April 2008
Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith on "Son of Rambow"
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 | 12:59 PM
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.
When Mixed Martial Arts Meet the Movies
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | 10:25 PM
Mixed martial arts (MMA) have come a bloody long way since John McCain legendarily dubbed the sport "human cockfighting" in 1996. Its flagship organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), aired eight of the top 15 pay-per-view programs in 2007 (boxing had four), while two smaller outfits (Strikeforce and EliteXC) have recently inked deals to air events on NBC and CBS. With major media outlets slowly offering more coverage and the sport's popularity continuing to crest, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got its opportunistic hands on those tantalizing cauliflower ears... right?
Uncharacteristic of the movie business, producers are showing restraint in capitalizing on the fad, perhaps still haunted by McCain's "cock" slam. David Mamet encountered fierce resistance to his new MMA influenced film, "Redbelt," as he tells Sam Alipour of ESPN.com: "Everybody in Hollywood passed on it. One of the things I talked about (in the pitch) was the demographics of UFC. Look at who goes to these fights. Look at how many follow on TV. It's huge among young males, exactly the demographic studios are trying to reach. You're wondering how you can get these people to see a film? Well, this is your answer. The reaction was baffling."
Tribeca Tale of the Tape: Mariah Carey vs. Dave Matthews
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | 1:43 PM
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
In a festival that's boasted such fine music docs as "Lou Reed's Berlin" and "Playing for Change: Peace Through Music," along with an appearance from Madonna to promote the non-musical Malawi doc "I Am Because We Are," Tribeca has also turned out to be a place where musicians put down their instruments and pick up scripts. Though acting is nothing particularly new for either Mariah Carey or Dave Matthews, the two have taken on supporting roles in the low-budget films "Tennessee" and "Lake City," respectively, both in this year's line-up. Here's a look at how they measured up.
Mariah Carey, "Tennessee"
Albums sold: Over 160 million worldwide.
Previous acting experience: "Glitter," the straight-to-DVD "WiseGirls"
Role believability: We're inclined to believe that Carey's early moments in the film, as a forlorn waitress longing for a better life, might've been inspired by the fact that shooting in New Mexico was probably not that exciting to Mimi. And once we see her sitting by the side of the road in front of the Route 66 Restaurant where she works with a notebook, humming, we know "Tennessee" isn't going to be a real stretch for Carey as an actress. The same can't be said for her character's plunging neckline.
Tribeca '08: Dori Berinstein on "Gotta Dance"
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | 11:30 AM
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
It's not unusual to see a filmmaker appear at two different festivals in two months, but usually, it's with the same film. If Dori Berinstein is aiming to be the most popular documentarian around, she's certainly not wasting time.
After wowing audiences at SXSW only a month ago with "Some Assembly Required," a film that followed a kiddie competition to build a new toy, Berinstein is back at Tribeca with another crowd-pleaser, "Gotta Dance," which goes to the opposite end of the age spectrum to chronicle the inaugural season of the Netsationals, a dance squad comprised of 60-year-olds and above. (It actually makes sense that their jersey numbers reflect their ages, which top out at 83.) While some of the dancers in "Gotta Dance" have a reverse legacy — their granddaughters are on the official Nets dance team — most are amateurs there to find fun and in some cases, themselves. If that sounds a lot like another senior citizen documentary making the rounds, trust us when we say these seniors follow the beat of a different drummer — or rather, Fat Joe.
Berinstein is no stranger to multitasking, considering that she also produces Broadway shows, a subject that became the inspiration for her first documentary, "Show Business." Still, in the midst of her festival two-step, she found time to talk about the senior dancers that brought a smile to Walt Frazier's face and her own complicated dance during the past year.
