered him a budget to make a film before they even saw a script. They gave him complete freedom, the only restrictions being he had to shoot it in two weeks and use local actors. He had to scramble for a story, and earlier in the article he describes the image that spurred his imagination: "A lighthouse positively swollen with the unseemly sexual desires of children — and their parents!" From this charged thought a whole seamy narrative was woven, circling around the main character "Guy Maddin" (Eric Steffen Maahs) (after the screening the director claimed the film is autobiographical, like his hockey peep show "Cowards Bend the Knee" (2003)). The unseemly desires center around a teenage sleuth harpist, Wendy Hale (Katherine E. Scharhon), who's investigating Guy's overbearing mother for abusing the kids in her orphanage (and how!). Guy's in love with Wendy, but she only has eyes for his Sis (Maya Lawson). Gender-bending, bosom-baring and slurpy sound effects filled the room until an orphan revolt, re-animation of the dead, and a barrel of brain nectar shuttled the film to its close. Maddin packs a whole serial's worth of plot twists into its 95 minutes — and all of it is scored to the hypnotic tempo of Jason Staczek's pulsing score and Rossellini's formidable voice.


The actress, nattily decked out in a dark suit and red tie, deftly navigated the film's hysteric rhythms without a wink of condescension while always returning to nail down its mournful refrain: "The past! The past!" (Rossellini has become a bit of a muse for Maddin, appearing in "Saddest Music" as well as the delightful short essay-film "My Dad is 100 Years Old," which celebrates the work of her increasingly neglected father, Roberto). In the framing story Guy returns to the lighthouse after 30 years — and hallucinates visions of Wendy, including brief flashes of color (flowers! her lips!) in the midst of the grainy black and white Super-8 stock. Like Alain Resnais' superb festival entry "Private Fears in Public Places," which is diametrically opposite stylistically, it is an adult story about loneliness that leaves its characters adrift in the final scene, enclosed in Spartan spaces filled only with regret. Resnais opted out of the cannibalism scene, though. Both are without distributors as of this writing.

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<![CDATA[Everything You Need to Know About the New York Film Festival]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/everything-you-need-to-know-ab.php Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

IFC News


[Photo: David Lynch's "Inland Empire," Studio Canal, 2006]


Why should you care about the New York Film Festival? There are some who'd argue you shouldn't. It's not a destination festival like Cannes or Sundance, where people premiere their films to the world. It's not a marketplace like Toronto, where people cement North American distribution deals. But for 44 years now, New York's oldest film festival has been a symbol of unapologetic highbrow cinema, of classic arthouse films, of auteurism and sometimes elitism, and, yes, of the blue rinse brigade gathering in cashmere coats outside of Lincoln Center.


These days, with Tribeca sprawling its 200 films all over downtown each spring, the NYFF seems more old-fashioned and, perversely, more important than ever, a testament to uncompromising love of film, even at its most subtitled, long and arty. This year's festival ran more toward the mainstream than usual — a big chunk of the films selected already had distributors, and some critics complained about the presence of glossy fare like Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," which comes out in theaters this week and hardly needed further promotion. Still, there were plenty of rare gems to be found, like Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul's beautiful and strange "Syndromes and a Century," and David Lynch's — how to put this? — batshit insane three-hour epic "Inland Empire."


Click on a title to read our review of the film:


"Bamako"

Director: Abderrahmane Sissako


"Climates"

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan


"Falling"

Director: Barbara Albert


"The Go Master"

Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang


"The Host"

Director: Bong Joon-ho


"Inland Empire"

Director: David Lynch


"The Journals of Knud Rasmussen"

Directors: Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk


"Little Children"

Director: Todd Field


"Marie Antoinette"

Director: Sofia Coppola


"Offside"

Director: Jafar Panahi


"Pan's Labyrinth"

Director: Guillermo del Toro


"Paprika"

Director: Satoshi Kon


"Private Fears in Public Places"

Director: Alain Resnais


"Syndromes and a Century"

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul


"Triad Election"

Director: Johnny To


"Volver"

Director: Pedro Almodovar


"Woman on the Beach"

Director: Hong Sang-soo

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<![CDATA[Terry Gilliam on "Tideland"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/terry-gilliam-on-tideland.php Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Aaron Hillis

IFC News


[Photo: ThinkFilm, 2006]


From his salad days as an animator and performer with "Monty Python's Flying Circus" to his impressive career as a bona fide Hollywood iconoclast responsible for such irreverent and visually inventive films as "Brazil," "12 Monkeys," and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," American-born director Terry Gilliam has been making films his way, regardless of how tough the fights were with those who controlled the checkbooks. Though it certainly fits within the tragicomic fantasies that have come to define his work, "Tideland" might just be Gilliam's most uncompromised film yet, concerning a young girl named Jeliza-Rose (played by Jodelle Ferland) who retreats into her own imaginary world of talking squirrels and doll-head puppet friends after the death of her heroin-junkie mother (Jennifer Tilly). Based on Mitch Cullin's dark wonderland of a novel, the film also stars Jeff Bridges — who led the cast of Gilliam's "The Fisher King" — as Jeliza-Rose's equally drug-addled rock star dad, who pretty much leaves his daughter alone to shoulder most of the story herself after they move to a rural farmhouse reminiscent of serial killer Ed Gein's. I sat down with Gilliam for coffee just before the film's opening in New York.


Earlier this year, you renounced your dual citizenship and became, in your own words, "100% British." Even so, is there anything about you or your sensibilities that you'd say is specifically American?


Oh yeah, the scarification goes deep. No, I'm American. This is the problem, and so the British side of me is just calming down my American side, giving me perspective from another part of the world. I'm somewhere in between the two things, but I mean, I come here and I know these people, I know this world. It's all around. I'm just pleased to be able to get newspapers and television that show me what the world really is. I was watching Fox News last night, a joy. (laughs) How do they get away with this? That's what is extraordinary about this country, the Big Lie. You say it again and again, nobody does anything about it, and people eventually are suckered. Since I've been in America, suddenly it hit me. I think I'm going to have to sue George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for the illegal, unauthorized remake of "Brazil," the reality version. Isn't it crazy? If anything, I'm more angry at the Democrats than I am George Bush. Every week, they're handed his head on a plate and every week they fluff it. I don't know what to make, I mean, this country deserves better than it's getting.


"Tideland" was screened at Toronto way back in late 2005. I'm happy for you that it's finally getting a theatrical release.


Yeah, I don't actually know why ThinkFilm waited this long, it was their choice. Are we getting into Oscar season? Is this the end of the year when you start taking notice of these things? I don't know. If there is, I would love Jodelle to get nominated for something; that kid is extraordinary, she's fearless. Without her, there's no movie. That was the scary thing about deciding to do this film because I said if I don't have the kid, we can't make the movie. We were in pre-production before I found her. It reached the point where I was about to tell Jeremy Thomas, the producer, "I know you're spending money, but we're going to have pull the plug because this girl doesn't exist." And then, magically, there is a God! Bing!


Where was she hiding?


Vancouver. Because it was Canadian funded, we needed to work with Canadian actors. So Dakota Fanning was out of the mix, thank God. (laughs) It was very late in the day and the casting lady in Vancouver had sent this tape. This kid was so tiny, had great eyes and was really strong. They brought her to Toronto and put her in a scene with an actor and she just blew me away. What was interesting about her is there's the script, the lines, and the situation, but she made these extraordinary choices every time that were like, hello! And that for me is what I want, an actor to come along and constantly surprise me. Like, in the screen test, there's a specific scene on a bus where Jeff is farting. We're doing that scene with a Canadian actor, and she's getting more and more pissed off at him. There's a point where he doubles over in pain and she says, "Serves you right." Now, the other little girls were too nice about it: "Oh, Daddy's hurting!" No, in her version, she didn't say the words, but it was as if she said, "Fuck you! Serves you right!" Where's this coming out of this little girl? I said that's it, she's got the part.


What's troublesome about a lot of child actors is that what's considered quality acting is often too unbelievably precocious.


Dakota Fanning is incredibly talented, but it's like a clockwork mechanism at times. All these scripts are written with these super-smart kids with lines that adults should be doing, except let's put them in the kids' mouths, isn't that cute? I hate that. In Mitch's book, I didn't think I was reading the story of one of those precocious kids, it's about a real kid. We started shooting, and I didn't direct her. I don't want a 64-year-old man deciding what a nine-and-a-half year old girl thinks that she's doing in a scene. She just learned the way and constantly amazed us. Like the scene with [her man-child neighbor] Dickens when they first kiss, we're sitting in back with the monitors like, fuck! Jodelle! What are you doing? She's a very smart kid, and those scenes are about a little girl who watches television, reads books, and fantasizes what romance is. She's not aware of her power in a situation like that. In the book, she's really physically on the edge of puberty. But 12-year-old girls, even 11- or 10-year-old girls were too knowledgeable. They've grown up too quickly in this climate, and it took a nine-and-a-half year old to have this innocence.


The film may be your most melancholic to date. Does this have anything to do with what was on your mind at the time, or where you want to go next in your career?


Not really, no. I just connected with it, that's the way I work. It's very instinctive. Maybe it was the mood I was in, I don't know. It's funny because "Time Bandits" is the same story. A kid in a world with his fantasy life, terrible parents in both films. It's actually funny because I was thinking about this only as I started doing these interviews... at the end of "Time Bandits," the parents blow up. At the beginning of "Tideland," the parents blow up. Well, they don't blow up, but they're dead. You have kids on their own, and there's a connection here, so I suppose I made "Time Bandits" 25 years on, or as the world changed, I'm not sure which.


Your career has been plagued with uphill battles against artistic compromise, but in hindsight, have you made any concessions that were for the better?


Ah, that's a good one. I can't think of a specific, but I do know that the battles focus my attention on things. If I had total freedom, I think I would be making much more mediocre films. I scream and rail against restrictions — and they're usual financial ones, budgetary restrictions — but they do force me to make better films. It doesn't feel like that on a day when I'm making a cut, but they are tighter, more focused, more clear about what's important to me, and what's less important.


In an instance like "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," whose unmaking-of was chronicled in the documentary "Lost in La Mancha," does it make you more neurotic or superstitious?


They don't make me neurotic, they wear me out. At times I feel the strings winding down, and I'm just getting weary. That's the thing I'm fighting more now, because all films are difficult. At the moment, I find the atmosphere out there is particularly dire. The studios are even more conservative than they've ever been, and the guys running them aren't even personalities there. Before, I could hate the person, but at least they were human beings. Now they're all drones in there.


There's something "Brazil"-ian about that, too.


Exactly. And then in independent filmmaking, whatever that is anymore, that's just a way of selling films. Most of my funding by the studios is behind a mask. (laughs) Those films at least can get muscle behind them, because the studios are behind the scenes. If you're making truly independent films, and I would say "Tideland" is, there's no studio involved, not even an element of that. It was made completely outside the system and to try to get these films to studios is hard. In the end, it was only ThinkFilm who came to our rescue. Everybody else ran away from this script. And then how do you hold onto the cinemas? There are so many independent films made, and the [theaters] now are working exactly like the studios. The first weekend decides what happens with the film. We're going to be at the IFC Center, and depending on this weekend, they'll decide whether we stay in or just leave it one week.


If the Brothers Lumière rose from the dead to grant you godlike powers for fixing what's wrong with Hollywood, what would be first on your agenda?


Oh, Jesus. See, that's really weird, I've given up trying to be in Hollywood. I think that's the truth of the matter. I suppose I'm waiting like an old lefty, waiting for the old system to collapse under its own inertia. The cost of making films and advertising is so crazy now, but it's not just Hollywood, the world has become that. How do you get the attention of people anymore when there are so many things out there? We have choice now, I hate that idea. It's like, I hate Starbucks. I don't want to know about the many varieties of flavor I can have in my coffee, I just want a cappuccino. It's a classic thing, it's about that big, it's not formal. You make it well, and it's perfect. I have a house in Italy, and I can get my cappuccinos there, and I'm not asked what I really want. I hate walking down the street with so many possibilities, it makes me crazy. I want to know, can I go left or can I go right? End of conversation. (laughs)


But great art movements often come from conflict against a failing system. Are we on the verge of a new wave in independent cinema and distribution?


I don't know, because it's gotten so strange now. There's the studio films, then there are the halfway houses, the independents. Then there are truly independent ones. Then there's DVD and the web. All of this is going on, and I think there's a sense of turmoil in everybody's minds and nobody knows quite what is going to happen. I make films for the big screen, but I know most people see them on their televisions, that's the irony of what goes on. I love YouTube, but we're talking about little glimpses of things, little sketches, you know. Anybody can make a film now, and maybe it gets on the web, and maybe some people see it. Great, but maybe that's what's worrying me is that I can't see the solution. I think about it all the time, and I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe it's a good thing, I can't predict the future. (laughs) It has taken me a long time to get here, and I still like the [film medium]. I can always sit at my computer, if I was really inspired, make any number of animations I wanted, and get them distributed on the web. And I could probably get paid to do so. That's my fallback position, but I haven't given up yet.



"Tideland" opened in New York October 13th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 20th, 2006]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/opening-this-week-october-20th.php Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 A round-up of the indie and indie-ish films opening in theaters this week.


"51 Birch Street"

Doug Block's acclaimed documentary is about as personal as a film can get — it looks into his parents' marriage when, after the death of his mother, his 83-year old father announces he's moving to Florida to live with his secretary from 40 years before.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Conventioneers"

After premiering at Tribeca last year and winning the John Cassavetes prize at the Independent Spirit Awards this year, "Conventioneers" finally gets its moment in the theaters. The film blends doc and narrative, telling the story of a romance between a Republican and a Democrat that was filmed during the tempestuous 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Flags of Our Fathers"

We love the smell of Oscars in the morning! Clint Eastwood's re-enactment of the Battle of Iwo Jima is written by no less than the man who wrote and directed last year's Best Picture winner "Crash": Paul Haggis. Plus, who doesn't love World War II? So straightforward!

Opens wide (official site).


"Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple"

Stanley Nelson's doc promises never-before-seen footage from the Guyana-based Peoples Temple led by preacher Jim Jones, who led his hundreds of followers to mass suicide in 1978. Kool-Aid was never the same.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Marie Antoinette" [pictured]

The joys of decadent Versailles life are set to an 80s New Wave soundtrack in Sofia Coppola's unconventional biopic, which premiered at Cannes to mixed reviews and a few reported boos (some critics found it a little fluffy). Kirsten Dunst stars as the titular queen and "let them eat cake" line denier.

Opens wide (official site).


"Requiem"

This German film is based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, who in 1976 died following an exorcism. Michel's life also inspired last year's religiousy horror flick "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" — this promises to be in better taste.

Opens in New York (official site).


"Running With Scissors"

The dysfunctional family dramedy is pretty much its own genre these days — the latest title to add to the pile is this adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' best-selling memoir, which has an amazing cast that includes Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes and Alec Baldwin.

Opens in limited release (official site).


"Sleeping Dogs Lie"

If you've even seen comedian Bobcat Goldthwait's indescribable directorial debut "Shakes the Clown," then you have some idea of what to expect (and we'll see you at the theater!). Supposedly the sweetest movie centered on an act of bestiality ever, "Sleeping Dogs Lie" premiered with the title "Stay" at Sundance this year.

Opens in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[Opening This Week: October 20th, 2006 (photo)]]> Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10025409 2006-10-13 00:00:00 closed closed opening_this_week_october_20th_photo inherit 25409 0 attachment 0 <![CDATA[Reevaluating "The Break-Up"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/on-dvd-reevaluating-the-breaku.php Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


[Photo: Universal Pictures, 2006]


The Break-Up

Directed by Peyton Reed


In retrospect the marketing for "The Break-Up," the "romantic" "comedy" starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, was at best an act of desperation and at worst an outright deception. Commercials, trailers and posters positioned the film as a charmingly playful battle of the sexes; these images, while present in the film, were anomalies in an otherwise dark and surprisingly serious look at a rocky relationship. They (deviously and, yes, ingeniously) sold a picture that didn't exist; no wonder many audiences were disappointed by the end result. "The Break-Up" is, in fact, a mature, honest story of a couple's turbulent end. In other words, everything a real romantic comedy is not.


Vaughn and Aniston meet at Wrigley Field. Vaughn inhabits the charmingly overbearing persona he's honed in "Swingers" and last year's "Wedding Crashers"; Aniston utilizes her sheepish mode, previously deployed in "Office Space," "Bruce Almighty," and others. Standard romantic comedies end immediately after the couples get together, because it's generally agreed-upon that it's all downhill from there (or, at the very least, right boring). "The Break-Up" takes the opposite tact, beginning at the beginning, but only momentarily; after an opening credits montage of candid, happy snapshots, director Peyton Reed jumps right to the juicy stuff, the point when practical neat freak Brooke and goofy slob Gary realize they aren't awfully compatible. Each has an equal stake in their gorgeous Chicago condo, both refuse to leave. Their break-up is peppered lightly with the moments from the trailer that made it seem like a fun romp — Brooke's flamboyant (but not gay) brother Richard (a note-perfect John Michael Higgins), her attempt to drive Gary mad with lust with a "Telly Savalas" wax job. But the bulk of the film is two unhappy people venting their frustration on one another.


Granted, "The Break-Up" isn't Cassavetes, but it's not that far off, and even offering that comparison in the context of a big budget Hollywood comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston is remarkable in and of itself. At times you wish Reed and Vaughn (who also serves as a co-producer and co-writer) were willing to push it farther, to be more conceptual. Most of the film is set in the couple's condo, but the movie might have been even better if the whole thing was set there, if their angst and bitterness was completely inescapable. Still, only the test audience-approved ending feels like a Hollywood copout.


The movie is particularly a revelation for Vaughn who after "Wedding Crashers" could have easily milked his persona for the next five years. Gary starts off quite close to "Crashers"' Jeremy, his slothy charm working overtime. But the process of breaking-up with Brooke reveals Vaughn's persona's shallowness, his inability to connect with other human beings. Jon Favreau, who's played Vaughn's foil in two previous films, gets to act as his bartending psychiatrist, diagnosing the problems in Gary and Jeremy and all the rest that we were too blinded by charisma to see.


By the time I saw "The Break-Up," the deceitful advertising had been counteracted by friends who'd seen the picture, been surprised by it, but impressed all the same. Word-of-mouth, on the other hand, could have sold this picture just as easily as hollow promises. "The Break-Up" grossed more than $100 million. Imagine what the film might have made if Hollywood had trusted the quality of the film, and the intelligence of the audience. The DVD includes commentary by Vaughn and Aniston, an alternate ending, deleted scenes, outtakes, improv with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, and a tour of Chicago.


"The Break-Up" is available on DVD October 17th.

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<![CDATA[All the paints in the paint box: John Cameron Mitchell on "Shortbus"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/all-the-paints-in-the-paint-bo.php Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Dan Persons

IFC News


[Photo: ThinkFilm, 2006]


Into a desert of retrograde Puritanism and institutional denial, director John Cameron Mitchell (who made his directorial debut with 2001's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") posits "Shortbus," a New York-based oasis/salon where a Bush-fatigued populace can converge for art, music, conversation, and, oh yeah, unbridled sex. Into this fictional Eden, he casts, amongst others, a pre-orgasmic sex therapist (Sook-Yin Lee), a gay couple seeking a relationship-cementing third (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy), a dominatrix with intimacy issues (Lindsay Beamish), and a stalker with an uncommonly poignant raison d'etre (Peter Stickles). The film that follows has gained notoriety for the unsimulated nature of its sex scenes — dig past the sensation, though, and one finds no shortage of wit, plus a reassuring empathy towards characters striving, with varying degrees of success, to find the things that will make them whole.


This could've been easy: a potted plant positioned just so; a cutaway to an above-the-shoulders C.U. Why go so explicit, particularly when it might open you up to more criticism?

The kind of criticism it might court, I'm excited about. It raises a dialogue about censorship, about erotophobia, about our society, about the powers that be. That, I think, is a healthy dialogue. Originally, it was an aesthetic choice — it was more, why not use all the paints in the paint box? You don't ask, "Could you have done 'Hedwig' without the songs?" Well, yeah, but it's an aesthetic realm in which to play. And since sex is so revealing and so about our personalities, I really think it connects to a lot of parts of our lives. It can tell you a lot more about people than just looking at them having tea.

For a film so centered on eroticism, "Shortbus" pretty much states that sexual freedom isn't the complete answer.

No, I don't say at all that free sex is going to save us. But there are other films that examine people through other appetites or activities. You could say that something like "Requiem for a Dream," in the way that [the characters] interact through the drug world, that language, through the sharing of the needles and all that, there's a poetry in that, whether you like it or not. It's just another language through which we can reveal character. And this is another one. We're catching characters in moments of crisis, and, in fact, the sex is quite unsuccessful and ridiculous. I found that when we were rehearsing and the sex was going great, it was quite boring... unless you were doing it.

You've included the credit, "Story developed with the cast." Was it always in your plan that the actors would be involved in the creation of the story?

It started with the form: How can I use sex in a new way? Okay, the actors will be nervous; why not do what I've always dreamed of as an actor, which is to create a script through improv? Everyone wants to work with Mike Leigh, everyone loves Robert Altman — actors flock to them because they give them leeway and they give them, in some ways, authorship of their own characters. I realized that this was really necessary because of the sex, so the actors could feel comfortable creating their scenes, creating their characters, so that there was a mutual agreement on everything, with me as a guide, a bit of a benevolent dictator.

Did working with mostly newcomers make this process easier?

In the auditions I saw very clearly people who hadn't done many films or acted at all. Some of them were naturals at improv, remembering what they had to do every take, but as soon as they had a set script, they sucked. I worked that way with "Hedwig," so it just seemed like another aesthetic exercise: Let's try something unusual for this unusual film.

What did the actors bring to the story.

They brought their stories, their characters' backstories, their characters' names. I asked them to come up with a broad, overarching emotional goal for their characters. They all had goals, and taking those goals and their backstories, I wove them together into a script.

We did this for two and a half years, so there were all kinds of stuff that was emotionally important to them as characters. They would exaggerate elements of their own lives — for example, [Sook-Yin Lee,] when she was young, she didn't know what to do with her body and didn't know how to be free and sensual in any way. I just exaggerated that by making her non-orgasmic, made it more interesting. Paul had been depressed in the past. It wasn't suicidal, but [I turned] it up. I turned it to ten, for all of them.

Let's talk about Tobias, the Mayor [Alan Mandell]. This clearly is the character who's closest to a real-life analogue...

I don't want to say that it's... you know...

Let's just say that there are suggestions of a certain, allegedly closeted New York mayor...

Well, we say imagine this very dramatic situation... Might a person who's closeted and actually affected other people's lives, what if he acknowledged that in some way and sought some sort of forgiveness? We don't really point to any person, we let it... you know... we let it percolate. But it was always a character in my mind.

Why was it important to include him?

Well, for many people, that's the most affecting scene. He starts out as sort of a Greek chorus, telling us what New York is: A place where people come to be fucked and forgiven. He's not just a chorus, he's a protagonist, just like all of them, seeking some redemption from a real or imagined sin. A lot of [people] come here [to New York] thinking there's something wrong with them, and then realize there really isn't. There's that chicken-and-egg thing: If you think you're bad, you do bad things. This is a refuge for the outcast, the persecuted, and those who were branded sinners. [The mayor's] the... I guess he's the father of... He's like a messenger to me. He's seen it.

I tend to look at the politics of sex as a momentum type of thing: Once you've moved forward, you don't go back. But is that still true these days? Do you feel there's a regression going on in this country?

There's more like a lateral movement. You've got a lot of people who are really scared about the propulsive movement of the sixties and seventies, that they felt pushed into something they weren't ready for. The backlash to that is kind of a shutdown, a clampdown for many people. Oddly, I think fear of terrorism is linked to fear of sex. In fact, someone like Falwell explicitly called the terrorists and the sexual minority equally responsible for 9/11 — it's kind of amazing to hear that kind of clarity about a fear.

Anything that's a fear of the unknown gets equated, in a weird way. There's been a sort of crush-down from top-down — from conservatives, government — this crush-down on sex. But it doesn't go away — you don't vaporize sexual interest, you just push it into different realms. It goes into porn, rather than something more multivalent or colorful... like life, like relationships, like an openness in a healthier way. It goes into porn — which is sort of flattened sex — but I think it moves around, rather than reduces. And I hope a film like ["Shortbus"] can bring it back into connection with other parts of our lives, for those few people who will see it.


"Shortbus" opened in New York on October 4, Los Angeles and San Francisco on October 6, and expands to other U.S. markets starting on October 13 (official site).

]]> 8299 2006-10-13 00:00:00 closed closed all_the_paints_in_the_paint_bo publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008299 <![CDATA[Alternate Endings Actually Worth Watching]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/alternate-endings-actually-wor.php Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 10132006_alternateendings_article.jpgBy Aaron Hillis, Michelle Orange, Matt Singer, R. Emmet Sweeney and Alison Willmore

The DVD of "X-Men: The Last Stand," which went on sale this week, offers not one, not even two, but three alternate endings — what, did they let test audience vote with buttons on their armrests? (Well, we wouldn't rule it out.) In honor of a gentler, simpler time when alternate endings meant more than fodder for DVD editions, the IFC News team presents a list of notable alternate endings out there on DVD that actually offer interesting insights into the film, filmmaking or film biz.


Army of Darkness
Directed by Sam Raimi

Here's a case of the right ending for the wrong movie. As Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" series progressed through "Evil Dead 2" and "Army of Darkness," things got progressively sillier — the first "Evil Dead" is a straight-up gorefest, but the last picture, which includes Bruce Campbell's doggedly unheroic Ash battling a fleet of wise-cracking miniaturized clones, is practically a renaissance faire riff on the Three Stooges. Raimi established the set-up for "AoD" at the sadistic conclusion of "Evil Dead 2," where Ash finally defeats the unholy evil of the Book of the Dead, only to find himself sent back to the Middle Ages, where he learns he'll have to start the battle all over again without the pleasure of adequate toilet facilities. The original ending to "AoD" took a similar bent; Ash defeats the medieval evil, but he takes too much of the potion designed to make him sleep away the centuries, and he wakes to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, bellowing "I SLEPT TOO LONG!" as the credits begin to roll. It was a fitting ending for the series, but not necessarily for "Army of Darkness," which had pushed too far (and too successfully) into the realm of comedy to end on such a dark note. So Raimi came up with a doozy of a replacement: a silly and supremely macho shoot-'em-up at Ash's place of business, S-Mart superstore. Purists prefer the original version, but purists also prefer "Evil Dead 2." Personally, I'll take the fun of "Army of Darkness" and Campbell's pitch-perfect portrayal of a man with an ego that far exceeds his talents or his smarts, and the ending that goes along with it.

Better ending: Theatrical. —Matt Singer


Brazil
Directed by Terry Gilliam

It may be Gilliam's career high point to date, but the director's clash with Universal Pictures over getting "Brazil" released in the cut he intended is almost as famous as the film itself (see Jack Mathews' book "The Battle of Brazil" for a blow-by-blow). Universal chairman Sid Sheinberg's infamous if ultimately TV-only "Love Conquers All" cut, included on Criterion's 1999 special edition three-disc DVD release, involves plenty of additions and subtractions, but none more significant than the alteration of the ending, which the studio found too dark. In the Sheinberg edit, Jonathan Pryce's Sam wakes up in the idyllic country house he's escaped to with ladylove Jill, and declares that he "doesn't dream anymore." Soaring music, clouds and...Fin! Of course, Gilliam's version of the film then cuts to Mr. Helpmann and Jack Lint, who've been torturing Sam in the Information Retrieval Room. The final shot, of Sam smiling cheerfully and humming, sanity clearly gone, is bleakly perfect. Too perfect to mess with — Gilliam ultimately prevailed in getting it into theaters.

Better ending: Theatrical. —Alison Willmore


Clerks
Directed by Kevin Smith

Naming the lead character in Kevin Smith's $27,000 mini-masterpiece of suburban ennui "Clerks" Dante always struck me as an odd choice. It's way more gothic and theatrical than the rest of Smith's immature brood (Randal, Jay, Bob). Smith's original ending gave the moniker a bit more weight. As first conceived, the movie continued for one more scene after the ending that appeared in the final theatrical version (where Dante and Randal reconcile before Dante closes the Quick Stop for the night). Instead of that optimistic denouement, a burglar enters the convenience store, shoots Dante and robs the cash register. Instead of a cut to black and credits over upbeat selections from the soundtrack, the titles roll over the continuing shot of the Quick Stop, as a customer walks in (played by Smith himself) and steals a pack of cigarettes. The initial ending adds the extra oomph to "Dante" but it's also wildly out of character for a comedy that, while dark, essentially laughs at all of life's mysteries and dilemmas.

Better ending: Theatrical. —MS

[Photo at top: Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," Universal Pictures, 1985]

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<![CDATA[What's Up In October]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/events-whats-up-in-october.php Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Christopher Bonet

IFC News


[Photo: F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu," Film Arts Guild/Kino]


The Films of Dziga Vertov

Oct 1 -8

NYC's Anthology Film Archives presents another of its Essential Cinema series, this time focusing on one of the premier documentarians of the Soviet Cinema, Dziga Vertov. Be sure to catch his influential experimental film "The Man with a Movie Camera."


Otto Preminger: Notorious

Oct 1-29

This month-long series at NYC's Museum of Modern Art provides a centenary tribute to the provocative director and offers a chance to view his most beloved films with his seldom-seen work. We recommend catching the rarely screened German version of his 1953 "The Moon is Blue," shot while his American actors took breaks.


Oscar's Docs, Part Two: 1961 - 1976

Oct 2-30

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (in Beverly Hills) continues its ongoing retrospective, showcasing each of the Oscar winners for Best Documentary between the years 1961 and 1976. This month's screenings focus on the years 1965 and 1972, featuring films about civil unrest in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and interviews with American soldiers in Vietnam about the My Lai Massacres.


Coney Island Film Festival

Oct 6-8

Enjoy a dose of good ol' fashioned carny culture at the Coney Island Film Festival in Brooklyn. Opening night offers live performances by sideshow and burlesque stars, along with a screening of "American Carny: True Tales of the Circus Sideshow."


The New Yorker Festival

Oct 6-8

The New Yorker Festival returns for its seventh year in a celebratory weekend of public discourse on arts and ideas taking place at multiple venues in NYC...that's at the time of writing this already almost entirely sold out. Damn. We'd go to the "Milos Forman talks with David Denby" if only we could.


