Festivals
Cannes 08: Fernando Meirelles on "Blindness"
Thursday, May 15, 2008 | 12:17 PM
By Erica Abeel
Take it as a sign of some general anxiety disorder gripping the planet, but Cannes 2008 kicked off on a distinctly somber note. In "Blindness," the fest opener by Fernando Meirelles, civilization as we know it goes to hell and back when a group of urbanites in an unnamed city succumb to an epidemic of mysterious blindness. Only a character known as The Doctor's Wife (Julianne Moore, in a powerful turn) remains immune to the malady. Finding herself a leader in a world of savagery and chaos, she helps forge a new form of community that takes the film to a happier place (cue Kumbaya on the soundtrack).
Based on the celebrated allegorical novel by José Saramago, the film displays the ability first demonstrated by Meirelles in "City of God" to choreograph large groups of beleaguered folks through explosive situations. He's ably assisted by an international cast — who were coached by an expert in blindness — that also includes Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Alice Braga. In adapting this story, Meirelles confronted a daunting new task: finding an equivalent in cinema, the visual art par excellence, to convey the milky white sightlessness visited on his characters. Add to this the challenge of both bringing a human face to nameless characters who are generic stand-ins for humankind and striking a balance between gripping drama and the wider philosophical connotations of blindness intended by Saramago.
Whether or not Meirelles successfully met these challenges has been a hot topic of debate on the Croisette. I sat down to speak with the engaging, forthcoming filmmaker following the premiere of his film.
Live from Cannes, It's IFC
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 | 12:21 PM
The third annual Cannes Cam is a go — check it out for a live, 24/7 stream of the red carpet of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. IFC News host Matt Singer will be around for all of the major premieres, providing commentary along with a rotating cast of special guests that includes New York Times critic A.O. Scott, Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League and Variety's Anne Thompson.
You can find the Cannes Cam here.
Tribeca '08: Tracey Hecht on "Life in Flight"
Thursday, May 8, 2008 | 9:28 AM
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
There's a moment late in "Life in Flight" when Will (Patrick Wilson) tells his young son, "I haven't been paying a lot of attention lately." It's a difficult thing to admit for the harried husband and father, who spends most of the film kowtowing to his wife Kate (Amy Smart), who'd rather see him land a major commission for his architectural firm than have him attend their son's biodiversity science fair. As Will finds out, such choices have left him with the life he might once have imagined for himself, but not one he wanted. Though he's become a successful architect, the lines that have defined his life have become blurred, particularly when he meets Kate (Lynn Collins), a free-spirited designer. Writer/director Tracey Hecht knows something about those kinds of decisions, having recently broken away from a career in design to make her feature debut, which made its world premiere at Tribeca, and had time to talk about her own career path and why there's something for everyone to take away from her first film.
Tribeca '08: James Mottern on "Trucker"
Monday, May 5, 2008 | 10:19 PM
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
It's typical to assume when you sit down with a director that they have a love of film, but in James Mottern's case, his enthusiasm for the medium is infectious. When asked why he cast the perennially underrated Michelle Monaghan as the lead in his first film, "Trucker," he'll simply ask in return, "Did you see 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'?" That leads to a conversation about the little-seen 2005 drama "Winter Solstice" and the way Monaghan caught his eye in the background of a scene, and the next thing you know, you're talking about the way her eyes crossed in a segment for "North Country." That attention to detail is what might also be most impressive about Mottern's nuanced directorial debut, which premiered at this year's the Tribeca Film Festival. Though he'll rattle off his influences and the films he loves from the 1970s with reckless abandon, Mottern's "Trucker" is an original concoction that stars Monaghan as a mother whose hard living is interrupted by retaking custody of a young son she left long ago, with enough cursing between the two to make, well, a trucker blush. Mottern recently sat down to talk about his gritty character study, his war against sentiment and why not getting your film into a particular festival shouldn't be the end of the world.
Tribeca '08: Lucas Jansen, Adam Kurland and Spencer Vrooman on "This is Not a Robbery"
Friday, May 2, 2008 | 5:24 PM
[For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.]