"The Guatemalan Handshake," "Hypocrites"
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | 7:12 AM
Todd Rohal's "The Guatemalan Handshake" is one of the most inventive, most poetic, most disarmingly authentic indies of the last few years — so, of course, you've never had a chance to see it. It's a movie that seems to have dropped out of the sky, inexplicably, like a satellite fragment landing on Main Street. Naturally, it's not a project constructed around a traditional idea of storytelling propulsion — Rohal has whipped his world from the weedy ground up into a fiery, relentless storm of quirk, but he's original enough in his cataract of details to keep us in a constant state of enchanted disorientation. Why was "Napoleon Dynamite," with its relatively stereotypical uber-misfit, a hit, while this 2006 daydream foundered out of sight?
Set in some Forgottentown, Pennsylvania, "The Guatemalan Handshake" encounters characters undramatically, and its narrative gradually coalesces around them: Donald the triangular-electric-car-driving nebbish (Will Oldham); his pregnant girlfriend and one of "dozens of sisters, each with a different mother" (Sheila Sculin); Turkeylegs, the willowy, surreal-minded 11-year-old free spirit (Katy Haywood) who narrates the film; Donald's elderly and obsessive father Mr. Turnupseed (Ken Byrnes); a manic Guatemalan bus driver; a lactose-intolerant skating rink worker who may be the most socially inappropriate man ever devised for an American film; a woman in search of her lost poodle (who we find out got electrocuted by a power station mishap early on, but who reconstitutes magically anyway), and so on. Early on, Donald disappears (literally, he just walks off-frame), and Turkeylegs endeavors to understand why and how, as her already dipsy community reaches several sorts of ridiculous yet dead serious crisis points at once.
The IFC News Podcast is at Tribeca
Monday, April 28, 2008 | 6:32 PM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
The IFC News podcast is taking this week off — catch us in video form instead in our coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival right here. Want to download these video dispatches? Here's the link on iTunes.
+ IFC News Festival Video Podcasts (iTunes)
Tribeca '08: "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*"
Monday, April 28, 2008 | 10:57 AM
By Matt Singer
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
On February 16, 2007, Sylvester Stallone was busted in Australia with 48 vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin. To some, this was a non-story; after all, Stallone was not "cheating" in the same way a professional athlete might be if he were caught with the same performance-enhancing drugs. Stallone is an actor, and he's not competing against anyone. According to his lawyer, he was using Jintropin under medical supervision.
But Stallone is also the man who plays Rocky Balboa and John Rambo — in fact, he was training to play Rambo for the first time in 20 years when the seizure took place. In "Rocky IV," murderous Russian boxer Ivan Drago is vilified for using steroids. On the other hand, Rocky trains the all-natural, old-fashioned way, with backbreaking labor. The message: Hard work and determination always triumphs over shortcuts. Hard to stomach when you know that the guy playing Rocky was probably getting some kind of liquid assistance with his training regiment of carrying enormous logs across great distances in the snow.
Christopher Bell's clear-eyed, impassioned documentary "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*" puts this preposterous hypocrisy front and center. Narrated throughout by Bell himself, it begins with the director's recollections of his youth, one spent idolizing hard-bodied '80s muscle man icons such as Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hulk Hogan. Bell and his two brothers became so fixated on these Herculean figures that they put themselves on the training regimens these men publicly espoused. When they didn't see the same results, they turned to steroids. Though it's not fair to blame those men for the Bells' actions — I watched all those movies and wrestling matches and only took steroids when I had mono — it's not unfair to speculate that watching them is what first sparked his and many other young men's interest in bodybuilding. Bell's brothers still use performance enhancers, but they have a hard time admitting it to their loving parents (though, thanks to the siblings' collective desire for fame and stardom, they're incredibly comfortable discussing it with a movie camera).
Bell's approach is both micro and macro, chronicling his own family's steroid use and the strain it puts on the family's ethos (one that jives with that clean living over cheating one that was discussed earlier), while putting their struggles into a larger cultural context through interviews with noted physicians who've studied the effects of steroids and athletes whose lives have been touched by their impact. Though Bell himself considers steroid use by athletes to be unsavory, he's open-minded enough to discuss the drugs' positive medical benefits (an HIV-positive man speaks of how they give him a standard of life) as well as question a father who blames them for the death of his son.
