Written by Alison Willmore, the all-seeing Indie Eye blog reads the news so you don't have to. (Well, maybe just the A & E section).
Alison Willmore
is the editor of IFC.com's film coverage and one of the site's video hosts. Follow her at twitter.com/indie_eye
Email: ifcblog (at) ifc dot com
Festivals
"Drag Me To Hell."
By Alison Willmore on 05/28/2009
Filed under: Festivals
By the B-movie ethics of Sam Raimi's "Drag Me To Hell," the torments inflicted on poor Christine Brown are grossly (and grossly) unfair and yet, there's no denying it, also at least a little bit deserved. Christine (Alison Lohman) is the bank loan officer who makes the fateful final call to kick a zestfully unlovable old lady out of her house for failing to keep up on mortgage payments, but she's really just the last dinky cog in the machine, the one put in the disagreeable position of being the human face on a corporate decision. Eyeing a promotion to... MORE »
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Cannes 2009: "Inglourious Basterds."
By Alison Willmore on 05/20/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Spoilers below. Quentin Tarantino's a great writer of dialogue, and no one's more convinced of the fact than Quentin Tarantino. The ratio of talk to action -- not gun fights or explosions, but just people doing stuff -- in "Inglourious Basterds" is, generously, nine to one. Again and again, characters sit down over drinks (whiskey, champagne, milk), and the stakes may be high, but the conversations are meandering and lengthy, and no matter how clever they may get, they end up defeated by their own pace and their writer's inability to let anything go. Even the opening scene, a confrontation... MORE »
Cannes 2009: "Vincere."
By Alison Willmore on 05/19/2009
Filed under: Festivals
If Giovanna Mezzogiorno wants to be Italy's answer to Angelina Jolie, "Vincere" is her "Changeling," and how unfortunate. "Vincere," directed by Marco Bellocchio, is the story of Ida Dalser, the first wife of Benito Mussolini and mother to his first son, Benito Albino Mussolini. By World War I, Mussolini had finished with her and married Rachele Guidi, resorting to a dictator-style divorce of Dalser by taking her child, dumping her in an insane asylum and having all records of their union effaced, save for the marriage certificate she hid, never to be found. Bellocchio does neither the character nor the... MORE »
Cannes 2009: "Kinatay."
By Alison Willmore on 05/18/2009
Filed under: Festivals
There are two easy types of film provocation. You can prod an audience with boundary-pushing images -- say, Chloe Sevigny painting Vincent Gallo's tree -- or by testing their tolerance for style or narrative experimentation -- say, Vincent Gallo driving, driving, driving, driving. "Kinatay" (which translates to "Butchered") tries out both, culminating in an act of gruesome violence after a patience-trying buildup of dread and boredom over a long, unlit nighttime car ride. The film's main character is a upbeat teenager who's just married the equally young mother of his baby. Short on cash, he's been dabbling in petty crime,... MORE »
Cannes 2009: "Vengeance."
By Alison Willmore on 05/17/2009
Filed under: Festivals
We're far enough away from the golden age of Hong Kong John Woo action excess that a little nostalgia is warranted, and Johnnie To's "Vengeance" is meant to fondly recall every operatic slow-mo shoot-em-up of the era, though until that sinks in, it just looks ungainly. Singer Johnny Hallyday, who's often shorthand summed-up as France's Elvis equivalent, plays Francois Costello, a Parisian restaurant owner with a dark past and real talent for wearing a Burberry trench coat with the collar popped. He comes to Macao to avenge his daughter (played by Sylvie Testud, who despite top billing has maybe five... MORE »
Cannes 2009: "Thirst."
By Alison Willmore on 05/16/2009
Filed under: Festivals
"Thirst," Park Chan-wook's plague-vampire-priest-black-comedy-gothic-family-drama-noir, has enough going on for at least an entire other movie, if not two. Its developments are impossible to predict, but that's because half are unnecessary -- by the time clergyman-turned-secular-bloodsucker Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) and his lover Tae-joo (Kim Ok-bin) are hiding a body in the closet before hosting their weekly mahjong game, I could barely remember how everything started (Sang-hyun volunteers to be part of an experiment to cure a virus killing celibate male missionaries in Africa, and is unknowingly given a transfusion of vampire plasma that staves off the sickness). The disinterest in the... MORE »
Cannes 2009: "Taking Woodstock."
By Alison Willmore on 05/15/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Some many questions for such a straightforward comedy! Why would the apparently grown-up Elliot spend himself broke supporting his parents' run-down Catskills resort in the first place? Why is his mother so crazy? What's up with the money hoarding? Where did the mafia end up? Did the town actually manage to do anything to fight the concert's arrival? "Taking Woodstock," which was directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay written by James Schamus, is based on the autobiography of Elliot Tiber, which explains some of this messiness -- real life rarely includes conveniently tied-up narrative ends. But when part of... MORE »
Cannes 2009: "Spring Fever."
By Alison Willmore on 05/15/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Lou Ye was banned from making films for five years by the Chinese government after "Summer Palace" screened at Cannes in 2006 without their approval. Which means it's some sort of act of defiance and bravery, sure, for him to have since then made "Spring Fever," which this year premieres in competition. But the film is pure soap opera under the scarcest sheen of something higher, a love pentagon set in neon-and-concrete Nanjing. Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao) is its central tragic gay, subject to various emotional and physical beatings, who when things begin is traveling with his married lover to... MORE »
Cannes 2009: "Up."
By Alison Willmore on 05/14/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Pixar's proven, again and again, a miraculous ability to spin cinematic gold out of almost perversely unlikely scenarios, but the beginning of "Up," the opening night film at this year's Cannes, is something else entirely. A boy, Carl, watches a newsreel in a '30s theater about larger-than-life adventurer Charles Muntz, and when making his way home, enraptured with his hero's exploits, he encounters Ellie, a gap-toothed girl who's taken over an abandoned house to play out her own Muntz-inspired imaginings. One minor mishap later, they're fast friends, and from there "Up" cuts to the two, quiet Carl and exuberant Ellie,... MORE »
Up on the roof.
By Alison Willmore on 05/08/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Rooftop Films has announced the first half of their ridiculously cool summer outdoor series -- their 13th, and always one of the best things about being in New York for the season. They're kicking off with a short film showcase on May 15th on the roof of the New Design High School. Among the features they have planned: Zachary Levy's doc "Strongman" on May 30th, Cory McAbee's musical-western space comedy "Stingray Sam" on June 6th, Ben Steinbauer's Sarasota prize-winner "Winnebago Man " and Lynn Shelton's "Humpday." You can find the full line-up so far here.... MORE »
The folks flock to "City Island."
By Alison Willmore on 05/04/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Raymond De Felitta's "City Island," a comedy starring Andy Garcia set in the little-known New York neighborhood of its title, turned out to tbe the crowd favorite at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, winning the Heineken Audience Award. Marshall Curry's "Racing Dreams" and mockumentary "Midgets Vs. Mascots" were the runners-up. "Racing Dreams" was already lauded with a jury prize for Best Documentary -- the rest of the awards, which were announced on Thursday, are listed below. World Narrative Competition Best Narrative Feature: "About Elly" Best New Narrative Filmmaker: Rune Denstad Langlo for "North" Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film:... MORE »
Tribeca 2009: "My Last Five Girlfriends."
By Alison Willmore on 04/26/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Julian Kemp's "My Last Five Girlfriends" is less romance than ode to heartbreak -- the London-based comedy starts off with a suicide attempt by Duncan (Brendan Patricks), whose will to live has been shattered by the brutal end of his most recent relationship. The story then cycles back to the beginning of the trail of doomed romances, introducing us to Wendy (Kelly Adams) -- wasn't over her ex; Olive (Jane March) -- impenetrable; Rhona (Cécile Cassel) -- moody and just not the right fit; Natalie (Edith Bukovics) -- co-dependent; and Gemma (Naomie Harris), who he loved the most and who... MORE »
Tribeca 2009: "The Exploding Girl."
By Alison Willmore on 04/25/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Named after the B-side to The Cure's "In Between Days" -- the tune that provided the title to director Bradley Rust Gray's wife and filmmaking partner So Yong Kim's 2006 debut -- "The Exploding Girl" is a similarly moody slow-motion maybe love story between a young woman and the male best friend she's begun to reconsider in a romantic light. While Kim's film mixed its adolescent angst with the isolation of the newly immigrated, Gray's is set in more familiar territory, at least to anyone who's been to a festival in the last few years. It's mumblecoresque mainly in its... MORE »
Tribeca 2009: "Here and There."
By Alison Willmore on 04/24/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Men are from New York and women are from Serbia in "Here and There," the first narrative film from writer/director Darko Lungulov, a sweet-natured, by the book, fish-out-of-water comedy. Technically, some of the men are also from Serbia, but though it tries to tell the dual stories of an American man traveling to Belgrade to bestow a visa on a girl he hasn't met by marrying her, and the Serbian man in New York trying to raise enough money to pay him for that service, "Here and There" is weighted toward the former. Robert, played by eternal character actor David... MORE »
Cannes do.
