September 2008
Video: "Happy-Go-Lucky" at the New York Film Festival
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | 3:15 PM
Poppy, the main character of Mike Leigh's latest film, "Happy-Go-Lucky," is a 30-year-old elementary school teacher who lives in London and who's irrepressibly, almost unnaturally cheerful. As played by Sally Hawkins, she's a fascinating and divisive figure, endearing to some and grating to others. In the video below, Leigh and Hawkins, taking questions from the press at the New York Film Festival, insist that simply writing the character off as chipper is to be unfair to what Leigh has called his "anti-miserablist film": "The thing about Poppy is that to describe her as being unadulterated[ly] happy is not really to understand her at all."
More videos from this press conference after the jump.
Video: "Hunger" at the New York Film Festival
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | 2:08 PM
Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the late "Bullitt" star) went from Turner Prize-winning artist to lauded filmmaker with his directorial debut "Hunger," about the 1981 Irish hunger strike in which IRA prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, tried to win political status by refusing food. "Hunger," which won the Caméra d'Or prize at Cannes, made its U.S. debut at the New York Film Festival, where McQueen sat down with moderator J. Hoberman of the Village Voice to address the press. In the video below, he talks about the origins of the film -- he was 11 years old when the strike took place: "It was one of those moments where things just stick in your head -- an event where it sort of resonates."
More videos from this press conference after the jump.
Interview: Neil Burger on "The Lucky Ones"
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | 9:39 AM
Despite all the talk about Iraq that may be generated by "The Lucky Ones," Neil Burger's latest film is far more interested in what's going on in America. In fact, it might be the more foreign country to its trio of soldiers (Rachel McAdams, Michael Peña and Tim Robbins) who return home to find crowded bars spellbound by "America's Got Talent," and conversations with civilians limited to a series of empty "thank you for your service" platitudes to fill the air. But that isn't to say that "The Lucky Ones" isn't hopeful -- when what's supposed to be the end of a long journey for these war vets becomes the start of a cross-country trek, "The Lucky Ones" becomes a pleasantly old fashioned road trip movie where the destination isn't as important as the company you keep. Fortunately, it's good company to be in, which surely must've been a relief for Burger both as a storyteller and in a more practical sense, since "The Illusionist" writer/director shot much of the film in a cramped van as it passed by and stopped in real locations across the country from New York to Las Vegas. I recently spoke with Burger about his diverse filmography and what he learned from being on the road before the camera rolled and long after.
On DVD: "Jellyfish," "Snow Angels"
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | 8:23 AM
The new Israeli film "Jellyfish" (2007) -- co-directed by lifemates Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, and a Camera d'Or winner at Cannes -- is both familiar and otherworldly. Israeli filmmakers, doubtlessly because of their particularly tense position in the world, of their society's fervent militarization and of the question of the Palestinians, love the everyone's-connected social-weave film, à la "Crash" (Amos Gitai has made several), bouncing amongst a variety of intersecting characters as a way to paint a portrait of the whole culture. As a sub-subgenre, it has its pitfalls, but as all of our cultures become more and more deracinative and immigrant-scrambled, it's easy to see the idea's allure. "Jellyfish," fortunately, adopts the mode but maintains modesty: a mere 78 minutes long (hallelujah), the movie is sharp and poetic on particulars (somewhat like Keret's short fiction, though Geffen is credited as the screenwriter), and is rescued from undue ambition by drop-dead bits of mundane magical realism. Most of all, it's a woman's film; of the roughly 12 characters, only two are men. As it is, three women dominate: Batia (the rather Islid Le Besco-ish Sarah Adler, whom Godard filmed so rapturously in "Notre Musique"), a lost waitress numb from a breakup and confronted one day at the beach with a mute five-year-old girl who simply walked out of the sea; Keren (Noa Knoller), a newlywed stuck honeymooning in a Tel Aviv dump after she breaks her ankle during her reception; and Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), a Filipino nursemaid far from home and commissioned to care for a belligerent old woman.
