Reviews
"Drag Me To Hell."
By Alison Willmore on 05/28/2009
Filed under: Reviews
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: Reviews
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: Reviews
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: Reviews
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: Reviews
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: Reviews
"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: Reviews
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: Reviews
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: Reviews
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 »
Tribeca 2009: "My Last Five Girlfriends."
By Alison Willmore on 04/26/2009
Filed under: Reviews
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: Reviews
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: Reviews
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 »
SXSW 2009: "Sorry, Thanks."
By Alison Willmore on 03/17/2009
Filed under: Reviews
Apologies for whipping out the m-word, but mumblecore always seemed to me to be defined by its choreography of conflict avoidance. Its characters are so vague about they want and what they think because what they definitely don't want is to lay those things out and risk disagreement, rejection or open hostility. They lack any obvious sharp edges, and so seem to be infected with terminal niceness, but to say that is to ignore all the passive aggression lurking underneath the surface of those meandering exchanges. A fine sign of how the mumble-crowd is coming of age is Dia Sokol's... MORE »
"Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father."
By Alison Willmore on 10/31/2008
Filed under: ReviewsThe common refrain when describing Kurt Kuenne's documentary "Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father" is that you shouldn't -- that the shocking events that occur over the course of the film should blindside audiences as much as they blindside the filmmaker and his subjects. But you wouldn't be watching "Dear Zachary" if it were merely the film Kuenne first set out to make: a celluloid memorial to his childhood friend Andrew Bagby, a cheery 28-year-old with a touch of the hobbit to him, an Eagle Scout, an eager on-camera participant in all of Kuenne's teenage attempts... MORE »
"W."
By Alison Willmore on 10/17/2008
Filed under: ReviewsWhen the "South Park" boys looked at George W. Bush not long after he'd been sworn in in 2001, they saw in the malapropism-prone Texan we'd sort of elected the perfect sitcom character, a genial doofus whose hijinks could always be resolved in the space of half an hour, even though those problems hung on the unresolvable ones over which our country regularly tears itself apart. And with all that's happened in the intervening years, with "W." we find that when Oliver Stone looks at our current president, he apparently also sees...a genial doofus. "W." isn't a vitriolic indictment of... 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
That tricky directorial debut.
By Alison Willmore on 02/14/2008
Filed under: ReviewsThere are two conflicting critical impulses one has to fight off before ever seeing (and presumably honestly reviewing) a film like Madonna's directorial debut "Filth and Wisdom," whose Berlin Film Festival premiere yesterday was described by many as the hottest ticket in town, even if that warmth was generated by a desire to see La Madge commit acts of cinematic hubris. On one side is the urge to wield the long knife one's probably been sharpening since the film's presence at the festival was announced, and on the other is, perhaps, that wild contrarian compulsion to hold up the... MORE »
"Diary of the Dead."
By Alison Willmore on 02/14/2008
Filed under: ReviewsWith "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... 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: "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 »
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: "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 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 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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