By Alison Willmore on 04/23/2009
Filed under: Festivals
The competition line-up for this year's Cannes Film Festival has been announced! A fair amount of Euro provocateurs -- Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke -- and France in general, and only two American films, the expected Tarantino and the unexpected Ang Lee comedy, which hopefully has more to it than its trailer would indicate. New films from Jane Campion and Pedro Almodóvar and Ken Loach, plus Park Chan-wook's vampire drama (left), whee! Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" will screen out of competition, as will Alejandro Amenabar's "Agora," with Sam Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell" as a... MORE »
L'affiche.
By Alison Willmore on 04/22/2009
Filed under: FestivalsThis year's Cannes poster, created by Annick Durban and inspired, according to the festival, by "L'Avventura": "A mysterious female silhouette, caught in mid-movement, seems to be opening a window onto the magic of cinema and invites us into a dream..." MORE »
Joe Swanberg doesn't stop.
By Alison Willmore on 04/01/2009
Filed under: Festivals
I had a good half-hour talk with Joe Swanberg at SXSW, two days after the world premiere of his latest film "Alexander the Last" and a few days before my laptop hard drive failed, taking with it my audio files and transcripts. I'm slowly getting everything back, and while this interview isn't so timely anymore, I didn't want to let it go, either, since we covered a lot of interesting ground about how the way Joe shoots films is changing, and how he'd like to be, as impossible as it might seem, even more prolific. So here's a selection, with... MORE »
SXSW 2009: "The Hurt Locker."
By Alison Willmore on 03/25/2009
Filed under: Festivals
"The Hurt Locker" is an action movie, which, given that it's also a movie about the Iraq War, is kind of a revelation. Enough Iraq War films have been made now to enforce the common belief that no one actually wants to watch Iraq War films because they're "depressing." Which they generally are. The war is depressing. The trauma faced by the troops is depressing, the ethical morass of our involvement is depressing, the cost, in dollars and, more importantly, in lives -- depressing. "The Hurt Locker" doesn't sidestep these facts as much as it doesn't engage them at all... MORE »
SXSW 2009: "Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same."
By Alison Willmore on 03/24/2009
Filed under: Festivals
After watching "Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same," a documentary about an artist preparing for his first New York solo show, I got into a fight. Two of us who'd seen it loved it, others had disliked it, and one insisted it was a travesty of a supposed nonfiction film that had to have been completely complicit and staged. I don't agree, but the more I dwelt on it, the more beside the point it all seemed. Brock Enright is the kind of guy who'd never forget that he's on camera, and who'd act equally outsized whether... MORE »
SXSW 2009: "We Live in Public."
By Alison Willmore on 03/19/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Josh Harris might just be too good a subject for a film. A dotcom millionaire, Harris was unerringly ahead of his time, seeing promise in the internet before it really existed, focusing on chat at the dawn of services like Prodigy, moving into web-only TV before there was even infrastructure for it, and putting the home life of himself and his girlfriend online 24/7 all the way back in 2001. (The fact that by the end of "We Live in Public" he's been forced to flee to Ethiopia to escape his creditors seems today merely more evidence of forward thinking.)... MORE »
SXSW 2009: "Observe and Report."
By Alison Willmore on 03/17/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Jody Hill's "Observe and Report" is like a Will Ferrell movie that's been run over by a car again and again until it's warped and unrecognizable. It's still has the rough shape of a feel-good story about a lovable loser, a mall security guard who longs to be a real policeman and who's in love with the bitchy make-up counter girl while failing to see that the sweet coffee stand cashier genuinely cares about him. And it manages to hit every expected point in that scenario, including the triumphant nabbing of a flasher who's been terrorizing the shopping complex, without... MORE »
SXSW 2009: "Trust Us, This Is All Made Up."
By Alison Willmore on 03/15/2009
Filed under: Festivals
How to capture improvised comedy, which is the essence of having to be there, on film? Recorded, performances are always going to feel flat without the high wire act immediacy of watching people pull characters, jokes and storylines out of thin air. The central hour or so of Alex Karpovsky's documentary "Trust Us, This Is All Made Up" is a straight shot of a show that improv specialists T. J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi did at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York, where they have a standing monthly gig. Filmed on multiple cameras capturing the goings-on from different angles,... MORE »
SXSW 2009: "The 2 Bobs."
By Alison Willmore on 03/15/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Goofy, well-intentioned and not particularly good, "The 2 Bobs" is a mad-lib love letter to the city of Austin -- the tech industry, barbecue and a billion other disparate elements have been swirled together into a shambolic comedy about how the brilliant, socially inept founders of a gaming company, both named Bob, lose the title they spent years coding and are forced out into the harsh daylight to attempt, with backup from some friends, to retrieve it. Because it's written and directed by Tim McCanlies, who scripted "The Iron Giant" and, less excellently, "Secondhand Lions" (which he also helmed), the... MORE »
True/False 2009 and the point of panels
By Alison Willmore on 03/05/2009
Filed under: Festivals
When I tell people I only want to go to panels in which the speakers get into a fight, they usually laugh. I do not join them. I really do long to see a state-of-the-industry type discussion featuring some of the most serious of my colleagues build into a WWF-style, chair-throwing brawl, and by golly, someday my wish will come true, even if I have to heft that chair myself. Panels are the starchy side dish of film festivals and conferences, and they're often informative and a little dry, because moderating is difficult, because topics are broad, and because people... MORE »
SXSW 2009 is all lined up.
By Alison Willmore on 02/02/2009
Filed under: Festivals
The complete SXSW 2009 film line-up has been unveiled, the first under new head Janet Pierson and, arguably, its first post-mumblecore iteration. Not that there aren't still plenty of names familiar to anyone acquainted with the movement -- it was already announced that Joe Swanberg would be premiering his fifth feature in five years, "Alexander the Last," at this year's festival, but his wife and sometimes costar Kris Swanberg will also be debuting her first feature, "It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home," and collaborators David Lowery and Dia Sokol each have a film of their own,... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "The Carter."
By Alison Willmore on 01/26/2009
Filed under: Festivals
"The Carter" doesn't try to argue that Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., is, as he himself has claimed, the "best rapper alive." "Best" and "alive" aren't always long-lasting qualities in the world of hip-hop anyway. Instead of making the case for Wayne the artist, Adam Bhala Lough's documentary focuses on capturing the incredibly, frighteningly of-the-moment ocean of celebrity through which he wades, a diminutive 25-year-old from New Orleans with a multi-platinum album and, for now, all the talent and swagger in the world, as well as one of its more distinctive drug habits. "The Carter" follows Lil Wayne... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "The September Issue."
By Alison Willmore on 01/25/2009
Filed under: Festivals
There's a moment in "The September Issue" in which it seems, perhaps, that Miss Anna Wintour regrets. She's just explained that her siblings work in global labor organization, in arranging low-income housing and as the political editor of the Guardian. "My brothers and sister are very amused by what I do," she says, biting her lip, and for a second you believe that "Nuclear" Wintour, the famously glacial, controlling and all-powerful editor-in-chief of American Vogue, secretly wishes she'd gotten a medical degree and went off to Sudan with Doctors Without Borders. And then you don't, because throughout R.J. Cutler's documentary,... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "Cold Souls."
By Alison Willmore on 01/23/2009
Filed under: Festivals
The shadow of Charlie Kaufman looms unignorably large over Sophie Barthes' first feature "Cold Souls," which stars Paul Giamatti as a well-known and very serious actor named Paul Giamatti, who's finding that his role in a upcoming stage production of "Uncle Vanya" is weighing on him. An article in the New Yorker steers him to a service being pitched to wealthy New Yorkers looking to lighten their metaphysical load by having their souls removed and stored, and soon Giamatti is in the care of Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who professes, not reassuringly, that his company has no idea how their... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "The Killing Room."
By Alison Willmore on 01/22/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Like "Saw," but sort of topical, Jonathan Liebesman's midnight movie "The Killing Room" is about a room in which people are killed -- killed by the government! Or perhaps just one of those government-associated top secret groups that are always capable of levels of devious competence far beyond the capabilities yet demonstrated by any actual existing bureaucracy, I'm a little iffy on it all. Four people who think they're signing up for medical testing find themselves instead part of a deadly experiment to find...what? We're forced to guess as it all goes down alongside Chloë Sevigny, who plays a gifted... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "The Cove."
By Alison Willmore on 01/21/2009
Filed under: Festivals
"The Cove" is a documentary about Taiji, Japan's capital for dolphin hunting, and how effective it is is directly proportional to how horrified you feel at the idea of dolphins being killed for meat. I've come to the conclusion that for me, the answer is: not very. I didn't relish the concluding footage of the world's most lovable cetacean flopping through its death throes in bloody water, but in the end I felt the same way I've felt when confronted with a look inside commercial slaughterhouses -- was anyone expecting it to be pretty? Dolphins, unlike whales, aren't endangered. They're... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "World's Greatest Dad."
By Alison Willmore on 01/20/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Bobcat Goldthwait's not what you would call a natural filmmaker -- while "World's Greatest Dad" isn't half as clumsy looking as his 2006 Sundance bestiality-themed rom-com "Stay," it's still rough as all hell and reliant on handfuls of endless music montages. But as a screenwriter, he's among the best in what's its own subcategory these days: the sentimental center/outrageous set-up flick, the movie genre equivalent of the hooker with the heart of gold. And the premise of "World's Greatest Dad" is near-brilliant: A high school English teacher with unfulfilled dreams of being a successful author, Lance (Robin Williams) is the... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "Toe to Toe."