The First Annual Canine Film Festival

Oct 7-8

San Francisco hosts the first ever festival dedicated solely to films starring man's best friend. Comedian Fred Willard will be present for a special screening of Christopher Guest's "Best in Show." Ironically, dogs are not allowed in the theater.


Banking on Heaven with Laurie Allen

Oct 8

Polygamy is all the rage in 2006: first HBO's "Big Love" and now "Banking on Heaven," a new doc about the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints communities of Colorado City, AZ and Hilldale, UT. Producer/writer Laurie Allen, who escaped the polygamous lifestyle at age 16, will be on hand for a discussion following this screening, at Tucson, AZ's Loft Cinema.


An Independent Spirit: Monte Hellman

Oct 12-17

The Brooklyn Academy of Music rewards cult director Monte Hellman this month with a retrospective that includes many of his much-loved low-budget genre films, which often starred Jack Nicholson or Warren Oates. Be sure to catch the Nicholson-penned "Ride in the Whirlwind," followed by a Q & A with the director.


Frankenfest: Frankenstein Through the Ages

Oct 13-Nov 1

From Boris Karloff to Peter Boyle, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" has been a cultural icon of the American cinema since the earliest days of Hollywood sound. This year marks the 75th anniversary since the release of Universal's classic version of "Frankenstein," and DC's AFI Silver Theatre honors this horror legacy with a retrospective of Hollywood re-imaginings and re-tellings of the Shelley classic.


Vienna International Film Festival

Oct 13-25

This Austrian film festival dedicates itself to showcasing the newest feature films of every genre and structural form imaginable. This year's festival will include a special tribute to British punk documentarian Peter Whitehead and the special program "Tales of the Jungle," which explores the use of the jungle as a cinematographic motif in film.


Kill Bill: The Unseen, Uncensored Full-Length Cut

Oct 14

Quentin Tarantino promises to be on hand at the Alamo Theater in Austin, TX, for a special full-length screening of his "Kill Bill" films. It's already sold out, but we're hoping this will eventually lead to either a theatrical or DVD release of the full-length cut. C'mon...please?


From The Tsars To The Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema

Oct 19-25

American Cinematheque puts together an awesome series of Russian sci-fi, fantasy and horror films at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, sprawling from "Aelita: Queen of Mars" to Tarkovsky's masterpiece "Solaris."


The Blood Is The Life - Vampires On Film And Dusk-To-Dawn Horrorthon!

Oct 25-28

Vampires and films have always been joined at the hip — from F. W. Murnau's silent "Nosferatu" to Joel Schumacher's unintentionally (?) camp "The Lost Boys." Santa Monica's Aero Theatre has a bloodsucking horrorthon spanning the ages.

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8296 2006-10-13 00:00:00 closed closed events_whats_up_in_october publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008296
<![CDATA[A Brief History of Real Sex on Screen (Well, Without the Porn)]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/10/sidebar-a-brief-history-of-rea.php Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0500 John Cameron Mitchell, whose second feature, "Shortbus," opens this week, has justified his use of graphic, unsimulated sex throughout the film by saying it was done as "an act of resistance" against the Bush regime. Other directors usually come up with something about "normalizing sexuality" or "cinematic honesty" in their attempt to work actual sex into what they hope is a mainstream film. Some dismiss it as a cheap gimmick, some say that outside of snuff films it's one of the last big ideas the movies have, with the potential to say something new; before seeing "Shortbus" for myself, I tended to think it's the directorial version of leaving the house in sweatpants: you've given up. In the last six years (hmm), the number of films featuring unsimulated sex has grown noticeably — is burgeoning on a trend, in fact — and so we thought we'd take a look back at some milestones in real live sex on screen.


1972: "Pink Flamingos"
Debauchery of all flavors is on offer in John Waters' infamous yuck-fest, and Divine performing fellatio on her on-screen son is, incredibly, not the most outrageous example. For that I would vote for what I hope is the simulated rape of a young woman...by a chicken. Hardly mainstream, Waters gets credit nonetheless for being one of the first if not the first American director to put a sex act in what became a well-known, non-porn feature. That's the first time I've even written "fellatio," by the way. We'll see how long that lasts.


1976: "In the Realm of the Senses"
Nagisa Oshima's film, based on a book recounting true events, caused a huge ruckus in 1976, and was the first explicitly sexual film to lobby hard for arthouse credibility, with some success. John Cameron Mitchell pays dubious tribute to the film with a hilarious reference in his recent "Shortbus."


1979: "Caligula"
The uncut version of this Tinto Brass film included an orgy and several acts of graphic sex. Though none of the principals were engaged in said graphic sex, it's the first film with a pedigree (written by Gore Vidal) and actual movie stars (Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McDowell) to, as the kids say, go there. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone involved with the film later disowned it, except major backer Penthouse magazine; they felt all right.


1986: "Devil in the Flesh"
This Italian film is often cited as the first major western film to depict unsimulated sex which consists, if you must know, of a blowjob performed by lead actress Maruschka Detmers on co-star Federico Pitzalis.


1999: "Romance"
French director Catherine Breillat could put out a shingle, at this point, for films featuring (incredibly depressing) unsimulated sex, but this one brought her the widest acclaim. "Sex is forever," the movie poster warns, and if that doesn't terrify you, check out Breillat's "Fat Girl" or "Anatomy of Hell." "Sex is Comedy," her 2004 film, is something of a misnomer, as I can't imagine anyone has ever laughed watching a Breillat film, unless it was one of those bitter, French snorts.


2000: "Baise-Moi"
The title translates as "fuck me," but it really means "fuck you" in Virginie Despentes' sunny road trip flick. Two women (both of the actresses were adult film stars) set out to fuck and/or kill as many men as possible after one is raped and the other witnesses the murder of her pimp. The sex is nasty and probably too close in style to hardcore porn for any viewer with a pulse to keep their wires uncrossed, which is especially disturbing given the film's themes and outcome. Karen Lancaume, one of the lead actresses, committed suicide in 2005.


2004: "The Brown Bunny"
Chloe Sevigny blah blah blah.
All right, fine, it was the first American film to depict an actual, respected actress going down on a skeevy greaseball. Congratulations.


2005: "Nine Songs"
Michael Winterbottom's mopey shag-a-thon barely qualifies as a shag-a-thon because the sex was snore city. If, like me, you fast-forwarded through the bands just to see if the next round would be as boring as the last, you already know that the film, far from doing what Winterbottom intended — i.e. to "tell a story which honestly depicts the connection between sexual intimacy and being in love without claiming they're the same thing" — is not even passable porn.


2006: "Shortbus"
John Cameron Mitchell's love letter to New York's special brand of loneliness features a band of "non-professional" actors (and non-porn stars) engaged in every kind of sex you can imagine, and by that I mean: bad sex, sad sex, funny sex, mean sex, and really, really good sex. Mitchell, by showing us the vulnerability of his characters and the slapstick negotiations that vulnerability can sometimes leads us to, manages to film not just bodies having sex, but people.


Honorable Mention: 1978's "Germany in Autumn"
This one's for all the hardcore nerds out there: famed director Rainer Werner Fassbinder gets a nod for saying enough with the metaphors already and actually masturbating on film. Ach du lieber!

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<![CDATA["Imprint," Takashi Miike's snuff film "Rashomon"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/09/feature-imprint-takashi-miikes.php Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


Of all the bloody stumps and bared bosoms of the "Masters of Horror" series on Showtime, those depicted in "Imprint" were a bit too bloody and bare even for indulgent cable execs (the discarded fetuses were rumored to have been the tipping point). Banned from airing during the series' run in the U.S. (it aired on Bravo in the UK), Takashi Miike's snuff film "Rashomon" finally hits our shores thanks to this week's loaded DVD release. As with all of Miike's voluminous output (he has three other '06 films on his resume), it's a mixed bag — with scenes of genuine terror, outrageous camp, and stomach-turning violence.


"Imprint" was adapted from the Japanese horror novel "Bokee Kyotee" by Shimako Iwai — a straightforward tale of past misdeeds haunting the present. American vagabond Christopher (Billy Drago) travels to a remote island/brothel to find the woman he loved and lost, Kimomo (Michie Ito). In her place he finds a nameless prostitute (Youki Kudoh) with a facial deformity who informs him how Kimomo died. She changes her story multiple times, with each alteration depicted in flashback. Soon both of their histories are excavated, and it's a nasty, vicious, and viscous business.


The time period is strangely ahistorical, with Edo period architecture clashing with electric paper lamps. It feels like a whorehouse for the modern tourist, where one can get the kicks of old-time misogyny with the comforts of the industrial revolution. It is a bit of a dream world — an unreality the actors bring into their work. Drago ("The Untouchables") has one of the great under-utilized faces in Hollywood. Cavernous, skeletal, and strikingly blank, his stare is its own slasher flick. Utilizing this strength, Drago's performance is akin to pantomime, marking each emotion with wide loping gestures over his guttural drawl. It's highly theatrical, and clashes with Kudoh's more naturalistic approach (until her head is peeled back, of course).


Amazingly, Kudoh is the only actor in the film who could speak English (other than Drago). Everyone else learned their lines phonetically from a linguist. This lends a disembodied quality to their performance, and it's either a brilliant reflection of their loss of humanity, or just an extremely cheap way to hire actors. Probably more of the latter, but selected moments pay off: especially with the repeated scenes of the Buddhist monk speaking to Kudoh's character as a child in flashback. He unrolls a parchment depicting the tortures of hell, and says, "Pretty scary, huh", stuttering over the "s" in scary. It's funny but laced with menace — and during the second flashback the undertones in the scene become even more ambiguously evil.


Miike can't abide ambiguity long, so there's a torture set piece to put us cerebral folk in our place. It is epic cruelty, inflicted upon Kimomo by a jealous older prostitute (curiously, played by the book's female author Iwai). It's pulp exploitation that would fulfill any adolescent male's fear and loathing of femininity (in an interview on the disc, he said only lonely rural kids in Japan watched his films before he became a cult star overseas), but one can't deny that it's bravura filmmaking — meticulous in its structure and its violence.


The DVD is packed with extras that are actually worth watching, including an hour-long interview with Miike (hilariously titled "I Am the Film Director of Love and Freedom"), where he talks about being pigeonholed as a horror director in the West, and his refusal to refuse any project offered to him. Also included is a making of doc, a feature on the makeup, and audio commentary by American Cinematheque programmer Chris D. and writer Wyatt Doyle.

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<![CDATA[Leave the Kids at Home: The Rebirth of Arthouse Animation]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/09/feature-leave-the-kids-at-home.php Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Mickey Mouse first ripped off Buster Keaton to impress the kiddies in 1926's "Steamboat Willie," and it wasn't long after that that Bugs, Elmer and the merrie melodymakers were sketching out more sophisticated yuks for little ones and adults alike. Nowadays animated films in the U.S. have largely devolved into cheap babysitters, too cloying for parental consumption. It's a step in the right direction that the Hollywood machine has absorbed high-quality 'toon houses like Pixar and Aardman Studios, but for every acclaimed "Finding Nemo" or "Wallace and Gromit," three more strident "Madagascar" knock-offs have barreled down the pipeline. Is there any hope for grown-ups and older kids with refined tastes to appreciate the art of animation without a squealing farm/zoo/wildlife animal in sight?

You betcha, and the key word there is "art." Finding life along the major festival circuit and even some noteworthy theatrical releases across the country, a fresh crop of animated features are demonstrating darker, more mature, and downright arthouse sensibilities. First, let's not forget (even if its buzz has long waned) this past spring's "A Scanner Darkly," Richard Linklater's lysergic, quite literate adaptation of sci-fi demigod Philip K. Dick's paranoid drug-noir classic, which utilizes a rotoscoping technique to transform Keanu's scruff and Winona's breasts into vibrant surfaces with wiggly contours. That it barely left a box-office dent is probably attributed less to its queasy illustrations than to its high-brow plottings, an alienating no-no in the stupidity-embracing sociopolitical climate we seem to be living under. (Maybe part-time animator Mike Judge should make a movie about said idiocracy? Nah, that would never get released.)

Less bubbly but just as hyperstylized in its motion-capture renderings, Miramax's gorgeous French import "Renaissance" opens this weekend in New York and L.A. Sold to its producers based on a four-minute screen test, director Christian Volckman's cyberpunk conspiracy-thriller takes place in the labyrinthine sprawl of Paris, 2054, a daunting tech-tropolis as bleakly expressionistic as it is 19th-century retro. Critically speaking, neither its McGuffin-lite intrigue nor A-list voiceovers (led by Daniel 007 Craig) are half as fascinating as the film's stencil-sharp palette and virtuosity, which manage to convey visual depth and human emotion with only the colors black, white and nary a delineating shade of grey. Forget about "Sin City" — this is what a two-tone Frank Miller graphic novel might actually look like transposed to the big screen.

It seems impossible to bring up inventive pixel-making without invoking the name Hayao Miyazaki, but the Japanese master was too busy building "Howl's Moving Castle" to add his ink-and-cel genius to "Tales From Earthsea" (a/k/a "Gedo senki"), which premiered earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival. Still, Studio Ghibli lives on through the family line as Goro Miyazaki (Hayao's eldest, mildly estranged son) makes the leap from a background in forestry and museum design (?) to helm his feature debut. Largely sourced from the third book in Ursula K. Le Guin's popular fantasy series, this somber-faced parable of Japan's youth culture chronicles a bloodstained prince's journey through a realm of wizards, dragons and alt-medieval tropes. Rumors say that what this potentially G- or PG-rated fable lacks in capriciousness, it makes up for in family-friendly crossover appeal, so expect a celeb-redubbed American version to entirely negate it from this round-up in 2009. Oh yeah, that's the soonest the film can play in the U.S., after the Sci-Fi Channel's copyright on their own "Earthsea" series expires.

Coming 'round the bend next is the 44th New York Film Festival, whose notoriously snooty selection committee somehow found it in their elitist hearts to include the Japanimated "Paprika" in their programming schedule. Directed by the always-interesting Satoshi Kon ("Perfect Blue," "Tokyo Godfathers"), this heady exploration of perception, memory and the controlling powers of the subconscious focuses on the titularly nicknamed female detective and an experimental device allowing shrinks to enter their patient's dreamscapes. Those familiar with Kon's past work (especially his crackerjack "Millennium Actress") should expect shifting realities, identities and logic systems, but what's to make of the baffling NYFF synopsis that describes it as a "head-on collision between Hello Kitty and Philip K. Dick?" Most will have to wait and see after fest reviews roll in over the next few weeks, or check it out for yourself when Sony Pictures shakes out its spices in early 2007.

Most decidedly not for kids of any age, Danish first-timer Anders Morgenthaler's "Princess" is a sex-industry psychodrama that avoids the label "exploitation film" because it's, um... actively against exploitation? A guilt-ridden priest returns home after his porn star sister dies of a drug overdose, then goes on a brutal crusade with his abused five-year-old niece to rid the world of all pornography involving his sibling's likeness. Deeply distressing and yet deliriously entertaining, this anime-inspired commentary on the consumptive evils of commercial smut is a paradox of themes as well as form: though 80% of the film is animated, the remaining 20% consists of live-action flashbacks, and all 100% opened the prestigious Directors' Fortnight program at Cannes this year. Can it be, two decades after "Akira" began America's love affair with anime, that the medium is capable of intellectually and emotionally transcending its fanboy pegs? At the very least, Tartan will prove they've got a pair when "Princess" opens in U.S. theaters next year.

On a final related note, the most gonzo animated feature yet heard of has to be Joe Bum-jin's "Aachi and Ssipak," a futuristic South Korean comedy that takes place in a world powered by human poop and anally surveilled by a government that rewards everyone with addictive popsicles. No word yet on when this MTV-licensed insanity will be unleashed upon us, but the official recipe looks to be a mix of one part "Rugrats" (stay with me on this), two parts "Akira," and cooked under a Ralph Bakshi glaze. Official site here, if you dare.

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<![CDATA[Michel Gondry's Latest (Greatest) Idea]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/09/qa-michel-gondrys-latest-great.php Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


You can't spend a significant amount of time with director Michel Gondry without hearing at least four ideas that are completely brilliant and utterly insane. The smartest/craziest I heard during our half hour chat: Gondry's unsuccessful proposal to push the advertising for his current film, "The Science of Sleep," with selling points from his next one, "Be Kind Rewind." "It would have said, 'From the director of Jack Black's next movie!'" Gondry said. "They didn't go for it."

Gondry's ideas make him perhaps the single most exciting director alive today, but, as this story illustrates, his ideas aren't always admired. There's a lot of that Gondry, that mad and occasionally unpopular thinker, in Gael Garcia Bernal's character Stephane in "The Science of Sleep." Stephane toils away at a calendar company where his co-workers reject his creativity and insist on practicality. It's a feeling Gondry knows all too well.

You've said numerous times that "The Science of Sleep" is a very autobiographical film. Does the fact that it's such a personal story make it an easier or harder film to shoot?

It makes it easier in a sense, because I know where the characters are coming from, especially Stephane. And I knew a lot of the details because they already happened in real life. But it makes it very hard because the details included could be very embarrassing. But it was interesting because it was a good challenge to have to deal with that. I would have never expected I was capable of writing the story and directing the whole film and I'm glad I did.

And this was your first film that you both wrote and directed. Why did you choose to go that route with this project?

Well, because I could not explain the film to a writer. I didn't want to justify or explain the dreams. I had to do them the way I experienced them, otherwise the whole thing would be pointless. As a writer, I'm not here to help the story. The story is there to help the dreams.

Gael's job is so difficult in the film because he has to be both likable and unlikable, sometimes in the same scene.

Because the film was autobiographical, I didn't want people to see it as revenge. So I decided if there was going to be heavy dysfunctionality, I would put it on my end; so, on Gael's end. My first thought was that, since he's really handsome, you wonder why Charlotte [Gainsbourg] is not necessarily attracted to him. So I had to push the neurosis a little bit more than in my case, and make him very intense and scary. But the thing is, he is such a likable person that I could push him even farther into being an asshole. If it had been another actor it would have been a different story.

You've worked with special effects many times in the past. In this case, you chose to forego digital effects in favor of a more analog approach.

Initially all the dreams were supposed to happen in [Stephane's] office. But when I met Gael, he pushed me to go deeper into my personal dreams, and I thought that we could not afford to create that world in a realistic way. And I thought "Let's do it hand-made it and it'll be more humble." Something I didn't expect in the beginning that quickly became clear was that it gives you the feeling that no matter where you go you wind up in one of Stephane's contraptions. The fact that it's hand-made makes you feel you're watching something made by Stephane.

If you'd had a bigger budget, would it have been a different movie?

I think I'd have made something more spectacular out of the dreams. I had so many ideas. But I don't think it would have necessarily been better. Probably not as good, I would say.

"The Science of Sleep" and "Eternal Sunshine" might sound similar superficially, but when you watch them, they're vastly different films. Did you feel any internal or external pressure to repeat "Eternal Sunshine" with this film?

No, it's the opposite. I've had this project long before "Eternal Sunshine" and I've wanted to do this movie for so long. In fact, some people were trying to say to me "Don't do this one, it's too close to your last one," but since it's the movie I really wanted to make I didn't care. I think what's inside our heads is vast enough for two movies.


"The Science of Sleep" opens in limited release on September 22 (official site).]]> 8292 2006-09-20 00:00:00 closed closed qa_michel_gondrys_latest_great publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008292 <![CDATA[An Appreciation of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/09/feature-an-appreciation-of-dwa.php Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

He stands, with perfect posture, brandishing a 2x4, a scimitar, a rail gun — searching for an endpoint to a tale test-screened and ghost-written until it's been sapped of any life and coherence. And yet there he is, a presence curiously untainted by all the Hollywood accoutrements. His physical solidity is continually undermined by a penchant for self-parody — this whole hero bit is absurd, ain't it (as he snaps a goon's arm in two). So he flashes his shark's grin, grits those incisors, and does what he can. And what he does is carry a film — not into greatness, but at least to hearty pulp, the kind that leaves a bewildered smile on the face of audience members, because the effort and love were there if the material was not. This isn't the age of the action hero — times are too depressing, too conspiratorial — but The Rock soldiers on, his solid sobriquet reflecting his endurance of the industry that lacks an Aldrich or Fuller to expand upon his voluminous gifts.

Today he's Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, character turned man, as the grip of huckster/genius Vince McMahon loosens and more sober screenplay choices open up. Next is the male weepie "Gridiron Gang", a bit of football uplift that leaves enough sharp edges to make the plot-mush go down smoother. The Rock inhabits the role of the coach convincingly, the troubled kids turning to organized sport mirrors his own youthful misadventures, and his craft betters with each turn of the spool. He cries with grit and yells with tenderness. Legitimacy might not improve his films — but he's courting it whole-heartedly. He wants to be liked — that's what made him a star in the WWE/F. His showmanship was unparalleled, each rote punch and kick caricatured into a shimmering shimmy of exaggerated power. Every motion underlined, but not put in quotes — because this fight, while choreographed, was serious for the fans and therefore serious to him — no one worked harder in the ring, took as many bumps. The Rock is a stickler for realism, at least when it comes to blows — listen to him boast on "The Scorpion King" or "Walking Tall" commentary track on the commitment to those sequences — the consultations with Army Special Forces types and doing his own stunts. His background forbids anything else.

This sticks out — the fact he has a background. Today stars want to be stars as kids — all actors know is acting. The Rock is an exception — he made his living playing football in the Canadian Football League until a bum shoulder forced retirement. Then he played cities all over the world as "The Rock" in the ring, honing performance, timing, expression. Every move he makes speaks to this experience, adds weight to when he puts the pads on in "Gridiron Gang" to challenge a kid to knock him down (and even this dramatic moment is undercut by the sight of his frame bursting out of the high-schoolers jersey).

The films got better — "The Rundown" (2003) was graced by Christopher Walken's cracked monologues, while The Rock further honed his self-deprecating muscle-man persona, aided by the jibes of Sean William Scott. Another wrinkle — he refuses to use guns (until the corpse piling climax), a principled stand also taken up in "Walking Tall" (2004), his most emblematic work. It contains quick and dirty fight scenes, campy humor, and a rigid belief in the value of hard work — a bizarre combination embodied in the smirking, chiseled visage of the man himself. Johnny Knoxville takes over the Scott role in cutting him down to size.

He internalized the sarcastic conscience of Scott/Knoxville in the "Get Shorty" sequel "Be Cool" (2005), explicitly parodying the self-image that he had already so thoroughly deconstructed in straighter films. But his performance is brilliant — as gay bodyguard Elliot Wilhelm, he outs his love of performance, no longer masked under blood and guts. No, here he just emotes — spectacularly so in his one-man rendition of a scene from "Bring It On," playing both sides of a cheerleader bitch session. It dwarfs the rest of the film by its utter fearlessness — what comparable box-office draw would have the confidence to pull off such a feminizing stunt? It's remarkable, and his version of Loretta Lynn's "You Ain't Woman Enough" might even top it.

"Doom" (2005) was cheap red meat for his core audience, bland, workmanlike, and thoroughly forgettable (despite the fact his hero turns psychopathic villain) — but then he went and starred in Richard Kelley's infamous "Southland Tales" (2006), an apocalyptic satire so derided by critics at Cannes it may never see the light of day. He plays an action star stricken with amnesia — a further elaboration of Elliot Wilhelm, the chiseled body stricken by an identity crisis. Let’s hope Sony doesn’t mutilate it too badly.

The Rock is the ideal post-modern action star — a self-referential comedian who breaks down his image at every turn yet manages to satisfy our (my) primitive urges for beat downs with earnest conviction and immense physical prowess. He's utterly fascinating and completely ignored, but hopefully "Gridiron Gang" will turn the expected buck and some middlebrow maestro (Ridley Scott? Paul Haggis?) will cast him in some piece of revolting Oscar bait. With a modicum of control over his projects afterward, the matinee adventure film, driven by character and wit, would ease back into theaters, and our afternoons would be richer for years to come.

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<![CDATA[Mike Judge's 'Oh' Face]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/09/feature-mike-judges-oh-face.php Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michelle Orange

IFC News


At last, Mike Judge and Justin Timberlake will have something to talk about over gluey hors d'oeuvres at the MTV Christmas party. Last month, Sony Pictures sent Timberlake's first film "Edison Force" straight to DVD, and Judge's second live-action feature, "Idiocracy," looked like it was going to face a similar fate after Fox postponed its release indefinitely. Last week, it was reported that "Idiocracy" would indeed be released on September 1, but, in a triumph of studio passive-aggression, with zero marketing and only in seven cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Toronto, Atlanta, and Chicago. Sweet of them to look so fondly upon Judge's home state of Texas (the film was also shot in Austin, where Judge is based), but somehow I'm guessing the gesture was lost on the writer/director, as the glaring omission of New York means the review coverage is considerably cut down.


"Idiocracy" stars Luke Wilson as a dim-witted soldier who agrees to be frozen in a Pentagon experiment, expecting to be revived a year later. Instead he's forgotten, and five hundred years pass before he wakes to find himself, in a society dumbed-down to the point of plant food, to be the smartest man alive. The film was shot in 2004 and has become the ultimate tease for Mike Judge fans desperate for a fix: budget problems, production problems, and test-screening problems have ratcheted the bad buzz up so high only your Irish setter can hear it; now this.


Of course, Judge's relationship with Fox has been an awkward one almost from the start; you and your Irish setter may have a more effective system of communication. Around the time that shooting for "Idiocracy" wrapped, Fox was hedging heavily about the fate of "King of the Hill," Judge's animated series for the network, to the point that the entire operation was shut down following its eighth season. Judge told the writers and animators to move on, only to have Fox call them scrambling back for one more season. In June of this year an Esquire profile of Judge stressed the strange and strained relationship he has with Fox, and the confusion he expressed about the fate of "Idiocracy" proved prescient. "I've never experienced anything like this," Judge said, describing the process of finishing the photography two years ago only to get the bait and switch from various executives over special effects and then, a year ago, when the film was finally finished, marketing. "They're just overthinking it, which is what they always do, It's just about an average dumb-ass person who winds up in the future. It's not about 'What if you could travel through time...' It's just dragged on way too long — a good seven months longer than "Office Space." I could have made another movie after I locked the picture before this one comes out."


What makes the decision to turf "Idiocracy" to 125 screens nationwide that much more unbelievable is Judge's track record with 20th Century Fox; namely, "Office Space." Released in February 1999 on a decent 1740 screens (to compare, "Little Miss Sunshine" is currently on 1400 screens), theories differ about why the corporate satire tanked so hard, but most come down to Fox's bungled, barely-there marketing campaign. The film limped to 10 million dollars and faded away, but found an audience on DVD so voracious that in 2005 a trumped-up special edition was released (no Judge commentary) to keep the party going. By 2004 the "Office Space" DVD had made over 40 million dollars, is now acknowledged as a bona fide cult hit and has broken every record in Fox video history. That's the kind of thing gets a studio's attention, and, you would think, respect. In an interview this May, Judge had this to say about a sequel:

Fox has been asking about it. I don't know. I finished this last movie I did, and I've got something else that I wrote that's more like "Office Space," in that it's smaller and kind of character driven stuff, but I don't know. I haven't been working on a sequel. If I don't just completely retire, I'd like to do another live action movie, something along the lines of "Office Space" I think. I'm kind of thinking about Christopher Guest's career. How he, in the 90s, started making these little movies that have an audience, and I'd like to do something like that. Kind of lower budget comedies… "Idiocracy," I think, is coming out Labor Day weekend. They told me that is the official release date. That was kind of a bigger effects movie and I think I'd like to get back to doing at least one or two more like "Office Space."

What Judge is saying, and has stated more blatantly elsewhere, is that he is done with studio movies, and in future would rather raise money on his own for low budget features. And who can blame him; to quote Dirk Calloway: With friends like this, who needs friends?

Could "Idiocracy" be as bad as Fox clearly thinks it is? Test screening reviews have been mixed, but the general wisdom is that Mike Judge fans will go see Mike Judge movies. Following the quiet opening last Friday, a few reviews have trickled in, including a rave from the LA Times and a pan from Entertainment Weekly. In between are some dogged conspiracy theorists and the expected love letters from Judge die-hards. For most of us it will be a while — Fox has not yet issued a DVD release date — before we can decide whether Fox executives made the right decision or are indeed what the "Idiocracy" director might call "ahead of their time."]]> 8290 2006-09-06 00:00:00 closed closed feature_mike_judges_oh_face publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008290 <![CDATA[The Final Frontier of Filmmaking: Three Stories of Self-Distribution]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/08/feature-the-final-frontier-of.php Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Here's how the story goes: You scrimp, save and starve to make the film of your dreams. You sleep in your car, you only eat ramen for two years and develop scurvy, you volunteer for experimental drug treatments for cash, you teach the 9-year-old next door how to use Final Cut Pro so that he can edit a trailer for you while you're supposedly babysitting him. And when you're finished, you premiere it at a festival to audience and critical acclaim, and a distributor swoops down and carries you and your film off to the fame and minor fortune you deserve.


Right?


These days, a crowded market and the sheer difficulty of making money on a theatrical release has made distributors wary of taking any chances, and often when an offer is made, it's not at all favorable towards the filmmaker. Suddenly self-distribution, once an unthinkable rarity, seems like a viable option for filmmakers who are willing to do the work to get their films on screens. September may be the month self-distribution comes into its own. The three filmmakers profiled below are all in the midst of releasing their own films, and they're not the only ones. Susan Buice and Arin Crumley are setting up screenings for their film "Four Eyed Monsters" using an innovative online request system inspired by Chris Anderson's idea of The Long Tail. Joe Swanberg opened his film, "LOL," in New York last week.



Andrew Bujalski

Film: "Mutual Appreciation," a black and white Brooklyn-based comedy about the semi-adventures of a aimless musician who just moved to the city.


In the words of Variety, "Wait, you don't know Bujalski?" His first film, "Funny Ha Ha," ended up A.O. Scott's top ten list last year after a tortuous path from festival to television to eventual self-distribution three years after its premiere. On the basis of just two films, critics have hailed him as the voice of a generation, but Bujalski finds himself once again having to bring his own film to theaters, with the help of "one enthusiastic angel (in several senses of the word) investor" and the distribution company they created, Goodbye Cruel Releasing.


Bujalski's not one to aggrandize his start-to-finish DIY process — "It's completely unsustainable. I've been absurdly lucky," he told the New York Times. He had hoped for a distribution deal this time around, but was prepared for difficulty: "We had a good sense of how steep an uphill battle this would be and had our nerve steeled pretty well against disappointment." And there are plenty of benefits to having your film play in theaters, even if you've had to do your own booking. For one, it gets reviewed, and so far critics have been very pleased with "Mutual Appreciation." For another, as Bujalski notes, "Light, pouring through a projector, through a film image, onto a big screen in a dark room full of strangers, is a beautiful and moving thing!"