Above all, what Bell portrays better than anything else is the mountain of lies buried beneath the controversy surrounding performance enhancers. He gets a professional bodybuilder and model to admit that his chiseled build is a direct result of the steroids he takes, not the dietary supplements that he pimps in magazine ads; a photographer later shows Bell how the "before" and "after" pictures in a lot of these advertisements can easily be manipulated using digital airbrushes. While Ronald Reagan was declaring a war on drugs, he was also publicly saluting actors and their on screen creations that had more to do with injections than squat thrusts.
That American myth that Reagan used Stallone and Schwarzenegger to prop up in the 1980s is one built on the idea that everyone is given equal opportunity to succeed, and that those who work hardest are the ones that ultimately accomplish the most. Telling people with aspirations of a perfectly sculpted body that you've accomplished things through nothing more than grit when you've really been given a chemical boost isn't just immoral; it is, as Bell points out, a competitive advantage. We like to imagine that our enemies — the Ivan Dragos of the world — are the ones sticking the needles into their butts. But consider this: Captain America, the flag-draped superhero, wasn't born with incredible talents, and he didn't earn his great strength through years of pumping iron. He was a scrawny weakling who was given a shot of "Super-Soldier Serum." Yes, even our nation's greatest comic book representation is a juicer. Coming to terms with that will ultimately be the true legacy of this so-called era. Bell's fine film may well be remembered as one of the steps on the road that got us there.
[Photo: "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*," Magnolia Pictures, 2008]
For more on "Bigger, Faster, Stronger," check out the official site here.
Opening This Week
Monday, April 28, 2008 | 10:45 AM
By Neil Pedley
The Tribeca Film Festival is in full swing, but if you don't live in New York, there's no need to fret. No less than three films ("From Within," "Mister Lonely" and "Redbelt") on this list of coming attractions have played the festival in recent days. Then again, if you are in New York and want to catch something outside the fest, there's always that intimate character drama starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and a red and gold metal suit of armor.
"The Favor"
Writer/director Eva J. Aridjis brings us a quiet tale of angst and alienation starring former New York subway busker Ryan Donowho as Johnny, a high school loner who's taken in by Lawrence (Frank Wood), a quiet pet photographer, after his mother (Paige Turco) is killed in an accident. In order to be the father he needs, Lawrence must fight through Johnny's rebellious behavior and enlist the help of the one person he responds to — Marianna (Isidra Vega), a gentle neighborhood girl.
Opens in limited release.
Tribeca '08: Robert Drew on "A President to Remember"
Sunday, April 27, 2008 | 10:22 AM
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
If there's any truth to the idea that what's old can become new again, Robert Drew's "A President to Remember: In the Company of John F. Kennedy" is a prime example. Free of the pressure to film sound bites and be caught up in a campaign's spin room, Drew simply let the camera roll during the campaign and all-too-brief presidency of John F. Kennedy, creating an influential group of documentaries between 1960 and 1963: "Primary," "Adventures on the New Frontier," "Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment" and "Faces of November." With an assemblage of filmmakers and journalists from his days as an editor at Life magazine (including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles) by his side, Drew pioneered the practice of cinéma vérité on what now seems like the least likely of subjects — the president. While Drew's four films on the Kennedy Administration have been long available on DVD, "A President to Remember" is a bit of a CliffsNotes for the uninitiated, weaving together fly-on-the-wall footage from Kennedy's early days on the campaign trail to his invasion of Cuba and his untimely death, with narration from Alec Baldwin tying everything together. But what sets "A President to Remember" apart from being just a greatest hits collection is how innovative Drew's approach to filmmaking still seems (aided by the eternally fresh-faced Kennedy), especially when compared to the coverage of the current election cycle. On the eve of the film's premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Drew discussed why Kennedy was such an appealing subject and why, with no false modesty, all his films are masterpieces. (No disagreement here.)