By Alison Willmore on 01/18/2009
Filed under: Festivals
So much going on in D.C. prep school drama "Toe to Toe"! Troubled, promiscuous rich white girl befriends martyrdom-happy control-freak poor black girl, they fight over a boy who won't take either seriously in the end because "non-Muslim girls are just for practice," there's lacrosse, Princeton, go-go, class dynamics, a needy lesbian videographer, and some wild family troubles, including one of indie film's most unintentionally camp neglectful mothers, whose all-consuming job involves flying off to exotic locales to meet with government ministers, and who takes off in a cab while her daughter shrieks, wails and claws at herself while begging... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "Moon."
By Alison Willmore on 01/17/2009
Filed under: Festivals
"Moon" has the serious/silly premise you'd expect from a '70s sci-fi movie, the type that's meant to make you gasp "Oh, the terrible inhumanity of it all. And yet... that could be us someday!" while not holding up to real examination. (In this case: how could it possibly not be more economical to just bring in workers from China?) But "Moon" also has Sam Rockwell, who gives such a funny, sad, tender performance that the film works as a drama about a man who, thanks to a mixture of high technology and corporate malfeasance, is forced to confront the wrathful... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "You Wont Miss Me."
By Alison Willmore on 01/17/2009
Filed under: Festivals
"You Wont Miss Me" is all about Shelly Brown, a girl with the kind of problems plenty of 20-somethings dream of moving to New York for the express purpose of having: substance abuse, reckless hookups in her bedraggled Williamsburg apartment with shaggy boys who mistreat her, sudden fights with friends and strangers, an unseen actress mother who doesn't pay her enough attention, and no job beyond auditioning for roles herself. But the film, the second from Ry Russo-Young, isn't your average chronicle of dabblings in urban self-destruction, because Shelly, as she's begun to realize herself, can't turn down the volume.... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "Nollywood Babylon."
By Alison Willmore on 01/16/2009
Filed under: Festivals
Nollywood, the subject of the solid Canadian documentary "Nollywood Babylon," is Nigeria's homegrown movie industry. The world's third largest after the -woods Holly and Bolly, it's the source of hundreds of movies annually, all shot quickly, cheaply and digitally, all released directly to DVD or VCD (outbursts of public violence made theaters less than appealing). Nollywood cinema is, by definition, popular cinema -- funded by investors or the filmmakers themselves, the features are calculated to give the people what they want, crowdpleasers, melodramas, crime stories, tales of religious redemption, broad comedies, all designed to recoup cash. "Africans telling African stories,"... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "Mary and Max."
By Alison Willmore on 01/16/2009
Filed under: Festivals
The opening night slot at Sundance is customarily considered one of doom, and in that tradition "Mary and Max" is a disappointment, though just a mild one. The film, animator Adam Elliot's first feature, has many of the elements and motifs of his splendid, award-winning shorts -- a distinctive portraiture-inspired look, heavy voiceover, characters with mental or physical disabilities, misspellings, insulting newspaper headlines, accident-prone pets -- while demonstrating why, as it is, Elliot's style is better kept to a briefer form. MORE »
Ready, set, go.
By Alison Willmore on 01/14/2009
Filed under: FestivalsClockwise from lower right: Painkillers, actual cold meds (knock on wood!), faith-based preventative cold meds, now aged Flip, shiny new digital voice recorder, Sundance 2009 program, trusty notebook, press pass, bourbon (strictly for Saint Bernard-type mountain rescue scenarios), stimulant beverage #1, stimulant beverage #2, Blackberry, tissue, useless glove-like things. Bounced from this year's Sundance survival kit -- Zicam, which for me only induces disturbing nose bleeds. A colleague swears by it after being proffered some by Winona Ryder at some earlier iteration of the festival, but the inside of Ryder's nose is clearly tougher than mine.... MORE »
15 observations on the Sundance line-up.
By Alison Willmore on 12/04/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThe U.S. and world competition line-ups are here; the premieres and sidebars are here. Documentary Competition: 1. Sundance often leans toward the documentary-as-journalism/vehicle for activism, and, from the descriptions, there's again plenty of that this year: Joe Berlinger (going solo!) has "Crude" is "the inside story of the 'Amazon Chernobyl' case in the rainforest of Ecuador"; "Dirt! The Movie" is about "how humans are rapidly destroying the last natural resource on earth"; "The Cove" follows "a group of activists led by Ric O'Barry, the man behind Flipper" as they look into environmental horrors in a small cove in Japan. 2.... MORE »
Adam Elliot's claymation "Mary and Max" will open Sundance.
By Alison Willmore on 11/19/2008
Filed under: FestivalsTwo years ago Sundance opened with a Brett Morgen's animated doc "Chicago 10," and it's just been announced that the upcoming iteration of the festival (only 57 days to go!) will kick off with more animation -- "Mary and Max," a claymation drama, is the feature debut of Australian director Adam Elliot, who's otherwise known for a spectacular set of claymation shorts that includes "Harvey Crumpet," which won the 2003 Best Animated Short Oscar. My favorite is "Brother," from his "Family Trilogy" -- while it lasts, you can find it here on YouTube. "Mary and Max" is voiced by Toni... MORE »
NYFF 2008: The rest.
By Alison Willmore on 10/15/2008
Filed under: Festivals, Reviews"I'm Gonna Explode" An unhappy girl and a troubled boy meet in detention in their high school in a suburb of Mexico City, and before you can shout "Holy Nouvelle Vague, Batman!" they're running away on a dreamy days-long adventure together, having found their perfect co-conspirator. Their parents don't take this well, but their on-the-lam offspring haven't actually gone further than the roof of the boy's house, where they sunbathe with the radio on, divest themselves of their virginity, curl up to movies in a tent, and sneak food and booze from downstairs when everyone's out. The lad's father is... MORE »
NYFF 2008: "Happy-Go-Lucky."
By Alison Willmore on 10/14/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsYou're not supposed to take to Poppy right off the bat. She rides through London in her wildly colored outfit over the opening credits grinning so cheerily that at any moment a chorus of animated forest creatures threatens to leap out and provide backup as she burst into song. She pops into a bookstore and tries to chat up the utterly resistant cashier as she browses. She is, to put it lightly, irritating as all hell. When she rounds the corner to leave, her bike is gone, and she just sighs "We didn't even get a chance to say goodbye,"... MORE »
NYFF 2008: "Ashes of Time Redux."
By Alison Willmore on 10/09/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsWhen Wong Kar-wai's lone attempt at a martial arts film, "Ashes of Time," first came out in 1994, it was considered by most to be awfully pretty and mystifyingly elliptical. "Redux" finds it restored, re-edited, seven minutes shorter, with feverishly heightened colors and dramatic new music from Yo-Yo Ma. Having never seen the original version, I can't speak to whether it's also been clarified, but here's what I got: The Blind Swordsman (who's more in the process of losing his vision) loves his wife Peach Blossom, but left her because she has a thing for Huang Yaoshi, a warrior who's... MORE »
NYFF 2008: "The Wrestler."
By Alison Willmore on 10/08/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsMickey Rourke is one magnificent wreck. "The Wrestler" holds off from giving you the full-frontal of his face for a while, as if he were the monster in a low-budget horror flick. When it does finally creep around, you see misplaced tautness, semi-mobile features, starlet lips, an overall impression of carved putty. One of the film's visual jokes is that Rourke's character, faded pro wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson, is a shambling but still formidable hunk of meat, but he's aging in the style of a South Beach matron. It's not just the too often overhauled mug -- we follow... MORE »
NYFF 2008: "The Class."
By Alison Willmore on 10/02/2008
Filed under: Festivals, Reviews"The Class," Laurent Cantet's very fine film about an academic year in a life of a teacher and his students at an inner city Parisian middle school, gets its structure and its strength from limitations. The camera doesn't wander outside of the walls of the school; it seldom leaves the classroom, the only meaningful place of intersection between the worlds of François Marin, imperfect instructor, and his boisterously mixed bag of multicultural pupils. When a student departs for the day, or summer, or forever, he or she might as well be oceans away, news of homelife trickling back in through... MORE »
NYFF 2008: "Bullet in the Head."
By Alison Willmore on 10/01/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsI hope someone out there is proclaiming Jaime Rosales' "Bullet in the Head" a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking that forces you to reconsider narrative's place and importance in film and such and such. There is something likable about its daring, and it's exactly the kind of film that needs a vocal contrarian champion to stubbornly insist it's the best thing ever. But that person is not me. "Bullet in the Head" is an 85-minute film shot in stalker-cam via long range lens. There's no audible dialogue save a moment when the characters yell loud enough to reach even the theoretical... MORE »
Fantastic Fest 2008: "Ex Drummer."