"Mutual Appreciation" opens in New York on September 1 and platforms out to the rest of the country from there (more).



Sujewa Ekanayake

Film: "Date Number One," a full-length comedy composed of five different stories about first dates.


Ekanayake has always organized his own screenings ("I like DIY distribution."), but "Date Number One" is the first film he's taken outside of the Washington, D.C.-area. He's an enthusiastic and vocal supporter of both the theatrical experience and the DIY ethic, bypassing the more conventional festival route, selling his own DVDs through his website. He offers some encouraging words for anyone less fearless who's considered handling their own distribution:

It is not as hard as most people think. The essential work required is: 1) Set up screening. 2) Promote screening. 3) Oversee screening, make sure the event goes well, solve any problems that come up. 4) Repeat steps 1-3 'til you don't feel like it no more.

Like many indie filmmakers, Ekanayake has taken full advantage of the web to garner interest in his work, documenting his experiences on his blog and reaching out to other film bloggers to review his films. Maybe it's all that fresh air from working outside the system that's allowed his to retain a remarkably positive attitude about filmmaking, noting that "Being able to make and show movies is a privilege (due to various economic, cultural, political and other historical factors), a privilege reserved for very few people on this planet at the moment."


"Date Number One" premiered in DC in May. It opens in New York August 31st, with other dates and cities to be announced (more).



Lance Weiler

Film: "Head Trauma," a psychological horror film inspired by a pair of traumatic experiences: a terrible car accident and a hellish period working as the producer of a pilot at a major studio.


Weiler's first film, "The Last Broadcast," was a faux documentary about the grisly fates of a trio filming a cable access show about the Jersey Devil in the remote woods. Sound familiar? It preceded "The Blair Witch Project" by a year, and many will argue it's the better film. "The Last Broadcast" also had the distinction of being the first film to be shot, edited and screened entirely digitally — Weiler and his fellow filmmakers released the film themselves in five cities, and it played on HBO and IFC. Weiler did look into traditional distribution for "Head Trauma," but says that "the deals were weak – the advances were low and everyone wanted so much for so little... So I decided early on to return to self distribution. We’d done it with our first film and we’d seen a profit and best of all we retained the rights to the work."


Drawing on the experiences from his first bout with self-distribution, Weiler laid out an impressive, practical plan that included the creation of an interactive comic to build early interested in the film, pairing screenings with speaking engagements at schools and film societies to offset costs, selling posters, enlisting fans to spread the word and making use of social networking sites. He's already opened the film in three cities, and will expand it further in the weeks leading up to the DVD release.


It's tempting to use Weiler as the savvy poster boy for self-distribution making economic sense, but he's also passionate about the theatrical experience. "There is nothing like seeing the movie on a large screen with an audience," he declares, adding that "the most important thing for me, since I'm traveling with the film, is that it allows me to make a personal connection with the audience and assists in building a fan base for the work."


"Head Trauma" opened in Portland, OR on August 18th and is expanding from there to other cities across the country (more).

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<![CDATA[Idle Hands - Bryan Barber's Small Screen Showpieces]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/08/sidebar-idle-hands-bryan-barbe.php Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News


There is no art form as critically ignored as the music video. So expect plenty of terse parentheticals this weekend regarding Bryan Barber, the vid vet who directed the Prohibition-set, OutKast-starring musical "Idlewild" that opens this Friday. With the help of the cultural memorialists at YouTube, I'm going to sketch a (very) brief history of Barber's work on the small screen to fill the gap.


Friends with the group since "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik" came out in 1994, Barber's been a key factor in the evolution of OutKast's image from Dirty South stylists to the P-Funk retro-futurist look they promote today. Compare André Benjamin's Atlanta Braves jersey in the now classic "Player's Ball" (1994) to his glam carnival barker in Barber's "The Whole World" (2001). Much of this change has to be attributed to Benjamin's artistic mutation, as he embraces the performative excesses of Prince and George Clinton over, say, the Goodie Mob — but Barber's ability to massage pop iconography with a loving wink melded perfectly with Outkast's own entrance into the pop lexicon (peaking with "Hey Ya").


Even before he perfected this style with "Roses," Barber was experimenting with homage/satire of pop images. He helmed a number of videos accompanying films, from the mundane (Kelly Clarkson's "The Trouble With Love Is" from "Love, Actually") to the bizarre (OutKast hanger-on Sleepy Brown's "I Can't Wait,", with André starring as "Chamelio Salamander", from "Barbershop 2"). His first full-length culture riff was for Southern rapper Bubba Sparxxx and his single "Deliverance" in 2003 (watch the video). The template is the Coen brothers' "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" For the most part it's played straighter than its model, Bubba stalking through the dustbowl as an escapee from a chain gang (without Clooney's mugging). The tune loops an acoustic guitar riff as Sparxxx hits the chorus: "I've been travelin' for some time/With my fishin' pole and my bottle of shine." It's a perfect fit of lyric and milieu, except Barber and Sparxxx replace the Coen's parade of caricatures with a more rooted sense of place (while keeping the randy Sirens). "Can you recall a time people loved you unconditionally?/Toast in the new south, this one is for history" Sparxxx ends holed up in an old barn, and before the credits hit, he and his crew burst out in modern dress, drawing a direct line between the struggle to remain upright from the 30s to today.


A few months later — "Hey Ya" (watch the video) hit TV, and insinuated itself into every unwilling eardrum across the U.S. This time Barber takes a more playful attitude — adopting the Beatles' Ed Sullivan performance as a showpiece for André Benjamin's particular brand of charisma. It's bright, over-caffeinated, and delightfully absurd (the three-man chorus dressed as jockeys are a personal favorite). The next single off "The Love Below" was "Roses" (watch the video) a sophomoric little ditty about being resentful of a popular girl's distracted attentions. Not Dre's finest work — but it's certainly one of Barber's. Borrowing from "Grease" and "West Side Story" this time, it's set at a 50s era high-school talent show — with Andre, tight-pantsed and wearing a lettered jacket (more Olivia Newton-John than Travolta), leading his "Love Below" fellows in a tune. This is intercut with Big Boi leading a group of "Speakerboxxx" thugs (his side of the double-album) smashing mailboxes on the way to the show. They call each other out and rumble — while the girl everyone's pining for runs out with a rich, fey interloper. It's a clever play on the critical merits of both albums, and on the increasingly strained relationship between the two members, which has caused a flood of speculation on the future of the group — which will only increase with the release of "Idlewild," the album, on which they co-wrote only four songs together.


Since those reputation making successes, Barber's been busy: having Destiny's Child watch themselves act in a fake "Sex and the City" episode for one of their final videos together in "Girl," and dolling up Christina Aguilera like a flapper in this year's "Ain't No Other Man," in which he seemed to borrow the speakeasy set (and cinematographer) from "Idlewild." For those concerned about such things — it's nominated four times at the upcoming MTV Video Music Awards.



"Idlewild" opens nationwide August 25th (official site).

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<![CDATA[Cinema's Love for Hapless Conjoined Twins]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/07/sidebar-cinemas-love-for-haple.php Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Tom and Barry Howe, the beautiful teenage rock 'n' roll conjoined twins at the center of Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's "Brothers of the Head" (which opens today), are only the latest in a long line of cinematic siblings joined at the hip (or chest...or back...you get the idea), and all inevitably doomed to tragedy or, worse, metaphor. Some other memorable, melancholy on-screen conjoined duos:


"Sisters"

Margot Kidder plays French-Canadian model Danielle Breton in Brian De Palma's Hitchcock homage gone way weird, and in eerie and oddly affecting black and white flashbacks, she also embodies the secret Danielle has been unable to leave behind: Dominique, the twin she wasn't surgically separated from until early adulthood.

Doomed? Well, there's always got to be an evil twin, right?


"The Bride With White Hair"

Francis Ng and Elaine Lui play the male and female halves of wicked cult leader Ji Wushuang — they're joined at the back, but this doesn't seem to interfere with their wire-enhanced fighting ability. Conjoined twins of different genders are an impossibility, but that's hardly the least plausible aspect of Ronny Yu's very fun wuxia film.

Doomed? Clearly — they're the bad guys, and you can't mess with Brigitte Lin's hairstyle of doom.


"Twin Falls Idaho"

Filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish are frighteningly good as Blake and Francis Falls in the brothers' meditative debut, which manages a tone floating somewhere between melancholy, surreal and wistfully funny. Michele Hicks, who plays the prostitute who enters the brothers' previously sealed-off lives and romances one of them as the other slowly nears death, is an unfortunate actress, but the Polish brothers are so compelling it's hard to care.

Doomed? Only halfway, but it's still pretty damn sad.


"Three...Extremes"
Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa), the troubled novelist who's the focus of Takashi Miike's "Box" segment, was once half of a pair of twins in the creepiest carnival act this side of Herk Harvey — possibly Siamese twins. Or was she? No, she was. Or was she?

Doomed? Who knows? We doubt Miike does — he seems to have tossed this visually arresting, incomprehensible short together just to justify the haunting (but baffling) final image.


"Freaks" Tod Browning cast real (famously so) conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in his controversial 1932 film to play, essentially, themselves. The Hilton sisters were vaudeville and sideshow veterans who'd been trained in singing and dancing from a young age by the woman who'd all but bought them from their mother — they're referenced in "Brothers of the Head" and their lives clearly inspired part of the narrative.

Doomed? Actually, in the film they both prepare to get married (though they also both apparently like the sauce a little too much). In real life, they died of the flu in 1969, after having been abandoned by their manager at a drive-in in North Carolina with no means of transportation or income.

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<![CDATA[What Guys Talk About When They Talk About Girls]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/07/hot-bothered-what-guys-talk-ab.php Mon, 24 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Movies about men hanging out shootin' the shit have a pretty lurid reputation. In those besides, say, "My Dinner With André," images that spring to mind are road trips, beer bongs, masturbation jokes, togas, carnal encounters with baked goods. And if we're lucky, a heart-to-heart that reveals that these loud-mouthed louts with nothing but sex on the brain might actually be human deep down inside. For me, besides belly laughs (and smug satisfaction at being confirmed the more civilized sex), the interest in guy flicks lies in the insight they offer into the way men talk to each other, especially about women.

In most broad comedies about high school or college-aged guys, such gems as "Porky's" and "American Pie," the main goal in life seems to be getting laid, although occasionally an added impetus spices things up, like trying to satisfy the munchies ("Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle"), get into Princeton ("Risky Business"), or pass history class ("Bill & Ted's Big Adventure") — all, of course, in addition to doing one's damndest to get laid. In "American Pie," the über-guys-trying-to-get-laid movie, the quest dominates most conversations among the attractive, horny males in the cast, allowing for dialogue like this:

"What exactly does third base feel like?"

"Like warm apple pie..."

"McDonald's or homemade?"

Many guy flicks transcend their base premise with realistic, witty dialogue ("Clerks"), funny, high concept plot machinations ("Harold & Kumar," "Bill & Ted") or overall comic genius ("Animal House"). And the best of them manage to bury sweetness and humanity beneath the filth. While Hollywood woos the delish 18-25-year-old dude demographic with absurdity and dick jokes, independent filmmakers who make chatty guy flicks tend to have some deeper purpose in mind — more "American Graffiti" than "Losin' It." Often the fictional men whose lives we invade are older and their goals are shifting from losing their virginity — or banging as many cheerleaders as possible — to growing up and potentially sleeping with one woman for the rest of their lives, a shift that can trigger anxiety, stubborn bursts of commitment-phobia and a lot of drama. Hence the attraction for directors of a certain age who still want to make movies about themselves and their homies.

"If you want to talk, you always have the guys at the diner. You don't need a girl if you want to talk," says Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) in Barry Levinson's "Diner" (1982), a film about a group of 20-somethings in 1959 Baltimore resisting adulthood with all their might. Eddie is a man prepared to call off his wedding if his fiancée fails a prenuptial football trivia quiz he has devised for her, clearly an excuse. Marriage is a symbol of growing up and having to say good-bye to a carefree youth spent hanging out with the guys at the diner.

In Ed Burns' "The Groomsmen" (now in theaters), the director plays Paulie, a Long Island reporter on the verge of marrying his pregnant girlfriend (Brittany Murphy) who is wrestling with his fear of taking this leap. Gathering for the big event are Paulie's brother Jim (Donal Logue), who is having marital problems of his own, happily married bartender and father of two, Des (Matthew Lillard), secretly gay T.C. (John Leguizamo) and Mike (Jay Mohr), who still lives at home, obsesses about his ex and gets all the funniest lines. Like "The Brothers McMullan," which launched Burns' directing and acting career in 1995, the film features scene after scene of the guys engaging in such manly activities as softball, fishing and boozing it up, all the while giving each other advice about sex and love, although now more mature topics like fatherhood and infertility are integrated into the discussion.

Even the guys from indie sensation "Clerks" are growing up — or at least trying to. On July 21, the audience that fell in love with such dialogue as "My girlfriend's sucked 37 dicks." "In a row?" excitedly welcomes Kevin Smith's "Clerks II," which the writer-director has described as being "about when that lazy 20-something malaise lasts into your 30s." I haven't seen the film yet, but reportedly Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) are still working behind the counter, now at a monster fast-food joint, although Dante is engaged — but still spending his days having conversations (classified as "obscene" by one critic) with the guys and making the moves on his hot boss (Rosario Dawson).

Occasionally, real insight into the concerns of real men can be found between the obscenities. Doug Liman's "Swingers" (1996), for example, which was written by Jon Favreau who also plays Mike, focuses on Mike and his friends acting suave and drinking cocktails and strategizing hilariously about how to get girls, or "babies," into bed. But under the Machiavellian rule-making lies the story of a man devastated by a breakup and friends that genuinely care.

"I could, like, forget about her and then when she comes back make like I just pretended to forget about her," Mike says.

"Right, although probably more likely the opposite," says his friend Rob (Ron Livingston). "I mean, at first you're going to pretend to forget about her. You'll not call her, I don't know, whatever... but then eventually you really will forget about her."

"Well, what if she comes back first?" Mike asks.

"See, that's the thing," Rob says, "is somehow they know not to come back until you really forget."

John Cusack's character, Rob, in Stephen Frears' "High Fidelity" (2000) owns a record store where he employs two music fanatics (Jack Black and Todd Louiso) with whom he chatters constantly. Too emotionally retarded to share their inner lives, all the trio discuss with any degree of fluency or passion is music. Rob is broken up over his break-up with live-in girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle), a fact he can only wrap words around when making lists in his head. In his mind he realizes he drove Laura away by refusing to commit. In his mind he identifies the top five things he misses about her, including her sense of humor, her smell and the way "she kinda moans and then rubs her feet together" when she can't sleep. Sounds like love to me, but Rob has a hard time admitting that to Laura or even himself — and he certainly wouldn't breathe a word of it to the guys at the store.

If there's one thing to learn from all these movies about men it's that they have a lean understanding of women. And they're scared shitless of them. Time and time again, men who surround themselves by other men are portrayed as dividing women into those they have sex with and those they adore, while they have a hard time building a relationship or friendship with one. That role is relegated to the guys. This theme was front and center in Mike Nichols' "Carnal Knowledge" (1971), in which (Jonathan) Jack Nicholson and (Sandy) Art Garfunkel go from college through marriages, divorces and finally middle age still unable to simply relate to a woman. For Jonathan, women are meant to be conquered and for Sandy, they are meant to be worshipped.

Movie men (and real life ones) must often sacrifice an idealized version of women before they will be able to love one who is made of flesh and blood. Eddie might just have to settle for a woman with less-than-perfect knowledge of the Baltimore Colts and Paulie will embrace his girlfriend, hormonal eruptions and all. Poor Jonathan and Sandy, however, spend their entire lives seeking not a person to go through the shit with, but some ephemeral goddess who fucks like a whore and looks like Candace Bergen. Alas, that image of feminine perfection that young boys — and some unfortunate grownups — place on a pedestal is hard to forget. In George Lucas' "American Graffiti," (1973), two high school grads, Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve (Ron Howard), spend a summer night in 1962 cruising their favorite local spots as they ready to go off to college. While Steve struggles with a real relationship, Curt chases an elusive blonde in a white Thunderbird who represents innocence and youth and the dreamgirl he will never attain. In "Swingers," Mike finally meets his goddess, also a blonde (Heather Graham), shimmering dreamily on the dance floor, and she seems willing to give it a whirl. Sometimes, the movie seems to say, if you trash the rulebook and follow your heart, the dream can become your reality. Or as Rob, after much prodding, tells Laura in "High Fidelity":

"I'm tired of the fantasy because it doesn't really exist. And there are never really any surprises, and it never really..."

"Delivers?" she responds.

"Delivers," he says. "And I'm tired of it. And I'm tired of everything else for that matter. But I don't ever seem to get tired of you."

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8286 2006-07-24 00:00:00 closed closed hot_bothered_what_guys_talk_ab publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008286
<![CDATA[Top 5 Reasons to Go to the Newport Film Festival]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/06/festival-top-5-reasons-to-go-t.php Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Almost a week back from the Newport Film Festival (June 6-11), and I'm still catching up on sleep. Maybe I'm getting old and can't slam tequila like I used to, but there's only so much back-to-back movie and party-going that one body can take. It had been much too long since I'd indulged in the wonders of a warm, welcoming regional fest, and this was a great one to break the fast with. Newport has many things to recommend. Here's my top 5:


The chateaux: Newport is a coastal town in Rhode Island famous for its myriad sprawling mansions. I grew up in West LA and have seen my share of homes of the rich and famous, but these beachside manors, once inhabited by the likes of the Vanderbilts and Astors, belong in the Loire Valley in France. I took a drive along Bellevue Avenue, where the bulk of them are found, in a convertible and on foot did the famous six-mile Cliff Walk, which stands between the ocean and the mansions' backyards.


The chowder: New England clam chowder is one of those things like pizza and sex — even when it's bad it's good. But when it's good — creamy and spicy like they make it at the Black Pearl on Newport's wharf — it's heavenly. It's considered the best in town — locals boast that even Governator Schwarzenegger became an addict when he was shooting "True Lies" in town. I was equally impressed with my grilled shrimp and scallop brochette.


The fab documentary program: Ultimately it's the movies that make or break a festival, and Newport's were outstanding — especially the docs. Culled from the best of the world's fests, one after another made me laugh, cry, cheer, squirm, or wanna punch somebody. While I didn't see a single clunker, I had some favorites: "The Trials of Darryl Hunt," Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's Audience Award-winning stunner about a black North Carolina man convicted of raping and murdering a white woman by an all-white jury without a shred of evidence, who spent the twenty years in prison trying to prove his innocence; "Rank," John Hyams' profile of the three top ranking contestants in the fight for the bullfighting world championship; Kristi Jacobson's "Toots" about legendary New York saloon-keeper Toots Shor; Chris Paine's "Who Killed the Electric Car?" chronicling the life and premature death of GM's emissions-free vehicle; "Thin," Lauren Greenfield's look at a group of girls battling life-threatening eating disorders; Gary Tarn's Best Doc Award-winning "Black Sun" in which artist and filmmaker Hugues de Montalembert tells his own story of being blinded during a mugging and learning to live and travel and create art as a blind man; and Andrew Walton's "Arctic Son" about an aimless kid who gets some life lessons when he moves in with his dad in a tiny town in the Arctic.


Boozy events: When certain movies leave you in need of a drink, it's a good thing there's no shortage of cocktail receptions, parties, and after-parties, all conveniently sponsored by Stella Artois, Boru Vodka and Corazon Tequila. Highlights featured dancing to disco with the "Darryl Hunt" crew (including warm, wonderful Darryl and his equally wonderful lawyer Mark Rabil), a late-night get-together at an oceanside Italianate villa with a pool and a hot tub, and the very boozy awards ceremony brunch at The Chanler, one of Newport's snazziest hotels, where the bloodies and mimosas we downed while Dianne Ladd was accepting a lifetime achievement award were almost as pretty as the view.


The getaway: Newport is a quaint town on the water with both luxurious hotels and quaint b&b's, where the locals rally for its annual film festival. The people, from the staff to the volunteers (like Esther, everyone's surrogate grandma) to the filmmakers provide excellent company, while the films and special events, like improv by SNL's Rachel Dratch and her hilarious cohorts at the Upright Citizens' Brigade, provide non-stop entertainment. At a mere three-hour train ride from Penn Station, there's no excuse to miss it.

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<![CDATA[The Cast of "A Prairie Home Companion" Has That Feel-Good Feeling]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/06/interview-the-cast-of-a-prairi.php Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


There's no mistaking a Robert Altman film. Whether the great director is turning a genre inside out, like he did in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" or "The Long Goodbye," or investigating the dark nooks and crannies of a subculture, like Hollywood in "The Player," a ballet troupe in "The Company" or the British aristocracy and the people who serve them in "Gosford Park," we recognize his sprawling, ensemble casts making their way through interconnected narratives and captured in snippets by an eavesdropping camera, all of which endow films like "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" with a scope rarely seen on screen.


The latest microcosm Altman has taken on is a homegrown radio show based on the real one "A Prairie Home Companion" created and hosted by Garrison Keillor, who wrote the screenplay. The fictional show is not nationally syndicated like Keillor's, but a small-town variety show performed in a beautiful old theater, and it's is about to be shut down. The movie begins on the day the guillotine is scheduled to fall. With a wistful air hanging over the proceedings, the regulars perform as if it were just another day. The Johnson Sisters, Yolanda (Meryl Streep) and Rhonda (Lily Tomlin) belt out country duets, while singing cowboys Dusty (Woody Harrelson) and Lefty (John C. Reilly) do naughty ditties. GK, played by Keillor, emcees. Thrown into the mix is Yolanda's death-obsessed daughter (Lindsay Lohan) who's finally getting a crack at a song, Kevin Kline's Guy Noir, a private detective who runs security, Tommy Lee Jones as the dreaded Axeman from the Texas company purchasing the theater, and Virginia Madsen a mysterious angel floating about sweetly suggesting sinister things to come.


As always, Altman's camera takes it all in, the main attraction on stage and the seemingly extraneous conversations, gestures and glances that weave together to create a tapestry of nostalgia, music, laughter, camaraderie, and the sadness and panic of having to let go, Altman at his most purely enjoyable.


"I couldn't wait to get to work," Madsen said while in New York promoting the film. "It didn't matter if I had anything to say. I would just come and see if I could insinuate myself or just sit behind Bob and watch him direct… Everyone was always creating."


Part of what actors appreciate on an Altman set is a looseness about their characters and what is expected of them. Kevin Kline, in particular, had some questions about his character, Guy Noir, a regular on Keillor's show. "I asked Bob, 'You know, he's the only one who's completely delusional. He thinks he's in a film noir in the 40s. Is it that he [is] one of those marginal showbiz people on the fringes who wants to be onstage and thinks he would be better than any of them? Or is he one of these guys who's really a doorman but had an accident?' He just said, 'Well, he's a nut!'" Kline recalled. "That was the kind of dialogue I'd have with him — probing, deep. But he would always give directions that would open a door for you to go into… He doesn't have a shot designed and then, 'Come put your performance into my shot.' It's give and take between the camera and the actor."


That kind of space also allows the actors to play around with the script, a possibility that Kline has relished throughout his career, famously on "A Fish Called Wanda," which he compared to "Prairie." "In both cases the writer was right there, and I think it must be that little class buffoon subversive little imp in me that just loves not being reverent and defying authority in a very passive-aggressive way. I refuse to say the lines that they've written while they're standing right there," he said. "I did a scene with John Cleese, and he was like (in his best Cleesian accent), 'You are really not going to say one line that I've written, are you?'"


Surprisingly, Kline suggested that it was Streep who first suggested to him that a script could be stretched and tailored to fit the actor better, when they first worked together on Alan Pakula's "Sophie's Choice," Kline's first film, 24 years ago. "Only the most confident directors encourage you to play around with the script, make it your own," Streep said. "It was just a thing that would encourage freedom and creativity."


While most actors were fairly faithful to the script they loved, even Keillor was flexible.
"The screenwriter was on the set at all times. The script police were there," he said when asked how he felt about people messing with his baby. "But there were still a few. You can't really put a lid on Lily, and Kevin does a lot of improvisation, but the rest stayed pretty close to the script."


While Streep and Tomlin only knew each other peripherally before production began, they fell quickly into their roles as the last two remaining singers in a four-sister act that began when they were children. In no time, the two actors were singing their hearts out, finishing each other's sentences — remember their homage to Altman at the Oscars? — and speaking in perfect, singsong Midwestern accents about improv, awards ceremonies and beautiful Minnesota skies. Here's a sample:


Tomlin: The regional US accents are more available to you.


Streep: They're more in your body.


Tomlin: It's a rhythmic thing. Once you get into it, you're fine.


Streep: It more about cadence and music...There are plenty of people who have a Wisconsin accent and don't have a certain lilt and an optimism and that's Yolanda. People just hear the accent, but I think it's something more interior.


Tomlin: It won't be any good if it's not.


Streep: Rhonda, it's more about cigarettes and trying to quit, trying to quit, trying to quit, and her voice is located down here with her rage and her realism...


Tomlin: I didn't know that, darn it. In the script, we had auditioned for the Lawrence Welk show, the four little sisters, and my character is still bitter, like fifty years later, because they were more talented than the Lenin sisters, and she's never gotten over it.


Streep: And the Lenin sisters were communists.


Tomlin: Yeah, the Lenin sisters were commies, right.


Streep: That was in our script.


Tomlin: I hate to see that gone. Of course Yolanda's so nice and massaging everything I'm saying and saying it's not that bad and they're not communists…


The actors unanimously said the feel-good feeling is tough to beat on an Altman set. "There was always something going on," said Madsen. "Everyone always wanted to be there. It's not like that on many films. Sometimes it can be more stressful. Sometimes you just get to the hotel bar. But this one you wanted to be there. It's very rare to have that much of a thrill."


"A Prairie Home Companion" is currently in theaters (official site).

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<![CDATA["Born In Flames" Is What Being Independent Is All About]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/06/dvd-born-in-flames-is-what-bei.php Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Thom Bennett

IFC News


The term "independent film" has been forced onto far too many titles over the years, sometimes to lend a film credibility or as a defense of filmmaking incompetence. Another term overused by film critics the world 'round is "seminal." So there are any number of "seminal independent films" and filmmakers that have garnered accolades while others that truly deserve them are forgotten to time. Lizzie Borden's 1983 film "Born in Flames," finally released on DVD June 13th, is legitimately both seminal and independent, an example of 80s New York guerilla filmmaking at its finest.


People have been making underground, experimental and self-financed films since the beginnings of cinema. Before being indie was a genre or a fashion statement, there was a substantial movement of underground and self-described "transgressive" filmmakers that arose out of New York in the late 70s and early 80s. Prominent in this movement were Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Beth B, Amos Poe and Lizzie Borden, among others. Their films, while varied in style and approach, dealt in no uncertain terms with the political and social concerns of the day and served as a stark contrast to the American ideals of the 80s.


"Born in Flames" is set ten years in the future, after a second American Revolution. Societal ills have allegedly been eliminated and the world is a far better place. When the founder of the Women's Army, Adelaide Norris, is killed, factions of women of divergent race, class and sexuality rise up to tear down the façade that has been created in an effort to achieve actual justice and freedom for all.


The film is a mixed bag of filmed interviews, footage of pre-gentrified, early 80s New York City, feminist manifestos and a loose narrative that serves mainly to hold the whole thing together. The documentary look and feel of the film, a result of the simple economics of guerrilla filmmaking more than any grand aesthetic, give the films an immediacy and intensity that cannot be faked. "Born in Flames" is an angry, funny, provocative statement that deserves a place of prominence in any serious assessment of American independent film.


Chalk it up to the visionary genius of Lizzie Borden or the eerie similarities between the then Reagan, now Bush-era United States, but "Born in Flames" holds up remarkably well. Hopefully the DVD release will help it find a larger audience and inspire a new generation of filmmakers.

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<![CDATA[Hope and Despair at the Human Rights Watch Festival]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/06/festival-hope-and-despair-at-t.php Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Everybody's doc-crazy these days. On the heels of popular nonfiction crowd-pleasers like "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Super Size Me" and "March of the Penguins," it's become clear that documentaries aren't just for lefty film geeks in Birkenstocks anymore. If that weren't enough to start a movement, we find ourselves in a highly politicized climate in which everybody's fired up — about Darfur, global warming, the price of gas, immigration, drilling in the Arctic, Iraq, Iran, bad behavior in the White House...just to name a few of the issues keeping folks up at night.


While many audience members are beginning to appreciate quality documentaries — and their serious, issue-oriented narrative counterparts — for the smart, informative and engrossing entertainment they can be, many have watched these films for decades. Human Rights Watch is an organization dedicated to protecting human rights through the investigation of human rights violations, advocacy and building awareness around the world. With the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the organization is hosting the 17th annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater from June 8-22. With that kind of pedigree, the festival invites the hardest hitting and most artistically accomplished narrative and documentary films that dare to tackle the issues concerning the world today.


The festival opened on June 8 with a benefit screening of Zach Niles and Banker White's "The Refugee All Stars" about a band created by six Sierra Leonean musicians living in a refugee camp in the Republic of Guinea after being forced to flee their country's brutal civil war. Infused as much with heartache as it is with music, the film explores the ways that art can bring a sense of hope and purpose even in the most dismal circumstances.


The films in the festival span the world, exposing injustice, devastation and the hope that seems to always endure. Lucian Muntean and Natasa Stankovic's "Punam" introduces us to a nine-year-old Nepalese girl who takes care of her two younger siblings while her father works ceaselessly to earn enough money to send his children to school. Another nine-year-old girl is the focus of Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater's "Rosita," about a poor Costa Rican family fighting for the right for their daughter, who became pregnant after she was raped, to get an abortion, and finding themselves the focus of a battle involving two governments and the Catholic Church. Spanish director Manel Mayol's "Switch Off" tells the story of the Pehuenche-Mapuche people who have lived in Chile's Ralco valley for centuries, until Spain's hydroelectric company built a dam in 2004, flooding the valley and forcing the people from their homes.


All the films in the festival cover compelling territory, but other standouts include Anthony Giacchino's "The Camden 28," about a group of Vietnam protesters who in 1971 broke into draft offices to destroy government records and save men from having to fight, and "Iraq in Fragments," James Longley's award-winning triad of stories about ordinary people finding ways to survive in various corners of the war-torn country. Narrative highlights include Adrian Shergold's "Pierrepoint," based on the true story of England's celebrity hangman who hung over 600 people between 1934 and 1956, and director Michael Winterbottom's latest (co-directed with Mat Whitecross), "The Road to Guantanamo," another true story about four Muslims who were arrested in Afghanistan and held for two years without formal charges at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The film won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.