When Lucas Jansen, Adam Kurland and Spencer Vrooman had to come up with a title for their first documentary, "This is Not a Robbery," they looked to the René Magritte surrealist painting "This is Not a Pipe" for inspiration. While there was very little that was artistic about the robberies attempted by the film's subject, J.L. "Red" Rountree — who merely went into a bank and handed a teller an envelope with the word "robbery" scribbled on it — there was something positively surreal about the fact that Rountree was 86 years old when he decided to first rob a bank. Rountree died in 2004 after starting out with great success in the oil business and ending in prison, though not before a series of incredible twists and turns of fate led the octogenarian to turn to a life of crime. Jansen, Kurland and Vrooman recently sat down to reflect on Rountree's legacy, how they got cozy with law enforcement and how they're getting away with things of their own at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The New York Underground Film Festival's Last Hurrah
Friday, April 4, 2008 | 1:14 PM
As film festivals proliferate like strip malls in nearly every city on the globe, say sayonara to the seminal anti-fest fest, the New York Underground Film Festival, giving up the ghost and closing shop after 15 years of courageously struggling to commercially showcase the inherently uncommercial. Over the years the fest has been the nation's premier landing zone for every type of film no one else would show: screaming punk sci-fi, optical abstractions, found-footage statements, transgressive fiction features, counter-culture homage, post-Waters camp, video installations, ageless-teen rebellion, radical politics and what have you. It's been a sack full of fighting rats every year as festival dockets go, but that's been part of the festival's charm and, frankly, its necessity, abetting and fueling as it has an entire secret film culture that has always had a hard time finding screens, and will now find times only tougher.
SXSW 2008: René Pinnell & Claire Huie on "The King of Texas"
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 | 12:10 PM
It was an oddly complementary pairing at SXSW when there was a mid-festival premiere of "Lou Reed's Berlin" followed by "The King of Texas," a documentary about indie film pioneer Eagle Pennell. Like Reed, whose sole album fronting The Velvet Underground inspired a host of imitators, Pennell is cited as an influence for not only filmmakers like Richard Linklater, who picked up Pennell's loose-knit aesthetic for "Slacker," but also for the likes of Robert Redford, who was said to have been inspired by the film to commandeer the U.S. Film Festival in Utah in order to make it a forum for regional filmmaking — now known as Sundance. Pennell made two films that suggested far greater things — the laconic, lived-in slices of life "The Whole Shootin' Match" in 1979 and "Last Night at the Alamo" in 1983 — before his struggle with alcoholism and other personal demons left him homeless and ultimately, dead mere days before he was to have turned 50 in 2002.
Although Pennell's work is largely unknown outside of Texas, his friend and restoration expert Mark Rance is hoping to change that with a DVD of "The Whole Shootin' Match," complete with a new documentary on Pennell made by his nephew René Pinnell and Claire Huie. But make no mistake, the resulting film, "The King of Texas" is far more than your typical DVD special feature. Insightful and pulling no punches, the film chronicles Pennell's adventures as a filmmaker who was immensely talented and unprepared for success, with interviews with Linklater, screenwriters Bud Shrake and Kim Henkel, and several other of Pennell's friends and collaborators. Pinnell and Huie spoke about capturing Pennell's larger than life personality shortly after their film's SXSW premiere.
Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro on "Body of War"
Monday, March 24, 2008 | 11:09 AM
"My gold standard for the length of the movie was 85 minutes, which, by the way, is the length of 'March of the Penguins'...and I missed it by two," muses Phil Donahue, a day before his first film, "Body of War" starts its national theatrical run. "But we have longer credits, I think."
Donahue can't be faulted for thinking big. After a career spent in the homes of millions of Americans on his groundbreaking talk show, he's hoping that just as many will see his first documentary, "Body of War," in theaters — and not because of the box office. It's the former television host's first time working in the medium, his first time working with a partner (in co-director and Austin-based documentarian Ellen Spiro), and his first time on the road raising awareness for the film. But it's all been worth it to Donahue, who was compelled to find a way to tell the story of Tomas Young, a young man who enlisted in the military shortly after 9/11 and came home from Iraq paralyzed. Instead of letting his disability ground him, Young becames an anti-war activist, but as Donahue and Spiro will tell you, this isn't just another anti-Iraq war doc — "Body of War" is an examination of courage, from the average American citizen to within the highest levels of government. While in Austin for SXSW, Donahue and Spiro spoke about the response to the film, getting Eddie Vedder on board to write a song, and how Michael Moore ruined the ending of their movie.