By Alison Willmore on 09/25/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsInteresting that at a festival that celebrates visceral cinematic shocks -- the over-the-top splatter of "Tokyo Gore Police" and the "we dare you to walk out" boundary pushing of "Martyrs" and "Deadgirl" -- the two most disturbing films I saw weren't horror at all. The first is "I Think We're Alone Now," and the second Koen Mortier's feature debut "Ex Drummer," which wins the prize for moral decay. It's been compared to "Trainspotting," and, like that film "Ex Drummer" has visual style to burn and threads of seedy surrealism, but in terms of content it makes Danny Boyle's work look... MORE »
Fantastic Fest 2008: "I Think We're Alone Now."
By Alison Willmore on 09/24/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsLike "American Movie" and "Billy the Kid," Sean Donnelly's "I Think We're Alone Now" makes you squirm at its relationships with its subjects and its audience. I wouldn't say that, as a documentary, it's unethical, but it does focus on two people who suffer from unknown degrees of mental illness and, watching it, you have to wonder why they ever agreed to be filmed in the first place. Jeffery Deane Turner and Kelly McCormick are obsessed with, and in the case of the former, have also stalked former '80s star Tiffany. Tiffany is the faded pop center of their troubled... MORE »
Fantastic Fest 2008: "JCVD."
By Alison Willmore on 09/24/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsCentering your film on the tragedy of being famous is a iffy proposition -- it's not a topic to which the majority of the world will relate, and from any normal and honest perspective, the benefits of celebrity far outweigh any downsides. But director Mabrouk El Mechri has as his star the Muscles From Brussels himself, Belgian action icon Jean-Claude Van Damme, a man whose legitimate claims to fame were staked decades back, and who's now a figure of ridicule with a history of cocaine problems, four divorces, a tendency to spout ludicrous things in televised interviews and a recent... MORE »
Fantastic Fest 2008: "The Substitute."
By Alison Willmore on 09/22/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsPaprika Steen, the Danish actress best known for her roles in Dogme films like "Festen," "The Idiots" and "Mifune," is to die for in Ole Bornedal's horror-comedy "The Substitute." Like, she eats someone whole. She plays the forbiddingly named Ulla Harms, a substitute teacher who takes over sixth grade class 6B and whose hair-raisingly cruel instruction technique is augmented by what seem to be the abilities to read minds, balance pencils on their sharpened tips and force people to say nice things about her. In short, Ulla is an alien, a fact 6B, led by moody protagonist Carl (Jonas Wandschneider),... MORE »
Fantastic Fest 2008: "Seventh Moon."
By Alison Willmore on 09/21/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThere was an episode of "The Maury Povich Show" in which people confessed to serious but laughable phobias -- birds, pickles, balloons -- after which, for scientific purposes, you understand, a PA would come out and confront them with their object of terror. As I watched a housewife be chased around a sound stage, shrieking, by an intern wielding a balloon, it occurred to me that the segment was one of the most awesome things I'd ever seen on TV, and also that, in a far-off way, I could relate to the woman. I can't stand the low-grade torture of... MORE »
Fantastic Fest 2008: Opening Night, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."
By Alison Willmore on 09/20/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThere's incredible (and welcome) cultural whiplash in sneaking away from the middle of the determinedly highbrow New York Film Festival to head to Austin for Fantastic Fest, an event that's most certainly not. Dedicated to horror, sci-fi, fantasy, cult and general genre fare, Fantastic Fest is the brainchild of Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League with support from Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles, with a line-up of international fanboy sprawl that this year includes everything from Icelandic LARPing comedy "Astropia" to Korean Leone homage "The Good, The Bad and The Weird" to a documentary about William Castle and sidebars focused... MORE »
Rourke roars.
By Alison Willmore on 09/08/2008
Filed under: FestivalsDarren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," with Mickey Rourke starring as former pro Randy "The Ram" Robinson, is shaping up to be the film of the fall, having just won the Golden Lion for best film at Venice. The Silver Lion, for best director, went to Aleksey German Jr. for "Bumažnyj Soldat" (Paper Soldier) -- the complete list of awards is here. "The Wrestler"'s still without distribution, but that should change in the next day or two at Toronto -- Steven Zeitchik and Borys Kit at the Hollywood Reporter have been monitoring the sales talk, and note that as of this morning,... MORE »
Paris Hilton takes Toronto.
By Alison Willmore on 09/04/2008
Filed under: FestivalsAdria Petty's Paris Hilton doc "Paris, Not France" has been cut down to a single screening at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Steven Zeitchik at the Hollywood Reporter rumored that this was because the heiress was so unhappy with the film that she was threatening legal action, but Karina Longworth at Spout wondered if it wasn't all just a savvy publicity stunt: It would be one thing if the Hilton camp has insisted that the film be removed from the festival completely... but they didn't. Instead, they've made tickets to Paris' single TIFF screening a hot commodity.... MORE »
Telluride's quiet year.
By Alison Willmore on 08/28/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThe unique Telluride Film Festival, which (in)famously asks that you place your trust in it, purchase your pass and book inordinately expensive lodging in its small Colorado mountain town before ever knowing what films will be there, kicks off Friday, and has just announced its line-up. Due to the writers strike, this year's festival seems to be low on major premieres -- "Juno" and "Walk the Line" are among the films to have first screened there, though this year's sneak peeks are still a secret. Paul Schrader's "Adam Resurrected," a film about a circus performer (Jeff Goldblum) forced to perform... MORE »
"Burn After Reading": The trades say yes! And no!
By Alison Willmore on 08/27/2008
Filed under: Critic wrangle, FestivalsThe early reviews of the Coens' "Burn After Reading," which opens the Venice Film Festival tonight, are out, and they're up, down and all over the place. Todd McCarthy at Variety thinks the film finds the brothers C retreating "to sophomoric snarky mode," bemoaning the fact that the "seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters." The Coens' script, which feels immature but was evidently written around the same time as that for "No Country," is just too fundamentally silly, without the grounding of a serious substructure that would make the sudden turn to violence catch the... MORE »
Zack and Miri go to Austin.
By Alison Willmore on 08/25/2008
Filed under: FestivalsI've never been to the Toronto Film Festival. We've traditionally left it the realm of IFC Canada -- but this year I am headed to Fantastic Fest in Austin, and couldn't be more pleased. The country's fiercest genre festival has already announced two waves of films; among the selections the U.S. premieres of "Ong Bak" director Prachya Pinkaew's "Chocolat," meta Muscles from Brussels mockumentary "JCVD" and "Deadgirl." The most recent round of news is that king fanboy Kevin Smith will be bringing "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" there as the opening night film, to be followed up by the... MORE »
"The Road" to nowhere.
By Alison Willmore on 08/19/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThe complete Toronto line-up has finally been unveiled -- Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE has the long list of 312 films from 64 countries, 249 of those features. Among the last round of announcements is the Paris Hilton documentary no one knew they wanted, Adria Petty's "Paris, Not France," a film that's intrigued Spout's Karina Longworth into a link round-up; "The Illusionist" director Neil Burger's post-Iraq War road trip film "The Lucky Ones," with Rachel McAdams and Tim Robbins; a work-in-progress screening of "New York, I Love You," Gotham's answer to short film omnibus "Paris, je t'aime"; and the Coens' "Burn... MORE »
The 46th New York Film Festival lines up.
By Alison Willmore on 08/12/2008
Filed under: FestivalsAnd it's Cannes-tastic! As previously announced, Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or-winning "The Class" is the opening night film, with Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" (a film I couldn't stand) as the starry centerpiece, and Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," post premiere at the Venice Film Festival, closing things out. Also in there, as rumored, Steven Soderbergh's "Che," as well as Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale," Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky," Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy," Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours" and Hong Sang-soo's "Day and Night." The festival kicks off September 26th, full line-up after the jump.... MORE »
Madonna on festivals, Bordwell on cinephile signaling.
By Alison Willmore on 08/04/2008
Filed under: FestivalsOver the weekend, Madonna brought her documentary on Malawian orphans, "I Am Because We Are," to Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival. While there, the pop icon offered her unique take on the film festival circuit. From the AP: " 'It's great bringing my movie to a place that I feel familiar,' Madonna told the audience. 'Not like the Cannes Film Festival, where nobody's speaking English, or the Tribeca Film Festival, where no one sits down.' " I've been a sometimes reluctant attendant of Tribeca for a few years now, and never noticed anything along the lines of that enigmatic... MORE »
Venice 2008 lines up.
By Alison Willmore on 07/29/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThe 65th Venice Film Festival announced its line-up today -- among the juicy offerings are the new Darren Aronofsky film "The Wrestler," with Mickey Rourke playing Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a retired pro wrestler struggling to get back into the ring; Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq drama "The Hurt Locker"; Takeshi Kitano's comedy "Achilles and the Tortoise"; the new Miyazaki movie "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea," which is already in theaters in Japan; Jia Zhang-ke cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai's São Paulo-set multi-ethnic thriller "Plastic City"; and Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married," in which Anne Hathaway plays a girl fresh out... MORE »
"The Class" opens New York.
By Alison Willmore on 07/15/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThis year's New York Film Festival will open with the North American premiere of Laurent Cantet's "The Class" (Entre les murs), or so my inbox tells me. "The Class," the stealth late entry that managed to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, is about a year in an inner city high school, and is one of the few competition films I didn't get to catch, so I'm pleased as rum punch to see that it'll be at the festival. From the release: Additionally, two showcases at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater will round out the festival's main line-up with... MORE »
Tilda Swinton founds strangest film festival ever.