IFC News Podcast #96: Soundtracks That Overshadow Their Movies
Monday, September 29, 2008 | 8:24 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
"Nick and Norah"'s playlist may be infinite, but for a movie, making soundtrack choices can be like putting together the world's most high-pressure mixtape. And the most amazing soundtrack won't guarantee the greatness of your film -- on this week's IFC News podcast, we come up with a list of titles we think are overshadowed by their own music. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.
Download now (MP3: 33:43 minutes, 30.9 MB)
[Photo: "The Graduate," Embassy Pictures Corporation, 1967]
Opening This Week: Comedy in the Muslim world, infinite playlists and Jonathan Demme
Monday, September 29, 2008 | 8:03 AM
By Neil Pedley
At the multiplex this week, we have some pre-Halloween gothic fancy, films about the two things guaranteed to start a fight in any elevator — religion and politics — and a little music from Nick and Norah and Jonathan Demme's infinite playlists.
"Allah Made Me Funny"
When Albert Brooks went looking for comedy in the Muslim world, he perhaps didn't consider that it was alive and well inside our shores. Filmmaker Andrea Kalin picked up her camera and hit the road with Muslim American stand-up comics Azhar Usman, Mo Amer and Preacher Moss, who started the tour in 2004 to combat the negative stereotypes associated with their faith by sharing their unique brand of humor. The film intersperses their routines with personal vignettes that show how the comedians employ laughter as a tool of information to entertain, to educate and to show that a good mother-in-law gag simply knows no boundaries.
Opens in limited release.
Interview: Wayne Coyne on "Christmas on Mars"
Thursday, September 25, 2008 | 3:35 PM
Over a decade ago, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne began to think it was time for the Oklahoma-based psychedelic act to make a film: "The Beatles or Pink Floyd or The Ramones or even the fucking Spice Girls -- they've got movies and stuff, they're not just a group." And for a band famous for its theatricality and for live performances that include confetti, balloons, costumes and crowd-surfing in a giant bubble, a shift to the big screen seemed inevitable. By 2001, "Christmas in Mars" was in production, a pensive sci-fi drama about a crumbling Red Planet space station whose occupants are in the grip of despair until an unexpected alien visitor and a futuristic birth give them new hope. Flaming Lips friends and band members make up the cast -- Coyne plays the martian, while multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd is Major Syrtis, who tries to organize a Christmas celebration to lift the station's sagging spirits. They're joined by plenty of unexpected but familiar faces, including former "Blue's Clues" host Steve Burns, actor Adam Goldberg and "Saturday Night Live"'s Fred Armisen.
The ramshackle, DIY project ended up being seven years in the making, earning comparisons to a certain eternally upcoming Guns N' Roses album. But unlike Axl Rose, Coyne finally managed to premiere his finished first feature (co-directed by Bradley Beesley and George Salisbury) on May 25 at the Sasquatch! Music Festival. As you'd expect from a band that's anything but conventional, the film is now taking an unusual route through theaters in the U.S., with a kick-off run in New York City's Kraine Theater, which has been souped up with a Lips-designed Zeta Bootis Mega Supersonic Super-Sound Surround System. I spoke to Coyne, who was ensconced in upstate New York recording a new album, a few days after "Christmas on Mars" opened.
Interview: Chuck Palahniuk on "Choke"
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 | 9:35 AM
By Aaron Hillis
In my favorite Chuck Palahniuk novel, "Survivor," a former religious cult member-turned-celebrity messiah records his life story into the black-box recorder of a commercial airliner aimed to crash in the Australian outback. "Invisible Monsters" chronicles a former fashion model (before her jaw was blown off by a drive-by shooting) as she road-trips with a pill-popping transsexual to find herself. And I think we all know what happens in "Fight Club," whether we read the book or just watched embittered everyman Edward Norton grapple with the Brad Pitt-looking anarchist sharing his headspace. Palahniuk certainly loves to satirize the nihilism and social diseases wallowing in the underbelly of American culture, so it makes sense in this confusing, tumultuous zeitgeist that a second film would erupt from Palahniuk's pages. In the psychotically funny "Choke," adapted and directed by character actor Clark Gregg ("Iron Man"), Sam Rockwell is perfectly cast as another of the novelist's deeply troubled characters: Victor Mancini, a sex-addicted med school dropout who works at a colonial-era theme park when he isn't deliberately choking in restaurants to scam empathy and money out of Heimlich-inducing Good Samaritans. I met up with Palahniuk to talk about the film, how he feels about making people faint and his former belief about orgasms.