Tribeca '08: Trisha Ziff on "Chevolution"
Friday, April 25, 2008 | 10:17 AM
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
Che Guevara probably never envisioned his image on a crystal-encrusted T-shirt as he traversed the Cuban countryside with thoughts of political upheaval. But there's the rub of featuring front and center in the most reproduced photograph of the 20th century.
"Che died, but thousands of Ches were born," remarks Diana Diaz during "Chevolution," a documentary making its world premiere in the Encounters section of this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Diaz is the daughter of Alberto "Korda" Diaz, a Cuban photographer who took the iconic shot of the revolutionary that originally went unused by the newspaper it was commissioned for and existed only as a print on Korda's wall. It wasn't until after Guevara's death in 1968 that the image called "Guerrillero Heroico" found its way into his memorial service and became the inspiration for protests and pop art the world over. For the past three years, Trisha Ziff has been collecting Che items from around the globe and putting them into a wildly popular exhibition that's still touring. With the help of "Election" producer Ron Yerxa and co-director Luis Lopez, Ziff decided to turn the exhibit into a film, which serves as a fascinating history of a single snapshot that became the legacy of two men — Guevara and Korda.
Tribeca '08: "Fermat's Room"
Thursday, April 24, 2008 | 10:06 AM
By Matt Singer
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
Four Spanish mathematicians convene for an evening of puzzle-solving at the house of a man named Fermat. But almost as soon as they arrive, their mysterious host is called away to attend to his ailing daughter. A PDA rings, giving the group a question they're told they must solve in just one minute. When they don't, the walls of Fermat's room inch towards one another. Now, they must answer the riddles while trying to find an escape before they're all squeezed to death. In other words, "Fermat's Room" is sort of "Saw" for arithmetic dorks.
The characters are all supposed to be geniuses, but the problems they have to solve require less advanced calculus than your average brain teaser from "Die Hard With a Vengeance" — lots of trick questions and doors you have to choose between or vessels of different sizes. That's probably beneath what these sort of people normally do with their brains, but it's a decision that makes sense from an audience perspective; if writer/directors Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña were really to put four math professors to work solving hardcore theorems, viewers would probably die out of sheer boredom well before the characters on screen do.
Tribeca '08: Julie Checkoway on "Waiting for Hockney"
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 2:18 PM
By Stephen Saito
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
Last year, when New York magazine celebrated Richard Avedon's portrait of a pensive Marilyn Monroe by publishing reinterpretations of the famous photograph, they probably didn't think to ask Billy Pappas for a contribution. A waiter and busboy from Baltimore, Pappas devoted almost a decade to painstakingly recreating the Avedon snapshot as a hand-drawn sketch, a labor he called his attempt "to take a drawing where Lindbergh took the airplane."
Pappas was brought back to earth when he decided it was time to introduce his piece to the art world. After rounding up a motley band of supporters to find a way to showcase his work, he settled on trying to get an evaluation from David Hockney. One would think that with a title like "Waiting for Hockney," the feature debut of director Julie Checkoway would be about Pappas' pursuit of the famed artist, but that's only half the story. What Checkoway discovered was a story as riddled with complexities as Pappas's intricate drawing of Monroe. While the documentary evokes the age-old discussion of what is art, "Waiting for Hockney" also asks the far more fundamental question of what it means to be successful. Recently, I asked a few questions of my own to Checkoway, a former producer for NPR's "Morning Edition" and "This American Life," whose film makes its world premiere in the Discovery section of this year's Tribeca Film Festival.
Errol Morris on "Standard Operating Procedure"
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | 7:11 AM
By Nick Schager
Since his masterful 1980 debut "Gates of Heaven" — and, more specifically, after 1988's "The Thin Blue Line" — documentarian Errol Morris has boldly expanded the notion of documentary filmmaking, pushing the boundaries set by his cinema vérité forefathers in an effort to discover, if not kindred spirit (and admirer) Werner Herzog's "ecstatic truth," then at least an essential truth. Whether examining the life of Stephen Hawking, the ruminations of Robert S. McNamara, or the study of eccentrics like those featured in his "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control," Morris has sought to explore fundamental questions about life through a combination of traditional nonfiction interviews and fictionalized reenactments. That hybridized aesthetic design is at the forefront of his latest, "Standard Operating Procedure," an in-depth look into the infamous photos taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib in which, amidst stylized reenactments of the controversial pics, the director affords a platform for the thoughts of the soldiers-turned-amateur-photographers at the heart of the story. Meticulously crafted and methodically argued, it's an inquiry into what actually happened at the prison, but also into the nature of images, both topics that Morris took time to discuss with me.
