August 2008
List: If the Slipper Fits... Five Cinderella Reinventions
Friday, August 29, 2008 | 9:22 AM
By Matt Singer
What happens when you put the classic Cinderella story together with a modern setting or flip the protagonists' sexes? A whole lot more than bippity-boppity-boo. In honor of the new film "Year of the Fish," a self-proclaimed "Cinderella in a Chinatown massage parlour," here are five more unique reinventions of this durable fairy tale popularized by French author Charles Perrault in 1697. Read quickly, though: at the stroke of midnight, this article turns back into zeros and ones.
"Ever After" (1998)
Directed by Andy Tennant
The Brothers Grimm are called before the Grand Dame of France (Jeanne Moreau) to set the record straight on the "real" Cinderella, who had no magical benefactors or means of conveyance, though she did get some wardrobe support from Leonardo da Vinci (Patrick Godfrey). Actually named Danielle De Barbarac (Drew Barrymore), she was living in servitude to her stepmother, Baroness Rodmilla (Angelica Huston) when she met Prince Henry (Dougray Scott) as he pilfered one of the family's horses. When she bumps into Henry again while posing as Nicole de Lancret to try to save one of her family's servants, Danielle is forced to carry on a double life, meeting the prince at a series of secret romantic rendezvous. Barrymore's Danielle is no fair princess — with her secret identity, selfless deeds and championship skills with a blade, she's more like a superhero. This version of Cinderella is unquestionably the most "adult" (with the exception of Cheryl Smith's 1977 soft core musical version, which, unfortunately, wasn't at my local video store) — it's the only one rated PG-13 — and the least whimsical; at times, the magic-free depictions of the dingy realities of France's lower class can get a bit oppressive. Still, this rendition isn't as accurate as it claims — the real Prince Henry was born the same year the real da Vinci died, not to mention the fact that everyone in France in the 16th century speaks with an English accent.
Interview: Ken Leung on "Year of the Fish"
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | 9:38 AM
By Aaron Hillis
38-year-old New York actor Ken Leung ("Rush Hour," "Saw," "The Squid and the Whale") may have only gigged on a single episode of "The Sopranos" (as Junior Soprano's violent protégé in a psychiatric hospital), but it was enough to inspire producers to write him into another TV pop phenomenon, "Lost." As brooding spiritualist Miles Straume, one of the elusive strangers to parachute onto the island, Leung brings to the role both quiet menace and caustic wisecracks.
Leung can also be seen in writer/director David Kaplan's rotoscope-animated indie "Year of the Fish," a contemporary retelling of the Cinderella fairytale set in a seedy massage parlor and the streets of Chinatown. Leung costars as Johnny, an accordion player who may also be the Prince Charming to disillusioned immigrant Ye Xian (An Nguyen). Notoriously shy, Leung graciously offered up a phone interview from Hawaii while preparing to shoot his next puzzling episode of "Lost."
On DVD: "Please Vote for Me," "Primo Levi's Journey"
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | 8:31 AM
The new Chinese documentary "Please Vote for Me" (2007) has an irresistible arc: take a class of average middle class third-graders, give them the opportunity to vote for "class monitor;" tell the three candidates that they have to run campaigns, in order to net as many votes as they can; and let the political process run its course — that is, let it corrupt, humiliate and demoralize the children just as they were led to believe they were creating "democracy." Weijun Chen's film — which runs a mere 55 minutes — has an almost crystalline purity to its ironies. Three Wuhan children are "selected" by the teachers — two boys (one of whom is the incumbent monitor, and given to shoving his classmates around) and a girl, whose shy demeanor would seem to make her a dubious candidate. Right out of the gate, the campaigns become hilarious-yet-chilling mirror images of adult political activity: rather than appeal to common sense with reason and honesty, the seduction of power takes over, and the three candidates instantly resort to bullying, subterfuge, illicit coalitions and false accusations. Palm-pressing is relentless, and subordinate posts are promised in exchange for votes (including something called a "vice monitor"). A "talent show" is disrupted by heckling (afterwards the guilty candidate forces his cohorts to tearfully apologize to the victim, an act that he hopes will win him class-wide approval); debates immediately devolve into character assassinations. Behind the scenes, the candidates' parents encourage them to fight dirty, and instruct them in appearance and substance-free speechifying. Every monstrous tendency of our political system, including, in the end, bribery, finds its way into this innocent little classroom, and there may not be a more potent new film to see this election year.