On DVD: Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy, "Shadow"
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 | 12:31 PM
When we first met Aki Kaurismäki, in 1989 when "Ariel" had its run as probably the first Finnish film to play theatrically in America since Jörn Donner's "Portraits of Women" (1970), we more or less fell in love. Lost in the hollow skull of the Reagan-Bush '80s, suffering the ascension of Spielberg and Ivan Reitman and Shane Black, wondering what remote atoll international art cinema had escaped to, and more or less completely ignorant of Finnish life, we had every reason to embrace this last of the red hot deadpan existentialists, whose films somehow altered the cellular structure of working class depression and turned it into cool comedy. His distinctively bittersweet dyspepsia established Kaurismäki, in a thick run of films that included "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" (1989), "The Match Factory Girl" (1990) and "La Vie de Bohème" (1992), as a new arthouse brand name, a kind of vodka-weary Bresson-meets-Tati.
IFC News Podcast #95: From Fantastic Fest
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 | 11:07 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
For eight blissful days in September, Austin, TX, is home to Fantastic Fest, a celebration of sci-fi, horror, fantasy and other genre films that's also a rollicking good time. This week on the IFC News Podcast, we reports (late!) and exhausted from the festival to discuss the World Air Sex Championships, "JCVD," Tiffany stalkers and karaoke.
Download now (MP3: 30:16 minutes, 27.7 MB)
[Photo: "JCVD," Peace Arch, 2008]
Opening This Week: Ladyboys, sex addicts, Spike Lee
Monday, September 22, 2008 | 11:01 AM
By Neil Pedley
If the old maxim "What I really want to do is direct" still holds true, this week's releases confirm that the filmmaking game is more open than ever. Anyone can have a crack at it; actors, teachers, digital artists, preachers. Perhaps you should have a go yourself. Hell, if Paul W.S. Anderson can get work doing it...
"The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela"
Offering up the most unlikely fairytale you're ever likely to see, Icelandic filmmaker Olaf de Fleur Johannesson draws on his documentary background with this endearing low-budget, semi-improvised Cinderella story. As a young Filipino lady-boy, the spunky, pre-op sex worker Raquela longs to be the belle of the ball as she trawls the Internet looking for love. When an American suitor pledges to be her Prince Charming and proposes a meeting in France, Raquela departs for her long-awaited date with destiny under the glittering Paris skyline.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.
Interview: Wayne Wang on "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers"
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 | 12:38 PM
By Aaron Hillis
Since the '90s, Hong Kong-born filmmaker Wayne Wang has directed large-scale Hollywood productions like "The Joy Luck Club" and "Maid in Manhattan," though his richest films have really been his smaller projects, like "Smoke" and its companion work, "Blue in the Face." Going back to the earliest days of his career, Wang was at his most personal and independent with films like 1982's "Chan is Missing" and 1985's "Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart," and it's these stories of the immigrant experience that Wang felt obliged to return to, having moved to America as a teenager.
Winner of four awards at the San Sebastián Film Festival, including best film, Wang's distinctly modest delight "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" is the first of his two films adapted by author Yiyun Li from her own collection of Chinese-American-themed stories. (The second is "The Princess of Nebraska," which arrives for free on YouTube in October.) In "A Thousand Years," the wonderful Henry O. stars as Mr. Shi, an aging widower who travels to the U.S. in hopes of repairing his divorced daughter's life. His intentions are admirable, but being raised in a different generation and culture, he doesn't realize how intrusive he is to her, even as he begins to warmly befriend and explore the curiosities of small-town America around him. I spoke with Wang back in July, before it was announced that Magnolia would be debuting "A Thousand Years" in theaters and "Princess" online.