If all these films seem a bit depressing, the message of "The Refugee All Stars" can be helpful: That the human spirit soars even from the darkest depths, a motto that extends to some of the other films represented here. Avner Faingulernt and Macabit Abramzon's "Men on the Edge — Fishermen's Diary" is about a beach on the Gaza/Israel border where Palestinian and Israeli men fished together from 1999 to 2003. Roy Westler's "Shadya" follows a Muslim girl from a small village in Israel who in spite of family and social pressures becomes a World Champion in karate. And Simone Aaberg Kaern and Magnus Bejmar's "Smiling in a War Zone" tells Aaberg Kaern's story. She is a pilot who against all odds — and breaking the laws of several nations — travels 6000 kilometers from Denmark to Afghanistan in a rinky-dink plane to meet and inspire Farial, a girl she read about who dreams of becoming a pilot.


For more information, visit www.hrw.org/iff.

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<![CDATA[This year, Brooklyn's All An "Enigma"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/06/festival-this-year-brooklyns-a.php Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Throw a beer bottle in New York and there's a good chance you'll damage the skull of a filmmaker — or an aspiring one, or a film industry worker-bee, or at least a backseat critic who's sure he knows movies. That might explain the myriad of film festivals popping up throughout the city, many of which vaporize as quickly as they appear. But those with a little luck, pluck and funding have managed to stick around — and the Brooklyn International Film Festival (BIFF) is one of them.


The first international competitive film festival ever to hit screens in New York is now entering its ninth year, showcasing a diverse program of films — 15 narrative features, 11 docs and a slew of shorts from 15 countries — from June 2-11 at the regal Brooklyn Museum.


The event kicked off on Friday night with Italian director Libero De Rienzo's melodramatic and zany love story "Blood, Death Does Not Exist." It's fitting that such an enigmatic display would open a festival that has the enigmatic title Enigma-9. I'm not sure why a festival needs a title or why it's not just called the Brooklyn International Film Festival, but the intent is apparently to declare the festival's quest to cinematically confront "the most delicate and difficult questions of our times." An executive summary explains the event's goal to "stimulate the intellect and inspire conversation among people of diverse backgrounds. It is about attempting to connect the dots and can be viewed as a vast puzzle where opposite viewpoints, inconsistencies, ambiguities strive to coexist."


While the opening night film is puzzling at times, "Blood, Death Does Not Exist" does offer a refreshing departure from usual rules of narration and tone. At its center is a surprising brother-sister relationship, the incestuous frolicking seeming to naturally spring from an intimacy as playful as it is fraught. While the film's formal experimentation is occasionally gratuitous, the film is entertaining and provocative.


Another twisted relationship is the focus of French director Diane Bertrand's "The Ring Finger," about a factory worker (Olga Kurylenko) who, after slicing off a bit of her finger into the lemonade she bottles, finds a new job at a mysterious laboratory that creates specimens of objects that trigger clients' most painful memories. In no time, the wounded waif is wearing the red shoes her new boss gives her — and occasionally enjoying sweaty romps with him on the bathroom floor. While the film's metaphors are both clunky and hazily out of reach (is that possible?), dreamy cinematography and pacing and an irresistible, measured performance by the gorgeous Kurylenko make the film a hypnotizing watch.


Steamy sex has clearly invaded the summer zeitgeist. Evidence comes with the East Coast premiere of Bent Hamer's "Factotum," in which Matt Dillon and Lily Taylor rock the rusty old bedsprings as rough-and-tumble writer Charles Bukowski's drunken alter-ego, "Hank Chinaski," and Jan, his favorite fuck-buddy. Dillon gives the downtrodden, blathering performance of his career. Between this film, "Crash" and, of course, "There's Something About Mary," it might be time to admit the guy is not just another pretty face.


Other highly sexed fare includes Brazilian director Sérgio Machado's "Lower City," starring "City of God"'s Alice Braga as a hooker with a heart of gold who comes between a couple of petty hoodlums (Lázaro Ramos and Wagner Moura), whose equally golden hearts are damaged when other body parts get the best of them. The stars of the indie road-trip flick "Road," by director Leslie McCleave, roll around a beaten-up backseat together, but they also have other things on their mind in this suggestive, ecologically-minded story about an ex-boyfriend and -girlfriend on a trip through the toxic waste sites of Canada, where they find that the world is out-of-whack. On a similarly frustrating journey is the protagonist of Iranian director Mohammed Reza Arab's "The Last Queen of the Earth," about an Afghani working in Iran who makes a desperate attempt to return to his wife before the Americans make their inevitable attack in the wake of September 11th.


While "Factotum" and "Lower City" will get limited releases in the States, most films rely on festivals like BIFF to for exposure in communities that might otherwise not have the opportunity to see them. One example of a film that is unlikely to hit "theaters near you" is Azazel Jacobs' kooky "The GoodTimesKid," about two guys named Rodolfo (Jacobs and Gerardo Naranjo) circling an oddly attractive Echo Park Olive Oyl (Sara Diaz) while trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The film is absurdist, wistful and sweet, so don't miss your chance to see it.


While the narrative program is compelling, BIFF's best films are found among the documentary selections. Especially noteworthy is Joseph Mathew and Dan DeVivo's "Crossing Arizona," a look at the immigration debate that gathers the opinions of the humanitarians to the ranchers to the Minutemen, all doing heated battle along the Arizona/Mexico border. My personal favorite, Amy Nicholson's "Muskrat Lovely," is further proof that truth is more mind-blowing than fiction. The film follows the contestants of a dual-purpose event in Dorchester County, Maryland - the National Outdoor Show, where teenaged girls put on their evening gowns to compete to become Miss. Outdoors, and on the same stage the best local muskrat skinners try to rip the hides off the little furry critters faster than the next guy. Nicholson never knocks us over the head with a message, just lets the footage of bloody hides contrast images of primping and twirling and curling — and what a dizzying and dazzling display it is.


For more information, visit www.brooklynfilmfestival.org.

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<![CDATA[See This Movie, Dammit! "An Inconvenient Truth"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/05/commentary-see-this-movie-damm.php Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


I'm not really comfortable on a soapbox. But the other night I saw "An Inconvenient Truth," and here I am — shrieking from the top of a wobbly crate, suds sloshing around my ankles. That's how important this movie is. As you may have gathered from the current Al Gore mania in the press, Davis Guggenheim's film documents the former vice president's fascinating multimedia presentation about global warming. A filmed lecture about an Important Environmental Issue might sound like a bore — or, as my colleague Alison Willmore more eloquently put it, "cinematic spinach" — and it's true that high school science teachers nationwide will probably force students to see it. But just like veggies (even those forced down the gullet with the threat of no TV) provide essential vitamins, this movie is good for you. And to push the metaphor further, just as we learn to love the taste of spinach (especially sautéed in garlic), this movie is also enjoyable going down.


Or maybe enjoyable isn't the best word to describe the sensation. It is entertaining — riveting even — but viewer emotions are likely to range from astonished, to alarmed, to downright terrified. What Gore calls his "slideshow" is an impressive, impeccably researched presentation that he's compiled over the last 30 years and improved with impressive charts, diagrams and film clips to explain in a compelling, often amusing way the connection between carbon emissions and the global climate change responsible for such phenomena as melting glaciers, disappearing lakes, widespread heat waves and the increased frequency of unstoppable storms like Katrina.


The film is essential viewing, because even true believers can use a brush-up course in global warming — and most could use a kick in the pants as far as taking action is concerned. No one who sees this film can remain skeptical or indifferent, and Gore is very clear that we already have the tools necessary to reverse the alarming changes in the weather. We just need to use them. He says it's not a political question at this point, but a moral one, although political steps are a necessary part of the solution. Time is running out and everyone, politicians and civilians alike, needs to start taking this seriously if we want to save the planet.


Interspersed throughout the film are interviews with Gore, in which he talks about his life and life lessons. These segments reveal an Al Gore who is passionate, thoughtful, funny — it's hard to believe from Election 2000, but he's actually a funny guy — and as handsome as a movie star. It is strange to see him so assured, entertaining and comfortable in his skin. You might wonder what joker was in charge of image control during the 2000 election — and you might want to beat him up. Almost as depressing as the impending doom facing our planet is the fact that this confident, intelligent, impassioned man did not become president. You can't help but wonder how our country — and world — might have been different had the winner of the popular vote been allowed to take his rightful seat.


I'm about to stop preaching and simpering, but one last thing. "An Inconvenient Truth" has given me a much clearer picture of the threat of global warming. Its devastating effects are rushing toward us like a missile. If we don't reverse their course, the glaciers will continue to melt and the results will make Katrina look like light drizzle. The Bushes and Cheneys of the world are going to have to change their tune soon enough. They have no choice. And what can you do? Swap out your light bulbs. Trash your SUV. Take shorter showers. Walk, ride a bike, buy rollerblades. Recycle. Plant a tree. Write an editorial. Bug a congressperson. And for God's sake, go see the movie. If my soapbox were high enough and my voice loud enough, I'd demand that everyone in the world go see it. Our lives may depend on it.


"An Inconvenient Truth" opens in limited release on May 24. For more on the film, see www.climatecrisis.net.

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<![CDATA[The Film Geek Achieves Nerd Nirvana at E3]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/05/geeks-guide-the-film-geek-achi.php Fri, 19 May 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer

IFC News


Imagine Las Vegas, with the fairer half of the population replaced by dudes in Hawaiian shirts and beards, and you have a sense of the atmosphere at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3. IFC sent my
lucky geek ass to cover the event, and in that
capacity, I had opportunity to speak with legions of
grateful (and bearded) nerds, all in attendance to pay homage at the shrine of all things Xbox and PlayStation. When asked to describe the event, their praise bordered on effusive, with a sort of glazed, contented look in their eyes one generally finds in a religious zealot who believes they've communed with God. "What, if anything, is E3 missing?" I would invariably ask. "More women," they would invariably reply. What few women there were were of the paid-to-be-there variety.
















































That zombiefied look is everywhere at E3. You've
never seen so many nerds so happy. Essentially, two
massive buildings are transformed into the world's
most well carpeted arcade for three straight days.
Everywhere you look there is some other video game
vying for your attention, calling out to you with
their addictive, neon siren song. E3's masssive halls
have the power to turn a functioning adult human male
into a sensory overloaded puppy: eyes flashing, head
turned ever so slightly, brain overwhelmed by too much
stimuli.


To be fair, as someone who is, and always has been,
a casual gamer at best, I can't deny the intense
coolness of E3. Here is a place where you wander
around, and play video games — games that would
typically set you back in excess of fifty bucks —
and then people give you free stuff to thank you for
playing their unreleased and totally badass video
games. Who wouldn't want to spend three days
doing that?
















































You might wonder why IFC would send me to an event
exclusively devoted to video games, but a quick scan
of the list of the convention's hottest titles reads
like a list of Hollywood's biggest blockbuster
filmmakers. In recent years you could count on the
year's biggest movies receiving their own video game
adaptations: href="http://www.activision.com/microsite/spider-man/"> color=000000>"Spider-Man 2"
and href="http://www.ea.com/official/lordoftherings/thebattleformiddleearth/us/home.jsp"> color=000000>"The Lord of the Rings" both hit
theaters accompanied by well-designed video games.
The massive success of the most popular games (we're
talking billions of dollars of massive success) has
encouraged filmmakers to dip their toes in the pool;
Peter Jackson, for instance, put his name above the
title of the recent href="http://www.kingkonggame.com/us/"> color=000000>"King Kong" game.

The latest trend seems to be skipping the movie and simply taking film talent and making a stand-alone game. The best example of this phenomenon at E3 was John Woo's video-game-only sequel to his classic "Hard-Boiled," "Stranglehold". Players take control of Chow Yun Fat's unstoppable cop Tequila, as he takes down the bad guys with an assortment of moves — balletic leaps and spins, double-handgun assaults, special attacks replete with flying doves — straight out of the John Woo playbook.

Creators of all these sorts of games said the same thing: movies are wonderful, but they are, to their core, a passive medium. Video games are interactive. If the thrill of a movie like "Hard-Boiled" is connected to our identification with its hero, then what does it do to our brain to get to control the hero? Before we interviewed the game's creators I got a chance to play a demo of the game, and if there is a cooler video game experience, I have yet to see it.

























Clearly, the appeal of becoming your favorite movie star is a major selling point for the industry. You can become Al Pacino in a new game based on "Scarface" (one which imagines what might have happened if Tony Montana had survived the film's final slaughter), or play as Johnny Depp in "Pirates of the Caribbean" or fly as Brandon Routh's Superman in "Superman Returns: The Video Game." But if, as some video game creators suggested, games could ultimately replace movies in the hearts of Americans seeking entertainment, the symbiotic relationship between the two is less one-dimensional than some expressed. Basing your game on a movie or movie stars (like the original property "The Wheelman" starring Vin Diesel) gives you an instant sales pitch, not to mention an air of artistic legitimacy that numerous people I interviewed were quick to play up. But if video games replace movies, who will star in these video games and what will they be based on?

Most at E3 weren't particularly interested in answering that question. They just wanted to play some more, and hopefully get another free t-shirt. Truth be told, in my weakest moments, I was one of them.]]> 8279 2006-05-19 00:00:00 closed closed geeks_guide_the_film_geek_achi publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008279 <![CDATA[Intimate Perfection]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/05/hot-bothered-intimate-perfecti.php Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Three Times" tells three separate love stories in three separate eras — in the years 1966, 1911, and 2005 — starring the same lovely actress and actor, Shu Qi and Chang Chen, to create a triptych of love in all its intricacy. In 1911, during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, a courtesan waits for the sporadic visits of the married diplomat she loves, yearning for their relationship to develop into something more permanent. In 2005, a broody bisexual performance artist juggles her needy girlfriend and a photographer (who also has a girlfriend) on the back of whose motorcycle she finds freedom and release from the drama.


It is the first segment, however, entitled "A Time for Love," that captures the heart as if by lasso. With stunning, saturated cinematography that recalls the work of Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai and the songs "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Rain and Tears" — music dripping with an innocent romance that seemed to disappear with the era depicted — played repeatedly, the scene is set for a pool hall girl with a repertoire of breathtaking outfits to fall for a soldier about to leave for training. He writes to her. She leaves her job for another. He sets out to find her. They spend a summer evening together. That's all there is to it. The film is a little slice of perfection that makes you smile and gives you hope — that life is sweet, endings are happy, for every he there is a she.


What Hou has accomplished is no small feat. There are too many celluloid love stories to innumerate and few make us feel anything at all. Those that do more often than not do so through shameless manipulation: A swelling soundtrack; gauzy mood-lighting; an interminable series of obstacles set along the path to the poor lovers' kiss; meaningful pauses, tears, and secondary characters' crying, cheering, shaking their butts when lips finally meet. Running breathless through the rain also never hurts — in slo-mo if the footage still doesn't cut it. But a genuine, simple story that gives you the chills? Not so many of those out there. What does it take to tell a perfect love story? The kind that makes you believe in love all over again?


"In the Mood for Love" (Wong Kar-wai): Hong Kong's preeminent director of amorous films tells stories of cheating, dumping, breaking up and yearning more often than relationships working out. While this film, true to form, is about a man (Tony Leung) and woman (Maggie Cheung) brought together because their spouses are having an affair, it is one of the most beautiful depictions of love ever made. Besides the sensuality of Nat King Cole tunes and sumptuous images captured by Wong's brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the movie is flawless in its depiction of yearning, of the purest passion yet untainted by consummation.


"Before Sunset" (Richard Linklater): The first film in Linklater's duet, "Before Sunrise," in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy spend one night together in Vienna before he boards a train, is pretty damn charming. But it's the second, in which they meet again many years later, that touches perfection. Older and wiser now — he is unhappily married and has a child, she is in a tumultuous relationship — Jesse and Celine speak with greater insight about their emotional lives, meandering through Paris first by foot and then by taxi, eventually arriving at her apartment and a scene in which a song, a confession, a careless act, a look, a laugh combine to create a moment of rare perfection.


"Moulin Rouge" (Baz Luhrmann): Many movies are bolstered by one lover who dies, leaving the other alone and doomed to a life of emptiness without that person who remains crystallized in the mind as the romantic ideal. "Wuthering Heights," "Betty Blue," "Camille," "Ghost." (Not all of them are very good.) As a device, it's a good one, and one of my favorites is Lurhmann's portrait of doomed ardor, which meshes lush, frenzied visuals — enhanced by Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor's matinee-idol good looks and likeability — with musical medleys that merge the likes of Elton John, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, the Beatles and Fatboy Slim, a thrilling (or ludicrous, depending on who you ask) plot and the most traditional of purveyors of doom, tuberculosis. In any case, while the love lasts it is absolutely breathtaking, gorgeous, thrilling.


"50 First Dates" (Peter Segal): No insult to Pete (who you may or may not remember from "The Nutty Professor II" and "Anger Management"), but it's the concept here (the script is by George Wing) that works magic — executed sweetly by stars with serious comic chemistry, Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, as Lucy, a woman who suffered a brain injury that erases her memory every day, and Henry, the commitment-phobe who loves her. The gags are silly (e.g. a smart-assed walrus plays a supporting role), the humor broad, but the premise is transcendent. Every day Henry has to find new ways to make this woman with no memory of him love her — and his efforts are truly inspirational and touching.


"Next Stop Wonderland" (Brad Anderson): This Boston-based indie that was not seen by enough people takes on philosophical territory, the role of fate and destiny, that was mined by the late Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski in his brilliant "Red." Recently dumped by a loser (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), Erin (Hope Davis), holes up at home focusing on herself rather than looking for love. Meanwhile, we follow the life of hapless Alan (Alan Gelfant), a would-be marine biologist whom the film leads us to believe is Erin's soulmate. The two lives crisscross, never quite making contact, while other potential lovers risk preventing the encounter. When a series of serendipitous events finally land Erin quite literally into the arms of Alan, it is quite simply a perfect cinematic moment. Just try to hold back the tears.


For more on "Three Times," see the official site.

]]> 8278 2006-05-18 00:00:00 closed closed hot_bothered_intimate_perfecti publish articles _cf_legacy_url _thumbnail_id 1008278 <![CDATA[Sweet Sixteen and Dying to be Kissed]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/05/hot-bothered-sweet-sixteen-and.php Tue, 02 May 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Being a teenage girl ain't easy. Sure, there are innocent pleasures of giggling with the girls over Tiger Beat — or some guy's balls falling out of his shorts at the beach, but overnight breasts, sudden prettiness, sexual curiosity and uninvited attention make adolescent girlhood as confounding as it can be magical. While the John Hughes teen films of the 80s whitewashed sexuality in favor of fairytale kisses over a candlelit birthday cake, there are a lot of movies that dive right into the stickiness.


Watch "Lolita" licking her lolli, much to her stepdaddy's despair. Poptart Juliette Lewis shamelessly flirting with a psychotic De Niro in "Cape Fear." "Fat Girl"'s impossibly beautiful Elena (Roxane Mesquida) doing "everything but" with the guy she snuck in through her bedroom window while her chubbier sister tries not to watch. Jodie Foster and her pack of "Foxes" competing to see who can suck the most faces (or was that me and my high school posse?) Carroll Baker's child bride "Baby Doll" cozying up to 40-something Eli Wallach. "36 Fillette"'s voluptuous, 14-year-old Lili prowling Biarritz for a man to take her virginity. Her New Zealand counterpart Janey slipping into her mom's boyfriend's bed in "Rain." Gorgeous Vahina Giocante in "Lila Says" spewing obscenities too lewd to spill from her angelic lips. Aviva in "Palindromes" sleeping with boys and men, trying to get pregnant at 13. Baby-faced Chloë Sevigny in "Kids" learning that she is HIV-positive after having sex for the first time.


Sex is scary, but virginity is so over. Boys are immature and inexperienced, but men are old and hairy and off-limits. Male attention is crucial to fragile adolescent self-esteem, but don't you wish they'd just leave you alone? Such is the plight of the pretty 13, 14, 15, 16-year-old who's just sprouted boobs.


The latest film to masterfully portray the treacherous landscape of teenage girlhood is Australian director Cate Shortland's debut, "Somersault" (winner of 13 Australian Film awards, including Best Film, Actress and Director), a movie about a girl just starting to learn what pretty can get her. Heidi, a sixteen-year-old who could be Nicole Kidman's little sister, is pretty by anyone's definition, with bold guilelessness and wonder that make her even more attractive. As played by newcomer Abbie Cornish, an Australian actress who is going to be a superstar, Heidi is delighted when her looks and charm bewitch men and women alike, but stung when she's dismissed for the same qualities. Testing boundaries, she hits on her mother's boyfriend and, when her mother catches them kissing, flees to a small ski town where she works at a gas station and sleeps with Joe, a local rich kid (Sam Worthington). Wracked with guilt and convinced her mother doesn't love her anymore, Heidi believes that all she has to offer is her body. She throws herself at Joe and when they fight, at any other guy who will buy her a drink. But as much as we recoil at her self-destructive acts, we want to take her in our arms and cradle her, because what Heidi is really seeking is her mother's love, and a stranger's affection can't quite cut it.


Heidi has entered the cinematic landscape of loveably precocious and pathetic jail bait confronting the world of sex and trying to make some sense of it, flirting, fighting, kissing and fucking — and hoping to make it to the other side, intact, alive and confident.


That said, here are my five all-time favorite underage movie hussies.


1. Linda (Phoebe Cates), "Fast Times at Ridgemont High": Amy Heckerling's groundbreaking 1982 cult hit showed in stark detail how humiliating adolescence could be. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Stacy, a girl who has sex a couple of times with little joy, only to end up pregnant. Even more endearing is Stacy's best friend Linda, played by then-Seventeen model, now-Mrs. Kevin Kline Cates. Linda brags about her mysterious boyfriend and their mind-blowing sex and in one famous scene shows Stacy how to fellate a carrot. In another, Linda walks in on Stacy's brother while he's jerking off to fantasies of her. Her horror suggests that she might not be as sophisticated as she purports, which is the root of her appeal. Linda talks the talk, but she's really just a sweet girl who dreams about big love and looks hot in a bikini.


2. Connie (Laura Dern), "Smooth Talk": Laura Dern oozes sexuality (see: "Wild at Heart"), but her big, blue eyes also convey bewilderment and hurt, filling up in a way that suggests the world is harsher than she'd imagined (see: "Blue Velvet"). In this early film, Dern plays a girl who's all long limbs twisting around themselves as she waits impatiently for life to begin. Connie is at that age where she leaves the house in one outfit and transforms it with loud jewelry, makeup and unzipping once she hooks up with her friends at the mall. She is both scared to death of boys and boy-crazy. But the film is based on the Joyce Carol Oates' creepy story "Where Are you Going, Where Have You Been?", so welcome Arnold Friend (Treat Williams), an older guy who sets his sights on Connie. What begins as playful flirtation turns sinister, with Connie fleeing at one point from his lurid words to hide under her parents' steps and cry, "Mommy!" The whole film can be seen as a metaphor for sexuality as experienced by a restless nymphet, who is no longer a child but not quite a woman yet either.


3. Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), "Thirteen": In Catherine Hardwicke's furiously paced debut, sweet Tracy falls in with Evie (Nikki Reed), a "bad girl" who turns her world into the whirlwind she's been waiting for all her life. They steal things, pierce their tongues, sneak out to take drugs and fool around with older guys. Drugged up and high on their own wildness, they are out of control. Wood's performance is so real, it is painful to watch for anyone (like me) who was ever a wild child too cute for her own good and ready to tell childhood to fuck off and take an unrestrained leap toward a life without limits. Wood more or less reprises the role in the upcoming "Down in the Valley" (in theaters May 5), in which she plays Tobe, a character who could be Tracy three years later, a 16-year-old who has tried sex and likes it. She falls for an older cowboy (Ed Norton) and scratches and screams bloody murder when her dad tries to keep them apart.


4. Rizzo (Stockard Channing), "Grease": Who really cares if Channing was 34 when she played Rydell High's biggest slut? She was a total sexpot in her skintight dresses and satin Pink Ladies jacket. She had the acting chops to make us love the bitch who slammed sweet Sandy as being "lousy with virginity." And she had the best voice in the cast, knocking "There are Worse Things I Could Do" — her ballad about the woes of being Rydell High's biggest slut — out of the field.


5. Deedee (Christina Ricci), "The Opposite of Sex": When she appeared in "The Ice Storm" at 17 as a gamine who kept crawling into bed with the neighborhood boys, it was clear that Ricci was born to play a seductress. In Don Roos' hilariously dark directorial debut, she plays Deedee, a pregnant tramp with platinum blond hair, a potty mouth and no morals, who seduces her gay brother's boyfriend and says things (in the film's brilliantly acerbic narration) like: "I don't have a heart of gold and I don't grow one later." She's both precocious and juvenile, both the film's bossy, manipulative villain and its funny-as-shit heroine. Deedee Truitt might be the best pubescent tramp ever to grace movie screens.

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<![CDATA[Maggie Cheung Unbeautifies for "Clean"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/05/qa-maggie-cheung-unbeautifies.php Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Close your eyes and picture Maggie Cheung. Are you envisioning the impeccable beauty of "In the Mood for Love," lithe body tucked into an elegant cheongsam and emotions bottled up somewhere deep inside? The ruthless killer soaring above swaying yellow trees, sword poised, face placid, in "Hero"? Or perhaps "Irma Vep"'s catlike Hong Kong star-slash-burglar in black leaping from one Parisian rooftop to the next? Time and again Cheung is flawlessly lovely, emotionally refined — even when vulnerable and jilted as in "Days of Being Wild" — the epitome of grace. Until now.


For "Clean" (in theaters April 28), the Hong Kong actress who has appeared in 80-some-odd films, paired up again with "Irma Vep" director Olivier Assayas — whom Cheung married and divorced since their last collaboration — to play a sallow, frizzy-haired ex-con with a drug habit and a penchant for disaster. And Cheung loved every minute of it. "It was great," she says of the experience. "Of course it's great to be beautiful in a movie... but if you don't have a break, when you can just go in your jeans and no hair and makeup... I'm just wasting my life. You don't need to prove you're beautiful again and again and again. It's like you have two films [where] you're beautiful and then I would prefer to prove I can act."


"Clean" gave Cheung that opportunity. She plays Emily, a strung-out emotional wreck who has nothing to live for except the son she dumped with her in-laws while living in a rock 'n' roll haze, desperately clinging to the dregs of her musician husband's washed up career. When he dies of an overdose in a seedy motel room and Emily gets tossed into prison for possession, she is faced with an opportunity to try to kick the drugs, the methadone, the reckless refusal to lead a normal life, in order to become a woman suitable of raising the son her in-laws won't let her touch unless she cleans up.


"The part is so much like me, except for the drug elements, so I really felt there's not much designing to do," Cheung says of the role that won her the prestigious award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival. "It's ironic because this is the film I was laziest on, but I got the biggest outcome from it... I wasn't lazy on the set, but after I finished reading the script the first time, I decided I know what it is, I'm gonna put it away. I thought you have to be very spontaneous."


Assayas' directing style leant itself the freewheeling performance that Cheung craved. She says if Wong Kar-Wai, the director of such achingly gorgeous films as "In the Mood for Love" and "Days of Being Wild," makes movies with the breathtaking precision of a Monet, painstakingly leading his actors through meticulous take after meticulous take (after meticulous take...), Assayas is more like Jackson Pollock, splattering actors and emotions liberally all over a bare canvas. "I was just doing whatever I wanted and the camera would move with me. I was totally free," Cheung says. "Olivier would say to the cameraman, 'I don't want her to have any limits. I just want her to move and you follow her. Whatever she needs to do in this shot, we'll catch it,' whereas Kar-Wai's set would be like, 'Okay, three steps forward, turn around and then walk five more steps and your head faces left but your body more to the right and then that's the perfect light where you say your first line.'"


While Cheung says her career would not be complete without both directors and their opposing styles, right now she hopes to get a crack at more films in the more realistic style of "Clean." "You just build it all up inside and you go do it with no reservation, with nothing you have to care about except that emotion," she said. "It's just so nice for an actor who wants to really act. I think doing more realistic films, I get the real joy of being an actress."


With help from Assayas and the rest of his talented cast, including a somber Nick Nolte as her father-in-law, Cheung has created the rare recovery film that is raw and never cloying. There is no 12-step circle for reluctant breakthroughs to take place, no seductive former friend trying to make her do lines, not even a wrenching scene of sweats and puking as the imprisoned junkie cold turkeys out her poison. "Olivier hates dramatic scenes," she says. "Every time we'd see a Hollywood film and there was a calculated moment — oh,we all need to cry now — Olivier would sigh, roll his eyes, shaking and sighing and I'd be like, 'It's so sad.' He really avoids all the cliché dramas in any of his films."


Another unexpected perk of the movie is the attention Cheung has received for her singing. In the film, Emily has the opportunity to record a couple of songs, and Cheung did the singing herself. "Since then record companies have been approaching me and I'm on the verge of thinking, hmm, should I make an album or not?" While she has recorded one song before, with Tony Leung for the soundtrack of "In the Mood for Love," she's never thought of herself as a professional musician. "In Hong Kong, most actors do both," she says. "All my fellow actors have had an album, at least one, except for me. It's something people thought I would never do, so because of that, I might do it."


If "Clean" has brought Cheung unexpected creative challenges and professional opportunities, the pleasure of starring in a Wong Kar-Wai film is something else entirely. "I enjoy watching 'In the Mood for Love,' but it's not something you can do everyday," she says, recalling the great director's perfectionism. "'Can you have your face angled this way because the light is coming through there and this shadow is great.' I'm so glad to have 'In the Mood for Love' on my list until I'm 60 or 70, but if you say tomorrow, come to the set and do another 16 months of 'In the Mood for Love,' this is a big decision to make. It's heavy everyday. You think, oh shit, I have a spot! Whereas in 'Clean,' it doesn't matter. It's like, 'Add more [dark under-eye] circles! That's what we want."



"Clean" is now playing in New York.

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<![CDATA[Sympathy for "Lady Vengeance"'s Park Chan-wook]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/04/qa-sympathy-for-lady-vengeance.php Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Park Chanwook makes violent movies. His recent project was a revenge trilogy about wronged characters setting in motion intricate, gruesome retribution upon those deserving cads who have done them wrong. In "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" (2002), an unemployed man wreaked vengeance on his former boss. In the Cannes Film Festival-winning "Oldboy" (2003), a businessman imprisoned for no apparent reason upon his release seeks justice from the man responsible. Park's latest, "Lady Vengeance," takes a feminine look at eye-for-an-eye themes.


