By Matt Singer

Nothing in "Speed Racer" is real: not the cars, not the buildings, not the physics, not the stakes, and certainly not the danger. If the Wachowski brothers, creators of "The Matrix" trilogy, were trying to make a movie that looked like a video game, they've accomplished their mission — more than once, "Speed Racer" reminded me of something I'd seen just hours before while playing my new copy of Mario Kart Wii. But while absurd racing games that laugh in the face of Sir Isaac Newton can be fun to play, they're certainly not very fun to watch, especially for two hours straight burdened by merciless editing and lousy subplots.

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

By Matt Singer in Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Speed Racer, Wachowski brothers

By Stephen Saito

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

By Stephen Saito in Interviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Chris Eigeman, Famke Janssen, Turn the River

By Stephen Saito

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

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

By Stephen Saito in Festivals, Interviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Life in Flight, Patrick Wilson, Tracey Hecht, Tribeca 08

By Aaron Hillis

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

By Aaron Hillis in Interviews | Link | Recommended (3)

Tags: Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield

By Michael Atkinson

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

By Michael Atkinson in On DVD | Link | Recommended (3)

Tags: Abderrahmane Sissako, Bamako, Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, Weddings and Babies

By Stephen Saito

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

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

By Stephen Saito in Festivals, Interviews | Link | Recommended (2)

Tags: James Mottern, Michelle Monaghan, Tribeca 08, Trucker

By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

This week, "Juno"'s Ellen Page is back in theaters with "The Tracey Fragments," playing another troubled but eloquent teenager girl. Is it safe to say that Page is the wide-eyed, smart-mouthed face of the MySpace generation on the indie screen? In honor of her role, this week on the IFC News podcast, we take a look at some of the better representations of teens on screen, from "Kes" to "Ghost World."

Download now (MP3: 27:56 minutes, 25.5 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

[Photo: "The Tracey Fragments," THINKFilm, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Podcasts | Link | Recommended (2)

Tags: Ellen Page, teenagers, The Tracey Fragments

By Neil Pedley

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

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

By Neil Pedley in In Theaters | Link | Recommended (2)

By Stephen Saito

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

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

By Stephen Saito in Festivals, Interviews | Link | Recommended (4)

Tags: Adam Kurland, Lucas Jansen, Spencer Vrooman, This is Not a Robbery, Tribeca 08

By Matt Singer

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

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

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

By Matt Singer in Interviews | Link | Recommended (2)

Tags: Garth Jennings, Hammer & Tongs, Nick Goldsmith, Son of Rambow