Interview: Lou Adler on "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains"
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 | 10:36 AM
By Nick Schager
Most film fans have never seen 1981's "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains," the hard-charging, potent tale of an all-girl punk band's meteoric rise and fall, which featured supporting performances by members of the Sex Pistols and The Clash (and a young Ray Winstone, who played the lead singer of the Stains' tourmates The Looters). That's because Paramount Pictures never saw fit -- save for a couple of random screenings -- to give the film any sort of theatrical release, or even put it out on VHS. Yet despite the studio's attempts to forever shelve the film, it (like punk) wouldn't die, finding renewed life through bootlegs and airing on USA Network's "Up All Night," where frequent broadcasts of the film during the midnight shift helped turn it into a cult classic that would later influence, among others, future riot grrrl pioneers Courtney Love, Bikini Kill and L7. That underground popularity will finally pay dividends now that Rhino's released "The Fabulous Stains" on DVD, an event sure to be celebrated by the film's ardent fans, as well as its director, record producer and music business manager (not to mention helmer of Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke") Lou Adler, who I recently spoke to about, as he sarcastically put it, the film's "immediate" release.
On DVD: "The Forsaken Land," "Team Picture"
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 | 9:57 AM
Ah, minimalism, the miserable hairshirt pajamas so many critics still love to put on in the semi-privacy of their vocations, ostensibly separating them from the herd of passive filmgoers like enlightened monks separated from the peasantry -- or, at least, so it may seem to the mainstream, who have been trained from the cradle to desire only distraction, and for whom a movie that deliberately fails to deliver narrative excitement is akin to water torture. Honestly, both are fair and comprehensible positions, and if you can decry the ignorant impatience of the many viewers intolerant of the new movie by Jia Zhangke or Pedro Costa or Tsai Ming-liang, you could also legitimately wonder when and where art film asecticism steps over the border into pretentious tedium. (Just because it's not a terribly commercial gambit doesn't mean it can't be overexploited by filmmakers -- take Costa's "Colossal Youth," please.)
IFC News Podcast #94: Non-Kids Movies For Kids
Monday, September 15, 2008 | 7:44 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
Emergency babysitting situation? Unexpected underage dinner guests in addition to the people you'd actually invited? Even a cinephile whose closest brush with the kiddy set was a debate on the similarities between "WALL-E" and Chaplin can end up having to entertain young ones sometimes. This week on the IFC News podcast we look to our own collections to see what films we own that might not have been made for children, but that would entertain them just fine.
Download now (MP3: 28:44 minutes, 19.8 MB)
[Photo: "The King of Kong," Picturehouse Entertainment, 2007]
Opening This Week: Ed Harris goes Western, Keira Knightley goes corseted (again)
Monday, September 15, 2008 | 7:19 AM
By Neil Pedley
Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen put their signature on an oater, but they're not the only ones to head west this week — an all-star cast led by Charlize Theron charge into Seattle, Wayne Wang follows the travels of a Chinese scientist visiting his daughter in Spokane, Neil LaBute tries vilifying the L.A.P.D. and Ricky Gervais heads across the pond to bring his schtick to an American comedy.
"All of Us"
In this documentary, filmmaker Emily Abt follows Dr. Mehret Mandefro, a young, Ethiopian-born, Harvard-educated physician working in the South Bronx, and her efforts to both treat and bring awareness to the plight of African-American women affected by the HIV virus. Through her research with two of her patients and their own candid stories and circumstances, Dr. Mandefro highlights some of the key factors that have led to a steep increase in the number of women who have become victims of this terrible disease and ultimately arrives at some intriguing conclusions for women as a whole.