Beautiful, frosty Lee Geum-ja takes the fall when Mr. Baek, a schoolteacher she used to pal around with as a pregnant teenager, kidnaps and kills a child. After 13 years as an exemplary prisoner who pretends to be reformed — God-fearing innocence incarnate — Geum-ja lays the groundwork for an elaborate revenge plot that enlists the help of many of her former fellow prisoners, one of whom has gone so far in her devotion to marry Baek ("Oldboy" star Choi Min-sik). Her scheme is not as simple as hunting the man down and putting a bullet through his head — Geum-ja's painstaking and very painful punishment is so over-the-top, you don't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up.


While revenge has been Geum-ja's all-consuming preoccupation for 13 years, complications arise when she is reunited with her daughter, Jenny, who was put up for adoption when she went to prison. This is where female vengeance differs from the male version — while the homicidal ice queen is obsessed with carrying out her bloody revenge on Baek, she also finds emotions bubbling up that she thought she had repressed, and, in spite of herself and her circumstances, wants to be a loving mother to Jenny. In working through these conflicting drives, Geum-ja becomes more than just the sum of her bloodlust. She becomes a fully-realized woman whose viciousness and vulnerability are justified and even compatible in a person battling to create a life after going through hell.


But first she wants to force the asshole responsible for her imprisonment to go to hell, too.


Park very consciously chose to make this hero in the third film in his revenge trilogy a woman, believing it would add a more emotionally dimensional, even hopeful, element to the films. "There's a saying in Korea that once a woman has set her eyes on vengeance then snow will fall even in June," the director said when he was in the States for the New York Film Festival. "People thought it would be more cruel, more violent. They were thinking she was going to transform and be the angel of vengeance, but I didn't use a female lead because women are more vengeful — rather the opposite. I felt like only a woman would have certain virtues that this character needed."


For audiences back in Korea, part of the film's great success was due to casting. Park's Lady Vengeance is played by Lee Young-ae, the country's screen sweetheart. She has become famous playing the beloved palace chef on "The Jewel in the Palace," one of the most popular TV shows in Korea. For "Lady Vengeance," Lee both casts aside her angelic looks and reputation and uses them as a foil to the horrendous acts that her character commits.


"As a star she had really only been doing a certain kind of role," Park said. "She herself wanted a change so she came to me, who's known for making such violent films. She was ready to take this on so I didn't have to do anything special to get a certain type of acting out of her. Rather, she would actually take it a step further sometimes, startling me, and I would find new chilling aspects to her that I wasn't expecting. There is a scene where she is cutting off a man's hair with a knife and the editor came to me and said, 'Something was wrong with the film,' because her movements were so fast. But that was in real time. She's so crazed and moving so fast that the editor thought the speed of the film was different. Also Min-sik Choi, the actor whose hair was being cut off, said he had never felt more frightened in his acting career. He was convinced that this knife was going to go into his head."


While Americans are accustomed to slasher fare and such directors as Quentin Tarantino have introduced us to a certain grotesque, at times cartoonish, violence that is largely inspired by Asian directors, we still squirm when it comes to watching these grueling, visceral acts. Even though we love it, as evidenced by the popularity of Japanese horror films and their American remakes, Americans still sometimes play the prude when faced with splattered blood, which makes Park a little defensive. "As I make more and more films and the more interviews I've given, I get asked a lot of stuff like 'What kind of dreams do you dream?' 'How were you brought up?' and 'Is there something that happened in your life that makes you burn with such vengeance?'" he said, when asked if he's in therapy. "Sometimes I feel like I'm being interrogated by an FBI serial-killer profiler, so I just want to say that nothing in my films is personal. I take nothing from my personal life."


When it comes to creating films of great brutality, Park takes his role very seriously. "When I think of these scenes, they don't make me happy or anything like that," he said. "I don't feel overly thrilled. But when it comes to portraying such cruel violence, I do feel a sense of responsibility. I ask myself if this violence is justified. If I feel satisfied that it is justified, it's only then when I will put theses scenes in."



"Lady Vengeance" opens in New York on April 28th, with more theaters to follow (official site).

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<![CDATA[Heavenly Menages a Trois]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/04/hot-bothered-heavenly-menages.php Wed, 26 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


The other night I watched "Days of Heaven" for the millionth time. An exaggeration, of course, but it is one of my favorite films, and I went through a period when I would watch it every time I was bored or in need of inspiration. With a new print currently screening at the Film Forum in New York, it was time to see Terrence Malick's near-perfect film again. As the credits rolled, after thinking, as usual, that it's one of the most beautiful films ever made, it occurred to me that there's nothing more powerful in the movies than a love triangle.


In the film, Bill (Richard Gere), a factory worker, leaves Chicago to work on a farm in the Texas panhandle with his sister (Linda Manz) and girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams), who poses as a family member to avoid gossip. When they learn that the farmer (Sam Shepard), who has taken a liking to Abby, is terminally ill, they decide to stay on when the other seasonal workers have gone, seizing an opportunity for a more comfortable life. Abby marries the farmer and the foursome live heavenly days until the triangle barely supporting them crumbles, pushing all three characters toward tragedy.


Terrence Malick is a brilliant writer and director whose breathtaking compositions (captured by über-DP Nestor Alemendros, who won the 1978 Oscar for the film), patient editing style and signature narration — Manz's childishly innocent, funny and insightful narration is a masterpiece in itself — but let's be honest: As far as subjects go, there are few situations — in art or in life — that are more loaded with potential for drama than the love triangle. "Days of Heaven" is one of the best, but the plot device has driven many other movies, many great, many small.


Most common is the simple story of a nice guy/girl who's torn between two lovers: the wrong one, who likely has certain compelling attributes like parental approval rating or a real job, and the right one, a.k.a. the soul mate, who likely lives right under the lead's nose but goes sadly unnoticed as she/he is busy being dazzled by Mr./Ms Wrong. Think: "Some Kind of Wonderful," "Sabrina," "Reality Bites," Bridget Jones' Diary." Or alternatively, Soul Mate stumbles upon Nice Guy/Girl's path unexpectedly, subsequently messing up plans often matrimonial in nature: "The Wedding Planner," "Arthur," "Sleepless in Seattle," "A Room with a View." If this is a romantic comedy, and often it is, generally all's well that ends well and Nice Guy/Girl winds up in the arms that are destined to hold him/her until death do they part. And mean/stupid/boring Mr./Ms Wrong runs off with someone suitably mean/stupid/boring — or into a hole all by his/her lonesome where he/she probably belongs.


Then again, some of the more interesting love triangles aren't so warm, cuddly or predictable, often involving cheating spouses. In "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Tomas loves both his wife (Juliette Binoche) and his long-time mistress (Lena Olin). Frederick in "Chloé in the Afternoon" toys with the idea of playing with a nubile young thing, only to confirm that he still loves his wife. In "Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself," a young wife falls for the suicidal brother of her husband, whom she also loves. While generally these situations settle themselves in favor of one of the prospective life mates, in some unfortunate cases, when easy excision of one of the triangle's sides is not a possibility, somebody winds up dead. See "Unfaithful," "Diaboliques," "Deathtrap," "Amantes."


And then there are the really interesting cinematic three-way love affairs, those that don't fit into any particular mold, tapping into the emotions ranging from the jealousy to bliss to homicidal rage that can occur when she loves him but he loves her, or he loves them both, or she can't decide which one she loves best, which brings us back to "Days of Heaven," one of the most devastating love triangle tales on film. (Then again, as I mentioned, it's practically perfect.) Other refreshingly genre-bending tales of three-way love include Stephen Frears' "Dangerous Liaisons," which stars John Malkovich and Glenn Close as bored aristocrats in 18th century France who play with people's lives as if they were hamsters in a habitrail, often through the art of seduction. Close shudders with glee, for example, when Malkovich beds a blushing bride-to-be (Uma Thurman) whose fiancé she once loved. She licks her lips, too, when he prepares to seduce a devout married woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) — but can she handle it if her partner in crime and in bed falls in love?


Other atypically appealing love triangles include "Cyrano de Bergerac," the poetic soldier with a warm heart and enormous schnoz whose heartbreaking story has been depicted again and again, most famously by Gérard Depardieu (and by Steve Martin in the comically uplifting version, "Roxanne"). Cyrano loves Roxanne, but she yearns for the fine-featured Christian, who woos her with letters written by none other than Cyrano. Nobody wins in this triangular tale. Lessons are learned in "Y Tu Mama Tambien," in which two teenagers (Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna) embark on an adventure with a sexy older woman (Maribel Verdú) that leaves their friendship forever altered. And in what is often considered the greatest love triangle of all, François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim," which also has best friends falling for the same girl, the Bohemian lovefest must inevitably and tragically come to an end — as do the days of heaven.


What makes Malick's vision as powerful as Truffaut's is the compassion we feel for all the characters involved. Nobody is wrong — they just act from the gut and the heart. And there is no clear wrong man or right man for Abby. Both are handsome and kind and both adore her. So who does not empathize as Bill watches his Abby marry another man? Or feel the farmer's rage when he witnesses a kiss between Bill and his wife that is far from brotherly? And what about the girl caught between them, who is less given a point of view than the role of emotional catalyst for a violent, almost primal battle between two very different men — one gentle, one rash; one rich, one poor; both passionately in love with her? How can we not feel for this woman who pledges eternal fidelity to another man at the behest of her lover, only to find herself falling a little bit in love with the one who provides for her? With no reasonable resolution in sight, what heart does not ache as three people in love hurtle themselves toward inevitable doom?



"Day of Heaven" is playing at the Film Forum in New York through April 27 (official site).

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<![CDATA[The Sarasota Film Festival: Sun, Fun, and Herzog]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/04/festival-the-sarasota-film-fes.php Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Mark Rabinowitz

IFC News


I just got back from the 2006 Sarasota Film Festival and boy is my liver tired!


I tell you, when they invite you to a festival, they never tell you that you might end up at 5am drinking and smoking in a hotel a room full of gay, lesbian and transgendered MCs and filmmakers! Four days and not once did I get out of the room early enough for the maid to tidy up — I'd like to extend a personal apology to whoever had to clean my room...I left you an extra large tip. But lest you think the fest is just one, long party...






















































When my friend Tom Hall took over as programmer of SFF two years ago, I knew the fest and the city were in for something special. If there's anyone who could take a small on-again, off-again festival and bump it up a few notches, programming-wise, it's Tom. To paraphrase the Bard, I don't mean to bury the pre-Hall fest as much as I mean to praise the current incarnation — executive director Jody Kielbasa, Hall and the active members of the executive board have worked tirelessly to raise the festival to its current level. It's even more amazing when one is reminded that only two years ago, SFF's jury refused to award a prize to any of the competition films, opting instead to seed a fund for emerging Florida filmmakers.


By way of introduction, let me point out that I am a festival addict, having been to 80-some events in the past 13 years. I seen festivals so badly organized and programmed that my colleagues and I decided not to write about them at all in order to give the event a chance to grow, and I have been to festivals so fantastic that I intend to be a lifelong attendee. While I won't go so far as to firmly place Sarasota in the latter category, it's certainly in the running for hall of fame status and I'm putting the organizers on note that next year I am going down for the duration!


The city of Sarasota is small (I mean small — I was sleeping in my hotel when my airport driver called and woke me up at 9:52am, and by 10:16am I had checked in my bag at the airport), but is a haven for the arts, both performing and visual. I've never attended a festival with the level of community support shown to the SFF — not only in audience attendance but also in cold, hard cashish. The fest board and community is forthcoming in helping the organization meet its financial goals, which allows the festival to throw a few lavish parties and to charge relatively low prices for them. For example, $60 got attendees a raucous six-plus hour street party with several bars and dozens of food stations serving the best that Sarasota restaurants (another high point of this Gulf Coast locale) had to offer, in addition to a fantastic Latin band and a demonstration of Polynesian and Hawaiian dancing in authentic costumes. And on top of all this, they had Werner Herzog receiving his World Cinema Master award.


Don't get me wrong. This isn't a playground for rich film snobs. The SFF has its financial problems, just like almost any other not-for-profit arts endeavor in the US, but it's nice to see some of our wealthier citizens put their money where their...you know.















































Oh...you want to hear about some films? How about the Florida premiere of Cristi Puiu's festival circuit hit "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (Tartan Films) or the East Coast premiere of Michael Cuesta's "Twelve and Holding" and John Hyams' "Rank" (both IFC Films), the East Coast premiere of Michael Tully’s well-received (and Florida-shot) "Cocaine Angel" and Rotterdam Golden Tiger winner (and SFF 2006 Narrative Feature Competition Award winner) "Old Joy" by Kelly Reichardt? Not enough? How about a retrospective of 14 of Werner Herzog's non-fiction films, including some rarely seen medium-length docs, and the chance to chat with the maestro? Ever gracious, Herzog took time out during the two speeches I heard to make sure the audience thanked the festival staff and volunteers, pointing out all the hard work that goes into making events like the SFF come off. Nice guy.


All in all, Sarasota knows how to put on a great show, for filmmakers, audience and industry, alike. The climate is perfect, the locals friendly and appreciative of both arthouse cinema and mini-major releases and there's enough going on that boredom is not going to be a problem. Hangovers, fatigue and sore feet from dancing, maybe, but never boredom. Bring on 2007!



2006 Narrative Feature Competition Award: "Old Joy," directed by Kelly Reichardt, and starring Daniel London and Will Oldham.


Special Jury Prize: "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," directed by Cristi Puiu, and starring Ion Fiscteanu and Luminita Gheorghiu.


2006 Documentary Feature Competition Award: "Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, OR," directed by Peter Richardson.


Special Jury Prize: "Black Sun," directed by Gary Tarn.


The 2006 Independent Visions Competition Award: "Find Love," directed by Erica Dunton.


Special Jury Prize for Screenwriting: "Somebodies," written and directed by Hadjii.


Special Jury Prize for Originality: "Wild Tigers I Have Known," directed by Cam Archer.


2006 Sarasota Film Festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature: "Neo Ned," director Van Fischer.


2006 Sarasota Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature: "Abel Raises Cain," directors Jennifer Abel and Jeff Hockett.


2006 Sarasota Film Festival Audience Award for Best In World Cinema: "Lady Vengeance," director Chan-Wook Park.


2006 Sarasota Film Festival Audience Award for Best Short Film: "Dammi Il La," director Matteo Servente.

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<![CDATA[Betty Crocker -- with a Whip: Harron's "Notorious Bettie Page"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/04/qa-betty-crocker-with-a-whip-h.php Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Scasserra

IFC News


"The Notorious Bettie Page" documents the heyday of the 1950s most enduring pin-up queen, the all-American gal who began posing for camera clubs, turned bondage into suburban parlor play, became the subject of Congressional hearings — and was rediscovered three decades later as a pop icon of the highest order.


By today's standards, Page's kitten-with-a-whip act looks downright wholesome. (Madonna went farther than this twenty years ago — and on television.) So why has Page's shapely form translated so effectively from the nudie magazines and dirty book stores of the 1950s to the coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets of today? The answer seems to lie in her particular approach to smut: she always looked happy, seemed in control of her own image, never went full-frontal — and there was never a man in the frame. "What was dangerous and disturbing in the 1950s is not so dangerous now," says director Mary Harron ("I Shot Any Warhol," "American Psycho"), whose "Notorious" new film puts Page in the context of that era when sex was still discussed in hushed tones — yet was bursting at the seams of America's pop culture.


"If Bettie hadn't been a pin-up queen, she would have been a typist or a secretary, but what she really wanted was to be an actress. Posing was a way to pay the rent, but it took over her life," says Harron, who contrasts Page to another 1950s icon, Marilyn Monroe. "Marilyn had that driving ambition to be a movie star and would sleep with someone to get a job, but it seems that it just wasn't that important to Bettie. She didn't see herself in a big arena — but she did have an overwhelming desire to be looked at. She accepted the values of her time in that she felt her proper destiny was to settle down with a husband and kids, but she was also a free spirit, a natural Bohemian. Her photos reflect that spirit. She's like Betty Crocker coming out with a tray of cookies, yet she's posing with a whip."


Working from a screenplay co-written with Guinevere Turner ("Go Fish"), Harron's biopic utilizes the cinematic vocabulary of the 1950s to document the rise and fall of this Christian country girl from Tennessee who became the object of fetishes she didn't even fully understand. The movie's uncanny recreation of the era moves from gritty, authentic looking black-and-white (some shot on hand-cranked 16mm) to gorgeous, saturated color (primarily when the action moves from New York City to Miami). This is one of those few occasions when the combination of color and black-and-white makes perfect sense — and rarely have we seen a better match of new and stock footage, courtesy of cinematographer Mott Hupfel, who here fulfills the promise of his ingenious cinematography for 2001's "The American Astronaut." The fashion, hair, and make-up of the period are impeccably recreated, and the entire affair unfolds to a nifty soundtrack that includes vintage recordings by Patsy Cline, Peggy Lee, and Artie Shaw.


But all that texture wouldn't amount to much without Mol's sexy, subtle performance. "We looked at every actress with black hair, anyone who looked even remotely like Bettie — and the problem was that they all came in sexy," Harron recalls. "Gretchen was not on anyone's list. She came in wearing a simple shirt and pants, and she had the sweetness. Gretchen wasn't acting sexy — she was acting the joy in posing. I think she knew instinctively what Bettie was about — the delight in showing herself off, the delight in posing, the delight in her own body."


On screen, Mol looks like Page, poses like Page, is every inch a sex goddess — yet the power of her performance is in her searching eyes, her smiles, her quiet expressions and offhanded shrugs. There's never a moment of fuss or self-consciousness in her portrayal — even when she asks a photographer to remove a ball-gag from her mouth, just so she can remind him that she believes in Jesus. Naked or not, Mol is a dream in black-and-white — and even more sumptuous in color. Near the conclusion of the film, at the moment Bettie takes communion and become a born-again Christian, Harron moves in for a rapturous, Technicolor close-up — and Mol holds the shot like a vintage Hollywood star. "The Notorious Bettie Page" is Mol's movie — from topless to bottomless. (Look out, Reese — there's a new girl in town.)


In the years after she stopped posing, Page went into seclusion, became a missionary, had a mental meltdown — but Harron wraps things up way before then. "Anyone's life story can be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you end it," she says. "I'm not trying to give a final answer about who Bettie was, because I don't think there is one. I think the truth about Bettie lies in her contradictions."



"The Notorious Bettie Page" opens on April 14 in limited release (official site).

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<![CDATA[Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page on the Sweet Revenge of "Hard Candy"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/04/qa-patrick-wilson-and-ellen-pa.php Tue, 11 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Scasserra

IFC News


"How do you wipe chocolate off a 14-year-old girl's mouth?" That's one of the tougher questions that all-American leading man Patrick Wilson had to struggle with when he took on the role of pedophile Jeff Kohlver in "Hard Candy," an unnerving, completely riveting psychological thriller cast in the mold of "Death and the Maiden," "Extremities" and "Oleanna."


As a charming, 32-year-old fashion photographer and internet stalker, Wilson more than meets his match when he lures precocious, 14-year-old Hayley Stark (terrific newcomer Ellen Page) out of a chat room and into his candy-colored home — where she proceeds to turn the tables in an increasingly grisly manner. If you winced when Kathy Bates hobbled James Caan in "Misery," wait until you see what Page has got in store for Wilson.


Director David Slade's cat-and-mouse game, in which Hayley becomes detective, jury, and potential executioner, is an intensely acted two-hander with one of the most disturbing revenge twists you're likely to see all year. The crafty screenplay by playwright Brian Nelson was inspired by a real-life story about a group of Japanese school girls who lured older men into hotel rooms — then beat them and took their money.


"This is not a pedophile movie," maintains Wilson. "It's about the power struggle between two protagonists — or two antagonists, depending on how you look at it. It's about taking responsibility for your actions — and about where you draw the line between justice and vengeance."


Was Wilson, now an expectant father himself, uncomfortable taking on such a controversial role — particularly one that's hitting screens at a time when internet child abuse permeates the media? "I was no more uncomfortable than I was playing a closeted, gay Mormon (in 'Angels in America'), or running around in long hair with a sword (in 'Phantom of the Opera')," he explains. "I wouldn't take a part if I felt that uncomfortable. He is who he is. These guys tend to be charismatic — or they wouldn't be successful. When you're playing the good guy, you want to find the dirty parts — and when you're playing the bad guy, you want to find the vulnerability."


Vulnerability is putting it mildly. In "Hard Candy", Wilson spends most of his screen time in increasingly uncomfortable emotional and physical positions — and often does his toughest acting while tied down to a makeshift operating table. An exhausting, 18½-day shoot required both actors to dive into Nelson's script with abandon — and to do their own stunts.


In "Hard Candy", the roles of predator and prey are in constant flux. Like "Crash," "Hard Candy" forces viewers to take a point-of-view — and draw their own moral lines. "No one would deny that his taking this girl home is wrong," says Wilson, "but what happens from there is open for debate."


"In this movie, the whole concept of good versus bad is askew," says Page, a young Canadian (she was 17 when the movie was shot in 2004) who was cast over 300 contenders. "One moment you feel sympathy for a character — and the next, you feel utter hatred."


"You don't usually come across a 14-year-old girl who's written so well," continues Page, who sought inspiration from Jodie Foster's subtle portrayal of a teenage murderess in 1977's "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane." "I think we're really starved for passionate, intelligent young female roles in the media. Hayley has so many layers. She is an exceedingly intelligent, passionate young woman who sees something wrong in society — and sees that nothing is being done about it."


Page's commanding performance in "Hard Candy" is likely to earn this rising star a lot of attention. She's got the indie "Mouth to Mouth" opening in May, and later this year goes Hollywood as Shadowcat in "X-Men: The Last Stand." But with "Hard Candy" hitting screens first, is she worried about being typecast as a man-killer — on screen or off?


"I'm not concerned that having done this film will make me worry about the men I go out with," she says. "I'm more concerned that it will make them worry about me."



""Hard Candy"" opens in New York and L.A. on April 14 (official site). Gentlemen, be prepared to squirm.

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<![CDATA[New Directors/New Films Never Fails to Please]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/04/festival-new-directorsnew-film.php Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Another New Directors/New Films has come and gone. At the annual festival hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, 25 up-and-coming feature film directors from around the globe screened their darlings for New York, and now they've packed up their press notes and party clothes and returned to Denmark, Australia, Mexico, the Philippines, Iran, Russia... Or in some cases they've gone back to whatever other United State then came from or to a studio in Brooklyn, where they'll begin dreaming up the next flick. Any common themes or trends to be found there this year? Not really. The only generalizations that can be made about the films is that they're eclectic, and, by and large, very, very good. Lucky for those New Yorkers not lucky enough to catch them at the festival, many were picked up for distribution and will appear on theaters in the upcoming year.



"Half Nelson" (directed by Ryan Fleck): One of the more talked-about films stars Ryan Gosling, the guy with the best face and possibly the strongest acting chops of his generation, in a heartbreaking performance as a passionate, committed high school teacher and coach who on his own time is battling a major crack habit. When one of his students, Drey (the astounding Shareeka Epps), catches him wasted in a school bathroom stall, an unlikely friendship is born. While director Fleck leads audiences on a seemingly familiar path toward lessons learned and expected redemption, every stumble feels painfully real, every gentle moment is earned. Opens in August.



"October 17, 1961" (Alain Tasma): Most Americans have a cursory knowledge of the French-Algerian conflict at best. This thoroughly disturbing docu-drama explores the ways in which the violence crept onto French soil in the 60s, as Algerian residents were targeted for humiliation and violence at the hands of Parisian policemen and Algerian activists retaliated with attacks on the police. Expertly building tension, the film interweaves several stories — of good cops afraid for their lives, viciously racist cops driven to perverse acts arguably sanctioned by the government, French officials trying to play tough in uncharted political territory and innocent civilians afraid to walk the streets — and culminates in a demonstration (also referred to in last year's "Caché") that led peaceful protestors to a horrific and inevitable tragedy that history has largely obscured.



"Look Both Ways" (Sarah Watt): Is it a predictable rom-com or a deeply moving philosophical treatise on death and its sneaky habit of biting people on the ass when they least expect it? Actually, it's both. Australian animator Watt makes her live action feature debut with a bittersweet story about a man and a woman who are both obsessed with death but nonetheless prefer to spend whatever days, weeks and years they have left with another warm body in their bed. Meryl (Justine Clarke), a cranky painter on the way home from her father's funeral, imagines her own death constantly (in scenes that animate her artwork), while Nick (William McInnes), a newspaper photographer, has just learned that he has cancer. When Meryl witnesses an actual accident, the pair meets and cautiously explores romantic possibilities. Thought provoking, a bit gooey and stylistically experimental at the same time. Opens on April 14.



"Quinceañera" (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland): In the Mexican-American community in L.A.'s Echo Park, Magdalena's (Emily Rios) dreams of the perfect 15th birthday celebration are interrupted when she becomes pregnant — even though she's never had sex. Meanwhile, her gay cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia) has been ousted from his father's house. The two shameful exiles shack up together at the home of their aging uncle, a modern-day saint. While the film, winner of the Sundance Grand Prize and Audience Award, at times becomes saccharine, at others infuriating, overall the film offers a textured and enormously likeable window into a community many of us cruise by on the freeway without much attention. Opens in August.



"John & Jane Toll-Free" (Ashim Ahluwalia): This surprising doc points a camera at an unlikely subject: the men and women who field customer service questions and try to sell you better, cheaper phone service from an overseas call center in India. This diverse group has taken on American names and learned to sleep by day and work by night to perform the jobs that have been outsourced to them. The film opens our eyes to the many ways that Glen, Naomi and Nikki have happily sacrificed their own culture for an imposed belief system that worships money, individual success, consumerism and all things American. The film will be broadcast on HBO/Cinemax in 2007.



"In Bed" (Matías Bize): With his camera glued to the same pretty pair for the length of his film, the Chilean director dissects a one-night love affair, taking its participants from sweaty sex with a stranger to flighty conversations loaded with pop-psychology and pop-cultural references, to goofy pillow fights, to something deeper. Secrets are revealed, emotions touched, future prospects explored, dismissed, explored again, and more meaningful love is made. This playful experiment that could have been slight and predictable is actually entertaining, at times touching, and — amazingly for 85 minutes of footage of the same two people in the same cheesy motel room — never boring.



"Iron Island" (Mohammad Rasoulof): On an enormous, abandoned oil tanker off the coast of Iran, a community has been established, with a fragile economy, a semi-functional government headed by Captain Nemat (Ali Nasirian) — an old man with a cell phone who acts as if he's got it all under control — and a host of problems from insufficient medical care to inappropriate love affairs. When a company lays claim to the ship just as it becomes increasingly clear that the vessel is sinking, other plans must be made. The film plays like an enigmatic fable with Biblical undertones and an intriguing tug-of-war between optimism and hopelessness. Opened on March 31.



"13 Tzameti" (Gela Babluani): It's hard to believe that this taut, outrageously tense thriller was made by a 26-year-old first-time filmmaker. The Georgian-born, Paris-based Babluani tells the story of Sébastian (played by his intensely beautiful brother Georges), an immigrant fixing the roof of an aging drug addict who suddenly dies, leaving a hotel reservation and train ticket leading to a mysterious get-rich-quick scheme. Without any financial prospects, Sébastian snags the goods, figuring he'll follow directions to the pot of gold he expects to find at the end of the rainbow. What he finds is a house in the woods that might as well be hell. Opens in August.



"Twelve and Holding" (Michael Cuesta): Following his acclaimed debut "L.I.E.," Cuesta again enters the realm of adolescence and again digs into the disturbing conflicts and urges that lie beneath the giggling, picnics and bike rides in the woods. After young Rudy Carges (Conor Donovan) is accidentally killed by the neighborhood bullies, his quieter twin brother Jacob plots revenge. His friend Malee (Zoë Weizenbaum) develops a crush on her therapist mom's patient. And the third in the trio, overweight Leonard (Jesse Camacho) goes on a health kick after losing his sense of taste in the accident and tries to convince his whole fat family to diet with him. It is painfully obvious that these kids' journeys, fueled by hormones and emotions they are too young to handle, are sorting through the muck on their own. Their parents are too self-absorbed to have a clue. Opens on May 19.

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<![CDATA["Stoned": Sex and drugs, a little light on the rock 'n' roll]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/03/review-stoned-sex-and-drugs-a.php Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500 The musician biopic has come into its own, or at least a kind of middlebrow prestige, with "Ray" and "Walk the Line" scoring award nominations by molding their respective subjects' lives into a standard narrative arc of troubled childhood/rise to success/drug abuse/redemption, with a hearty dash of half-assed psychoanalysis thrown mixed in. Early Rolling Stones member Brian Jones isn't so convenient a focus — after being kicked out of the band in his mid-20s, he lolled around Sussex, drinking, dallying with a succession of girlfriends and playing at remodeling his house, before turning up dead in the pool at the rock star-approved age of 27, his life less an arc than a mild incline. But Stephen Woolley's rambling "Stoned" is less concerned with Jones' life than with the mystery surrounding his death, which the film, with admirable effrontery, purports to solve.

For the bulk of "Stoned," Jones, played by Leo Gregory as if he were always remembering something funny but trying to keep a straight face, is already ensconced in his countryside home with his Swedish girlfriend and nothing much to do. The Stones' road manager Tom (David Morrissey), sends his friend Frank Thorogood over as much to babysit and entertain Jones as to work on the house. As played by Paddy Considine, Thorogood is the embodiment of the Britain's bewildered older generation, both drawn to and disapproving of Jones' super-60s decadence, which we see more of in flashbacks to Jones' troubled relationship with Anita Pallenberg (Monet Mazur) — cocaine, wild sex, drinking, clubbing, S&M and, most shocking of all, dropping acid to the tune of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," a combination so gratingly obvious it we could almost hear the theater's eyes roll in unison.

Jones and Thorogood start up a kind of sadistic, codependent friendship in which Jones both depends on Thorogood for company and plays extensive, cruel mind games with him. For his part, Thorogood does a lousy job as a builder, but latches desperately onto the escape from grim London life Jones provides. Because Thorogood is played by the awkward, pasty, compelling Considine, who can be brilliant at personifying pent-up, working-class rage, he's naturally more sympathetic than Jones, who's portrayed as both self-pitying and malicious, and who the film never tries too hard to convince us is that great of a musician anyway. Jones toys with both his Swedish actress girlfriend Anna and with Frank, who end up competing for his mercurial affections (and the cash flow that comes with them).