By Alison Willmore on 07/08/2008
Filed under: FestivalsTilda Swinton is starting a small festival in her hometown of Nairn in north-east Scotland. She's passed up what I feel is a key opportunity to capitalize on her recent Hollywood role by calling her event "Nairnia" or the like, instead going with "The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams." Tickets to films will cost £3 or a tray of baked goods, and everyone will sit on beanbags to take in "films with highly coloured, dreamlike elements," according to the Guardian. Part of the impetus behind the festival is Swinton and [co-organiser Mark] Cousins' idea that "Money dictates the festival circuit... MORE »
Opening nights.
By Alison Willmore on 06/18/2008
Filed under: FestivalsYesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival announced that its opening night film will be "Passchendaele," a $20 million World War I epic from actor/director Paul Gross, whose other helming credit is 2002's "Men With Brooms," as far as I know, the only curling rom-com in existence. Guy Dixon at the Globe and Mail talks with Gross, who based the film on the life of (and stars as) his grandfather Sergeant Michael Dunne: "About two-thirds of the film is set on the home front, so it is a romance that culminates in battle," Gross said. "It is at times epic and... MORE »
Cannes 08: "Wendy and Lucy."
By Alison Willmore on 05/24/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsI've seen films about genocide at this year's festival, I've seen films about corruption, about terrible crimes, about war and about murder, but nothing cut me to the quick like "Wendy and Lucy," which is about a girl who loses her dog. The second third film from Kelly Reichardt, whose superb "Old Joy" was one of the few bright lights on the American indie landscape of the past years, is, like that last feature, deceptively simple and brief. Over the course of 80 minutes, Wendy (a very good Michelle Williams) drives into a shabby Oregon town with her dog, Lucy.... MORE »
Cannes 08: "Che."
By Alison Willmore on 05/23/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThe noxious thing to say would be that when Steven Soderbergh's "Che" is whittled down and divided up into two solid-sized features for realistic theatrical consumption, it's not going to be nearly as good as it is in the Brobdingnagian, barely finished form that screened here at Cannes — 268 minutes, with no credits but with an intermission, during which the festival staff proffered brown bags stamped with "CHE" containing a bottle of water and half a sandwich, and smokers and non-smokers alike crowded onto the balcony to feverishly light up. And to be sure, there are resonances between part... MORE »
Cannes 08: "Changeling."
By Alison Willmore on 05/21/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsA cloche-wearing madonna, Angelina Jolie is the porcelain personification of trembling courage and devoted motherhood in "Changeling." As Christine Collins, entire scenes exist solely for the world's most famous collector of international orphans to allow her eyes to well up as, clutching her hands over her mouth, she gives in to despair of ever finding Walter, her kidnapped son. Other times, the facade shatters and she shrieks "He's not my son! He's not my son!" Or "Did you kill my son?! Did you kill my son?!" Or "No! No! No!" Someone actually refers to her as having "moxie," which is... MORE »
Cannes 08: "The Chaser."
By Alison Willmore on 05/19/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsA few ways to cut in line at Cannes: Get there late and drift in with the crowd at the front, looking lost or bewildered. Pretend to only be walking over to get a magazine off the table conveniently by the theater entrance, then glide in through the doors. Shove. Most often, though, someone will just wriggle into a line near the front, and then stoically pretend not to understand the people standing nearby telling him or her to fuck off in various languages. There's a lot of press at the festival, divided into the strata of white, pink with... MORE »
Cannes 08: "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."
By Alison Willmore on 05/17/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsHere's a sentence I wasn't expecting to write: Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is... fun. It's not sexy, despite all the buzz about the Scarlett Johansson/Javier Bardem/Penélope Cruz menage and sapphic snuggling between Johansson and Cruz, which, sorry to disappoint, consists only of an ungainly kiss. But it is an enjoyable fling of a film, and enjoyment is something that seemed to have dropped off Allen's list of interests entirely. His European excursions post-"Match Point" haven't lived up to that film's promise of auteurist rejuvenation, but rather than try out more cultural ventriloquism this time around on the guitar, Allen... MORE »
Cannes 08: "Tokyo!"
By Alison Willmore on 05/17/2008
Filed under: Festivals, Reviews"Tokyo!" is made up of three unrelated shorts directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho, all set, yes, in Tokyo. Stop, you're shrieking, how much hipness can one little omnibus film contain? It turns out, as is often the case with these things, a swoopingly uneven amount. I liked the Gondry portion, found Carax's a promising joke stretched too thin (though it attracted the most applause at the screening) and Bong's pretty damn disappointing. None of these filmmakers is actually from the city in which the film is set, and their methods of approach to encapsulating it in... MORE »
Cannes 08: "Waltz with Bashir."
By Alison Willmore on 05/15/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsFollowing up Fernando Meirelles' dystopic "Blindness" with the animated Israeli documentary "Waltz with Bashir" made for an exceedingly dour day here at Cannes. "Bashir," the better film, orbits a black hole in director Ari Folman's memory that's consumed his time in the army in the early '80s, the point of singularity being the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Israeli soldiers allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen to go into two Palestinian refugee camps, where they then slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children. Folman was there, but all he remembers is looking at the flare-illuminated ruined city while floating... MORE »
Cannes Cam, class of 08.
By Alison Willmore on 05/14/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThe third annual IFC Cannes Cam, streaming live, 24/7, for the duration of the festival, is going live in a minute or two. You can find it here; at 6:40pm local, Matt Singer and I will be on to discuss tonight's opening film, "Blindness," during the red carpet. + Cannes Cam (IFC) MORE »
Tribeca '08: Rednexploitation! "Tennessee," "From Within," "The Wild Man of Natividad."
By Alison Willmore on 05/02/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsAfter a few rounds on the festival circuit, you start to wonder if the road to indie inauthenticity is paved with Southern accents. "Tennessee" is a banner example of the type of film that aims for grit and heartstrings by way of regional blue-collar misery and ends up seeming as genuine as a McDonald's sweet tea. The second film from Aaron Woodley, who's actually Canadian — so Canadian he's David Cronenberg's nephew — is indeed about Tennessee, along with New Mexico, and the states through which you'd have to drive in order to get from the latter to the former.... MORE »
Tribeca '08: "Let the Right One In."
By Alison Willmore on 04/30/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsRed on white on white, Tomas Alfredson's "Let the Right One In" is a moody, surprising Nordic pre-teen love story about a bullied boy, Oskar, and the girl who moves in next door, Eli — a vampire. And it's not the perky goth fable it sounds like it could be — Oskar's a monochromatic, friendless lad who plays with a knife and dreams of killing everyone who's tormented him, while Eli's eating habits leave her and the surrounding walls smeared with gobs of blood. Set in an ice-encrusted Swedish backwater, the film is centered in the apartment building in which... MORE »
"Blindness" is in.
By Alison Willmore on 04/29/2008
Filed under: Festivals, Rumors"Blindness," the new film from "City of God"'s Fernando Meirelles, was one of the major omissions the industry was buzzing about when the Cannes line-up was announced last week. Now it looks like the film will be opening the festival — from the Toronto Star: The Cannes Film Festival has selected Blindness, produced by Toronto's Niv Fichman, for its coveted opening night slot on May 14, the Toronto Star has learned. This dark $25 million epic - about an unnamed city struck by a unique plague in which 90 per cent of the population go blind - is a three-way... MORE »
Tribeca '08: "Somers Town."
By Alison Willmore on 04/28/2008
Filed under: Festivals, Reviews35-year-old director Shane Meadows seems unruffled by the burdens of being the current great hope of British cinema. "Somers Town," his sixth film and best yet, is all the finer for its modesty — shot in black and white and coming in at a neat 75 minutes, the tale of the friendship between two teens in the North London neighborhood of the title reaches for nothing beyond its grasp and is, because of it, just about perfect. Meadows reunites with Thomas Turgoose, the fierce little thirteen-year-old he made the star of "This is England" after the kid demanded for five... MORE »
Tribeca '08: "Playing."
By Alison Willmore on 04/25/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsFor his tenth feature, "Jogo de Cena" (Playing), documentarian Eduardo Coutinho placed an ad in the paper calling for Rio de Janeiro women over the age of 18 with stories to tell to come to an audition. Naturally, everyone has a some kind of story to tell, but the subjects he selected were all particularly driven to perform, either because of a burning need to recount something that happened to them in the past or because they harbor aspirations toward acting. "Playing" is composed entirely of interviews conducted on a bare stage, monologues of women's stories in tall type, of... MORE »
Peter Scarlet talks Tribeca.
By Alison Willmore on 04/23/2008
Filed under: Festivals, WatchyHaving taken advantage of none of the past weeks' advance screenings, I'm going to be heading into many a Tribeca film come tomorrow, and possibly turning around and heading right back out of a few, given my luck in the past with parsing the festival's daunting line-up. All of IFC.com's Tribeca coverage, including interviews and videos, will be gathered here; in the intro piece, below, Matt and I talk to the fest's executive director Peter Scarlet. The flash 8 plugin was not detected. var so = new SWFObject("/static/bc/ifc_generic_blog.swf", "cinemaeye", "380", "295", "8", "#ffffff"); so.addParam("wmode", "transparent"); //change player width so.addVariable("pwidth", 380);... MORE »
More Cannes: Un Certain Regard, midnight and special screenings.