IFC News Podcast #91: A Salute to Manny Farber and Termite Actors
Monday, August 25, 2008 | 9:58 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
In honor of the late critic Manny Farber's idea of termite art, and of the movie doldrums of late August, this week on the IFC News podcast we pay our respects to our favorite working leads in good-bad films. After all, great acting is one thing, but the ability to yell about getting revenge on the guy who killed your wife while flexing your abs and outrunning a fireball is quite another, and worthy of its own kind of appreciation.
Download now (MP3: 32:23 minutes, 29.6 MB)
[Photo: Jason Statham in "Death Race," Universal Pictures, 2008]
Opening This Week: Vin Diesel saves the world, Takashi Miike goes west
Monday, August 25, 2008 | 9:37 AM
By Neil Pedley
This week's new films include the Western going Eastern, a couple of exotic music docs, Cinderella stories for girls and for boys and Vin Diesel attempting to walk, chew gum and shoot people -- all at the same time.
"Babylon A.D."
Second chances all around in this stylish cyberpunk romp that sees "La Haine" director Mathieu Kassovitz take another bite at the mainstream cherry after stumbling with his last detour into Hollywood, the Halle Berry clunker "Gothika." Vin Diesel, who passed on "Hitman" for this, also gets another shot at a potential franchise after eliciting a collective yawn with his Neo-lite performance in "The Chronicles of Riddick." After a troubled shoot fraught with budget overruns and uncooperative weather, Diesel has the bigger challenge on his hands as Toorop, a mercenary charged with trying to save the world with a snowboard while escorting a genetically altered young woman with a secret through post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe before delivering her to New York. Michelle Yeoh, Gérard Depardieu and Charlotte Rampling highlight the international cast.
Opens wide.
Video: Ludivine Sagnier
Friday, August 22, 2008 | 4:43 PM
An interview with France's Ludivine Sagnier, the star of Claude Chabrol's "A Girl Cut in Two" and the upcoming "A Secret."
Feature: An Appreciation of Anna Faris
Thursday, August 21, 2008 | 2:48 PM
Anna Faris may finally be getting her due. After years of fearless and sparkling work in lowbrow spoofs and indie doodles, she's starring in and executive producing a big Hollywood comedy, "The House Bunny." Whether it's worthy of her talents is yet to be seen, but it definitely heralds a new stage in her circuitous career, one in which she can start calling her own shots. If given the chance, she's capable of out-dumbing Judy Holliday and out-ditzing Carole Lombard, or at least give them a run for their heiress money.
With the Apatow boys dominating the comedy circuit, there's been little room for feisty female comediennes. Apatow's art is based on absurdist riffs on macho man-children, the women serving as sullen straight gals. There are some exceptions, of course (Kathryn Hahn's sex-starved wife in "Step Brothers," Molly Shannon's boozehound in "Talledega Nights"), but they simply serve to prove the rule. And that's why Faris is such a bracing talent, with her brash physicality, slow-burn timing and endlessly expressive eyes that promise the kind of screwball pluck that David Denby is constantly mourning as lost in his New Yorker columns. While I'm much fonder of Apatow and the severely underrated Adam McKay than Denby, he's right about the disappearance of the comic actress. Performers like Faris, Amy Adams and Isla Fisher are enormous talents, but there's no room for female clowns when teenage males are the targeted customer.
Feature: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (in Woody Allen's Movies)
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 | 9:25 AM
By Matt Singer
As far back as last February, the press began speculating about a supposed lesbian tryst between the stars of Woody Allen's new film "Vicky Christina Barcelona." Under a headline reading "Sapphic Steam," the New York Post's Page Six announced that they'd learned from an anonymous source that the scene between Scarlett Johansson and Penélope Cruz was "extremely erotic" and that when the film reached theaters audiences would "be blown away and even shocked." Various news agencies picked up the story. Some even distorted it further; one website assured its readers in no uncertain terms that "Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz will have lesbian sex in Woody Allen's new film," as if the actresses were bypassing any notion of dramatic pretense and doing the scene purely for their own sexual gratification.