SXSW 2008: Jody and Dennis Lambert on "Of All The Things"
Wednesday, March 19, 2008 | 2:02 PM
Dennis Lambert may be the most successful singer/songwriter you've never heard of — unless you live in the Philippines. Although best known as the songwriter and producer behind everything from The Four Tops' "Ain't No Woman Like The One I've Got," Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" and, more infamously, Starship's "We Built This City" (which Lambert calls "an accumulation of all the crap of the '70s and '80s combined"), Lambert made one solo album, "Bags and Things," in 1972 that faded away almost immediately. A few years later, Lambert followed suit, moving to Boca Raton and transitioning into the real estate business. But if that were the end of the story, his son Jody wouldn't have much to work with for "Of All The Things," which follows the elder Lambert tour in the one place his solo album was successful — the Philippines — 35 years after its initial release. From dilapidated dancehalls to the arena that housed Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier's "Thrilla in Manila," Lambert is greeted with packed houses, playing all of the music he penned, in some cases for the first time in public. Since then, the 60-year-old has settled back into being a realtor and family man in Florida, but he and his son Jody, and the film's producer, Taylor Williams, gassed up the tour bus once again to stop by SXSW, where Dennis played a few gigs in addition to talking with me about the rigors of touring and the most unexpected of comebacks.
How did the concert tour in the Philippines come about?
Dennis Lambert: I've been approached by this particular Filipino gentleman going back to when he just became a promoter, which was in the late '70s. He'd been a deejay, a very successful one and he was beginning to promote shows on the side when he first approached me. Every so many years thereafter, I would hear from him — I think he came and approached me at least five times over that 30-some odd years. And the last time was in 2006, when I said yes.
SXSW 2008: Caroline Suh on "Frontrunners"
Monday, March 17, 2008 | 10:31 AM
Kofi Annan once told Alexander Payne that "Election" was the most purely political film he'd ever seen, which makes one wonder where the former U.N. Secretary-General would place the nonfiction "Frontrunners," Caroline Suh's study about the real life political process at New York City's Stuyvesant High School. As the film immediately lets the audience know, Stuyvesant is one of the most prestigious schools in the country and a proving ground for some of the best and brightest — where a term as student union president could equal a ticket to Harvard or Yale. With so much at stake, the race for student government involves primaries, televised debates, newspaper endorsements and, yes, the usual schmoozing with constituents (which in one candidate's case involves serving glasses of Pellegrino in the middle of a hallway "lounge").
For most, this isn't the typical high school experience, but then again, what is? Although the four candidates at the center of "Frontrunners" represent the familiar cliques of high school life — Hannah, the drama queen whose extracurriculars included a role in Todd Solondz's "Palindromes"; George, the Max Fischer-esque go-getter; Mike, a seemingly withdrawn type who cruises by on his looks and charm; and Alex, the ill-prepared basketball player — the resulting election reveals a generation of teens that is at once diverse, but also media savvy and unafraid of resorting to old fashioned stumping for votes. The documentary is the first to be directed by Suh, who had previously been a producer on various PBS documentaries with Erika Frankel. Suh discussed the highs and lows of the campaign trail following "Frontrunners'"s world premiere at SXSW.
SXSW 2008: Jay Delaney on "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie"
Thursday, March 13, 2008 | 9:55 AM
I'll start with a spoiler: You won't see Bigfoot in Jay Delaney's documentary, "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie." (Actually, that's a matter of opinion, since there's photographic evidence presented throughout the film that may or may not be Sasquatch.) But there is something much more elusive that Delaney captures as he tracks two Bigfoot hunters through the Appalachian woods of Portsmouth, Ohio — a loving portrait of Dallas and Wayne, two old friends looking for a major accomplishment to be remembered for in a place where there aren't many opportunities to make a mark. While both men believe the discovery of Bigfoot could also bring fame and fortune, they also enjoy the thrill of the hunt, and when the arrival of a high-profile Bigfoot hunter complicates their research, their friendship is tested. I caught up with Delaney after his film premiered at SXSW to talk about the creature they call Yeti in Australia and the pursuit of the American dream.