By Alison Willmore on 04/23/2008
Filed under: FestivalsHere's the official announcement from the festival. (See this previous post for the competition line-up.) Another addition to the big out-of-competition premieres: Korean director Kim Ji-woon's western "The Good, the Bad, and the Weird" — "The Host"'s Song Kang-ho is "the Weird." You can find the full line-ups for Un Certain Regard and the midnight and special screenings are after the jump. A few call-outs: "Wendy and Lucy" is the new film from "Old Joy" director Kelly Reichardt; James Toback chugs along, making films I have so far been totally unable to appreciate; and Jennifer Lynch, whose "Surveillance" is one... MORE »
An Ebertfest without Ebert.
By Alison Willmore on 04/23/2008
Filed under: FestivalsIt seems Roger Ebert won't be making it to the 10th anniversary of the Illinois film festival he established after all. He writes: After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip. Sigh. I was really happy with this one. The films, the guests, the friends. Chaz, Nate Kohn, Mary Susan Britt and I had all the pieces in place. The only tweak I didn't have time for was a proper full-length review of "Shotgun Stories." It was on the to-do list. What I'm using now... MORE »
Cannes 2008: The Competition.
By Alison Willmore on 04/23/2008
Filed under: FestivalsAt long last! Premiering out of competition will be, as expected, "Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull," as well as Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and everyone's favorite "Kung Fu Panda." The closing night film may still be the already announced "What Just Happened?" from Barry Levinson — or maybe not — and the opening night film has yet to be announced. Some of the goodies down below — Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut "Synecdoche, New York," the one American film many had called ahead of time; Clint Eastwood's Changeling"; Steven Soderbergh's "Che," which, given talk that the... MORE »
Janet Pierson takes over SXSW.
By Alison Willmore on 04/14/2008
Filed under: FestivalsFresh off the wires: SXSW is pleased to announce that Janet Pierson has accepted the position as Producer of the SXSW Film Festival and Conference, the Austin, TX based event founded in 1993. Matt Dentler, who has acted as SXSW Film Festival Producer since 2004 will be moving to New York City to pursue a new career to head the marketing and programming operations of Cinetic Digital Rights Management. [Co-founder and Senior Director of SXSW Film Louis] notes that "SXSW Film has been privileged to have Matt Dentler working for it; the event has benefited extraordinarily from his leadership. We... MORE »
Sarasota.
By Alison Willmore on 04/14/2008
Filed under: FestivalsI was lucky enough to get to spend the past few days at the Sarasota Film Festival, which was a kick-ass mix of an ambitious and wide-ranging film line-up from programmers Tom Hall and Holly Herrick, lavish, gown-and-tux-and-shrimp cocktail parties, and downtime on the beach. I was on the jury for the Narrative Feature Competition, along with John Kochman of Unifrance and Ligiah Villalobos, writer/producer of "La Misma Luna." After some solid deliberation, we ended up giving the prize to Lee Isaac Chung's very fine "Munyurangabo," which follows a pair of boys, one an orphan and the other estranged from... MORE »
The New York Asian Film Festival strikes back.
By Alison Willmore on 04/08/2008
Filed under: FestivalsMy favorite sign of summer — the New York Asian Film Festival is, as they put it, "back like a bad dream." It'll be running from June 20 through July 6 this year. The line-up so far (descriptions theirs): SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO - we unleash the beast a full month before it hits movie theaters: Takashi Miike's berserk, bloody, out-of-control English-language spaghetti western, guest-starring Quentin Tarantino. Full of female gunfighters, clockwork wheelchairs, razor sharp samurai swords and tiny fetuses growing inside blooming flowers this is the Takashi Miike movie Variety calls "one of his wildest ideas yet." And they're right.... MORE »
Manhattan GoGoGo.
By Alison Willmore on 04/02/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThe Wachowski brothers' "Speed Racer" has been confirmed as the Tribeca Film Festival's closing night film. It'll screen Saturday, May 3rd at the BMCC TPAC in Lower Manhattan, and "several of the cast members will be in attendance." Sayeth the press release: "Warner Bros. has been a big part of the Festival many times over the years and we are thrilled that the Wachowskis and producer Joel Silver are bringing Speed Racer to us this year to close the Festival," said Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival. Well, it's not the strongest of New York tie-ins, but maybe... MORE »
Tribeca: Look who's directing now.
By Alison Willmore on 03/31/2008
Filed under: FestivalsI've been shamefully avoiding looking over the Tribeca line-up until now because it's just so damn big. Finally, the deed is done, and it seems a good time to give a few shout-outs to some unexpected names showing up as directors: I Think I Thought, directed and written by Matthew Modine: "To think, or not to think, that is the question in I Think I Thought," the program helpfully tells us of this short. Modine's actually directed a few shorts before (in addition to his direct-to-DVD feature debut, "One Last Score"). The first, 1993's "When I was a Boy," was... MORE »
SXSW 2008: "Stop-Loss."
By Alison Willmore on 03/18/2008
Filed under: Festivals, Reviews"Stop-Loss," Kimberly Peirce's first film since 1999's "Boys Don't Cry," tears itself into tortured pieces trying to be an impossible combination of things — an Iraq War film for the MTV crowd; Serious Cinema that's also a goggle-eyed aesthetic appreciation of Channing Tatum's hot bod, Ryan Phillippe's pretty face and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's expert broodiness; a celebration of the troops' badassery that doesn't condone their actions against collateral citizens; an issue flick that nevertheless sometimes earnestly recalls "Top Gun." Peirce's younger brother enlisted and went to Iraq, and she's reverent of the choice, which puts her in a bind — "Stop-Loss,"... MORE »
SXSW 2008: "Nights and Weekends."
By Alison Willmore on 03/17/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThere's a meta-mumblecore movie just begging to be made that's set amidst the group of people who've been making mumblecore movies, and it would start off at the tense premiere screening of "Nights and Weekends." Co-directors, writers and stars Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg presented their third feature together to (and later took part in a candid Q&A in front of) a crowd half made up of friends and acquaintances uncomfortably aware that things had gotten ugly during the making of the film. In a mini-movement that's eluded agreed-upon definitions beyond the fact that its films are the collaborative creations... MORE »
Austin says goodbye.
By Alison Willmore on 03/14/2008
Filed under: FestivalsIf you'd like to recreate the SXSW experience in the comfort of your own home, you can find two of the "Burger Hut" SXSW trailers that played before the start of each fest film up on YouTube. The "Close Encounters" one is good, but it's the "Glengarry Glen Ross" one that has my heart. I've stuck a fork in this festival (though there are plenty of reviews and interviews piled up to be doled out over the next few days) but my colleague Jim Shearer's still in Austin covering the madness that is the music portion of the fest. Check... MORE »
SXSW 2008: "Medicine for Melancholy."
By Alison Willmore on 03/13/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThe details of Barry Jenkins' righteous "Medicine for Melancholy" — fixed-gear bikes and messenger bags, bottled iced tea and late night tacos, Rainbow Grocery and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, old Victorians and housing rights discussions — evoke a life I once lead so strongly that watching the film sent me into sense memory flashbacks. A bittersweet paean to San Francisco and its indie scene, "Medicine for Melancholy" is also a vivid semi-love story and a contemplation of race and gentrification in the city — and to answer the question that was posed to producer Justin Barber at the Q&A... MORE »
SXSW 2008: "Wild Blue Yonder"
By Alison Willmore on 03/11/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsCinéma-vérité and the first-person documentary go to war in "Wild Blue Yonder," and vérité wins — this engrossing car wreck is an unintentional argument as to how difficult it is to successfully include yourself in your own nonfiction film. "Wild Blue Yonder" is about "a daughter's search for her father," as the filmmaker, Celia Maysles, puts it — that father is David Maysles, who with his brother Albert made seminal docs like "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter," and who passed away in 1987, when Celia was 7. Judith Maysles, Celia's mother and David's widow, fought it out with Albert over... MORE »
SXSW 2008: "The Order of Myths."
By Alison Willmore on 03/09/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsTradition is rooted in history, and history is littered with things we'd rather forget. Mobile, Alabama's Mardi Gras celebration is the oldest in the U.S., and some aspects of it, like a customary float depicting Folly chasing Death around a broken column, can't fully be explained even by those who grew up there. Others, like the fact that the celebration, the pride of the city and the generator of $227 million of income a year, is blatantly and surreally segregated into separate parades and pairings of Mardi Gras kings and queens for the black and white populations, can be broken... MORE »
SXSW 2008: "Bi The Way."
By Alison Willmore on 03/09/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThere's an interesting doc to be found somewhere in the recent surge in the cachet of showing an openness to sometimes bat for the home team, or at least make out with the shortstop on a friend's couch after a few beers. "Bi The Way" is not it. The first film from Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, "Bi The Way" would like to be an exploration of our nation's shifting sexual mores, but it's so unfocused that it never really manages to argue its thesis, one that some of its own interviewees are hesitant to endorse. Is bisexuality actually on... MORE »
SXSW 2008: "Humboldt County."