When Jones finally tries to cut ties with Thorogood, and an infuriated Thorogood drowns him in the pool, the effect is less tragic than relieving — finally! Maybe the fault is Gregory's, for not getting under the skin of the character enough to make him more than a smirking cipher, but I'm inclined to think it's more Woolley's — the director spells out his intentions in a closing scene in which manager Tom imagines a conversation with Jones' ghost, who watches mourners come to the side of the pool in which he died, and who thanks Tom for making him a martyr, rather than just a failed musician. So, screw the "Behind the Music" biopic formula — is that what it's all about? Staying young, wild and talented, while the 60s faded and passed? Because from here, it's looking more like a story of the death of arrogant, self-absorbed prat who the world has already half-forgotten.


"Stoned" opens in New York and LA on March 24 (official site).

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<![CDATA[Bastard Cinema: Sam Peckinpah's "Convoy"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/03/bastard-cinema-sam-peckinpahs.php Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Thom Bennett

IFC News


Labelled "lesser Peckinpah" by film snobs, Bloody Sam's 1978 film "Convoy" became a staple of early 80s afternoon TV, a dismissed one-off from one of the greats. But "Convoy" is, at its core, a Western with eighteen-wheelers instead of horses, and is not as far removed from the more revered of Peckinpah's films as you might think.


Inspiration often comes from the strangest places. In the curious case of "Convoy," the film was inspired by and based almost word for word on the unlikely 1976 hit song of the same name C.W. McCall, a ploy to cash in on America's bizarre if not brief obsession with citizens band radio (that's C.B to you uninitiated types). The song, about a band of outlaw truckers led by the oddly monikered Rubber Duck and their tenuous relationship with the law, pretty much sums up the resulting film, if one chooses to completely disregard the sheer Peckinpah-ness of the final product.


By the time production on "Convoy" began, cinematic legend and poet of violence Sam Peckinpah was not in the greatest of shape either career-wise or personally. After a recent string of less than blockbuster films, including "Straw Dogs," "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" and "Junior Bonner," none of which would receive their due until years later, Peckinpah was a persona non grata in Hollywood. Add to this his long history of battling studios over his films and his now-legendary drug and alcohol intake, and what you had was a recipe for disaster. While history would prove his studio clashes to be justified when eventual "director's cut" re-releases of several of his films prompted a critical reassessment, at this point in his career he was regarded as little more than a pain in the ass — a coked-out and paranoid maker of out-of-vogue Westerns. His name still commanded a certain amount of reverence among cinemaphiles, but his track record and state at the time certainly made him a curious choice to helm what was designed to be little more than a quick cash-in of a film.


By all accounts, the filming was a nightmare. Shooting had to be shut down temporarily when leading man and afore-mentioned Rubber Duck Kris Kristofferson had to go on tour. There were constant script revisions — Peckinpah's grasping at straws for some deeper meaning in the simple story, and struggling with the logistics of working with such large machines. Eventually Peckinpah became disinterested and handed the film over to his editors to complete.


While "Convoy" was neither a critical or box office success (having been beaten to the big screen by the similar "Smokey and the Bandit"), no less a luminary than the late Pauline Kael described "Convoy" as "Sam Peckinpah's happy-go-lucky ode to truckers on the road — a sunny, enjoyable picture with only ketchup being splattered." The ketchup spilling she refers to takes place in an early fight scene in which Peckinpah seems to be poking fun at himself through over-the-top use of his trademark slow motion in a simple rest stop punch-up.


Despite the film's many shortcomings, not the least of which a mind-numbingly bad performance by Ali MacGraw, "Convoy" shoudn't be dismissed as a total misfire in the Peckinpah canon — there's more than enough of what made him a great filmmaker here to behold. He turns a simple tale of truckers traveling from point A to point B while avoiding the long arm of the law (in the form of one scenery-chewing Ernest Borgnine) into nothing less than a tale of redemption, a commentary on racism and, ultimately, a Christ allegory. Peckinpah loved dwelling on a way of life that was disappearing and a code of loyalty among men that was no longer adhered to. Much like himself, his heroes were flawed characters who were ill at ease with the way the world was changing around them. As the film drives on along interstates and through dusty deserts, you can almost see Peckinpah struggling with the nature of these modern-day outlaws, his own life and what the hell it is that his film is ultimately about. "Convoy" looks and feels like a Peckinpah film and shares a heart — though somewhat weakened — with the titles that made him a legend.


He would make only one more film after "Convoy," the equally derided "The Osterman Weekend," but that, my friends, is a discussion for another day. "Convoy," in the meanwhile, remains a flawed and interesting film from a flawed and interesting man.



"Bastard Cinema," musings on the lesser works of the greater filmmakers, appears every other week at IFC News.

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<![CDATA[Is Colin Farrell Sexy?]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/03/hot-bothered-is-colin-farrell.php Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


The release of Robert Towne's Depression-era romance "Ask the Dust" offers the occasion to ponder some burning questions: Namely — what's the deal with Colin Farrell? Does the generically cute actor with a scoundrel's smirk and ripped bod have what it takes to be a sex symbol? Can he act his way out of a pair of boxer shorts? And, more importantly, is the guy even sexy?


In the less-than-titillating "Ask the Dust," the Irish bad boy plays Arturo Bandini, a broke LA-based writer bent on writing the Great American Novel and seducing a California blonde to wear on his arm. Instead he falls in love with Camilla, a sassy Mexican waitress played by Salma Hayek. Rather than wooing, though, he taunts and tortures her in a series of cringe-inducing scenes. (He doesn't however go so far as to pull her pigtails.) Hayek oozes sensuality — she can't help herself — but the chemistry meant to sizzle between the antagonistic pair never materializes onscreen. They engage in verbal warfare and skinny-dip in the moonlight, but the attraction supposedly reaching boiling point beneath their surface awkwardness remains cold. When they eventually take their clothes off, it's a snooze. Watching Hayek wait tables in her huaraches is sexier.


Maybe the casting is off in this film. Maybe it's not Colin's fault that the love story falls flat. An online poll, after all, found the notorious ladies man to be the "sexiest and most dateable celebrity bad boy." I don't know exactly what that means, but certainly it's a sign that some people find him attractive. And even though most of his fan sites are defunct, prestigious directors keep hiring him to play roles of greater and greater significance. So he's got to have something going for him, right?


Colin Farrell first came to international attention playing a Texan soldier in Joel Schumacher's "Tigerland" in 2000, a role that launched him into the Hollywood stratosphere, where he took parts in a wide range of films before landing the lead in 2002 in Schumacher's "Phone Booth." His name indelibly engraved on the A-list, Colin played Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone's "Alexander," a mystifying casting choice that stunned detractors who later blamed poor Colin when the film tanked; and Captain John Smith in Terrence Mallick's 2005 "The New World," a historical figure he embodied with greater success — he got to play impassioned and dewy while stalking the 15-year-old Pocahontas in the woods.


While "Miami Vice" sounds promising, so far the consistently miscast star's most compelling role is one that many people missed, in a low-budget, Irish ensemble drama called "Intermission," in which he plays an Irish punk with cocky charm and a vicious streak. In a word, he plays a nastier version of himself and he does so to truly powerful and scary effect. The performance benefits from tapping into those qualities that land him most often on Page 6, his reputation as a potty-mouthed rogue and lothario, a 29-year-old Don Juan who married a woman whose nickname — Millie — he tattooed on his hand, had a kid with a model ex-girlfriend, and is rumored to have dated "Alexander" co-star Angelina Jolie and Mouseketeer-turned-pop star Britney Spears, among others. And then of course there's Playboy's Miss January 2002, Nicole Narain, which brings us to the little matter of a sex tape.


While his drinking, swearing and charmingly unchecked propensity to say whatever crosses his mind make Colin more entertaining than most celebrities, he's also a famous guy whose genitals (or "bits," as he puts it) get more press attention than most. In the indie film "A Home at the End of the World," based on the novel by "The Hours" writer Michael Cunningham, Colin was bizarrely cast as a sort of asexual cherub with a bland personality, blank facial expression and incomprehensible sexual sway over everyone who crosses his path. The story goes that a full-frontal shot of our boy was cut from the film's theatrical version because, as was reportedly reported in The Sun, Colin was "too well hung." Audiences in test screenings apparently became overly-excited, women gasping while the men-folk squirmed uncomfortably.


That his "bits" are something to squirm about has been officially confirmed with the wide Internet dissemination of a notorious 14-minute home porn tape, in which we see Colin being his randy self. He strokes his most buzzed-about body part and grins up at Narain from between her legs to snarl, "I could do this for breakfast, lunch and dinner." The tape, much greater entertainment than "Ask the Dust," was for sale for $14.95 on a web site called dirtycolin.com until his lawyers got the site shut down (a legal battle which the ex-lovebirds are still hotly fighting). Fans on such sites as Defamer and Bastardly have suggested that maybe Colin shouldn't have been so hasty. This scandal could be just the publicity needed to boost "Ask the Dust" (which opened to crap reviews on March 10) and other upcoming projects at the box office. And truth be told, it might be his most winning performance ever.


With all the evidence in place, the question remains: Is Colin Sexy? One 30-something New Yorker said, "He's just a guy with a cute face and a bad boy reputation. I guess I got over my bad boy phase." A 20-year-old California girl said even though she likes Colin's accent, she's "not a huge fan. I kinda think he's dirty." When asked about Colin's dubious sexiness, my sister — the woman responsible for emailing me an abridged version of Colin's dirtiest 14 minutes on record — said simply, "The mystery is gone."

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<![CDATA[What a Girl Wants at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/03/hot-bothered-what-a-girl-wants.php Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


American movies aren't known for their profound, realistic portraits of female desire. Sure, there's a scattered few: "Unfaithful" explores a married woman's irrepressible craving for another man. "The Ice Storm" sensitively showed the emotional ramifications of 70s swinging on a community, especially its women and girls. "Boys Don't Cry" took on female longing and fulfillment without flinching. But those films are few and far between — most American directors shy away from really examining what women want and how they go about getting it. Someone like Woody Allen paints beautiful portraits of women, but he maintains an intellectual remove. Generally in Hollywood, when a woman is sexualized, she's a hooker or a psychopath: "Fatal Attraction" or "Pretty Woman."


So where can we find real women in the movies who want sex, have sex, freak out about sex? Look to the French, I'd say, as evidenced by the stunning, provocative films being screened at Film Society of Lincoln Center's 11th annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.


Danis Tanovic's "Hell" shines a light on female desire as it burns or suffocates in the bodies and minds of three estranged sisters still reeling from an episode from their past: a shock, a misunderstanding, a confrontation between their beautiful, cold mother and kind, volatile father, a tragedy that haunts them more than they will admit, even to themselves. Sophie (Emmanuelle Beart) has two young children and a husband who is cheating on her. She becomes obsessed with her husband's affair, following him like a detective who lurks pathetically outside hotels in the shadow, going so far as to sneak into the room where his lover lies sleeping — and smelling her hair. Played by Beart, so goddess-like in appearance, Sophie is plainly used to being placed on a pedestal by her husband. Pushed aside she becomes shameless, throwing her naked body upon him when he comes home from a tryst, forcing herself on him in daylight while her children cower down the hall, until her brashness finally drives him to reject her completely.


Meanwhile, Celine (Karin Viard) has sacrificed her own happiness and sexuality to care for their aging mother. When a mysterious stranger reads her an intimate poem, she mistakes it for a declaration of love. Innocent, uninhibited and frantically trying to heal the loss of their father, the youngest sister Anne (Marie Gillain) falls madly in love with her older, married professor, who eventually leaves her. Believing that she breathes only in his arms, she feels his absence like a death and lashes out, giving no thought to the pain she inflicts in her fury. That this sensitive, kaleidoscopic portrait of female desire is the creation of a man might be pleasantly surprising if it were a Hollywood film. But since it comes from France, the filmmaker's insight into the yearnings of the opposite sex can be expected.


Laurent Cantet's "Heading South" takes on the politics of race, class and sex and the dangerously blinding power of desire as they play off each other in a 1970s Haiti resort where white women sleep with handsome black boys in exchange for monetary gifts. Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), a teacher from Boston who is disgusted by the banal dramatics of American-style romance, spends every summer in the arms of Legba (Menothy Cesar), a seemingly carefree Adonis. Ellen's practiced nonchalance is challenged when Brenda (Karen Young) arrives, another woman who lays claim to Legba. As their love object becomes dangerously embroiled with Haiti's Macoute militia, the two women scratch and bare fangs, competing for a man they both believe they love, but whom ultimately they don't know at all.


Back in Paris, some not-yet-jaded women in their 30s just want to nab a nice young man and a wedding ring — or do they? In Sophie Fillières' "Gentille," Fontaine (Emmanuelle Devos) and Michel (Bruno Todeschini) live and sleep happily together. Only, when he proposes marriage, Fontaine begins to do crazy things like convince herself that she's falling for a mental patient at the hospital where she works.


Even when women are not front-center, often their sexuality drives the action. Antony Cordier's assured directorial debut "Cold Showers" focuses on Mickael (Johan Libereau), a high school judo star and the boyfriend of school sexpot Vanessa (Salome Stevenin). When Mickael befriends the good-looking, rich new kid in town, they wind up having a threesome with Vanessa that blows her mind. The intensity of Vanessa's sexual appetite was not something Mickael foresaw, and it bursts forth, like a full-grown and insatiable beast, increasing Vanessa's power, while Mackael cowers licking his wounded male ego. If Mickael crumbles in the face of female sexuality gone wild, "Russian Dolls,"' Xavier (Romain Duris) is positively transformed by the feminine touch. A bachelor happily juggling longhaired lovelies while earning a buck writing cheesy TV shows, Xavier finds his sexual nirvana when he gets one gig ghostwriting a memoir for a gorgeous princess and another co-writing a script with an English lass who loves him. Ultimately, though, the carnal overdose forces him to envision an end to the relentless bed-hopping.


Everyone's desires bang up against everyone else's in Danièle Thompson's philosophical and frenetic ensemble comedy "Orchestra Seats." Small-town girl Jessica (Cecile de France) lands a job waitressing at the only cafe on a block on the Avenue Montaigne, where the crowds spilling out of the neighboring theater, concert hall, auction house and high-class shops and hotels commingle to create a vibrant cross-section of artists, aficionados and behind-the-scenes staff. There she rubs elbows with the rich and the famous: the soap star who dreams of playing Simone de Bouvoir, the world-renowned pianist who yearns to trade his tuxedo for a house by a lake, the angry professor still sparring with his aging papa. With all that ardor raging around the Champs-Elysee, of course truths are told, dreams come true, compromises are made — and love is made, too, on a bed draped in gold and surrounded by priceless works of art.


The French understand the power of desire — especially as it courses through the veins of a woman. It's no wonder that in "Unfaithful" Adrian Lyne cast a Frenchman, the impossibly beautiful Olivier Martinez, as the man capable of luring perfect housewife Diane Lane away from her husband, played by Richard Gere, the American gigolo himself.


Rendez-Vous with French Cinema runs at Lincoln Center from March 10-19. For a complete schedule, see the Film Society at Lincoln Center's official site. The films will also screen during the same period at the IFC Center.

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<![CDATA[I Am Oscar's Broken Heart]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/03/i-am-oscars-broken-heart.php Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500 Finally! We've managed to come up with an awards show that pleases no one. Nominally "The Indie Oscars," what the 78th Annual Academy Awards should go down in history as are "The Glum Oscars." Host Jon Stewart looked miserable spouting Bruce Vilanch-isms studded with the occasional toothless political reference meant to remind us of how edgy a choice he was. The tastefully appointed crowd (the sartorial theme of the night seemed to be the blonde in beige dress, a style choice that made Reese Witherspoon look lovely, Nicole Kidman like a vanilla popsicle, and Uma Thurman like she had a terminal disease) seemed bored; the winners, ever dry-eyed, sped through restrained speeches, thanking their moms and their agents, with not a flicker of spontaneity (or personality) to be found.


The only ones who genuinely excited to win an award were "Hustle & Flow" songwriters Jordan Houston, Cedric Coleman and Paul Beauregard, aka Three 6 Mafia, who accepted the Original Song Oscar with such glee that Jon Stewart kept coming back to them as the night went on — possibly because he seemed stunned by their unquestionably energetic performance, only somewhat obscured by the dancers dressed as hookers prancing in the foreground (say what you will — it was still infinitely better than the burning car and interpretative racism dancers of doom peopling the set of Kathleen York's performance of "In the Deep" from "Crash"). Or perhaps he just couldn't get over the fact that they were the only ones who hadn't gotten the memo about Serious and Relevant this iteration of the Academy Awards were, a point hammered in by the many self-celebratory montages: the biopic montage, the film noir montage (introduced by a very shaky Lauren Bacall), the films of social import montage (which kicked off with a tragic editing leap from "All the President's Men" to "The Day After Tomorrow"), the "movies should be seen on the big screen" montage — all reeked of desperation, of trying to reinforce old dominance to an audience who wandered off to watch TiVoed episodes of "Grey's Anatomy"


Best speech: Three 6 Mafia, along with George Clooney's funny, leisurely acceptance for supporting actor — is it any wonder the camera kept cutting back to him for reaction shots later? Beyond being the only actor with a sheen of the old-school glamour this year's awards so anxiously tried to recall, he was also one of the few who seemed comfortable expressing emotions without a publicist's approval.


Flicker of life: The Stephen Colbert-narrated fake campaign ads were by far the funniest moments of the entire ceremony, not counting the "Crash" dancers. And all was forgiven for Jon Stewart when, after the "social import" montage, he intoned: "And none of those issues was ever a problem again."


Ideas that fell flat: The "gay cowboy" montage and the Lily Tomlin-Meryl Streep Altmanesque intro both dragged on past their prime.


Self-congratulatory quotes of death: Reese Witherspoon's June Carter Cash "I'm just trying to matter" and Paul Haggis' "Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer." Shut up, Reese Witherspoon. Shut up, Paul Haggis.


Signs of the times: "Paradise Now" is announced as a film from the "Palestinian Territories" — not that it was going to win or anything anyway. And "Crash"'s win for Best Picture wasn't surprising as much as disappointing — but the cameras actually cut away before producer Cathy Schulman was done having her say. Not even the Best Picture winners merit a few more seconds of TV time in this extra-brisk era — harsh.

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<![CDATA["Tsotsi": Steal a baby, redeem your soul.]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/02/review-tsotsi-steal-a-baby-red.php Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500 "Tsotsi" opens with a group of hoods playing dice. They bicker, one making a particularly compelling argument by slamming his knife into the table. The three turn to their leader, the title character (the name simply mean "thug"), who's brooding by the window: "What are we doing tonight, Tsotsi?" And Presley Chweneyagae turns to the camera, and a throbbing kwaito track kicks in as the gang swings off to saunter down the street of the township, a sprawling shantytown on the outskirts of Johannesburg.


It's gleefully, guiltily enjoyable. It's unavoidably reminiscent of "City of God." But director Gavin Hood's film quickly parts ways with Fernando Meirelles' slick epic of favela stylishness — "Tsotsi" has more intimate concerns. It's the sometimes simplistic, urgently earnest story of how a violent criminal ends up accidentally kidnapping a baby and eventually finding redemption.


Chweneyagae has a striking, catlike face, which, for much of the duration of "Tsotsi," is either fixed in a glower of repressed rage or quivering with uneasiness. It's not a handsome face, which is a good thing — if his Tsotsi were at all charming, this film would be unbearably sentimental. As is, he's both frightening and clueless — he commits acts of violence and acts of something approaching compassion (or at least, basic humanity) without thought. He beats one of his fellow gang members half to death because he dared ask about Tsotsi's past; he shoots a woman and steals her car on impulse; when he finds a baby in the back, he puts it in a shopping bag and carries it home simply because it smiled at him. After failing miserably at caring for the infant, he follows a young mother (Terry Pheto) home and forces her, at gunpoint, to feed "his baby." Half of Tsotsi's redemptive journey is less an emotional one than one of his learning to act on something other than pure instinct.


Cinematographer Lance Gewer keeps the township in seeming perpetual dusk, a smoky, mazelike collection of corrugated metal shacks that stretches out to the horizon like a settlement at the end of the world. There's a sense that the fragile civilization is barely holding out against entropy — an abandoned car is totally stripped by the next day, and one a memorably disturbing scene, Tsotsi leaves the baby with some condensed milk, only to come back to find it covered in ants. The rest of Johannesburg is confined to being a scenic skyline, save the main train station, prime hunting ground for Tsotsi and his gang. AIDS posters loom above, and the disease figures in to Tsotsi's backstory, one that's ultimately unsatisfying as an explanation for his violent present.


Athol Fugard was only in his late 20s when he wrote the novel on which "Tsotsi" is based, and you can feel it in the story, though the ending is Hood's own. Kwaito gives way to soaring African vocals, tears are shed, atonement is found, and you can imagine Academy voters nodding and dabbing their eyes — this is what a foreign film should be! The rest of us can take pleasure in the complexities and vitality of the first half of the film, before a fascinating look at life in the townships becomes a mere fable.



"Tsotsi" opens in limited release on February 24. For more on the film, see the official site.

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<![CDATA[Tony Scott's "Bounty hunting on acid"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/02/on-dvd-tony-scotts-bounty-hunt.php Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Thom Bennett

IFC News


"This is based on a true story... sort of."


Tony Scott's much-maligned "Domino," ostensibly based on the life and times of British prep-school girl-turned-model-turned-LA bounty hunter Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), is a frenetic and sometimes visually overwhelming piece of filmmaking...and that's before we even get to the story. Since an actual synopsis of the film would border on impossibility, we will go with the premise: Following the death of her actor father, Domino and her model mother relocate to Beverly Hills for a better life. Domino finds the lifestyle and the prospect of a career as a model to her disliking and proceeds to become not just a bounty hunter, but one of the best bounty hunters around, along with partners Choco (Edgar Ramirez) and Ed (Mickey Rourke). That's all you really need to know – the rest (and there is a lot of it) sort of flies at you - mescaline spiked tea, severed arms, an armored car heist, former 90210 stars, the DMV, reality TV, Christopher Walken, the freedom of Afghanistan and a too-bizarre-for-words appearance by Tom Waits in the desert.


Tony Scott has somehow managed to out-Tony Scott himself with "Domino." The hyper-kinetic editing and fiddling with film speeds and exposures resembles something between a seizure and a film shot out of a paint ball gun. That said, the film is remarkably entertaining if often bewildering. "Domino" was a labor of love for the director, who was friends with the real life Domino Harvey, and he pulls out every trick he has in his bag. The screenplay by Richard "Donnie Darko" Kelly similarly manages to throw in everything but the stylized kitchen sink. "Style over substance" seemed to be the general criticism aimed at the film when it was released in theater, but it's precisely this approach, along with the film's scattershot, far-fetched narrative, that elevates the real life Domino to comic book superhero status. Domino Harvey's actual life was far-fetched to begin with; why not drive it right over a cliff? While Scott's style of filmmaking usually does nothing for me, here he goes for broke and, for once, it pays off. The filmmakers describe the film as "bounty hunting on acid." That's an understatement.


The DVD release comes with a couple of worthy extras, including a short documentary on the real Domino Harvey (who passed away before the film's completion) and a making-of in which Scott and Kelly discuss their various inspirations for and approaches to making this highly unorthodox film. "Domino" may be a cinematic barrage, but it was unduly dismissed — it's a fun film and a suitably exaggerated telling of an already stranger-than-fiction life. As Knightley's Domino states in the final scene, "If you're wondering what's true and what isn't, you can fuck off. I'll never tell you what it all meant." Indeed.


The "Domino" DVD will be released by New Line Home Video in wide- and full screen editions on February 21.

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<![CDATA["Night Watch"'s New World Order]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/02/review-night-watchs-new-world.php Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500 What does a Russian blockbuster look like? It turns out, a lot like an American blockbuster...mainly "The Matrix," with plenty of MTV2 mixed in and a sporadic sprinkling of Eisenstein. Timur Bekmambetov's "Night Watch," made for an outrageous (in Russia) $4 million, may have been an unexpected and record-breaking hit in its home country, but the dark urban fantasy is more interesting as a cultural artifact than as a techno-heavy, flashy, forgettable bit of entertainment.


As is de rigeur these days, "Night Watch" (which is the first installment of a trilogy) rests on a convoluted, po-faced mythology — there are Others living among us, vampires, sorcerers, witches, seers, shapeshifters, who've chosen to be on the side of Light or Dark. They exist in an uneasy truce in which the Light side patrols the Dark's activities (the titular Night Watch), and vice versa. There's an A-plot involving some überOther who will tip the balance between the two forces, and a B-plot that concerns your run-of-the-mill impending apocalypse. Trenchcoats are worn. There are occasions of soulful, sci-fi angst.


It's impossible to convey Bekmambetov's fearless slathering-on of visual effects in words. No one walks across a room when they can stutter over in a series of digitally enhanced jump cuts. It's at turns impressive and headache-inducing — for every extraordinary image (a utility truck somersaults over a pedestrian and lands seamlessly back on the street; a man shatters like ceramic) there are at least a dozen that are excessive or silly (in a climactic fight, one character pulls a sword out of his spine, while another wields a fluorescent bulb, which illuminates like a lightsaber). But it's the film's night-shrouded Moscow that's its most impressive visual accoutrement — the action leaps through dingy streets, crowded subways and dozens of apparently windowless Soviet-era apartment buildings, an urban hell out of a Wachowski brothers wet dream.


A lingering sense of old ways crumbling gives "Night Watch" an odd soulfulness it might not deserve — though it's probably not an accident that the somewhat bureaucratic Light Others operate out of a grimy municipal building (the "City Light Company") while the Dark Others are all new money, gleaming cars and designer track suits. In the end, the differences between Dark and Light aren't heated or personal after all — they're just ideological.


"Night Watch" opens in New York, L.A. and San Francisco on February 17. For more on the film, see the official site.

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<![CDATA[Whit Stillman's "Metropolitan"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/02/on-dvd-whit-stillmans-metropol.php Mon, 13 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Thom Bennett

IFC News


Debutantes and their dates: Whit Stillman's "Metropolitan" was a tough sell amongst its indie peers when it came to be in 1990. Sixteen years on and only three films later, Stillman still has little, if anything, in common with his contemporaries. But "Metropolitan" remains one of a handful of post-Sundance American independent films that helped, for better or worse, to open the floodgates for a generation of filmmakers and their films.


It's the simple story of a guy named Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) who somewhat accidentally and reluctantly becomes a part of New York debutante society during one fateful Christmas season "not so long ago." He falls in with a crowd who call themselves the Sally Fowler Rat Pack (or SFRP for short) in honor of the frequent hostess of their get-togethers. Tom befriends Nick (Chris Eigeman), the caustic observer of the group, and attracts the interest of sweet, Jane Austen-obsessed Audrey (Carolyn Farina). Charlie (Taylor Nichols) is leery of Tom's acceptance by the group and himself harbors a secret crush on Audrey. Tom, who comes from a middle-class background, is an outsider who at first acts dismissive of the SFRP's neo-aristocratic lifestyle. However, he's quickly caught up in the comings and goings of the group, leading to a comical and touching showdown at the Southampton home of Nick's arch-enemy and renowned womanizer Rick von Sloneker.


"Metropolitan" went on to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay (losing to the bewilderingly bad "Ghost") and win an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. But Stillman's debut film has more in common with Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" than with the army of Scorsese imitations that arrived at the same time, and, unlike many of those more heralded films and filmmakers, holds up remarkably well. The insightful and often hilarious dialogue is the true star of the film and is indicative of a rare first-time filmmaker mature enough to stick with what he knows and do something great with it.


Once again, we have Criterion to thank for giving a great film the treatment it deserves. The special edition DVD comes with a captivating commentary by Stillman and actors Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols, who discuss, among other things, the making of the film on a shoestring budget and how out of place it was at the time. Stillman's subsequent films, "Barcelona" and "The Last Days of Disco," deal with similar themes in different eras and places with fine results — however, "Metropolitan" remains an essential American independent film by one of the great underappreciated American filmmakers of his generation.


The "Metropolitan" DVD will be released by the Criterion Collection on February 14.

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<![CDATA[The Best of Sundance Sex]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/02/hot-bothered-the-best-of-sunda.php Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer

IFC News


Does anyone else find it funny that the most talked-about sex at Sundance was the kind that didn't make it to screen? First off there's the case of the missing sex scene in "Thank You for Smoking." Apparently footage of Katie "mother of Tom Cruise's child" Holmes cavorting with Aaron Eckhart vanished. Poof. The director of the painfully funny satire, Jason Reitman, was the most shocked of all at the scene's omission, taking a wild guess that it had mistakenly wound up on the editing room floor.


I attended an added, end-of-fest screening that had the two sex scenes, both fairly tame: one of the handsome pair doing it all over Eckhart's apartment, almost fully clothed, in quick, cartoonishly kinky snippets, and another with Mrs. Cruise-to-be straddling Eckhart while wearing an oversized men's shirt. Whether or not either scene was the restored 12-seconds in question, it is clear that Katie's "Smoking" sex is nothing for Tom to bully a director into removing — or to jump up and down on the furniture like an outraged baboon about.


The other scandalous sex at Sundance also went unseen: the notorious dog blowjob in Bobcat Goldthwait's "Stay." It's no longer a spoiler to give away the nature of the notorious act, which occurs within the first 30 seconds of the film, and which we only experience via voiceover — and a quick flashback to the splayed pup, the race to the sink. The adorable comedy's dirtiest scene is actually our heroine (Melinda Page Hamilton) trying to sleep while her friend and her husband howl with pleasure in the bedroom next door — i.e., we don't see a thing there, either.


While not all the sex at Sundance was so chaste, rarely was it inspired by love or even lust. Just as Katie the sexy reporter jumped Aaron the tobacco lobbyist to nab a hot scoop, so much of the other Sundance sex was about exchanging goods for, well, services. In the world of Laurie Collyer's "Sherrybaby," nothing comes for free. Whether Maggie Gyllenhaal's eponymous ex-con is bent over in the basement while her halfway house manager pumps away or performing a blowjob for a job swap, Sherry understands the value of her skinny ass. While the 14-year-old heroine of Claudia Llosa's twisted fairy tale "Madeinusa" seems naïve when she lets an attractive city stranger hike up her skirt in an alley during the town's holy days, when God recognizes no sin, she may in fact be using her moral free pass to try to earn a ticket out of town.