Even after "Vicky Christina" played the Cannes Film Festival last May, rumors of the combustible chemistry between the stars continued, but audiences seeing the film as it makes its way around the country in limited release will have to be pretty prudish to be "blown away" by what's on screen — the moment in question is a same sex make-out scene, infinitely less explicit than movies like "Bound" or "Mulholland Drive." I guess it's pretty hot by the standards of a Woody Allen movie, but that makes it pretty tame by most other measures. For 40 years, Allen has made movies about sex without ever actually featuring it.
Interview: Azazel Jacobs on "Momma's Man"
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 | 8:51 AM
By Aaron Hillis
Last December, I met filmmaker Azazel Jacobs at a coffee shop just down the street from the Tribeca loft he grew up in, and where his parents — avant-garde cinema icon Ken Jacobs and longtime collaborator Flo — still rent. Though he now lives in L.A.'s Echo Park neighborhood, Aza was back in NYC for final tweaking on his third feature, "Momma's Man," before its unveiling at Sundance '08. The reason for our meeting was mostly professional, as Benten Films (a DVD label I run with film blogger Andrew Grant) had fallen in love with Jacobs' previous film, "The GoodTimesKid," starring his real-life girlfriend Sara Diaz, "I'm Going to Explode" writer/director Gerardo Naranjo, and himself. (Benten will release "The GoodTimesKid" in early 2009, so let the shilling stop here).
Several months later, after a distribution deal with ThinkFilm fell through and Kino picked up the slack, "Momma's Man" is finally seeing a theatrical release. Shot mostly in the aforementioned Manhattan apartment and co-starring Jacobs' real-life parents as fictitious versions of themselves, the film chronicles the unusual coming home of adult son Mikey (Matt Boren, as Azazel's quasi-surrogate). Regressing into the familiar comforts of living with his folks, Mikey begins deceiving everyone to overextend his stay, ignoring his wife and child at home while coming down with a self-inflicted case of agoraphobia. The New York Times' Manohla Dargis praised the film as "conceptually bold, emotionally naked... a work of surprising emotional and structural complexity. This is independent cinema defined."
Back in New York for the premiere, Jacobs spoke to me by phone from his childhood home and makeshift movie set — though to avoid repeating other recent interviews, we talked mostly about the Clash.
On DVD: Lech Majewski, "Brand Upon the Brain!"
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 | 8:28 AM
Who is Lech Majewski? Among other things, he's something of a newfound challenge for the critic and budding cinephile. A tireless and passionate Euro artiste of a kind that gets often relegated to the "underground" or "experimental" categories in this country, but who also employs old-fashioned surrealism and sometimes nets name actors like Viggo Mortensen (pre-"LOTR"), Majewski does everything on his films but make the coffee, and thus they are his works, uncorrupted by business and audience. Which may be the trouble — based upon the set of features released by Kino, Majewski may be one of the most pretentious filmmakers alive and working. Or is he a visionary? What separates the two quantities, except taste and argument? When does Majewski's brand of rampaging, overtly symbolic experimentalism dip below the line of transformative art and into nonsense? "Gospel According to Harry" (1994) attacks modern society's materialistic failures at happiness by placing Mortensen and wife Jennifer Rubin and a houseful of appliances in the barren dunes of the Mojave Desert, where a tragic domestic scenario plays out complete with Biblical allusions (a Catholic Pole, Majewski can rarely resist crucifixions) and digs at consumerism. "The Roe's Room" (1997) is a brooding, original modern opera-oratorio (libretto by Majewski, of course), sung over an ostensibly autobiographical dream-dynamic, in which the drab apartment inhabited by a young artist living with his middle class parents is transformed by the son's creative spirit into a bustling, seasonally active natural landscape. (Not unlike "Where the Wild Things Are," when you think about it, or David Lynch's "The Grandmother.") Too often, memories of music videos and Monty Python skits would impede on the viewing moment. "Glass Lips" (2007), assembled from a few dozen installment-art video pieces originally entitled "Blood of a Poet," limns without a word of dialogue the memories and hallucinations of a psychotic mental patient, a hopscotching journey that includes a Cronenbergian birth nightmare, bleeding walls (another LM motif), Oedipal lust and a woman in an evening gown boxing a heavy bag in an empty opera house...