By Alison Willmore on 03/08/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsTerm I wish someone cleverer than me would coin: one to describe that kind of movie in which a free-spirited (and ever so lightly damaged, like a can of discounted tomatoes) girl latches on to a glum male protagonist and hauls him off to introduce him to joy and laughter — see "Garden State," see "Elizabethtown," see everything in between. "Humboldt County," the feature debut of Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky, starts off looking like yet another entry in this genre, with Fairuza Balk playing Bogart, an actress/singer who swoops into L.A. to offer the promise of salvation to depressed... MORE »
Austin says hello.
By Alison Willmore on 03/07/2008
Filed under: FestivalsThe picture to the right is of Lady Bird Lake and the Congress Avenue Bridge, from beneath which swarm thousands of bats each night. But what I really wish I'd memorialized in image form is the mesa of Rudy's creamed corn I consumed last night, which had to have contained a gallon of cream, several sticks of butter and a few pounds of cream cheese — just thinking back on it, I tear up a little in nostalgia and at the thought of the years it's shaved off of my lifespan. So: Arrival in Austin, accomplished. Eating obscene amounts of... MORE »
SXSW 2008 lines up.
By Alison Willmore on 02/05/2008
Filed under: FestivalsindieWIRE has the line-up for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. There's some Sundance stuff there, including Nanette Burnstein's "American Teen" and Morgan Spurlock's "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" But it's the slew of premieres this year that are really impressive -- among them "Bulletproof Salesman," the new doc from "Gunner Palace" co-directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein; "Explicit Ills," the directorial debut of actor Mark Webber; "Nights and Weekends," from festival darling Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig; "Yeast," from "Frownland" star Mary Bronstein; and Michael Almereyda's "New Orleans, Mon Amour." And making their way from Berlin... MORE »
NYAFF 2007: "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A."
By Alison Willmore on 06/20/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsYou 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... MORE »
NYAFF 2007: "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay."
By Alison Willmore on 06/18/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsPark 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 do 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... MORE »
NYAFF 2007: "The Banquet."
By Alison Willmore on 06/18/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsSomehow, 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... MORE »
NYAFF 2007: "Memories of Matsuko."
By Alison Willmore on 06/14/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsA 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... MORE »
NYAFF 2007: "Exte."
By Alison Willmore on 06/14/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThe New York Asian Film Festival starts June 22 -- leading up to the festival, we'll be publishing reviews here on the blog and eventually gathering them over at IFC News. 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,"... MORE »
Cannes remnant: "My Blueberry Nights."
By Alison Willmore on 06/06/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsOne last one. Nah, we didn't like it much either. Looking back at "My Blueberry Nights" with some remove, though, the film doesn't seem such a crushing disappointment as much as just Wong Kar Wai on an off day. He was certainly due. The run of "Happy Together," "In the Mood for Love," "2046" and his "Eros" segment "The Hand" makes it easy to forget that there have been other times his signature fixations, his heady visual style and his narrative aimlessness haven't congealed into a great film. That it should happen with his highest profile film to date is... MORE »
Cannes remnant: "Flight of the Red Balloon."
By Alison Willmore on 06/01/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsHou Hsiao Hsien's "Flight of the Red Balloon" was commissioned by the Musee d'Orsay, and the film finds it way there at its close, as children peer at Vallotton's "The Balloon" and are coaxed through a discussion of whether the painting is a happy one, or a sad one. It's as close as one comes to feeling any sense of narrative pressure from the film, which combines Hou's typically exquisite naturalism with melancholy Parisian imagery inspired by a film doubtless thrust upon many an unwilling child by loftily intentioned parents, Albert Lamorisse's 1956 "The Red Balloon." Simon, the child... MORE »
Cannes remnant: "Terror's Advocate."
By Alison Willmore on 05/31/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsWe swore we get these last few up this week or not at all, by gum. Jacques Vergès, a famous, infamous French lawyer, is the focus of Barbet Schroeder's dense documentary "Terror's Advocate." If it didn't summon lingering memories of Al Pacino bellowing that God is a tight-ass and a sadist, "The Devil's Advocate" would really be a better English title. Vergès has made his name defending the seemingly indefensible, among them Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and, he's claimed, Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević. Schroeder seems to harbor an unflattering opinion of Vergès, though the film is no... MORE »
Cannes: The winners.
By Alison Willmore on 05/27/2007
Filed under: FestivalsAnd the Palme d'Or goes to (Surprise! Well, maybe not.) Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." The rest:Grand Prix: Naomi Kawase's "The Mourning Forest" Jury Prize (tie): Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's "Persepolis"; Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light" Director: Julian Schnabel, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"Screenplay: Fatih Akin, "The Edge of Heaven"Camera d'Or (best first feature): Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen's "Meduzot"Camera d'Or Special Mention: Anton Corbijn's "Control" Actress: Jeon Do-yeon, Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" Actor: Konstantine Lavronenko, Andrei Zviaguintsev's "Izgnanie" In Un Certain Regard, the top prize goes to Cristian Nemescu's... MORE »
Cannes: "Chop Shop"'s Ramin Bahrani.
By Alison Willmore on 05/25/2007
Filed under: Festivals, WatchyIFC News host Matt Singer talks "Chop Shop" with director Ramin Bahrani (of "Man Push Cart") and his young star Alejandro Polanco. Click on the image to play the video: IFC News' Matt Singer chats with director Ramin Bahrani (of "Man Push Cart") and actor Alejandro Polanco about their film "Chop Shop," which just had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. ; Chop Shop; IFC News; cannes film festival; An interview with Ramin Bahrani of "Chop Shop." http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid934052381http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=2621235 // By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T and C // found at http://www.brightcove.com/publishertermsandconditions.html. var... MORE »
Cannes: "Boarding Gate."
By Alison Willmore on 05/23/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsCannes seems to have a strong idea as to what a midnight movie is, and it appears to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the designation as we know it. The sole midnight screening we caught was of Olivier Assayas' "Boarding Gate," which is technically a genre film, an elliptical, shellshocked thriller starring Asia Argento. "Boarding Gate" lives in the same opaque world as the needle-sharp "demonlover," an awfully unfriendly one in which globalization seems to have leached all humanity and softness from its characters, each of whom nurses a bundle of not always explicated agendas and is... MORE »
U2, too.
By Alison Willmore on 05/21/2007
Filed under: Festivals, WatchyBy popular request, there's a video of the U2 performance on the Palais stairs in honor of the "U2 3D" premiere here. Don't say we never gave you anything.+ Cannes Cam: U2 Live From Cannes (IFC) MORE »
Cannes too.
By Alison Willmore on 05/21/2007
Filed under: FestivalsGoing to Cannes for only a few days was a terrible tease, though we're hardly complaining. Orange France, which provided internet access at our hotel, did not get along well with our blogging tool, so we have a few late, backlogged reviews to post shortly. We were given the okay to go far too late to apply for a press badge from the festival's famously draconian press office, but IFC did provide us with a bluish badge, the mysterious nature of which we did not manage to divine, as every time we used it to get into a screening... MORE »
Cannes: "No Country For Old Men."
By Alison Willmore on 05/20/2007
Filed under: Festivals, Reviews"No Country For Old Men" is the best thing the Coens have ever done. We would never have guessed that Cormac McCarthy's laconic fatalism would combine so well with the brothers detached genre sensibilities, but here it is -- a dark thriller laced with darker humor that unravels to reveal something greater, wiser and regretful. Josh Brolin (Josh Brolin!) is Llewellyn Moss, who stumbles on the wreckage of a drug deal gone wrong while hunting out on the plains of West Texas (as more than one later visitor to the site observes, as if to underline the carnage, they... MORE »
Cannes: U2.
By Alison Willmore on 05/19/2007
Filed under: FestivalsU2 performs on the steps of the Palais. As the announcer reminded us, Bono did write and produce "The Million Dollar Hotel."... MORE »
Cannes: "Les Chansons D'Amour."
By Alison Willmore on 05/18/2007
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsChristophe Honoré's "Les Chansons d'Amour" is a Hail Mary pass of a film, an omnisexual modern Parisian musical that makes the director's last effort, the dreadful and ridiculous bit of Oedipal arthouse fartery that was "Ma Mère," look like a safe choice. It's also exists so brazenly in its own world that even if you're not won over by its uneven charms, you have to admire its chutzpah. We started off with that kind of shrug and by the end were genuinely fond, so qui sait? And so: Louis Garrel, he of the massive tousled head and melancholic Gallic gaze,... MORE »
NYAFF 2007 lines up.
By Alison Willmore on 05/04/2007
Filed under: FestivalsThe New York Asian Film Festival, the dorkiest and most unremittingly enjoyable film festival in the city, has just announced a promising partial line-up for this year. Descriptions are theirs:AFTER THIS OUR EXILE - (2006, Hong Kong) Wong Kar-wai's mentor, Patrick Tam, returned to directing after 17 years and swept the Chinese film awards with this emotional epic about a marriage that falls apart and the damage a single dad inflicts on his son. This is the closest you'll get to an Asian Ingmar Bergman movie. I'M A CYBORG (BUT THAT'S OKAY) - (2006, Korea) Park Chan-Wook abandons Mr.... MORE »
Directors' Fortnight.