SXSW 2008: Daryl Wein and Richard Berkowitz on "Sex Positive"
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 | 9:55 AM
When Richard Berkowitz's mother is asked why she thought her son's book wasn't successful, she replies, "sex sells" and frankly, his book wasn't very sexy — even though it was titled "Stayin' Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex." Berkowitz had heard that before, even if his past as a gay hustler in New York during the 1980s would lead one to believe otherwise. Berkowitz spent his nights as a sex worker and his days as a journalist and AIDS activist at the height of the frenzy that surrounded the disease, attempting to dispel myths about how the disease was transmitted and pioneering the idea of having sex with condoms within the gay community. Yet his efforts mostly fell on deaf ears, and he retreated to write a book in 2003 that quickly went out of print. He also maintained an impressive archive that chronicled not only his own involvement in the early years of AIDS, but created a veritable oral history of the disease and potential prevention through saved television interviews, recorded phone calls and articles from the gay press. Although he may not have realized it, all he needed was 24-year-old filmmaker Daryl Wein to turn the treasure trove of material into something much more. I spoke to Berkowitz and Wein a day after their film, "Sex Positive", made its world premiere at SXSW, only 11 months after the two first met at a Passover Seder.
Considering the subject matter, how did you meet at a Passover Seder of all places?
Richard Berkowitz: When I first came to the city in the late '70s, I was a gay activist, and I made two feminist friends — one turned out to be Ardele [Lister, who appears in the film] and she almost became Daryl's mother-in-law. Every couple of years, Ardele makes a Passover Seder for the outcasts, for the transgendered or for the gay guys that would bring their lovers. It's a Seder for progressive people. So I show up by myself with my AIDS, and two guys who are lovers from Israel can show up, and Daryl was there because he was the boyfriend of her daughter.
SXSW 2008: The Winners
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 | 8:55 AM
Screenings for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival (as well as our coverage here at IFC.com) will carry on as the music contingent rolls into Austin, but last night, the winners of the jury and audience awards were announced.
Daniel Junge's "They Killed Sister Dorothy," about the murder of activist Dorothy Mae Stang, received both the jury and audience prizes for best documentary, while on the narrative side, Jake Mahaffy's "Wellness" and Mark Webber's "Explicit Ills" were given nods by the jury and by the audience. Here's a full list of the winners:
NARRATIVE FEATURE
Grand Jury Award: "Wellness," dir. Jake Mahaffy
Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast: "Up With Me," dir. Greg Takoudes
Special Jury Award for Cinematography: "Explicit Ills," dir. Mark Webber
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Grand Jury Award: "They Killed Sister Dorothy," dir. Daniel Junge
Special Jury Award: "Full Battle Rattle," dirs. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss
REEL SHORTS
Winner (Tie): "Warlord," dir. David Garrett; "Small Apartment," dir. Andrew T. Betzer
Special Jury Award: "The Second Line," dir. John Magary
IFC News Podcast #68: From South by Southwest 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008 | 10:31 PM
By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore
There's film! There's music! There's barbecue! There's... interactive! This week on the IFC News podcast, we check in from SXSW 2008 to talk about what we've been up to, what we've seen, and why we like this damn festival so much.
Download now (MP3: 32:51 minutes, 30.1 MB)
[Photo: Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg in "Nights and Weekends," 2008]
SXSW 2008: Richard Jenkins on "The Visitor"
Monday, March 10, 2008 | 4:12 PM
There's an everyman quality to Richard Jenkins, but not every man (or actor) has had the chops that have led Jenkins to become one of cinema's great scene-stealers. Though his career has spanned over 30 years, Jenkins first broke through with a turn as a gay FBI agent on acid in David O. Russell's "Flirting With Disaster," which was followed up by supporting roles ranging from the deceased patriarch of the Fisher family on "Six Feet Under" to being a regular in films for the Coen and Farrelly brothers. He joins a different fraternity in his latest film, "The Visitor" — the all-too exclusive club of leading men. In the film, Jenkins stars as Walter Vale, a widowed college professor whose life is reinvigorated by an unlikely friendship with Tarek and Zainab, a struggling immigrant couple who have unwittingly been illegally subletting his apartment. When an incident occurs that threatens deportation for Tarek, who befriends Walter and teaches him the drum, Walter attempts to save him from being returning to his native country of Syria and, in the process, begins to save himself.