Opens in New York.
Interview: Diane English on "The Women"
Thursday, September 11, 2008 | 9:28 PM
By Erica Abeel
In 1936, theatergoers were first treated to a rousing bitch-a-thon called "The Women." Outrageous and often hilarious, the Clare Booth Luce-penned play is set in a female-only zone of Park Avenue, and its plot, a flimsy affair, concerns the trials of Mary Haines, a contented wife who discovers that her wealthy husband Steven is having a fling with the "spritzer girl" at the Saks Fifth Avenue perfume counter. Mary's girlfriends offer solace by feeding her marital woes to the tabloids, when they're not cracking wise at each other's expense, at times literally drawing blood. (Sample stage direction: "Sylvia is about to use her nails...") In 1939, the fur flew again in a film by George Cukor that's become a cult classic and faithfully reflects the venomous spirit of the play.
Now, after a lengthy sojourn in development hell, Diane English (the creator of "Murphy Brown") brings "The Women" into the 21st century, turning the bitchfest into a lovefest. As in Luce's original, English has kept the all-female cast, with nary a guy in sight. Meg Ryan stars as Mary the wronged wife and Eva Mendes as the bombshell shopgirl. The delicious Annette Bening, tearing through pricey real estate with manic glee, takes on the Rosalind Russell role as Sylvie, Mary's best friend since college — though she's now a happily unmarried editor of a high-profile magazine. In a post-"Sex and the City" landscape, these "Women" come from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, generations, and professions, and I recently spoke to English about her valentine to today's woman — an appreciation of her efforts to navigate a web of choices, roles and responsibilities while maintaining a bond to one another.
Review: "Burn After Reading"
Thursday, September 11, 2008 | 9:01 PM
By Matt Singer
It doesn't make a lot of sense to follow up a movie as dark as "No Country for Old Men" with one as downright silly as "Burn After Reading," which is why it works for the Coen brothers. Joel and Ethan have done this before -- they made "Raising Arizona" after "Blood Simple"; "The Big Lebowski" followed "Fargo" -- and if there's one thing these brothers savor, it's upending their audience's expectations. The only thing people didn't like about the almost uniformly beloved "No Country" was the film's controversial ending and its handling of a sudden off-screen death of one of the main characters. In "Burn After Reading," they push it farther, refusing to show you the chain of events that set the film's entire blackmail plot into motion.
They're not just messing with you; by taking their last film's most significant criticism and making it even more noticeable, they're also making fun of themselves, and that idea of self-parody reverberates through every frame of their latest movie. This is a spy picture in which nobody does any actual spying (at least not for the government; plenty of people are snooping around on their spouses) and where the intelligence community is portrayed as a world inhabited wholly by people without intelligence. Just about everybody whose name appears on the poster is skewering their onscreen persona, the most obvious being the picture's two biggest stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt.
List: Remaking Your Own Foreign Language Film
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 | 10:45 AM
If "Bangkok Dangerous," with Nicolas Cage as a hitman in Bangkok moping over both his career choices and a girl, felt familiar -- well, that's probably because it's derivative of many a sad assassin movie that's come before. But it's also a remake, and not just your run-of-the-mill Hollywood retread of a foreign film. "Bangkok Dangerous" finds Hong Kong-born sibling directing team Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun remaking their own debut, a 1999 Thai-language film of the same name, and joining that growing club of directors who've headed to the U.S. to try an English take on their own movie. While the set-up makes sense -- subtitle-avoidant audiences here prefer a language and actors they're familiar with, and who knows the ins and outs of a project better than whoever helmed it the first time out? -- these remakes have a higher chance of stinkiness than the already dubious average redo. Here's a look at five other titles that offer foreign filmmakers reshooting their own work in good ol' American English.