By Alison Willmore on 05/03/2007
Filed under: FestivalsThe Cannes Directors' Fortnight line-up has been announced. Voilà :"Après lui" -- Gaël Morel "Avant que j'oublie" -- Jacques Nolot "Caramel" -- Nadine Labaki "Chop Shop U.S.A." -- Ramin Bahrani "Control" -- Anton Corbijn "Dai Nipponjin" -- Hitoshi Matumoto "Elle s'appelle Sabine" -- Sandrine Bonnaire "O Estado do mundo" -- Chantal Akerman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Vicente Ferraz, Ayisha Abraham, Bing Wang, Pedro Costa "Foster Child" -- Brillante Mendoza "La France" -- Serge Bozon "Garage" -- Lenny Abrahamson "Gegenueber" (Counterparts) -- Jan Bonny "La Influencia" -- Pedro Aguilera "Mutum" -- Sandra Kogut "Ploy" -- Pen-ek Ratanaruang "PVC-1" -- Spiros Stathoulopoulos "La Question... MORE »
The 2007 Cannes Line-up.
By Alison Willmore on 04/19/2007
Filed under: FestivalsLook at it, love it and despair! In Competition"My Blueberry Nights," directed by Wong Kar-Wai (Opening night film) "Auf Der Anderen Siete," directed by Fatih Akin "Un Vielle Maitresse," directed by Catherine Breillat "No Country For Old Men," directed by Joel & Ethan Coen "Zodiac," directed by David Fincher "We Own The Night," directed by James Gray "Les Chansons D'Amour," directed by Christophe Honoré "Mogari No Mori," directed by Naomi Kawase "Breath," directed by Kim Ki Duk "Promise Me This," directed by Emir Kusturica "Secret Sunshine," directed by Lee Chang-dong "4 Luni, 3 Saptamini Si 2 Zile," directed by... MORE »
NYAFF 2006: "Funky Forest: The First Contact," "Ski Jumping Pairs: Road to Torino 2006."
By Alison Willmore on 06/20/2006
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsStill wounded -- here's one we had prewritten: You do not know strange until you've seen "Funky Forest: The First Contact," from a team of three writers/directors that includes Katsuhito Ishii, whose "The Taste of Tea" won the audience award at last year's festival. "The Taste of Tea," while also off-kilter, did have a narrative; "Funky Forest" is a collection of sketches strung together by barely overlapping characters that resembles nothing so much as the experience of late night flipping through public access channels while half asleep on the couch. Powerfully bizarre, often hilarious public access channels: reoccuring characters include... MORE »
NYAFF 2006: "Art of the Devil 2," "Blood Rain."
By Alison Willmore on 06/17/2006
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsOne for all y'all who like your prolonged torture scenes (and you are out there): "Art of the Devil 2," a sequel in name only, is a Thai cautionary tale about the dangers of black magic (which go something like "once you pop, you just can't stop"). A group of Bangkok college students take a trip back to their rural hometown, while in flashbacks we learn that two years ago they managed to get one of their teachers, the beautiful Ms. Panor, fired for having an affair with the school coach. When they pay her a visit, it seems... MORE »
NYAFF 2006: "The Great Yokai War."
By Alison Willmore on 06/17/2006
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsLumbering out of the primordial ooze of pop culture, "The Great Yokai War" is a lavish children's film from, of all people, Takashi Miike, the director famous for his phantasmagorias of horrific, imaginative violence, horrific, imaginatively disturbed sexuality, and general horrific, imaginative weirdness. Epic in scale, scattered with motifs lifted from Miyazaki movies, favoring old-school, Jim Henson-style creatures and containing one of the most ludicrous (and, considering the brand in question is Kirin Beer, oddly chosen) moments of product placement ever seen, "Yokai War" is, in the tradition of "Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz," the kind of film that would... MORE »
NYAFF 2006: "Linda, Linda, Linda."
By Alison Willmore on 06/14/2006
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsIn "Linda, Linda, Linda," four high school girls in Japan pull together at the last minute to form a band to compete in the musical competition of their school's spring festival. They decide to cover three songs by 80s pop-punk band The Blue Hearts, include the titular song, their biggest hit. They practice and practice. They perform. The end. Ladies and gentlemen, we wept. Nobuhiro Yamashita's film is, in its understated, sharply observed way, one of the most joyous films about high school we've ever seen, one that understands that just how momentous the small-scale triumphs and dramas that... MORE »
NYAFF 2006: "A Bittersweet Life."
By Alison Willmore on 06/13/2006
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsSo, spoilers (barely): "A Bittersweet Life" has an odd coda that's either a flashback to a happier time or an implication that the slickly brutal, nihilistic gangster story that preceded it is all the fantasy of the (presumably normal, working stiff) main character. Of course, director Kim Ji-woon (whose previous film was the disquieting gothic horror flick "A Tale of Two Sisters") has made it known that the latter reading was not his intention -- still, we prefer it. It explains the unlikely way that, in the course of his bloody adventures, Sun-woo (Lee Byung-Hun, of "J.S.A.") continually shrugs... MORE »
NYAFF 2006: "Always - Sunset on Third Street."
By Alison Willmore on 06/13/2006
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsTakashi Yamazaki's "Always - Sunset on Third Street" is shamelessly sentimental (sort of admirably so) and gooey with nostalgia, in the fine tradition of many filmic representations of the 50s, which assure us that, for a decade, the world went slightly sepia-toned. The winner of 13 Japanese Academy Prizes (among them "Best Picture," "Best Director" and "Best Screenplay"), "Always" is a broad crowd-pleaser about the residents of a small neighborhood in Tokyo in the late 50s, when the promise of economic success was luring many into the cities, among them Mutsuko, a young girl from the countryside who accepts,... MORE »
NYAFF's starting line-up.
By Alison Willmore on 03/23/2006
Filed under: FestivalsThe New York Asian Film Festival, a blissful mix of the arty and the dorky (and one of our favorites), has just announced a few of this year's titles (the complete line-up will be announced in late April). Descriptions are theirs:"Funky Forest: First Contact": (Japan, 2005) - The follow-up film from the director and cast of "The Taste of Tea," last year's Audience Award Winner. A sci-fi film starring Tadanobu Asano, a fat white kid, space amoebas with long nose-hairs, armpit fleshapods, and the constant demand to "Show me your dancing!" "Linda Linda Linda" (Japan, 2005) - Korean actress... MORE »
NYAFF 2005: Green Chair.
By Alison Willmore on 07/01/2005
Filed under: Festivals, Reviews"Green Chair" is billed as a racy forbidden romance between an older woman and an underage boy, and it is. Sort of. Director Park Cheol-Su doesn't follow the narrative path we'd expect (or hope for?) in the story of divorced 32-year-old Mun-hee (Suh Jung, of "The Isle") and 19-year-old Hyeon (newcomer Shim Ji-ho) (and yes, the fact that the age of consent in Korea is 20 does take a little edge off the story) -- the film starts off in medias res, after the meet-cute (over a CD in a music store, as we eventually glimpse in sparse flashbacks), the... MORE »
NYAFF 2005: Hana & Alice.
By Alison Willmore on 06/28/2005
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsShunji Iwai's last film, the excellent "All About Lily Chou-Chou," was the bleakest, most emotionally devastating view of high school life we've ever witnessed. His latest endeavor, "Hana & Alice," is a fitting counterpoint to the earlier film -- taking place at the same stage of life (the end of middle school and first year of high school) with many of the same actors (notably Yu Aoi, who played a girl bullied into prostitution in "Lily," here enchanting as Alice, one of the two leads), "Hana & Alice" is a sweet and weightless as spun sugar. Hana (Anne Suzuki) and... MORE »
NYAFF 2005: Three...Extremes.
By Alison Willmore on 06/24/2005
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThe ostensible sequel to earlier multi-director Asian horror anthology "Three," "Three...Extremes" is another trinity of shorts from three different directors: Fruit Chan of Hong Kong's "Dumplings," Park Chan-wook of Korea's "Cut," and Takashi Miike of Japan's "The Box." Presumably more edgy than the original "Three," "Three...Extremes" has garnered considerably more international attention than the first film due to the fact that this set of directors are particularly hot shit right now. Sharing nothing thematically to string them together, the films are a mixed bag best taken in pieces. "Dumplings," from the least well known director of the bunch, is also... MORE »
NYAFF 2005: Tanuki Goten wa...paradaisu!
By Alison Willmore on 06/20/2005
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsThis is the first of our promised dispatches from the New York Asian Film Festival, and it's a doozy (Good lord, when did such words creep into our vocabulary?). Securing "Operetta Tanuki Goten (Princess Raccoon)" was a real triumph for NYAFF -- Seijun Suzuki pioneered the sort of visually brilliant, wondrously bizarre films the festival was created to showcase. He's now 82, and apparently sometimes requires the use of an oxygen tank, but age has hardly tempered his vision -- "Princess Raccoon" is joyously strange, goofy, stylized, and very much a Seijun Suzuki film. Zhang Ziyi plays the princess in... MORE »
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