Marcos, the middle-aged chauffeur in Carlos Reygadas' powerfully disturbing "Battle in Heaven," may not realize that sex comes with a price tag, but what he seeks when he lets his boss' daughter blow him is redemption, the kind he won't find screwing his obese wife-cum-partner in a hideous crime. In the explicit film, graphic sex and actors' raw, imperfect skin represents what is tactile and earthly, as opposed to the realm of the spirit, in which God — or at least conscience — punishes for sins committed by one's physical body.


Most films at Sundance 2006 declared that crawling between someone else's thighs is a good way to avoid the hell that life dishes out. Ashley Judd beds man after man while boozed up to near-unconsciousness in Joey Lauren Adams' "Come Early Morning." Matt Dillon and Lily Taylor do likewise in "Factotum" as Charles Bukowski's alter-ego Henry Chinaski and his most beloved floozy. Other booze-induced fumblings include Ryan Gosling's coked-up grappling with a cute fellow teacher in Ryan Fleck's soulful "Half Nelson," and small-town tae kwon do instructor Mr. Simmons' big-boobed wife's cheating on him with first her boss, then her hubby's sleazy martial-arts star idol in the hilarious midnight movie "The Foot Fist Way." And then there is Carter Smith's impressive short "Bugcrush," in which angel-faced Ben falls for the high school tough guy who has a slimy secret that makes their first touch a lethal one.


Glowy, rose-colored, between-the-sheets moments were few and far between in Park city. "Flannel Pajamas"' Stuart (Justin Kirk) and Nicole (Julianne Nicholson) meet cute in a New York coffee shop and proceed to copulate in beds, bathtubs and on the bare living room floor. Ambisexual Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser) rolls raucously around with boys (Kirk) and girls (Nicholson, Gretchen Mol) in Maria Maggenti's rom-com romp "Puccini for Beginners," and Carlos Bolado's "Sólo Dios Sabe"'s Damián (Diego Luna) and Dolores (Alice Braga) fall inevitably gaga following a series of enthusiastic and embarrassingly noisy couplings. The award for funniest sex scene, however, goes to Jennifer Aniston for sinking to new levels of humiliation in Nicole Holofcener's "Friends with Money," in which she plays a broke, love-deprived housekeeper whose personal trainer/would-be boyfriend demands sex — and payment — for his company. No one has ever looked more bored than Jen, clad in a French maid's outfit, while Muscle Man does his best to get his own rocks off.

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<![CDATA[The Film Geek's Guide to Oscar Surprises]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/02/the-film-geeks-guide-to-oscar.php Fri, 03 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Matt Singer
IFC News

The new issue of Newsweek has the magazine's annual roundtable discussion with the year's most important directors. Typically, this ritual predicts three or four of the nominees, leaving room for one or two surprises.


When the Academy Award nominations were announced this week, Newsweek proved prescient indeed: all five members of their roundtable — George Clooney ("Good Night, and Good Luck"), Paul Haggis ("Crash"), Ang Lee ("Brokeback Mountain"), Bennett Miller ("Capote"), and Steven Spielberg ("Munich") — earned nominations. All five also directed nominees for Best Picture. Without commenting on the merit of recognizing these particular filmmakers (I've seen four of the five films and liked all four, though not enough to include any of them in my top ten list for 2005) this strikes me as a rather ominous indicator of just how predictable (or, if you're more cynical, purchasable) this year's nominations were and, to a large extent, how seemingly wrapped up most of the races are (Reese Witherspoon, please continue to walk the line straight to your Oscar).


Still, there were some pleasant surprises, of the sort that fall into the category "Yes, it really is an honor to be nominated, because you sure as hell aren't winning." Not surprisingly, most of these were from the independent film world, and to these proud few, an IFC News salute:



Noah Baumbach, "The Squid and the Whale": There might have been better movies in 2005, but was there a better screenplay than Noah Baumbach's deeply personal tale of bitter divorce amongst the ranks of Brooklyn bohemia? They — whoever they are — say writers should write what they know, and Baumbach's familiarity with his subject matter oozes out of every frame of his carefully observed dark comedy. It's hard to be thoughtful and funny about any subject, let alone about divorce, let alone about your own parents' divorce, but Baumbach pulls it off time and again in "The Squid and the Whale," from the scene where Jesse Eisenberg's Walt passes off Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as an original talent show composition to the sequence where Jeff Daniels as his depressed dad tags along for one of Walt's date and insists on seeing "Blue Velvet" instead of "Short Circuit." His characters are so real they don't just exist as complete entities; they actually seem to change over the course of the film, as the events of the parental separation gradually affect both the children (whose allegiances are constantly shifting) and the adults (who reveal sides of themselves we can't anticipate). My parents and my childhood couldn't be more different than Baumbach's but, to his credit, no 2005 movie felt more relatable.



Jake Gyllenhaal, "Brokeback Mountain": In all the hoopla and hullabaloo surrounding his Australian co-star, Jake Gyllenhaal has been quietly, frustratingly lost. I'm not trying to diminish Ledger's performance, merely to observe that Gyllenhaal has been strangely absent from the collective congratulations that Brokeback has been receiving for the last two months. Face it: Heath's got it easy. He gets to act cool and tough and aloof: all hallmarks of great male performances in the Brando tradition. But watch Gyllenhaal in the key climactic scene between the two, when he has to deliver the line that's already become the film's contribution to the lexicon ("I wish I could quit you!"). It is Gyllenhaal who more powerfully conveys the couple's sense of loss and, in the shots that contrast their early, happy beginnings and their sad ends, it is Gyllenhaal who more convincingly portrays a middle-aged depressive. Going against Clooney (who won the Golden Globe) and Giamatti (who could win for missing out on Sideways), Gyllenhaal is almost certainly doomed to fail, except in the case of a massive Brokeback sweep. But his nomination is an encouraging reminder that the film succeeded not because of Heath Ledger, but because of the contributions of a superb ensemble.



"It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" from "Hustle & Flow": No rap song has ever come together so quickly, so creatively, and so perfectly as "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp" does for DJay (Terrence Howard) in his homemade studio. The way all of the elements — the beat, the hook, the lyrics, the backup singers — flow together (they probably hustle a little too) could only happen in the movies. But you know what? This is the movies! And the song, written by rap group Three 6 Mafia, provided one of the most memorable movie moments (musical or otherwise) in 2005, which is why it deserved its inclusion as a nominee for Best Original Song. I have no idea if Howard or Three 6 Mafia (who you can read a little about here) or some combination of the two will perform the song at the awards, but it always brings a smile to my face when the stodgy Oscars gets livened up by a musical performance completely out of place amongst all those uptight squares in their tuxedos. Maybe they can get Jack Valenti to sing along to "Whoop That Trick" too. I've got my fingers crossed.

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<![CDATA[In Case You Missed It: "Lord of War: Special Edition"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/01/in-case-you-missed-it-lord-of.php Mon, 23 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500 By Thom Bennett

IFC News


It's been a long time since I've been any sort of a Nicholas Cage fan. I've always had a problem with him as a leading man and have generally felt that he was meant for darker or quirkier things, like "Wild at Heart" or even "Moonstruck." "Lord of War" was a pleasant surprise, to say the least, and one of my favorite films of 2005.


"Pleasant" might be a poor choice of word, as the film follows unscrupulous arms dealer Yuri Orlov (Cage), who travels the world with his brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) making a dollar wherever a revolution or civil war erupts. He rises from insignificance as a Russian immigrant in Brighton Beach to become one of the biggest illegal arms dealers in the world. Man, woman, child — doesn't matter to him. How he makes his living lies in stark contrast to the lavish, insulated life he carefully creates and maintains for his wife and child without so much as a hint of remorse. He is constantly pursued by Interpol agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), who he eludes by manipulating existing loopholes in international law, carrying on with business as usual...and business is good.


Whereas most action movies rely on an empty barrage of guns and violence with no consequences, "Lord of War" is all about the cost and context of guns — where they come from, where they end up and ultimately the people and places they destroy. In one particularly powerful scene, Yuri is hallucinating after taking a mix of cocaine and gunpowder that the warlords give to children soldiers before they send them off to die. A young girl walks up to him, her arm having been blown off, and asks him if her arm will grow back.


Director Andrew Niccol's remarkable attention to detail creates a film with a style and subject matter that seem almost ill at ease with one another and somehow make the film that much more effective. The opening sequence is seen from the point of view of a bullet and shows the journey from manufacturing to the point where it is used to kill a child.


The special edition DVD comes with the requisite making-of and commentary — however, there is a very interesting short documentary called "Making a Killing: Inside the International Arms Trade," which helps put the subject matter at hand into context. Entertaining and ultimately insightful, "Lord of War" is something of an anti-action movie action movie and an overlooked gem from last year.


"Lord of War: Special Edition" is currently available from Lions Gate Home Video.

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<![CDATA[Loving a 30-foot Ape]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2006/01/hot-bothered-loving-a-30foot-a.php Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500 With the roaring passion of Kong making screens quake, I find myself meditating on the great cinematic tradition of interspecies love affairs. The great films about man — or woman — and beast, locked together in love's sweet embrace. I'm not talking about Lassie and the boy who pets him or Bobby Joe out back with a goat; I'm talking about grand amour that is capable of transcending such banal labels as Human Being and Basset Hound.

Shocking? Profane? Indecent? Gross? Interspecies love stories are grounded in a literary tradition at once vast and ancient, reaching back as far as the 2nd century myth of Cupid and Psyche, in which a maiden marries a hideous creature; Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that has the fairy queen making love to an ass; and, most appropriately, "Beauty and the Beast," first published in France in the 18th century, but based on older folklore about girls wedding crocodiles, frogs, bears, monkeys, all kinds of inappropriate matches whose ugliness represents sexuality and the fear it incites in virginal maids. In each of these stories, one loving kiss (or lick on the face) from their wives magically turns the animals into nice, marriageable young men.

In Jean Cocteau's haunting film version, "La Belle et La Bête" (1946), which inspired the later Disney film, Belle (Josette Day), a merchant's daughter, is promised to a lonely, misunderstood beast whose furry face would make most maidens shriek. But Belle learns to love the kind-hearted beast and, for her ability to see beyond his appearance, is rewarded. Her affection breaks a wicked spell and transforms him into dreamy Jean Marais sans the werewolf-esque headgear he sports as La Bête.

In Peter Jackson's remake of "King Kong," the relationship between the terror of Skull Island and the comely actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) develops like many a love affair, with seduction rituals that seem all-too-familiar: He sweeps her off her feet (literally) and drags her back to his place. She's hard-to-get, dashing off every time his back is turned. He sulks and beats his chest before chasing her down and, finding her in harm's way, slays dinosaurs to save her. Impressed by his strength and battleground prowess, she softens, dancing and looking pretty for his amusement. Now it's his turn to play blasé. They take in a sunset that turns her golden hair rose and connect deeply over its beauty.

But then what? What can the future hold for soulmates who want such different things? He gets off on crushing T-Rexes' skulls and she dreams of playing the great dramatic roles before settling down to make blond babies.

The real taboo here is sex. The consummation question would be a tricky one for Ann and Kong and nobody (especially Ann) wants to go there. Indeed, outside of the realm of friskyfarms and analbestiality.com, no self-respecting director will touch man-beast love of the carnal kind — unless, of course, it's funny enough. In "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask" (1972), Gene Wilder's Dr. Ross becomes smitten with a pretty, young sheep named Daisy. Writer-director Woody Allen, well aware of the age-old rumors about shepherds cozying up to soft, docile lambs who don't whine like their wives, treats the difference in species as inconsequential. When Dr. Ross is hauled to divorce court by his wife, the judge declares, "The defendant did commit an adulterous act with a sheep — most distasteful in view of the fact that the sheep was under 18 years old."

And who can forget in "Airplane!" (1980), when Captain Oveur's wife cheats on her husband with a horse? Nobody imagines that the neglected hussy chose her lover for his Kong-sized heart.

Ron Howard explored the logistical problems of interspecies love in "Splash" (1984), in which ordinary guy Allen Bauer (Tom Hanks) learns that his girlfriend Madison (Daryl Hannah) is a mermaid. While she has no problem doing the nasty all over Allen's swanky pad while in human form, Madison has other needs — namely being surrounded by saltwater — that prevent her from living a normal life on land. In this case, it's Allen who sacrifices his natural habitat and home to, in a fairy-tale twist, swim off to a wistfully happy ending at sea.

Apparently interspecies romance barely registers if neither party is human. It seems completely normal for Stuart Little the mouse (Michael J. Fox), for example, to fall in love with a cute little bird who speaks with Melanie Griffith's sweet, chirping squeak. And nobody questions the annoying flirtation that unites sensitive Kermit the Frog and his bimbo Miss Piggy — although nobody really wants to imagine what antics they get up to in the bedroom either.

With technology that allows directors to improve the classics with stunning feats of CGI-driven realism and the wisdom that comes from digesting films past, modern movies are able to deconstruct cinematic mythologies to create new ones that take the old ones' lessons into account. While Jackson's Kong decapitates more realistic brontosauruses and develops a more emotionally complex connection to Ann than the 1933 original, so "Shrek" one-ups "Beauty and the Beast," riffing on fairy-tale conventions to smart, comic effect. In the 2001 film, the princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) sees the loveliness that lies inside an ugly green ogre (Mike Myers). Instead of wishing her frog would turn into a prince, Fiona embraces the ugly green ogre in herself — rectifying the interspecies divide with a fresh, post-modern spin. Shrek and Fiona's happy-ever-after is especially satisfying because the misshapen misfits find true love without having to turn blond, skinny or beautiful. In fact, they reject that option when it's offered. Instead, they find love based on the loveliness within. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all, and to Shrek and Fiona, there's no face they'd rather wake up to in the morning.

But "King Kong" is not a fairy tale. There are no spells to turn Kong into a handsome playwright or Ann into a pretty she-monkey. So their love story turns tragic, as a relationship between a woman and a giant ape cannot last. If no spell has been cast, if the beast has no hope of becoming human, what options does he have? The feud between the Montagues and Capulets seems a mere pockmark compared to the chasm dividing Kong from Ann Darrow. There is no hope for their union, and once he's loved her, Kong is no more capable of living without Ann than Romeo without his Juliet. Like those other star-crossed lovers, death is the only option for King Kong. As Jack Black's character Carl Denham says as he stands beside the fallen body of Kong, "It wasn't the planes that got him. It was beauty killed the beast."

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<![CDATA[You're Never Too Old...]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/12/hot-bothered-youre-never-too-o.php Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer
IFC News


When the newly widowed Mrs. Henderson remarks that she's bored to tears, her lunch guest Lady Conway suggests taking a lover. "I'm nearly 70," Mrs. Henderson protests. "But you're rich," counters her cheeky friend. "The two cancel each other out."


Unconvinced, Mrs. Henderson settles for the next best thing: a hobby. After dabbling in charity (it's a yawn) and needlepoint (a snooze), Mrs. Henderson does what any rich, energetic, old broad (with a splash of the visionary in her) would do. She buys the out-of-use Windmill Theater and sets out to revolutionize the London stage by putting on a vaudeville in which women appear stark naked.


Stephen Frears' deliciously snappy "Mrs. Henderson Presents" (in theaters December 9), stars Dame Judi Dench as the real-life theater maven and Bob Hoskins as Vivian Van Damm, the man she hires to run the place. Hot, nasty sparks crackle between this odd couple — so much so that Van Damm initially turns the job down, until the smooth Mrs. Henderson bribes him with total creative freedom, an offer no producer can refuse — even if it means having a ball-breaker in floor-length mink as a boss.


After a few rounds sparring with this stout, brassy younger man, Mrs. Henderson realizes she's in love with him. While he's married to another woman and their connection goes largely unacknowledged and unconsummated, the affair is invaluable. It awakens Mrs. Henderson to her sexuality, which she had taken for dead along with her husband and makes the young flesh onstage more alluring. The glowing grand dame teases the dancers about their love lives, even setting her favorite up on a date with a soldier, and in one oddly moving sequence dances suggestively in the flamboyant solitude of her room.


Mrs. Henderson is not the first cinematic woman of a certain age to feel sex sneaking up to bite her on a sagging buttock. In the extraordinary love story "Fear Eats the Soul" (1974), director Rainer Maria Fassbinder borrows heavily from Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows"(1955), in which a widow falls in love with a much younger gardener played by Rock Hudson, to the horror of her friends and family. Fassbinder updated Sirk's story of an affair that suffers under disapproving eyes, by moving it to 1970s Munich, where a sixty-year-old charwoman first swoons at the taut, brown bod of a young Moroccan immigrant, then marries him. Fassbinder upped the ante by throwing race into an already bitter brew of age and class discrimination (an idea that was taken up again by Todd Haynes in his 2002 retelling "Far From Heaven," in which Julianne Moore's well-behaved housewife with a gay husband falls for a black gardener).


In Brad Anderson's wonderfully wistfully romantic "Next Stop Wonderland," depressed, just-dumped Erin's (Hope Davis) existential gloom is thrown into relief by her mother (Holland Taylor), a classy, hot-blooded jetsetter who refuses to let her beloved husband's death get in the way of her sex life. While Erin attempts to find herself, her mom runs a personal ad for her daughter and proceeds to bed one hot young thang after another in swank hotel rooms from New York to Par-ee.


It doesn't take a dead husband to kill a sex life. As muscles shrivel and boobs sag, so the libido and lust for life can take a dive, leaving some older couples in a sexual wasteland that requires something drastic to recharge. In Ron Howard's sci-fi heartwarmer "Cocoon" (1985), Joe (Hume Cronyn) and Alma (Jessica Tandy) still love each other but don't do a whole lot of bonking. When aliens move pods into the swimming pool where Joe and his retirement community buddies swim, they soon realize that a dip with the pods has a rejuvenating effect. As fast as you can say "first erection in decades," Joe's got Alma taking the plunge, too. Unfortunately, he gets so randy he's not only doing it with his wife, but he's making the moves on all the other grannies in town — and Alma's wishing they could return to the days of hot cocoa, Lawrence Welk and a peck on the cheek before lights out.


The most celebrated — and sexual — of the cinematic over-the-hill crowd has got to be Maude, the sassy eponymous heroine of Hal Ashby's cult black comedy "Harold and Maude" (1971), about a repressed, death-obsessed teenager (Bud Cort) who falls for an exuberant octogenarian played by Ruth Gordon. Maude has the morbid loner falling madly in love with life, by introducing him to its many delights, including those of the flesh. Needless to say, Harold's family goes ballistic, but the boy walks away with one hell of a notch in his bedpost. Nothing like an experienced, older woman to make a guy realize that life is a beautiful thing.

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<![CDATA["Baraka," "Brothels," and What Doc Makers Owe]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/12/opinion-baraka-brothels-and-wh.php Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Frank Rinaldi

IFC News



Last month, the Academy released its short list of potential nominees for this year's Best Feature Length Documentary award. Included was filmmakers' Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's buzz-garnering "The Boys of Baraka," which chronicles the lives of four black boys coming of age in the projects of Baltimore, one of America's poorest and most dangerous cities. The kids are given a chance to gain a better education via the Baraka School for Boys, located in Kenya and dedicated to providing guidance and hope for inner city males who might not otherwise have a chance to experience life outside the environment they were born into.


"Boys" brings to mind last year's Oscar-winner "Born Into Brothels," filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's visceral depiction of Indian youths growing up in Sonagchi, one of Calcutta's most infamous red light districts, , where Briski teaches an introductory and informal photography class to a handful of residential pre-teens.


Examined together, there are plenty of obvious parallels between the two pictures, but after viewing each in succession, I noticed a fundamental difference between them, a discovery that had me asking a lot of questions, particularly: What good do these "social awareness" films really do? Are the subjects merely being exploited by publicity-savvy artists, or are the filmmakers fulfilling their unspoken obligation to help their subjects by drawing attention to these widely ignored realities?


One of the cardinal rules of the documentary is to capture and communicate some sort of truth. "Born Into Brothels" is indeed harrowing in its depiction of India's lower castes, illegal businesses and abject poverty. As the film progresses, we also see Briski's determined attempts to rescue her students by begging parents and patiently navigating Kafkaesque bureaucracy in order to enroll her students in various private schools,though in the end, most of the students were either removed by their parents, or decided to remove themselves. Briski did what she could. She didn't abandon those she inspired, leaving them with a head full of unachievable goals and a heart full of maddening desire, but took action and opposed the traditional role of the documentarian as passive observer.


So does "The Boys of Baraka" follow suit in its articulation of truth? In a fucked up way, it does convey the harsh mechanics of a repressed society, how they affect the individuals living within and how, when placed into a supportive environment, those individuals can flourish But the film also smacks of manipulation and exploitation — I left feeling angry and guilty, but not for the "right" reasons, or rather, not for the reasons one would expect a naive upper-middle class white boy to feel after watching a movie about children growing to adulthood amidst terrifying and almost hopeless circumstances. As if the lives of Montrey, Devon, Richard and Romesh weren't, aren't difficult enough, a pair of artists gets the gumption to gallantly document their story of overwhelming hardship and sell it to a Sunday-afternoon arthouse crowd looking to feel cheap-sad and be cheap-moved for an hour and a half as they observe the very real and very foreign plight of these young men. And I have to ask, at what cost is this happening and for what benefit? I did some research on the matter and, as far as I can tell, the film will in no way directly aid in the alleviation of the societal maladies it so "responsibly" identifies. At the end of the day, "The Boys of Baraka" simply comes off as an exploitative take-it-to-the-streets effort that is likely to remedy very little.


Yes, the conveyance of truth is a quintessential goal of the documentary, but when a problem is recognized, sitting on your ass and acknowledging its existence simply isn't enough. Therein lies the most profound rift separating two of the past years' most widely regarded documentaries. Both recognize and explore the realities of a social malady, but only one attempts to do anything about, while the other falls short


After all, according to the terse tried and true G.I. Joe maxim, "Knowing is half the battle."

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<![CDATA["Brokeback" Breaks: Why All the Fuss?]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/12/brokeback-breaks-why-all-the-f.php Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer
IFC News

What is left to say about Brokeback Mountain? The so-called "Gay Cowboy Movie" is a shoe-in for the most hyped movie of the year award, spurring the kind of commotion that makes studio publicity departments salivate.


Besides nabbing the cover of every rag in the country, evidence of the craze includes Oscar buzz surrounding Heath Ledger, Ang Lee, Michelle Williams and the movie itself. Cyber-discussions about "the year's most daring love story" have apparently reached new levels of anticipatory hysteria, largely based on an epic trailer. And the conservative contingent has chimed in, with angry Wyomingans declaring there's no such thing as a gay cowboy. But we all know a little controversy never hurts at the box office — or as producer and co-president of Focus Features James Schamus puts it, "It's a Focus movie if someone out there hates it before we've even made the movie."


With all the bantering, bickering and blogging, the burning question begging to be asked is: What's the big deal?


As we all know by now, Ang Lee's epic love story charts the 20-year romance between Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a couple of Marlboro men hired to wrangle sheep on a desolate hillside in Wyoming. What starts as friendship built swigging whiskey around a campfire shifts when they share a tent on a cold night and find themselves having confusing sex that eventually leads to what neither man would ever refer to as falling in love. The feelings that overwhelm Ennis and Jack materialize in spite of themselves, in spite of their intention to live normal, wife-and-kid kind of lives, in spite of a society that cannot accept their bond.


Their tale is tragic and not that unusual. It is romantic, heartbreaking, complex and sweet. The movie's not daring. It's a big, beautiful weepie about lovers — soulmates even — whose passion never fades even as their union is thwarted by forces beyond their control. It's Romeo and Juliet, for God's sake, only both star-crossed sweethearts are guys. At a recent junket, Ledger, who calls his character, "a homophobic man in love with another man," said, "I think daring and brave is what the firefighters are when they're putting out a fire. We're just telling a love story."


Ledger doesn't believe there's anything especially risky about "Brokeback Mountain." "I never thought I had anything at stake," he says. "I feel pretty safe. I was always okay with the subject. For me it was an opportunity to work with such brilliant material, a brilliant director and such an interesting, complex character, and it was a story that hadn't been told. It was a story that has never made it to screen."


Maybe that's what has sparked all the hubbub. "Brokeback Mountain" is that rarity in Hollywood: a story that has never been told. When co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry, who is also the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Lonesome Dove," first read Annie Proulx's gut-wrenching short story on which the film is based, he said he "felt a little frisson of 'why didn't I write this'? It's been there my whole life and Annie wrote it and I didn't." Fresh stories are like buried treasure in Hollywood, something we might discover in the wild mind of Charlie Kaufman, but rarely in a genre as firmly entrenched in its conventions as the Western. It's the kind of precious jewel that deserves Oscar talk, Internet hysterics, and a dose of conservative backlash just to whip up the box office numbers.


"I refuse to see portraying homosexual love as daring," said Anne Hathaway, the princess of tween flicks who plays Gyllenhaal's wife, who has her own take on the hype. "It's daring because it's very rare to find a Hollywood love story that's honest. That is daring."

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<![CDATA[Midlife crisis indeed: "Transamerica" and "Far Side of the Moon"]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/12/midlife-crisis-indeed-transame.php Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500 "Desperate Housewives" is a grand camp feat, a show about female archetypes as dreamed up by gay men that has won over a nation that's still supposedly hypersensitive about sexuality. And "Desperate Housewives" haunts "Transamerica" (for all that the show hadn't yet taken off when the film was being made) not the least because it's stars Housewife Felicity Huffman, but also because the film seems like the logical extension of the series — dropping the veil of surreal suburban narrative and skipping straight to a man in the last stages of attempting to reinvent himself as a woman.


Huffman's getting a lot of Oscar talk for her role as Bree (formerly Stanley), an L.A.-dwelling transsexual on the verge of doing away with the pre- in pre-op when contacted by the teenage son she didn't know she fathered in a long-ago hetero relationship, and she deserves it — plastering her long face with slightly off-color foundation, draped in catalogue scarves and pink suits, extremely self-conscious in all her movements, she's spookily convincing. Toby (played by Kevin Zegers, of, disturbingly, the "Air Bud" films) turns out to be a runaway living as a drug-addicted hustler in New York. Through several plot machinations, the two end up on a cross-country road trip — Toby believing that Bree's a woman and a missionary, Bree being forced to get to know her son after she finds she can't foist him off on his stepfather. The expected hijinks, bonding, and misunderstandings ensue.


"Transamerica" is saved from typical indie cuteness by an undercurrent of tartness that balances out most of the sappier scenes, and by Huffman's astonishing ability to add complexity to a character that was written as a pat Sundance cutout. Her Bree is selfish, wounded, and defensive — she's managed to seal herself off from everyone other than her therapist, putting her life on hold with the idea that after the surgery, it will start anew. Huffman sails above scenes in which she's forced to visit her eccentric-unbearable family, or ones in which she's wooed by a deus-ex-romantic interest, both by the numbers bits you'd expect from just knowing what the film is about. It's all worthwhile for the moment in which she's finally won Toby over, and he attempts to pay her back the only way he knows how — it's uncomfortable, heartbreaking and bitingly alive.


On the other end of being forced out of one's mire of middle-age solitude is Quebecer Robert Lepage's "The Far Side of the Moon," a cool-to-the-touch adaptation of Lepage's one-man show of the same name. A visually inventive exploration of the life of Philippe (Lepage), a lonely dreamer attempting to reconnect with his brother (also played by Lepage) after the death of their mother, the film opens with a rather beautiful montage about the Soviet space program and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of it's leading scientists, who once predicted that "one day, man would walk and live in weightlessness on the moon, the ideal refuge, he said, for those who find life heavy." The exploration of space becomes one of the film's lingering metaphors, and the definitive indicator of its theatrical roots (beyond the abundance of scenes in which a character is plopped in front of a busy background he or she doesn't interact with, simply for variety) — what flows on stage can seem tedious on screen. Still, the film, which moves at a languid pace, does build momentum, making its way to a melancholy, lovely peak, a paean to urban isolation as well as the inherent aloneness of existence.


"Transamerica" opens in New York and LA December 2. "The Far Side of the Moon" opens in New York.

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<![CDATA[Happy & Not-So Happy Hookers]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/05/hot-bothered-happy-notso-happy.php Tue, 10 May 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer
IFC News


Movies about prostitutes might not be as old as the profession itself, but there are an awful lot of them. The films range from silly (“The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”) to fairy tale (“Pretty Woman”) to depressing (“Vivre Sa Vie”), with the lovely ladies of the night portrayed as angelic and sad (“Leaving Las Vegas”), classy and sassy (“Mona Lisa”), or bitter and brash (“Whore”)-—sometimes to the point of going snap (“Monster”).


Coming soon are four great hooker flicks. On May 14-15, IFC hosts “IFZ Weekend,” airing films that were launched on the Z Channel to accompany Xan Cassavetes’ doc about the groundbreaking cable network. One of many highlights is Robert Altman’s beautifully melancholy anti-Western, “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” in which Julie Christie plays the opium-addicted Madame who Warren Beatty loves. In re-release at the Film Forum in New York from May 18-26 is Federico Fellini’s Neorealist masterpiece “Nights of Cabiria,” starring the filmmaker’s wife and muse Giulietta Masina as a heartbreakingly hopeful streetwalker in Rome. Coming to theaters on June 1, Israeli director Keren Yedaya’s wrenching “Or” focuses on a teenage girl’s relentless determination to keep her mother off the streets. July brings us Sundance winner “Hustle and Flow,” about a pimp who dumps his day job to become a hip-hop singer. Jump on the bandwagon and throw a happy hooker festival at home. Here are some of the best:


“What Have I Done to Deserve This?”
Hookers abound in the ingenious oeuvre of Pedro Almodovar, most notably “All About My Mother” and this early satire, which remains one of his most perverse and delicious. Carmen Maura plays a mom dealing with the most hilariously dysfunctional family ever. The only sane person around is the whore next door.


“Lilya 4-ever”
Steel yourself, perhaps with a stiff drink (or the whole bottle) before hitting Play. In one of the most devastating movies of all times, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson tells the story of a Russian 16-year-old who is abandoned by her mother and seduced by a charming young man who promises to start a new life with her in Sweden.


“Mamma Roma”
Starring the incomparable Anna Magnani as a woman struggling to create a better life for her teenage son, this breathtaking film by Pier Paolo Pasolini combines religious imagery with gritty realism to create a work as heartbreaking as it is transcendent.


“Belle de Jour”
Walking the blurred line between fantasy and reality, Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s compelling work stars Catherine Deneuve as a sexually repressed housewife, who spends her afternoons acting out her kinky fantasies with strangers in a high-end brothel.