"It's an hour and 45 minutes of life, is kind of what it is," says Jenkins, who came to SXSW Sunday to introduce the festival fave that's full of both laughs and tears. Although director Tom McCarthy couldn't join him, since the actor/writer/director was preparing for his first day of work on Tony Gilroy's thriller "Duplicity," Jenkins obviously relished the opportunity to praise "The Station Agent" helmer, dispel some talk about frequent collaborator David O. Russell and explain how the Coen brothers really lost at this year's Academy Awards.
SXSW 2008: Going Cuckoo for Cannabis
Sunday, March 9, 2008 | 7:54 AM
With 4/20 only a little more than a month away, SXSW kicked off an all-encompassing celebration of marijuana on Friday with the regional premiere of the Doug Benson doc "Super High Me" at the Paramount Theatre, shortly before other comedies about the herb made their premieres (officially: "Humboldt County"; unofficially: Jonathan Levine's Sundance hit "The Wackness," which played Saturday night as a secret screening). Part concert film culled from "Best Week Ever" regular Benson's stand-up act and part social documentary about the ongoing battle in California between the feds and the newly created legalized "dispensaries," which have been empowered by state law to sell medical marijuana, "Super High Me" sets its sights on being entertaining and informative and manages to do a little of both.
As Benson proves, it's not difficult to procure a doctor's note, and the film follows him as he detoxifies for 30 days from the substance before getting high for an entire month, inspired by Morgan Spurlock's attack on the Big Mac, "Super Size Me." On the surface, it would seem that the film is merely a vehicle for Benson's aloof brand of comedy, which, only moments into the film, gets him recognized as High Times #2 favorite pot comic. But, like Spurlock's seemingly self-serving doc, Benson's 30-day binge becomes something much larger than the gimmick at its center. The comedian's frequent trips to a doctor (who is merely high on life, providing an engaging dynamic) and director Michael Blieden's capture of the public outcry that results from overzealous drug enforcement officers breaking into the marijuana stores that have cropped up since California passed its medical marijuana law make for an intriguing discourse about the health and social ramifications of legalizing the drug. (Still, the sight of Benson and Sarah Silverman sharing a toke while Dave Navarro strums his guitar in the background is a bit jarring to see on camera.)
SXSW 2008: The Zellner brothers on "Goliath"
Friday, March 7, 2008 | 10:37 PM
If you know short films — and, given how hard it can be to see them, you'd be in a select crowd — then boy, do you know the Zellner brothers. David and Nathan Zellner are an Austin-based filmmaking team whose distinctively deadpan, frequently funny and unfailingly if oddly affecting shorts have earned them high praise on the festival circuit. This year marked their fourth in a row with a film at Sundance, and their first with a full-length feature, "Goliath," which is both true to and expands upon the off-kilter sensibility that made their shorter work so successful. In simplest terms, "Goliath" is a film about a missing cat and the recently divorced man desperately searching for it. But, as director/writer David Zellner puts it, "I guess more stuff happens." I checked in with the Zellners on the unseasonably cold day before "Goliath" was due to make its hometown premiere at SXSW.
What's it like being bringing "Goliath" back to SXSW and Austin after Sundance? Any major differences?
David Zellner: They're both cold.
Nathan Zellner: Yeah, just as cold here as it was there.
It was your first feature at the festival — that must have been an interesting experience.
Courting Controvery at Berlin
Monday, February 18, 2008 | 2:36 AM
José Padilha's "Tropa de Elite" ("Elite Squad") was awarded the Golden Bear, the top prize of the Berlin Film Festival, this past Saturday. The film, which looks at how the BOPE special police unit in Rio de Janeiro uses exceptionally violent tactics to subdue crime in the favelas, was a controversial pick. A box office hit in its native Brazil, "Tropa de Elite" drew a mixed reaction from critics at the festival, some of whom felt that it glorified the brute force used by its characters -- Variety's Jay Weissberg wrote that it elevated the BOPE to "Rambo-style heroes," and called the film "a one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs."
Padilha, who last directed the acclaimed documentary "Bus 174," told the AP that this was a misread, and that the film actually "aims to explain how the state turns ... people who join the police either into corrupted people, or people that don't really want to do anything with their jobs -- or, worst of all, violent people." "Trope de Elite" will be released in the U.S. by the Weinstein Company.