IFC News Podcast #90: Our Fall Indie Film Preview
Monday, August 18, 2008 | 2:17 PM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
The season of troubled (but incredibly box office-friendly) superheroes, of IMAX, of fanboys attacking critics, of women (hey!) wanting to see films after all, of some incredibly stupid comedies, of summer is coming to a close. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look ahead to fall and offer ten picks of indie films we're looking forward to, as well as word on ones we've already seen.
Download now (MP3: 29:56 minutes, 27.4 MB)
[Photo: The Coen brothers' "Burn After Reading," Focus Features, 2008]
Opening This Week: Tori Spelling does H.P. Lovecraft, Steve Coogan's sexy Jesus
Monday, August 18, 2008 | 8:30 AM
By Neil Pedley
This week finds Shakespeare meeting Sexy Jesus, a crash course in Czech history alongside a totalitarian demolition derby, apocalyptic sea monsters and Fred Durst trying to get in touch with his fuzzy side.
"Cthulhu"
Director Dan Gildark certainly isn't lacking for confidence. Whereas most first-time filmmakers would turn to the well-worn territory of twentysomethings and their quirky quarterlife crises for subject matter, Gildark has opted to tackle H.P Lovecraft's sprawling, heady, quasi-religious mythos from the short story "Shadow over Innsmouth" instead. Jason Cottle stars as Russ, a history professor who returns home to Oregon to execute his late mother's will and discovers his father is the leader of the coastal town's apocalyptic cult that centers on the fabled Cthulhu, an extraterrestrial deity that exists in a state of torpor at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. When Russ learns a mass sacrifice may be in the offing, he must find a way to stop it...and fend off the advances of co-star Tori Spelling.
Opens in limited release.
Interview: Fred Durst on "The Longshots"
Friday, August 15, 2008 | 12:55 PM
By Aaron Hillis
Sure, he's a nü metal superstar with over 67 million albums sold worldwide, but what Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst always intended to do was direct. The singer of "Nookie" and "Break Stuff" (who, incidentally, filmed both those and all of his band's videos) took the indie scene by surprise when his debut feature "The Education of Charlie Banks" premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. Not much more than a year later, Durst has already taken the canvas chair again with a bigger project, the family-friendly dramedy "The Longshots." Based on the real life events of Jasmine Plummer, the first girl to play Pop Warner football, the film stars Keke Palmer as the young quarterback prodigy and Ice Cube as her unemployed, apathetic uncle, whose spirit returns when he becomes her coach. I rapped with Durst about his new career trajectory, the movies that make him laugh and weep, and how he became a playable character in three video games.
Interview: Whit Stillman on "Metropolitan"
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 | 6:30 PM
It's been nearly 17 years since "Metropolitan" aired for free on PBS's "American Playhouse." On the surface, the placement would seem appropriate for a comedy set amidst the afterparties of New York debutante balls, one that popularized the term UHB (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, of course) and created a superhero for the Park Avenue set in Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman, in his first starring role), the party gadfly who wielded words as if they were daggers. Incidentally, had "American Playhouse" not kicked in some money during the production of "Metropolitan," Whit Stillman's brilliant first film might not have been completed, the beginning of a trilogy that was as formative an experience for some during the '90s (this writer included) as John Hughes' films were for those growing up in the '80s.
So it should be considered a great triumph that "Metropolitan" is now once again available for the masses gratis, this time online (via Hulu here), and an even greater one that Stillman, who's all but disappeared from the film scene since 1998's "Last Days of Disco," is working on a bevy of new projects. In fact, it was after a busy day in New York that Stillman took the time to reflect on his first film, one that didn't get a distribution deal "until Vincent Canby laughed," and spoke to me about his time abroad working on screenplays and how to get hold of the elusive "Last Days of Disco" DVD.