"Hannah Takes the Stairs," "The World According to Shorts"
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | 7:02 AM
Though it may seem unfair at first, let's pick up Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs," heft it in our grips for a moment, and then use it to beat this thing called "mumblecore" to a pulp. Implicitly a kind of low-budge, ultra-spontaneous, all-HDV answer to the glossy fatuousness of current American film, mumblecore has a number of inherent problems (the least of which is its inherited moniker; using "-core" as a suffix in this way has no meaning). The fad's general strategy — naturally lit shaky-cam coverage of semi-inarticulate twentysomethings with bedhead speaking entirely in casual small talk and having or ruining relationships — is easy to peg as narcissistic and lazy, if you're not finely attuned to the genre's nonchalant sense of cool. But more than that, mumblecore movies strive for an interpersonal intimacy they never achieve, because intimacy requires skill, real acting and visual wisdom, not merely amateurishness. In the pursuit of realism, mumblecore characters spend enormous amounts of time amusing themselves in variously immature ways, the upshot of which is less realistic than, well, immature. No one is actually witty, sex isn't on anyone's mind, and everyone, even when they're being goofy, is tediously earnest.
IFC News Podcast #74: Your Indie Summer Movie Preview
Monday, April 21, 2008 | 11:26 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
The weather's warming, the days are longer and "Iron Man" ads are getting inescapable — clear signs that summer's on the way. This week on the IFC News podcast, we present ten indie alternatives to the season's blockbusters that we haven't seen and are really looking forward to.
Download now (MP3: 28:41 minutes, 26.2 MB)
[Photo: "The Promotion," Dimension Films, 2008]
Opening This Week
Monday, April 21, 2008 | 11:24 AM
By Neil Pedley
While we pace the carpet back and forth in anticipation of the fast-approaching Tribeca Film Festival (kicking off on Wednesday), we can bide our time with a puppet kidnapping, some Bollywood royalty and an Ewan McGregor sighting.
"Baby Mama"
If the fad of pregnancy movies began with last year's "Knocked Up," it reaches its second trimester with "Baby Mama," which stars comedy goddess Tina Fey as a wannabe mom who's fast approaching 40 and Fey's one-time Weekend Update deskmate Amy Poehler as the uncouth oddball who offers up the use of her womb in exchange for a bit of cash. Appropriately enough, former "SNL" scribe Michael McCullers makes his directorial debut with the offbeat comedy, which could serve as "Juno" for people deemed too fuddy-duddy to find the term "home skillet" amusing. "Baby Mama"'s also serving as Tribeca's opening night film.
Opens wide.
Tribeca '08: "Man on Wire"
Friday, April 18, 2008 | 3:32 PM
By Matt Singer
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
As a boy, Philippe Petit enjoyed climbing things. Many boys do. But Petit never grew out of it, the way many boys do, and when he learned about wire walking, he found his calling in life. When he heard about a pair of towers being built in lower Manhattan — even though they were still years from completion, even though he'd never been to America, even though the very act was sheer suicide — he immediately decided that someday, he would walk on a wire at the top of the World Trade Center.
His journey to accomplish his goal is the story of the documentary "Man on Wire," and we know that it ends happily because we see Petit as an older man, recounting and reenacting his story with the sort of boundless enthusiasm a person must have if he is going to sneak into a heavily guarded landmark and perform an audacious and incredibly dangerous crime in the name of art. The fact that Petit obviously survives could potentially sap the suspense from the documentary, which has the structure and tone of a lighthearted heist film. But those sorts of considerations fall away whenever Petit gets up on a wire hundreds or thousands of feet in the air. The sight of him balancing on this tiny rope without a care in the world is enough to make the steeliest of nerves jangle and the steadiest of palms sweat.