Interview: Jamie Kennedy on "Heckler"
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 | 4:15 AM
By Aaron Hillis
Within all the symposiums, panels and debates trying to decipher what arts criticism is and will ultimately become in the Internet age, those artists and entertainers who are skewered by critics' ink are rarely discussed. Comedian-actor Jamie Kennedy ("Scream") has experienced the vitriol of opinionated haters for decidedly non-masterpieces like "Son of the Mask" and "Malibu's Most Wanted," but it has to be worse when it happens in the middle of a stand-up performance. Produced by Kennedy and directed by Michael Addis, "Heckler" is a deeply personal and often funny doc about the relationship between performers and their critics, right down to heated confrontations between Kennedy and his online eviscerators. The film features a surprising gamut of talking heads: comedians like Patton Oswalt and Kathy Griffin make sense, as do directors like George Lucas and Uwe Boll, but who would've suspected to hear from Christopher Hitchens, Larry Flynt and Jewel in the same film? In honor of indie film's most ubiquitous topic and this week's DVD release of "Heckler," I spoke to Kennedy to attempt to find understanding between our symbiotic careers.
On DVD: "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis," "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 | 4:14 AM
"Our starved instincts have been clamoring for centuries for more and more substitutes," Henry Miller once wrote, "and as a substitute for living the cinema is ideal." There may not be a single filmmaker that Miller's cynical observation describes better, sans the cynicism, than Jack Smith, famed New York avant-gardist, gay downtown gadfly, rebel performer and temperamental film artist. All Smith ever wanted was to create a new world for himself, separate from the mundane, ugly and unjust world he saw around him, and if we know his name today, it's because he largely succeeded. Mary Jordan's documentary "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis" (2007) is, for a new generation with heretofore unprecedented access (on DVD) to the entire legacy of experimental film, a smashing introduction into the world of mid-century, iconic D.I.Y. rooftop moviemaking, where penniless idiosyncrats could become world famous with a borrowed camera, some thrift-store accoutrements and the will to transgress.
IFC News Podcast #93: Debating Two Toronto Films
Monday, September 8, 2008 | 9:08 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
The Toronto Film Festival is in full swing, and so this week on the IFC News podcast we argue over two of the films screening there: Spike Lee's World War II drama "Miracle at St. Anna" and Mike Leigh's North London comedy "Happy-Go-Lucky."
Download now (MP3: 25:53 minutes, 23.7 MB)
[Photo: "Miracle at St. Anna," Touchstone Pictures, 2008]
Opening This Week: A 9/11 noir, a Flaming Lips film and a Coens comedy
Monday, September 8, 2008 | 8:55 AM
By Neil Pedley
Some might be quick to dismiss this week as part of the post-summer lull, but others might see it as a week of films that have been years in the making — it's been 13 since the now re-paired Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were last on screen together, while Diane English's remake of "The Women" took 12 to make it to the big screen, and the Flaming Lips' "Christmas on Mars" spent a mere seven years in the offing. As for fans of the Coen brothers, it only seems like forever since "No Country for Old Men."
"Able Danger"
Another week, another 9/11 conspiracy film, this one actually getting released on the seventh anniversary of the tragedy. Loosely inspired by "The Maltese Falcon," this DV noir offers something of a date movie for far-left conspiracy theorists who take issue with perceived abuse of power on the part of our government. In spite of a budget that wouldn't finance a toddler's birthday party, first-time director Dave Herman and scripter Paul Krik cook up a shadowy cloak-and-dagger mystery starring international woman of mystery Elina Löwensohn (in femme fatale mode here) who steps into the bookstore owned by a radical blogger (Adam Nee) and sweeps him up into a deadly hunt for a hard drive that contains proof of US government involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
Opens in New York.