List: Ten Disturbingly Powerful Fictional Film Corporations
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 | 3:35 PM
By Nick Schager
Serial killers are scary. So are mutant monsters. But in the collective American imagination, the terror they elicit is often no greater than that generated by malevolent corporate behemoths. Wielding stealthy political clout, recklessly tampering with genetics and technology, and casting morality aside in favor of profit, they're the avaricious power structures that loom large over our public and private lives, covertly pulling strings from their ivory towers while commissioning dirty deeds to be furtively carried out in the shadows of the night. Fueling our Big Brother fears, corporations are usually portrayed as villainous, and have most vigorously thrived in science fiction, where contemporary anxieties about nefarious boardroom conduct can be largely, fancifully projected. Consequently, it's not surprising that our list of the ten best fictional cinematic businesses turns out to be heavily skewed in that futuristic genre's favor, with the lone truly upstanding company to make the cut coming courtesy of this summer's marquee superhero, Batman.
Tyrell Corporation
"Blade Runner" (1982)
Putting the robotics achievements of "Short Circuit" and "Bicentennial Man" to shame, "Blade Runner"'s Tyrell Corporation is a 2019 biocompany that manufactures replicants, a series of androids so lifelike that they're only distinguishable from actual people by the retina-scrutinizing "Voight-Kampff Scale." Sporting a monumental pyramid headquarters that reflects its titanic cradle-of-civilization aspirations, Tyrell aims to fundamentally reconfigure the societal order, its worker replicants designed to free mankind from distasteful, hazardous menial labor, and its sultry pleasure models intended to service it sexually. As far as God complexes go, Tyrell's aim to splinter civilization into authentic and artificial castes is nothing shy of audacious. And, as is often the case with such endeavors, it's also one fated for catastrophe, which ultimately comes via four Nexus-6 almost-humans who -- through the development of a conscience, the ability to dream and, accordingly, a desire for an existence longer than their preprogrammed four-year lifespans -- prove to be soulful machines which ably live up to Tyrell's slogan: "More human than human."
On DVD: Larisa Shepitko, "A Throw of Dice"
Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | 12:10 AM
The farther we get from it, the clearer it seems that the Age of the Waves — the '60s and '70s, roughly demarcated — was film culture's own belle époque, glowing with post-teen hoochie koo and experimental piss and vinegar and hard-won grit, wherever movie tickets were sold and film stock could be bought. From the Parisian vague team to Budapest to Buenos Aires to even Hollywood, wavism spread over the globe like a supercool, ultra-realist virus, and as the home video digitization of film history continues, it's become obvious that what we thought we knew about the New Waves barely scratches the nitrate. (In just the last two years, the discs have included previously unavailable, and little-seen, world-beaters by Godard, Marker, Teshigahara, Borowzcyk, Varda, Masumura, Rosi, Melville, Syberberg, Klein, and probably scads I missed.) A bewitching case in point: Larisa Shepitko, who was something like the gorgeous Lombard to husband Elem Klimov's Gable, together the premier couple of the Khrushchev-thawed Soviet New Wave.
IFC News Podcast #89: Famously Disastrous Film Productions
Monday, August 11, 2008 | 2:20 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
"Tropic Thunder" may get its main goofs from the idea of delusionally self-important actors being dropped into an actual war zone to contend with some very real threats to their coddled existence, but it also contains many a nod to the great tradition of film productions going disastrously wrong. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look through some of cinema's most infamous examples, from Martin Sheen's near-fatal heart attack during the making of "Apocalypse Now" to Michael Cimino knocking down and rebuilding a $1.2 million "Heaven's Gate" set because he didn't like how the buildings were spaced.
Download now (MP3: 38:12 minutes, 35 MB)
[Photo: "Apocalypse Now" indeed - Martin Sheen in "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," Triton Pictures, 1991]
Opening This Week: Jazz living, Asian-influenced horror and Woody Allen
Monday, August 11, 2008 | 1:56 AM
By Neil Pedley
With the summer's end in sight, this week might represent the last hurrah in the name of good fun before the gloomy, Oscar-baiting seriousness of the fall release schedule descends upon us. Woody's back, there's a grindhouse/B-movie double header, and in the realm of blockbuster comedy, it's the wily veteran versus the young upstart as Ben Stiller battles Seth Rogen in an all-out race to the stupid.
"Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer"
Although she was overshadowed by such greats as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Anita O'Day became one of the "three queens of Jazz," in spite of an artform dominated by African-Americans and her struggle with her own personal demons. In this documentary, the famed white jazz vocalist reflects on nearly 70 years in the spotlight, not merely performing jazz, but living it as a lifestyle. O'Day's former manager Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden take a turn behind the camera to chart O'Day's rocky ascension to jazz royalty that included a stint in jail, four failed marriages, nearly as many abortions and addictions to alcohol and heroin, before mounting a stunning comeback in 2006 at the grand old age of 87.
Opens in limited release.
Interview: Larry Bishop on "Hell Ride"
Thursday, August 7, 2008 | 8:52 PM
By Aaron Hillis
Born in Philadelphia and raised in New Jersey, Larry Bishop (son of Rat Pack comic Joey Bishop) began his acting career after high school, working in comedy with friends like Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss. Though he's guest-starred on TV sitcoms like "Laverne & Shirley," "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Barney Miller," Bishop is far better known for being a drive-in theater badass, appearing as an American International Pictures contract player in wild-and-wooly biker flicks like 1968's "The Savage Seven" and 1971's "Chrome and Hot Leather." On an acting hiatus after 1983 (more on that later), Bishop returned to the screen in the mid-'90s with new credits to his name, writing the script for "Underworld" and making his directorial debut, "Mad Dog Time."
Enter exploitation film guru Quentin Tarantino. Understandably a fan of Bishop's AIP years, Tarantino cast him in a bit part for the second volume of "Kill Bill," but only after inspiring Bishop to write and direct "Hell Ride," an ultraviolent, oversexed homage to his motorcycle mayhem years. Bishop stars as Pistolero, the no-nonsense, quippy leader of the Victors gang, whose beef with their rivals, the 666ers, goes back to a murder some three decades before. QT executive-produced the Sundance-vetted midnight movie, whose cast includes Michael Madsen, Vinnie Jones, Dennis Hopper — and "Bill" himself, David Carradine. I spoke with Bishop about his contemporary take on the biker subgenre, women taking their clothes off and what Tarantino has in common with Brando, Sinatra and Muhammad Ali.
Feature: Judd Apatow's David Gordon Green
Thursday, August 7, 2008 | 8:15 PM
By Matt Singer
Though critics may be divided over "Pineapple Express" — at the time of this writing, it weighs in at 57% on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer — there is a consensus about at least one aspect of the Judd Apatow-produced stoner comedy: surprise over the choice of David Gordon Green as director. As Roger Ebert puts it in his positive review of the film, Green, "that poet of the cinema, is the last person you'd expect to find directing a male-buddy comedy about two potheads who start a drug war." Based on some of his own past comments, Green might be inclined to agree with him; when promoting his debut film "George Washington" a few years ago, Green told Charlie Rose, "I'm interested in any movie that's not like other movies. Growing up, I wasn't so much a 'Star Wars' or 'Raiders' kind of kid. I was a guy who'd watch 'Walkabout.'"
"Pineapple Express," like most Apatow productions, isn't just like other movies, it's about other movies. Potheads Dale (Seth Rogen) and Saul (James Franco) belong in the tradition of Cheech & Chong and Harold & Kumar. Their comedic misadventures place "Pineapple" somewhere in the vicinity of "Lethal Weapon" or "Tango & Cash" in the way it satirizes the action genre's rigorously observed rules and clichés, while its consistent blend of humor and mayhem puts it in a smaller category with Shane Black's "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and Edgar Wright's "Hot Fuzz." Apatow's characters speak to one another in a language of pop culture quotations ("Hey Crockett, how's Tubbs doing?") and, in keeping with that habit, "Pineapple Express" even has a prominent "Star Wars" rancor gag, regardless of Green's childhood viewing habits.