Morgan Spurlock on "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?"
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | 10:06 AM
By Aaron Hillis
Eating nothing but McDonald's for a month allowed "Super Size Me" director and star Morgan Spurlock to humorously illustrate to the masses just how toxic fast food can be. Apparently the guy likes to put his body at risk. Buzzed about since Harvey Weinstein bought the film after only watching a few minutes of it, "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" is Spurlock's new pop docu-quest, in which the handlebar-mustachioed filmmaker — concerned about the world he's about to bring his baby son into — ventures to the Middle East to talk with various Arabic people in an attempt to locate the terror-monger himself. I spoke with Spurlock not long after the film's SXSW premiere about his controversial intentions, his journalistic ethics and how best to groom one's beard.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on John Anderson's Variety review from Sundance, which said the film "serves up a rehash of others' 9/11 reportage, bin Laden biography, Islamic theology and suicide-bomber psychology." What do you think your film brings new to the conversation?
The goal for me is to try and put these [topics] into the realm of a mass audience. While some of this stuff may not be new, I think it's going to be new to a lot of people. Countless people came up to me after South by Southwest who had never seen any of those other documentaries — who don't read the newspaper every day or watch the news every night — and I think we present stuff in a fresh, fun, accessible way. The other thing the Variety review says is that the film will surely be a hit, so I will embrace that part. [laughs]
"Lars and the Real Girl," "The Dragon Painter"
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 | 8:11 AM
One of 2007's breakout indie hits, "Lars and the Real Girl" was just high-profile enough, profitable enough, acted-by-Ryan-Gosling- within-an-inch-of-its-life enough and conspicuously life-affirming enough to, in the end, warrant a substantial backlash. But a backlash descends every year on overpumped movies as naturally as autumn comes to summer, inevitably, and we need to keep in mind that backlash is as irrelevant to the movie in question as is the hype and popularity that spawned it. In an ideal world, we'd see movies in a vacuum unpoisoned by publicity plague dogs and self-aggrandizing bloggers and clueless critics. Instead, we're inundated with cant that is predominantly interested in itself and its opponents, not in the movie as it would be seen, by itself, a year or ten down the road. We need to remember, for instance, that while "Juno" didn't deserve any sort of Oscar, and was far too irritatingly snarky in its dialogue, and bordered on racism in its conservative narrative set-up, the film was still witty and sharply acted and made even Jennifer Garner seem like an actress.
IFC News Podcast #73: Movies in Real Time
Monday, April 14, 2008 | 10:13 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
The moment the phone rings in "88 Minutes" and Al Pacino is told he has the titular amount of time left to live, the film joins the small group of flicks set in real time — every minute that ticks by in the film is equal to a minute of the audience's time. "24" may have conditioned us to follow narratives as they unfold (and wonder if the characters will ever manage a bathroom break), the real time feature remains tricky and often gimmick-driven. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at some of the directors, from Hitchcock to Linklater, and some of the structures, from dinner parties to hostage situations, of films set in real time.
Download now (MP3: 28:10 minutes, 25.7 MB)
[Photo: "88 Minutes," Columbia Pictures, 2008]
Opening This Week
Monday, April 14, 2008 | 9:48 AM
By Neil Pedley
With such variety this week, we could be tempted to go nuts and combine them into one super movie. Osama Bin Laden would have 88 minutes to paint an anamorphic picture that disproved Darwinism while riding the winner of the Kentucky Derby through ancient China with his gay lover who is also an Oscar nominated composer moonlighting as a zombie stripper...we smell a Golden Globe!