Interview: Chris Smith on "The Pool"
Wednesday, September 3, 2008 | 7:09 AM
By Aaron Hillis
Wisconsin-born filmmaker Chris Smith's 1996 debut feature, "American Job," got his foot in the door at Sundance, but it was 1999's "American Movie," about a luckless amateur filmmaker in production on a low-budget horror flick, that earned him the Grand Jury Prize in Park City, putting his star on the indie-film map. Two more funny and moving docs, "Home Movie" and "The Yes Men," followed, and then Smith threw a game-changer into his oeuvre: a a Hindi-language narrative. Nominated for a Spirit Award and winner of yet another Sundance trophy (the Special Jury Prize this time around), "The Pool" is a neo-realist chronicle of entrepreneurial young Venkatesh (non-pro Venkatesh Chavan), a hotel "room boy" in Panjim, Goa who ingratiates himself to a wealthy family in hopes of swimming in their luxurious pool. Adapted from a short story by his long-time collaborator Randy Russell and exquisitely shot by Smith himself, this deeply humane and moving story couldn't be more deceptively simple. Just before NYC's Museum of Modern Art held a career retrospective for Smith as a run-up to the theatrical release of "The Pool," I chatted with Smith about India, being classified as a documentarian, and what he thinks about Todd Solondz's on-screen condemnation of his best-known film.
On DVD: "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom," "Television Under the Swastika"
Tuesday, September 2, 2008 | 10:12 AM
The most fabulous and fascinating thing about Pier Paolo Pasolini's notoriously terminal film "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" (1975) is its intractability, its single-minded evasion of traditional matters of visual pleasure, narrative, spectator experience and thematic thrust. Calling it a "masterpiece," as transgression-obsessed critics have done, or an "abomination," as many Italians, clergy and stuffed shirts have done over the years, or even a work that could be judged as simply good or bad, thumbs up or thumbs down, is not only unhelpful but ridiculously wrong. In many ways, the movie stands outside of cinema, and art culture — which is, of course, exactly where the Marquis de Sade himself has long stood. Sade didn't write books — stories meant to be read progressively in time for purposes of empathy and enlightenment and entertainment — he was the first hell-and-high-water oppositionist, assembling massive ramparts of words and ideas intended not as art, but only as testaments to a tireless antiestablishmentarianism. He didn't care about his readers, their interest or arousal or even disgust; Sade only cared about building his unreadable castle of protest. Pasolini had always been a much more socially responsible, and politically savvy, artist, but with "Salò" he followed Sade's example and managed the unprecedented: he made a film the viewing of which is incidental, but the existence of which is fundamental.
IFC News Podcast #92: The Rules of Sad Assassins
Monday, September 1, 2008 | 11:37 AM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
If movies have taught us anything, it's that there's a huge shadow economy for professional killings, and dozens of angsty men and women around the globe specially trained to fill it. "Bangkok Dangerous" finds Nicolas Cage becoming the latest to join the ranks of these sad assassins, and in honor of the film, this week on the IFC News podcast we look at the many reasons movie hitmen tend to be so tragic.
Download now (MP3: 34:42 minutes, 31.8 MB)
[Photo: Nicolas Cage in "Bangkok Dangerous," Lionsgate, 2008]
Opening This Week: Nic Cage's new hairpiece, Billy Elliot's dark side
Monday, September 1, 2008 | 11:22 AM
By Neil Pedley
This week's trip to the multiplex offers a jaunt around the globe where, amongst other things, there's a case of mistaken ethnicity in Boston, Nic Cage gets another wig fitted in Thailand, there's whimsy and surrealism in Scotland and Matthew McConaughey is right at home in Malibu, where he might finally have found something he does well, maybe.
"August Evening"
Strained emotional bonds and the transitory nature of the life of an illegal immigrant provide the backdrop for Chris Eska's quietly affecting family drama that stars Pedro Castaneda as an aging farmhand who loses his job at a chicken farm in a sleepy Texas town, forcing he and his devoted daughter-in-law (Veronica Loren) to relocate to San Antonio to stay with his older children and the grandchildren he never knew he had. As Alison Willmore pointed out in last week's Lunchbox, Castaneda is a first-time actor who turned heads at this year's Spirit Awards where he was nominated for best male lead and the film went on to win the John Cassavetes Award for a film under $500,000.
Opens in New York.
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