Rotterdam Dispatch #3: The Prizewinners
Monday, February 4, 2008 | 12:00 AM
By R. Emmet Sweeney
The 37th edition of the Rotterdam Film Festival is kaput after a low-key closing ceremony this past Friday night. The big prize was for the VPRO Tiger awards, which hands three first or second time filmmakers $15,000 towards future projects. The jury, headed by ace Iranian director Jafar Panahi ("Offside"), handed the prizes to the Malaysian underage comedy "Flower in the Pocket," the Thai post-tsunami drama "Wonderful Town" and the Danish Sunni-Shiite thriller "Go with Peace Jamil." "Wonderful Town" looks to be the breakout title of the three, with almost universal acclaim from critics (including myself in the previous dispatch), an award in hand from the Pusan Film Festival, and a slot in the upcoming Berlin Fest's Forum section. With its subtle romance wedded to an undercurrent of post-disaster violence, it's a haunting piece of work and a deserving winner.
The others had a more tempered reception. "Flower" director Liew Seng Tat belongs to a much-heralded, but little seen group of Malaysian directors who formed their own production company, Da Huang Pictures. A straight-up comedy effectively using the intimacy of DV, "Flower" gets strong performances from its child actors (latchkey kids with a mannequin factory workaholic father) and has an eye for the bizarre detail. Liew concocted the funniest scene I saw in the festival, involving an overly jolly doctor, a misplaced lock and key and a wayward X-ray. It's this eye that keeps his story about outcast kids from descending into cliché, and turns it into an aggressively likeable piece of entertainment. It also nabbed a spot in Berlin.
Cannes Dispatch 6: Parsing the Prize Winners
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 | 12:00 AM
By Dennis Lim
Not surprising given his own directorial sensibility, the defining characteristic of Stephen Frears' jury turned out to be eclecticism. Whatever your predilections, there was probably not a lot to complain about, given how this year's awards wealth was distributed between arty young auteurs (Carlos Reygadas, Naomi Kawase) and likely crowd pleasers ("Persepolis," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," "The Edge of Heaven"), even between the critically adored ("Secret Sunshine") and unloved ("The Banishment"). The jury's most defiant statement, in the end, was its evident indifference (or worse) to studio-backed American genre films. While the Coens, Tarantino and Fincher all left empty-handed, Frears and co. found a way to reward Gus Van Sant, presenting the recent laureate with a 60th anniversary prize for the superb "Paranoid Park."
As for the Palme d'Or, there could be no less controversial winner — at least among the critical contingent — than Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days," an overwhelming favorite literally from day one, to the point where its reputation seems to me now in danger of being inflated. Extremely well directed and acted, "4 Months" is a moral tale as suspense movie and it works on the principle of withheld information — those who saw it at its first screening, before it was christened "the Romanian abortion movie," can attest to the improbable, nail-biting effectiveness of the flatly observed opening minutes. Once its subject is clear, and events turn ever grimmer, the movie becomes less urgent and more methodical in depicting the privations of Ceausescu-era Romania, where black-market economics have polluted human interactions and transactions. With its long-take choreography and low-key naturalism, "4 Months" unavoidably evokes "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (both films were shot by Oleg Mutu), but, lacking the universality and metaphysical ambitions of Cristi Puiu's film, can't help suffering in comparison.
Cannes' Lonely Boys
Monday, May 28, 2007 | 12:00 AM
By Matt Singer
Even a place as exciting and glamorous as the Cannes Film Festival can feel pretty lonely. You're 4,000 miles from home, you don't speak the language, and there's nothing to eat but dried sausage and gherkins. Which makes it the perfect place to see movies like Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" and Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely," the first in competion and the second in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, and both absolutely steeped in the nature of isolation.
Nearly all of Van Sant's movies examine withdrawn heroes who've dropped out from society. His is a cinema of reclusion right on down the filmmography, which includes the emblematic figure of Norman Bates in his controversial shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho." In recent years, Van Sant's focused more on aloof youth, the killers and victims of the Columbine-like "Elephant," the burned-out rock star of "Last Days." "Paranoid Park" continues Van Sant's streak of movies about adolescent estrangement. It follows Alex (Gabe Nevins), a skater with a blank stare and a guilty conscience. As the time-bending narrative unfolds — mimicking a stream-of-consciousness entry in a frightened teen's journal — Alex is implicated in a train yard murder, one Van Sant recreates onscreen in shockingly graphic detail.