"Anamorph"
Utilizing the painting technique of anamorphosis, whereby the nature of an image changes depending on the viewer's vantage point, filmmaker Henry Miller marks his directorial debut with this intricate and cerebral thriller that reads like "Saw" by way of "The Da Vinci Code." Willem Dafoe stars as the dogged but haunted Detective Aubray, on the trail of carefully placed clues and elaborate puzzles, trying to catch a serial killer whose crimes bare a striking resemblance to an old case he is desperate to forget.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on May 2nd.
Still Rolling: 40 Years of the Rolling Stones on Film - "Cocksucker Blues" and "Shine a Light"
Friday, April 11, 2008 | 11:10 AM
By Matt Singer
In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, starting with 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil," and continuing on with "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" and 1970's "Gimme Shelter," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn. In our final tour date, we offer the rarely screened "Cocksucker Blues" and an encore featuring the Stones' most recent cinematic return to the stage, "Shine a Light."
Cocksucker Blues (1972)
Directed by Robert Frank
The Film: Returning to the United States for their first American tour since 1969 (covered in all its glory and tragedy in "Gimme Shelter"), the Stones hired filmmaker Robert Frank to document the trip. Frank gave cameras to all the members of the band to record their own experiences, and then edited their footage together on his own. Though the '72 tour is widely considered one of the Stones' best, "Cocksucker Blues" is less a chronicle of the band's rock and roll triumph than of their druggy attempts to stave off boredom in between performances. Those indiscretions includes on-camera masturbation by Mick Jagger, trashed hotel rooms, ruminations on the impossibility of cocaine addiction ("It's just too expensive to develop a habit!" remarks one incredibly high moron) and an inflight group orgy on the Stones' private jet. According to Rolling Stone, when Jagger saw the result for the first time, he remarked, "It's a beautiful film, Robert, but if it ever shows in America, we'll never be allowed there again." Frank battled the Stones for control of the film, but the best he ever got was the right to screen it once a year as long as he was in attendance.
The Demon Dog Eat Dog Film Career of James Ellroy
Friday, April 11, 2008 | 10:50 AM
Hollywood has never known what to do with James Ellroy. Then again, the man who calls himself "the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction" has never had much use for it. As he told the Toronto Star's Peter Howell in 2004, "Books are much more profound than movies. Books are not way stations on the way to motion pictures."
That may be true, but that hasn't stopped Ellroy from optioning all of his novels to be made into films. Although there's no such thing as a quick incubation period on adapting one of his dense noirs for the big screen, the author has established quite a filmography, including this week's release of "Street Kings." While Ellroy has appeared in front of the camera for documentaries on himself (and at one time, was set to be played by David Duchovny in an adaptation of his memoir, "My Dark Places"), here's a look at the behind the scenes history of Ellroy's film career that's nearly as tangled and tortured as one of his novels.
Still Rolling: 40 Years of the Rolling Stones on Film - "Gimme Shelter"
Thursday, April 10, 2008 | 11:20 AM
By Matt Singer
In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, from 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil" to last week's release of "Shine a Light," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn.
Gimme Shelter (1970)
Directed by Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
The Film: The Rolling Stones watch the events of their recent American tour as they play out before them on a flatbed editing machine. Though their return to the States was filled with plenty of highlights, including a triumphant series of concerts at Madison Square Garden and a successful recording session at Muscle Shoals Studios, all that really seems to matter is the disastrous result of their free concert held outside of San Francisco at the Altamont Speedway. Intended as a companion event to the recent Woodstock Festival, the day was regularly interrupted by outbursts of bad vibes and outright violence, culminating in the death of Meredith Hunter, an African-American teenager in front of the stage during the Stones' set, forever marking the show as one of the unofficial signposts on the road to the end of the 1960s.