“Arthur”
I include this comedy, which stars Dudley Moore as a rich playboy who falls in love with a waitress, not so much because it’s about prostitution, but because I’d like to see it again and think you should, too. And one of its high points is a sweet, funny, and uncommonly apolitical scene with a hooker.

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<![CDATA[Tribeca 2005: Best of the Fest]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/05/tribeca-best-of-the-fest.php Mon, 02 May 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer/IFC News

There were too many movies at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 12 days, it was impossible to scratch the surface of the 250-film program. I did not get to see Most Anticipated Film, Wong Kar-Wai’s “2046,” for example, or a load of others that reliable sources have called worthwhile, such as Sally Potter’s “Yes,” Chilean director Alicia Scherson’s “Play”(the winner of an award for Best New Narrative Filmmaker) and Craig Chester’s “Adam & Steve," as well as docs “Slippin’--Ten Years with the Bloods,” “After Innocence,” “Czech Dream,” “The Power of Nightmares,” and “How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It).” Besides Sundance faves like “Mysterious Skin” and higher profile upcoming releases like “Layer Cake,” here's the best of what I saw at Tribeca:


“Beautiful Country”: Hans Petter Moland directs this lyrical story of a Vietnamese man (Damien Nguyen) who travels to the U.S. to find his American GI father (Nick Nolte). The early segment in Vietnam is a perfect, self-contained unit that weaves the breathtaking details of the country into a portrait of the cruelty inflicted on the children of American soldiers there. The more chaotic, potentially sentimental American portion is also treated with commendable restraint. (In theaters July 8)


“Mad Hot Ballroom”: It’s hard to go wrong with cute kids and a competition. Think “Spellbound” with prepubescents wrapping their arms around each other to dance the merengue, the rumba and the foxtrot. The best kind of feel-good flick, this one had audiences bopping and cheering in their seats. (In theaters May 13)


“The Beat That My Heart Skipped”: In French director Jacques Audiard’s (“Read My Lips”) reworking of James Toback’s thriller “Fingers,” Romain Duris is Tom, a petty crook preparing for an audition to become a concert pianist. Two disparate worlds collide as Tom taps into a passion strong enough to fuel a complete transformation.


“Great New Wonderful”: A disclaimer: I don’t think this movie is one of Tribeca’s best just because my boyfriend shot it. Danny Leiner’s ensemble drama about people surviving in a world made scary and precarious by September 11 is one of Tribeca’s best because it is compassionate, sharp and absolutely riveting, while never taking itself or its subject matter too seriously. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Olympia Dukakis and Tony Shaloub star.


“The F Word”: In 1969, the great cinematographer and sometime filmmaker Haskell Wexler made “Medium Cool, a film that wove fictional and documentary elements together in the story of a fictional film crew covering the real Democratic National Convention. Jeb Weintrob takes on the same task here, with Josh Hamilton as a radio reporter who hits the NYC streets on the day of the 2004 Republican Convention. The film would have been more effective if it had been released on the heels of the convention. It would have felt more relevant if it had at least ridden the political-doc wave that hit just prior to the election. But even now, it packs a punch, especially if you’re a lefty who gets off on basic civil liberties and people willing to fight for them.

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<![CDATA[The New Doc Crop: Surveying the Standouts at Three April Fests]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/04/the-new-doc-crop-surveying-the.php Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Jonny Leahan/indieWIRE


When it comes to documentary film festivals, April has evolved into a key month, featuring some important festivals around the globe, among them the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in the United States, Hot Docs in Canada, and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in Greece. Since its launch in 1998, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has been one of these, and seems to outdo itself every year. Centered around the historic Carolina Theater in Durham, North Carolina, the festival is removed enough from the big cities to allow for a laser focus on non-fiction filmmaking, while still providing enough culture and youthful energy to make for a truly enjoyable time.


With 55 features in competition at Full Frame, in its relatively short April 7-10 run (kicking off tonight), it's hard to say what audiences are looking forward to most, but there are a handful of world premieres that seem to have a heightened buzz surrounding them. Among these is Dani Menkin's "39 Pounds of Love," which follows the fascinating life of Ami, a man born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy that caused his doctor to predict he wouldn't live past the age of six. Now 34 years old, and weighing only 39 pounds, Ami has stunned everyone by surviving, even though he can't move any part of his body — except for one finger. What starts out as an attempt to document his extraordinary life as a 3D animator in Israel becomes a quest to track down and confront the American doctor who predicted his early demise.


Another highly anticipated debut at Full Frame is Holly Paige Joyner's "Pack Strap Swallow," which enters the tragic world of the women's prison in Quito, Ecuador. Many of the inmates are there because they were caught smuggling drugs, either by packing them, strapping them to their bodies, or swallowing them. There are even European and American women, some who got involved in crimes unwittingly, who tell of their struggle to survive behind bars for years in this real life version of "Midnight Express." The film's U.S. pay TV rights were recently acquired by Sundance Channel.


In another kind of struggle entirely, Marshall Curry's "Street Fight" documents a heated political battle in Newark, New Jersey. In 2001, City Councilman Cory Booker challenged incumbent Mayor Sharpe James for leadership of one of Jersey's toughest cities. "Street Fight" follows the contentious race from start to finish, exposing the complicated connections between identity politics and electoral politics in modern American life. This flat-out barroom brawl of a race is the perfect microcosm for campaigns at the highest level, exposing just how dirty politics can get.


Also wrapping up April 10 is the ten-day Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, which is considered Greece's top event of its kind. In its 7th year, the festival is again focusing on "Images of the 21st Century," featuring 125 films in over a dozen special sections. Standouts include Austrian Director Hubert Sauper's "Darwin's Nightmare" and Bulgarian Director Andrey Paounov's "Georgi and the Butterflies."


In "Darwin's Nightmare," a strange 1960s Africa is revealed, where a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria during a scientific experiment. The predatory Nile Perch destroyed nearly all the indigenous species of fish, but the new fish reproduced so quickly that it's sold in seafood markets around the world to this day. The huge industry that has built up around it has become tangled in arms sales, and the area has mutated into a bizarre culture of World Bank agents, homeless children, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.


Perhaps equally as strange is "Georgi and the Butterflies," which recounts the story of Dr. Georgi Lulchev, a man with a singular vision. The good doctor is not only a psychiatrist and neurologist, but also the Director of the Home for Psychologically Challenged Men. His dream is to create a farm on the grounds of the compound where patients can raise things like ostriches, snails, and soybeans. In a country where 80 percent of the people are poor, Georgi tries all manner of methods to raise funds for his projects, and even in the face of failure he's unrelentingly enthusiastic.


Later this month, the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival takes Toronto by storm for its 12th year, running April 22 - May 1. Many of the 100+ films featured in the festival are world premieres, and although there isn't space to cover all the gems here, a small selection of the more anticipated docs include "The Cross and Bones," "Homemade Hillbilly Jam," and "Malfunkshun."


In "The Cross and Bones," Canadian director Paul Carrière explores the origin of life as seen by the residents of Drumheller, Alberta, home to the richest dinosaur graveyard in the world. The bones buried here prove that dinosaurs roamed the area millions of years ago, but a group of local Christians aren't buying that theory. As hometown pastor and real estate agent D'Arcy Browning puts on an elaborate Passion Play (including lepers), paleontologist Paul Johnson dismisses them as he continues to unearth evidence of evolution. In the middle of it all, a gang of bikers rolls into town to party for the weekend, adding a third ring to this already absurd circus.


In another curious look at rural life, this time in the Ozarks, director Rick Minnich ("Heaven on Earth") explores the lives of mountain musicians in "Homemade Hillbilly Jam." Focusing on the Bilyeu family, the film follows a brother, his sister and their cousins as they form the band Big Smith. Armed with only a guitar, a mandolin, a bass fiddle and a washboard, they create music true to their roots while bringing the house down around them. As their music evolves, so does their audience, but they never forsake their hillbilly DNA on this rich journey through a cultural legacy.


In another highly anticipated music documentary, Scot Barbour's "Malfunkshun" serves as a love letter to obscure musician Andrew Wood. As the charismatic lead singer of Mother Love Bone, Wood was a huge influence on the Seattle music scene, but died of an overdose in 1990, just before the band's debut album was to be released. Band members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament went on to form Pearl Jam, but Barbour makes sure that Wood's story is not forgotten — told here with captivating home movies, unreleased songs, and heartfelt interviews with family and friends.

Copyright 2005 indieWIRE.

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<![CDATA[Zombies, Strippers, Senseless Violence Headline This Week's B-Movie Fest]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/04/zombies-strippers-senseless-vi.php Thu, 07 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael P. Scasserra
IFC News


Looking for something cheap, entertaining and a little sleazy to do this week? (Who isn’t?) Then consider heading to Syracuse, New York, for the 2005 B-Movie Theater Festival, opening April 8 and running through April 14. This celebration of B-movies from around the globe promises a full week of zombies, aliens, gender confusion, strippers, drug addiction, senseless violence, teen angst, and rock and roll.


Among the titles screening at the fest: "Land of College Prophets," a thriller about a possessed wishing well, described as "'Batman' meets 'Pi' meets 'Wonder Boys'"; "Ghoul," a horror flick about a dead teen brought back to life by his grieving father, purportedly shot in eleven hours with a budget of $72; and "Inbred Rednecks," a cock-fighting comedy that screens in tandem with a "Dress as Your Favorite Inbred Redneck" contest. Other titles include "Teenage Bikini Vampires," "Saloonatics," and "Mari-Cookie vs. the Killer Tarantula," as well as retrospective screenings of "Reefer Madness" and the 1952 "Red Scare" oddity "Invasion USA," in which folks gather at a local bar to watch in terror as America is attacked by archival military footage.


Our personal favorite: "Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love," a delicious, post-feminist feature about a wallflower nurse who gets injected by a backwoods zombie, then transforms into a sexy but decomposing siren with a taste for human flesh. Shot in luscious 35mm black-and-white, sans sync sound, for about $50,000, writer-director Elza Kephart originally intended this to be a silent movie — then changed her mind. With the entire soundtrack done in post, the result is something like a long-lost horror flick from 1963 — and one of those rare occasions when B-movie aesthetics have been honed to perfection. When it played at Slamdance, "Graveyard" took home the cinematography award and earned more than a few rave reviews, including one in Variety that compared Kephart to George Romero, Sam Raimi, and her very arty fellow Canadian, Guy Maddin.


"I don’t see 'B-movie' as a derogatory term," says Kephart, who found inspiration in Romero's original "Night of the Living Dead" and in the sublimely creepy "Carnival of Souls." "B-movies aren't necessarily bad — they're just cheaply made and often have weird, quirky elements. To me, it just means that you don't have a lot of money and you don't have any stars. That's the actual origin of the term. Since we didn't have much money, I figured that if we modeled something after a B-movie, we couldn't fail."


So now that she's conquered the cult crowd, does Kephart plan to stay in a B-movie state of mind? "Yes," says the filmmaker, currently at work on three more horror scripts. "Not because I plan to do kitsch — but because I still don't have much money."


For more on the 2005 B-Movie Theater Festival: www.b-movie.com/hof/specifics.html


For more on Graveyard Alive: www.bastardamber.com

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<![CDATA["Millions": Danny Boyle Takes On Children, Globalism]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/03/millions-danny-boyle-takes-on.php Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500 For the record, Danny Boyle's theatrical gambits include a claustrophobic Hitchcockian thriller, a kinetic drug diary, an overblown fantastical romantic comedy, an uneven mainstream drama, and a postmodern zombie flick. This is not touching on the two broad comedies he made in his post-"Beach" lull, neither of which made it to US theaters, nor his semi-short film "Alien Love Triangle," which was supposed to be released as part of a horror anthology film, but which has now been attached to a presumably solo release date in September. So Boyle's latest genre-hop into the head of a dreamy, saint-obsessed seven-year-old boy isn't completely off the map.


These days, in fact, making a children's movie seems to be the hippest thing an edgy director can do. Alfonso Cuarón's output alternates between sex comedies and visionary adventures for the juvenile and juvenile at heart ("Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" being inarguably the best of the three Potter films so far). Wes Anderson is finally skipping the nostalgia for childhood and taking it head-on with a stop-motion animation version of Roald Dahl's "The Fantastic Mr. Fox." Jon Favreau, whose "Swingers" and later "Made" defined a type of late-twenties L.A. life, is wrapping up "Zathura," a retro space escapade based on a Chris Van Allsburg picture book. And Spike Jonze, prince of the bright young things, is adapting Maurice Sendak's classic "Where the Wild Things Are."


This being said, "Millions" is an odd bird, somewhere in between a film meant for children and a film about being one. In a recent New York Times article about the New York International Children's Film Festival (where "Millions" made its US premiere), Boyle was quoted as saying that though "Millions" wasn't conceived as a children's film "it's very much told from the kids' perspective, and that's why it deserves to be in [the] festival." The film's protagonist, Damian (newcomer Alex Etel, selected from a nationwide search), is a wide-eyed boy who just moved to a new house in the Midland suburbs with his father and slightly older brother. The boys' mother died not too long ago, and there's an underlying current of trauma that cuts through some of the coyness of Damian's magical realism-style visions of the Catholic saints. The new house, which, it's implied, is a bit out of their harried father's (played by James Nesbitt) price range, represents a fresh start for the family. The new development they live in is a smugly cookie-cutter suburban settlement that could be anywhere in the world, with identical houses lining lamp-lit streets, neat lawns, and a trio of blond Mormon boys just down the road.


Damian's brother Anthony is a typically, even exaggeratedly materialistic tween, taking easily to the family's plusher accommodations and new school. Damian, on the other hand, immediately isolates himself from his peers (and his bewildered teacher) by cataloging some of the more grisly deaths of the saints whose lives he's memorized, and ends up playing by himself by the railroad tracks in a fort he constructs out of moving boxes. It's in this self-made refuge that he imagines conversations with amusingly earthy versions of the saints who provide him with advice, and it's into the refuge that a massive duffle bag of money literally crashes.


The arrival of the money creakily puts the plot in motion, and suddenly the dreamlike world we've been seeing through Damian's eyes, of brilliant green fields of grass and eerie still suburban streets is lost to bustling trips to the shopping center and Anthony's taking charge of what Damian does. Whether this is intentional or not, the shift of gears is jarring. The money, which Damian assumes is from God, as it appeared to drop from the sky, is actually loot from a daring train robbery, the details of which are recounted in a Guy Ritchie-esque montage in the middle of the film. The robber, looking for his cash, starts lurking around the boys, and, as it turns out, England is finally giving up the pound for the euro, which gives the pair only a few days to spend the cash before it's rendered useless in the transition.


In the face of all of these contrivances, Damian only wants to do good, but he finds it notably difficult in the sheltered suburb in which he lives. In search of poor people to buy food for, he finds a group of grubby activists who are only too happy to invite more and more friends to dine out on his tab. He stuffs the Mormons' mailbox with cash, and they go out and splurge on electronics. Everyone who touches the money becomes cartoonishly infected with greed and pettiness, including the boys' father and a charity worker who visits the school and is drawn to the family.


By simplifying the message of the film to a rather didactic anti-materialism in the end, "Millions" is certain to frustrate most adults while probably not being enough to hold the attention of the average child. For a while, the film effectively puts us in the almost otherworldly grip of childhood. To then plunge us into a downtown filled with shoppers frenzied with Christmas approaching and the currency changeover has all the subtlety of an anvil dropping, and makes the actions and motivations of the angelic, snub-nosed, befreckled Damian unbelievable as those of a real boy. Which we hope wasn't the point.


"Millions" is currently in limited release. For more information about the film, visit the official site.

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<![CDATA[The Coolest Film You Never Saw Blasts onto DVD]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/03/the-coolest-film-you-never-saw.php Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Michael Scasserra/IFC News

Way back in 2001, we started reading about a hot indie title that sounded right up our alley: a science-fiction-western-musical stuffed with ingenious, low-budget set design, clever low-tech special effects, and lots of alternative rock. The New York Times called "The American Astronaut": "a tale that evokes Brecht, Beckett and Ed Wood." Details described it as: "'Star Wars' mud-wrestling 'Flash Gordon'—with Frank N. Furter officiating." Entertainment Weekly summed it up as: "a Laurel & Hardy skit directed by Salvador Dali." All that, plus a flinty, black-and-white look that evoked the cheapest expressionistic sci-fi flicks of yesteryear.


We couldn't wait to see it when it opened in New York in September 2001. Then 9/11 happened, and no one was going to the movies (not even us), so "Astronaut" fell back to Earth with a thud. But now, at last, this one-of-a-kind indie is available on DVD and all is right in the galaxy. (Stop whatever you're doing and put it in your Netflix/Greencine queue.)


Written and directed by Cory McAbee—an alt rocker who also happens to be one heck of good leading man—"Astronaut" follows the adventures of Samuel Curtis (McAbee), an intergalactic trader on a Homeric journey through a remote solar system. His mission: to supply the all-female population of Venus with a suitable single male. Along the way, his dirty job brings him into contact with a variety of bizarre outer-space derelicts, as well as an enigmatic, murderous professor with a score to settle.


"Astronaut" was developed and premiered at Sundance, then played some other prestigious festivals, including the big ones in Toronto and Moscow. The movie also earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for its outrageously inventive cinematography by W. Mott Hupfel III (whose hip factor continues to rise with his latest project, Mary Harron's "The Ballad of Bettie Page"). Since then, McAbee's arty B-movie has been an audience favorite and an award winner at dozens of smaller festivals around the country. We were finally able to catch up with it last year at the Southside Film Festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—and we've been a believer ever since.


Astronaut features supporting performances by Rocco Sisto ("The Sopranos"), Broadway regular Annie Golden (formerly of New Wave band The Shirts), PJ Ransone ("The Wire"), and seasoned stage veteran Tom Aldredge—along with an ass-kicking original score written and performed by The Billy Nayer Show, the cult band that McAbee fronts as lead singer and songwriter. The recent DVD release of "Astronaut" dovetails with the release of the group's latest CD, "Rabbit."


Meanwhile, now that "Astronaut" is finally in full orbit, McAbee is hard at work on the storyboard for what he hopes will be his next big-screen venture, "Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest." Let's hope that one happens—and soon.


In the meantime, to find out more about "The American Astronaut," check out www.americanastronaut.com.

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<![CDATA[2005 Indie Spirit Awards: The Most Famous People in One Tent]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/02/indie-spirit-awards-the-most-f.php Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer/IFC News


On a day when many Hollywood hotshots snuck in one last mani-pedi or decided whether to go with the Prada or vintage Valentino, the independent film community gathered under a tent on the beach in Santa Monica for the 20th annual Independent Spirit Awards, hosted by the Independent Feature Project. On February 26, just one day before Oscar Sunday, Samuel L. Jackson took to the stage to oversee the festivities—and "Sideways" swept, winning all six awards for which the wine-drenched dramatic comedy was nominated.


Jackson joked about the progression of the event that used to be held in a restaurant. "We've only moved from a bad restaurant to a tent on the beach. My dream is that twenty years from now the Independent Spirit Awards will be held in an actual building," he said. "Looking back, it seems that the only thing that hasn't changed is Jim Jarmusch's hair."


Clad in more casual attire than at that other awards show, presenters like Kevin Bacon (nominated for best male performance in "The Woodsman" and wearing jeans) and Marisa Tomei (in the miniest of minidresses) handed out awards to the likes of Thomas Hayden Church, who won the first of "Sideways"' many honors, for best supporting actor. "It's an honor to be recognized by the independent film community," Church said, "because I gave my heart and soul to some small un-releasable films in the past and I want to thank Alex [Payne] for giving me another shot."


When Paul Giamatti accepted his statue for best male lead, an honor many feel the actor was robbed of by the Academy, he said, "I'm really neither spirited or particularly independent, but it is awfully nice to be surrounded by folks who are." "Sideways," which presenter Robin Williams called "the way the country's going," also took home winged statues for best feature, best director, best screenplay, and best supporting actress for Virginia Madsen.


The award for best documentary went to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky for "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster." At the podium, Berlinger said, "We're so used to being on the loser list. This is really cool."


Accepting the award for best foreign film, "The Sea Inside" director Alejandro Amenabar said, "I share this award with Javier Bardem, who said this is the best award of all, and he's right."


Zach Braff's "Garden State" won the award for best first feature. Upon accepting the prize, the writer/director/star said, "All I ever wanted to do was make movies when I was a kid, so I guess this means I get to make more."


Rodrigo de la Serna, who won the award for best debut performance for "The Motorcycle Diaries" was not there, giving audiences the opportunity to see his costar Gael Garcia Bernal onstage once again. The film also won the award for best cinematography. Director of photography Eric Gautier was not there either, so director Walter Salles accepted on his behalf.


There were three special grants of $20,000 awarded by event sponsors, including the Bravo/American Express Producers Award, which was awarded to Gina Kwon, producer of Miranda July's Sundance favorite, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," and the Direct TV/IFC Truer than Fiction Award, which was awarded to Zana Briski and Ross Kaufman for "Born into Brothels."


When accepting the $20,000 Turning Leaf Someone to Watch Award, "Chain" director Jem Cohen recounted a recent incident when he was filming the passing landscape from a train and the authorities confiscated his film. "I've been shooting landscapes from trains for as long as I've been making films. Documenting the world we live in is the very basis of my life of a filmmaker," he said. "I think to be silent about such incidents, to pretend that they aren't happening is disrespectful to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and to the independent spirit itself."


Joshua Marston's "Maria Full of Grace" went home with best first screenplay and best female lead for Catalina Sandino Moreno. The John Cassavetes award went to Jacob Aaron Estes, a film that also won a special award for its ensemble cast. The entire group of young actors, including Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan ,Josh Peck, and Carly Schroeder were there to accept. Peck spoke for the group when he said, "This is definitely the most famous people I've ever seen in one tent." He went on to thank the other cast members, the director, and all of their moms.


The Independent Spirit Awards are being rebroadcast on IFC throughout the week—a list of air times can be found here. This year, it seemed like the Oscars were trying to be more like the Independent Spirit Awards than the other way round—the New York Times lauded the freewheeling Indie Spirits here, while the LA Daily News talks to IFC's own Evan Shapiro about how to hold an awards show people actually want to watch.


COMPLETE LIST OF WINNERS:


BEST FEATURE (Award given to the Producer):

"Sideways," Producer: Michael London


BEST DIRECTOR:

Alexander Payne, "Sideways"


BEST SCREENPLAY:

"Sideways," Writers: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor


BEST FIRST FEATURE:

"Garden State," Director: Zach Braff
Producers: Pamela Abdy, Gary Gilbert, Dan Halsted, and Richard Klubeck


BEST FIRST SCREENPLAY:

"Maria Full of Grace," Writer: Joshua Marston


JOHN CASSAVETES AWARD (Given to the best feature made for $500,000):

"Mean Creek," Writer/Director: Jacob Aaron Estes
Producers: Susan Johnson, Rick Rosenthal, Hagai Shaham


BEST DEBUT PERFORMANCE (Actors in their first significant role in a feature film):

Rodrigo de la Serna, "The Motorcycle Diaries"


BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE:

Virginia Madsen, "Sideways"


BEST SUPPORTING MALE:

Thomas Haden Church, "Sideways"


BEST FEMALE LEAD:

Catalina Sandino Moreno, "Maria Full of Grace"


BEST MALE LEAD

Paul Giamatti, "Sideways"


BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY:

"The Motorcycle Diaries," Eric Gautier


BEST FOREIGN FILM (Award given to the Director):

"The Sea Inside" (Spain) Director: Alejandro Amenábar


BEST DOCUMENTARY (Award given to the Director):

"Metallica: Some Kind of Monster," Directors: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky


SPECIAL DISTINCTION:

Ensemble Cast: "Mean Creek"
Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan, Josh Pec, Carly Schroeder


Turning Leaf Someone to Watch Award:

Jem Cohen , director of "Chain"


DIRECTV/IFC Truer Than Fiction Award:
Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman for "Born Into Brothels"


Bravo/American Express Producers Award:

Gina Kwon, producer of "The Good Girl" and "Me and You and Everyone We Know"

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<![CDATA[Getting It On At Sundance]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/02/hot-bothered-getting-it-on-at.php Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Andrea Meyer/IFC News

There's been a lot of talk about the graphic sex at Sundance. Filmmaking dynamo Michael Winterbottom tried his hand at art-house porn, getting his actors to really do the deed in his explicit relationship saga "9 Songs." Doc darlings Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato got inside the most notorious and profitable X-rated flick of all time with "Inside Deep Throat." Festival audiences fled theaters as comedian after comedian told the dirtiest joke ever in "The Aristocrats." A hot older woman—oh my God, she’s 32—does little besides bang her 19-year-old boytoy in the raunchy Korean romance "Green Chair."

What I noticed about Sundance 2005, though—besides the criminal non-existence of swag for non-celebrities, not even a Sony baseball cap or Palm Pictures tote in sight—was the sex, sex, sex that was gushing (or occasionally just hovering around the edge of the frame) in this year's teenager flicks. These movies were all about tasting it, craving it, using it to get what you want and, especially, losing it.

In Rebecca Miller’s lyrical dad-and-daughter love story "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," the titular teenage girl (Camilla Belle) is so pissed at her dad (Daniel Day-Lewis) for inviting his girlfriend and her sons to move in, she convinces one of her reluctant stepbrothers to deflower her—and hangs her bloody sheets in the yard as evidence. Troublemaking slut Maggie Gyllenhaal snags a young lad's virginity in "Happy Endings," though said lad is not so supportive: The only benefit he sees in the unpleasant turn of events is his dad might not realize he's gay.


In Noah Baumbach's award-winning (best screenplay and best director) "The Squid and the Whale," two Brooklyn boys have different ways of coping with their parents' divorce: 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) starts drinking booze and wiping his ejaculate on books in the school library. His 16-year-old brother (Jesse Eisenberg), on the other hand, tries to play tough and detached with his first girlfriend, a difficult task while suffering the humiliation of coming in six seconds and being told he uses too much tongue when they kiss.

If Baumbach's scenarios are disturbingly familiar, Miranda July, winner of a special jury prize for originality, uncovers the offbeat in everyday lives in "Me and You and Everyone We Know," in which sons deal with their parents’ divorce. 14-year-old Peter is a willing judge in the neighborhood girls' blowjob-giving contest, and 7-year-old Robby gets involved in the funniest cybersex ever committed to celluloid.

While sexual firsts can make for great, comic, cringe-worthy entertainment, there are also unsavory and much more serious possibilities. In Gregg Araki’s haunting "Mysterious Skin," two boys are sexually abused by their baseball coach. Both flailing to make sense of the experience later in life, one (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) becomes a hustler while the other (Brady Corbet) convinces himself he was abducted by aliens. In order to make sure nothing similar happens to her, the teenage bombshell (Ellen Page) in David Slade's midnight movie "Hard Candy" orchestrates a sinister revenge plot for the older man she encounters on the Internet.

Even when early sexuality seems sweet, nothing is simple in adolescence. Lou Pucci is astounded when his beautiful girlfriend announces she's only using him in Mike Mills' smart coming-of-age tale "Thumbsucker." A precocious blonde's sexual sophistication provokes lust, awe and rage in the boys of a southern France town—to horrific results—in Ziad Doueiri's "Lila Says." In "Pretty Persuasion," a satire in which three high school girls accuse their teacher of sexual harassment, nobody is innocent. Ringleader Kimberly (Evan Rachel Wood) uses her sexuality—and her oral sex skills—to manipulate and deceive everyone around her.

While not a movie about teenagers, it seems wrong to leave "Murderball" out of a roundup of sexual firsts. Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's film enters the real lives of guys who have been sexually active for a while, but have had to learn how to make love all over again. One of the funniest sequences in this documentary about quadriplegic rugby is where the athletes—manly men who have limited use of all four of their limbs—discuss the wonderful world of quadriplegic sex: the hard-ons they still proudly get, the early awkwardness and experimentation, the positions that work the best, the women that love them (and want them and boink their brains out) all in spite of their disabilities. Suburban teens could learn a lot from the brave, confident, sexy young men in this film.

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<![CDATA[Highlights from Another Hot Fest: Sarasota]]> http://www.ifc.com/news/2005/02/highlights-from-another-hot-fe.php Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500 By Lily Oei/IFC News

Seven years in, the Sarasota Film Festival, which ran from January 28 through February 6, proves that even a regional festival will have something to help you scratch any cinematic itch.


The fest is still establishing itself among industryites (although
several made the trip directly from Park City), but already has the
complete devotion of local townfolk, particularly at the many gala
functions (really, these kids like to dress up). Here are some highlights from the week:


"Mirrormask"

"Sandman" and fantasy geeks rejoice. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean continue their 20-year partnership with their first feature effort. In it, a rebellious teen makes a wish and gets exactly what she asks for—to
her dismay. Think "Alice in Wonderland" meets "Time Bandits" on an
upside down street in a parallel universe, with special f/x courtesy of
the wizards at Henson.


"Murderball"

Winner of the audience documentary prize at Sundance, this film is a look at the competitive world of quadriplegic rugby, aka the eponymous murderball. While "Murderball" is pegged around the international rivalry between Canadian coach Joe Soares and U.S. captain Mark Zupan, the documentary also delves into the individual lives of players, laying out their stories without being
even a touch treacly. Based on co-director Dana Adam Shapiro's magazine
story back in 2002, it's proof that something good can come from a Maxim
article.


"Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story"

A mockumentary by Brant Sersen featuring the Daily Show's Rob Corddry
and a number of other familiar comic faces. It's a classic story of redemption—caught cheating and banned from the sport, former paintball great Bobby Dukes returns to the sport to reclaim his reputation. About
90 percent of the script was improvised, but it never feels like it. As they say in
the movie, you'll come out feeling "bobbicized" and "dukealated."


"Ong-Bak"

A good old-fashioned chop-socky from Thailand, complete with a "high
speed" race in tuk tuks and a chase scene that not only includes the
perquisite sheets of glass to slow down the titular hero, but also
boiling oil and a wreath of barbed wire. The film stars the unflappable
Tony Jaa, who does all his own stunts without the help of wires. But don't just take my word for it, Wu Tang Clan member Rza has also thrown his weight behind the film.


New Music

The local Florida West Coast Symphony always gets involved with the
festival, but for the more progressive, this year's schedule included
the Independent Visions concert series. On the slate, Boulder's
Devotchka with its Eastern bloc-mariachi rock, a solo-ing Bob Mould, and
the always rousing Ted Leo + the Pharmacists. Whether it was faulty
promotion or shyness on the part of the natives, the Mould and Ted Leo
shows were undersold—probably the only time you'll experience such
intimacy at any of their performances.

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