Interview: Alex Holdridge on "In Search of a Midnight Kiss"
Tuesday, August 5, 2008 | 9:15 AM
It wasn't the most romantic situation when Alex Holdridge found himself standing by the side of the road, en route to a city he hated. At a time when Holdridge recalls having "no margin for error," there he was with his car flipped upside down and little recourse, except for a primal instinct. "As soon as I crashed the car, I found a camera and I knelt down and took that photo. I always knew that so long as that photo comes out, I could use it somewhere."
When a character in Holdridge's third film, "In Search of a Midnight Kiss," describes being involved in a car accident, there's something poetic about the small poof of smoke and the clutter of the car's undercarriage set against the open road, particularly illuminated by the film's monochromatic palette. Most of the amusing and poignant moments in "Midnight Kiss" came from the professional and personal setbacks that beset the writer/director as he made his way from Austin to Los Angeles a few years back. After going through a breakup with his girlfriend, it was Holdridge's foray into internet dating that became the inspiration for a script about two lonely Angelenos (Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds) who spend the hours leading up to New Year's Eve together, strolling through the city after meeting each other through Craigslist. Holdridge talked to me about his latest film, his uneasy embrace of L.A. and the rocky road in real life that led there.
On DVD: "Joy House," "The Witman Boys"
Tuesday, August 5, 2008 | 8:41 AM
We've been trained nowadays to believe that if a mainstream movie is not a monstrous, definitive, top-heavy, eye-blasting, eardrum-bruising mega-event, it's not worth seeing. Gone are the cultural aesthetics of the double bill (in which no one film was so commanding that it couldn't stand to be immediately followed by another), the moviegoing habit (when diversion, charm and story were all moviegoers wanted, every weekend) and the notion of a film's nature, like a person's, being valued for modesty, lightweight pulpiness, empathic thrills in the moment and the pleasant company of beautiful and confident movie stars. Stuck in the summertime hell of superhero crapola and CGI migraines, it's not hard from where I stand (which is, frankly, still a state of bedevilment about how the typically abbreviated and overwrought non-storyness of "The Dark Knight" has so many educated viewers bamboozled) to find relief in the forgotten matinee fodder of a less bombastic time. This week, it's René Clément's rather delightful 1964 suspenser "Les Félins" (The Felines), titled here (after the American pulp paperback it was based on, by prolific noiriste Day Keene) "Joy House." There's not much that's earth-shaking about "Joy House" (except perhaps Lalo Schifrin's pre-Jerry Goldsmith score). But it's a movie in a way movies haven't been in a long time: graceful, relaxed, fun-loving, unpretentious.
IFC News Podcast #88: The Passion of the Passion Project
Monday, August 4, 2008 | 9:26 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
This week, indie director David Gordon Green tests out the mainstream waters with stoner comedy "Pineapple Express." It's not uncommon to see filmmakers getting their start in the independent world before moving on to studio fare, it's rare that we get to see the opposite scenario. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at those instances where a successful studio director takes a pay and budget cut in order to make, if not necessarily an indie flick, certainly a smaller scale passion project.
Download now (MP3: 33:54 minutes, 31 MB)
[Photo: "Pineapple Express," Columbia Pictures, 2008]
Opening This Week: DIY art, Philip Roth, the Germs and motorcycle gangs
Monday, August 4, 2008 | 9:10 AM
By Neil Pedley
This week's delectable delights include, amongst other things, such highbrow morsels as a gallery retrospective on D.I.Y. art and a crash course in the history of the California vineyards. If that's not your cup of proverbial tea, there's always psychotic bikers and the ballad of two stoned losers on the run from gangsters and the police.
"Beautiful Losers"
More than 15 years after founding the hugely influential Alleged Gallery in New York, the freelance curator Aaron Rose continues to serve as a cornerstone of the now-global D.I.Y. art scene. Here he teams with "Blair Witch" actor-turned-director Joshua Leonard to chart the evolution and subsequent commercialization of a movement whose genesis was found in a group of outcasts, slackers and misfits from the fringes of subculture. Emerging from the dirty little worlds of surfing, skateboarding and street graffiti, a group of artists including the likes of Harmony Korine, Shepard Fairey and Mike Mills came together and pioneered a fresh and daring new art form.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on August 29th.
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