Thomas McCarthy on "The Visitor"
Thursday, April 10, 2008 | 10:40 AM
By Aaron Hillis
Though he's the writer-director of the acclaimed 2003 dramedy "The Station Agent," Tom McCarthy is probably not the first face you associate with the film (Peter Dinklage was the bigger breakout, no pun intended). But that doesn't bother the New Jersey-born McCarthy, who has had his own share of on screen recognition (more on that later) since he began acting in film and television in the early '90s. (If his name still doesn't ring a bell, then you certainly didn't watch the brilliant final season of HBO's "The Wire," in which he co-starred as the morally skewed Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Templeton.) McCarthy's second feature behind the camera is "The Visitor," a poignant and lightly funny drama about a widowed and utterly disillusioned economics professor named Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins, "Six Feet Under") who discovers, on a business trip from Connecticut, that a Syrian percussionist and his Senegalese girlfriend have been living in his New York apartment. Rather than kick them out, Walter allows them to stay, filling the void in his life through this act of kindness until a police encounter pulls the rug out from under them all. I spoke with McCarthy about his new film, liberal guilt, and why he's incapable of acting and directing the same project. [Warning: Minor spoilers follow.]
There have been so many films about stolid white people brought out of their shells by spirited people of color. While writing the script, what were your intentions to avoid a rehash?
Still Rolling: 40 Years of the Rolling Stones on Film - "The Rock and Roll Circus"
Wednesday, April 9, 2008 | 10:15 AM
By Matt Singer
In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, from 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil" to last week's release of "Shine a Light," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn.
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg
The Film: In order to promote their new album "Beggars Banquet" (whose recording we watched yesterday), the Stones put on a televised concert in December of 1968 featuring themselves and a couple of friends, all set inside a big circus tent and featuring real circus performers like a trapeze artist and a fire eater. At least, that was the intention; the Stones were ultimately so displeased with the finished film that they didn't release it for almost 30 years.
"The Night of the Shooting Stars," "Diva Dolorosa"
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 | 10:29 AM
A distinctive force in European cinema for over 35 years, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani achieved from their first films an eloquent stylistic bridge between Rossellinian stringency and Fellinian braggadocio. Their movies are often framed like friezes, but the chaos of human whim always muddies the compositions. Appropriately, the Tavianis began as political barnburners, fashioning absurdist parables and sometimes cosmic commedia from Italy's lunatic flirtations with extreme movements. No European filmmaker has ever been as dedicated to their nation's peasant legacy, and no one on the continent since the '70s has made such potent and revealing use of their native landscape. Still, if the Tavianis' penchant for old-fashioned narrative folkiness has grown tedious over the last decade or two, there's still 1982's "The Night of the Shooting Stars," their premier achievement, and arguably the best Italian film of the '80s.
Still Rolling: 40 Years of The Rolling Stones on Film - "Sympathy for the Devil"
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 | 10:15 AM
By Matt Singer
In honor of their 40 years on movie screens, from 1968's "Sympathy for the Devil" to last week's release of "Shine a Light," we're taking a look at The Rolling Stones' filmography, featuring enough collaborations with great directors to make any actor jealous and enough abandoned or aborted projects to give any movie investor heartburn.
Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
The Film: Godard captures the Stones during the recording sessions for "Beggars Banquet" in the summer of 1968 and charts the evolution of the song "Sympathy for the Devil" through a series of uninterrupted long takes. The Stones' progress is intercut with a series of vignettes about, amongst other things, black revolutionaries, an interview with a woman named "Eve Democracy," graffiti artists defacing public property with sarcastic slogans like "Cinemarxism" and "Freudemocracy," and a bookstore where people pay for their purchases of pornography and comic books by giving the shopkeeper a Nazi salute. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 1960s.
IFC News Podcast #72: Seniors of the Silver Screen
Monday, April 7, 2008 | 9:22 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
Looking at the posters of the adorable New England senior citizens that make up the chorus featured in doc "Young@Heart," it's hard not to think about how, with the exception of rapping grannies, you just don't see people over the age of 65 in movies that often. Certainly not as the focus of a film — which is why, this week on the IFC News podcast, we look over the small selection of features centered on older casts, and the films that seem specifically intended for the neglected 65-plus demographic.
Download now (MP3: 26:45 minutes, 24.5 MB)
[Photo: "Young@Heart," Fox Searchlight, 2007]