By Matt Singer

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

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

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

Tags: Speed Racer, Wachowski brothers

By 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.

By Matt Singer in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (3)

Tags: Bigger Stronger Faster, Tribeca 08

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.

By Matt Singer in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (5)

Tags: Fermat's Room, Luis Piedrahita, Rodrigo Sopeña

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.

By Matt Singer in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (4)

Tags: James Marsh, Man on Wire, Philippe Petit, Tribeca 2008

[A variation of this review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2007 SXSW Film Festival]

"Frownland", the first feature of New York-based projectionist-turned-director Ronald Bronstein, is the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. It was also my favorite film at the last year's SXSW Film Festival, one that dares you to walk out until you, perhaps out of spite, find yourself totally drawn in and so in its strange headspace that you harbor concerns for your sanity. When I first reviewed the film, I suggested you shouldn't expect to see it in a theater near you anytime soon — one year later, Mr. Bronstein has secured, while not a run of the nation's cineplexes, a solid one-week NY run for "Frownland" at the IFC Center. If that does happen to be a theater near you, I highly suggest you make your way down there.

By Alison Willmore in Reviews | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Frownland, Ronald Bronstein

By Matt Singer

By the end of "Married Life," the characters have caused each other a great deal of harm in order to better their own lives, and they know it. Is it wrong, they wonder, to build one's happiness on the unhappiness of others? If it is, that makes going to the movies one of the most immoral acts you can do. What are movies, after all, if not the vicarious enjoyment of the suffering of others?

There's plenty of suffering here, and thus plenty to enjoy. The film focuses on four people living at the turn of the 1950s and the damage they do to one another. Harry (Chris Cooper) is married to Pat (Patricia Clarkson), but their relationship chilled some time ago. Harry confides to his best friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan) that he wants something more out of a woman than just "the sex" by way of introducing him to his mistress, Kay (Rachel McAdams). While Richard -- who initially considers marriage as "a mild illness" -- falls for Kay, an oblivious Harry plots ways to remove an equally oblivious Pat from the picture.

By Matt Singer in Reviews | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Ira Sachs, Married Life

By Matt Singer

Three stories, three writer/directors, one movie. That's the premise of the apocalyptic sci-fi triptych "The Signal," a movie full of stuff that should feel like gimmicks but don't. David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush tell three interconnected stories with one shared cast and manage to craft something that feels like a collaboration, but looks like a work of one vision, albeit one shared by three like-minded and very creative artists.

A strange, psychedelic transmission from every television, computer, and radio in the city of Terminus has turned half the population into primordial murderers and has sent the other half running for their lives. Once you stare at this "signal" for too long, it infects your mind and triggers massive hallucinations and homicidal mood swings. One of the survivors is Mya (Anessa Ramsey), who, in the film's first segment, "Crazy in Love," returns from an extramarital affair she's having with a nice guy named Ben (Justin Welborn) shortly before people everywhere start freaking out. In the second piece, "The Jealousy Monster," Mya's jealous husband Lewis (AJ Bowden) follows her trail to an apartment complex where everyone has lost their mind but no one realizes it. And in the final portion, "Escape from Terminus," Ben tries to track down Mya and ward off her murderous husband.

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

Tags: The Signal

By Alison Willmore

With "Diary of the Dead," George A. Romero has retconned his zombie apocalypse series back to its beginnings, before the burdens of upping the scale in each installment backed things into tough-to-swallow scenarios like "Land of the Dead"'s fortress for the wealthy. In "Diary," it's present day, the dead have just commenced with the rising and the munching and everyone else is willfully resistant to accept how bad things are becoming. There's a guy, a girl, a few of their more edible friends and the end of the world -- and, oh yes, a camera with which to record it all. The unpolished filmmaking techniques that gave 1968's "Night of the Living Dead" the disconcerting air of a documentary have been traded in for new ones that explicitly signify the same -- shaky camerawork, uncertain lighting and actors repeatedly shrieking at an unseen shooter to just put the damn camera down already. Like "Cloverfield" and chunks of "Redacted," "Diary of the Dead" channels its story through the lens of one of its characters, the mostly unseen Jason Creed (Joshua Close), a Pittsburg film student who's directing a mummy movie out in the woods when everything goes to hell and, on the upside, provides him with some more compelling subject matter. Creed, a handful of fellow students and their hard-drinking British professor head out to find their families in the RV they were using for the production. I probably needn't tell you the trip doesn't go well.

By Alison Willmore in Reviews | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Diary of the Dead, George A. Romero

By Matt Singer

"The Band's Visit" is an antidote to the more common treatment of racial and ethnic difference on screen, which is typically characterized by tragic miscommunication and huge conflicts of monumental importance. (Think "Babel.") Instead, the focus of Eran Kolirin's feature debut is squarely on humanity's potential to overcome those sorts of roadblocks and find a common ground. The result is intentionally light, maybe even a little slight, but also unquestionably warm and charming.

An Egyptian police band, led by stern conductor Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), arrives in Israel to play a special concert at the opening of an Arab Culture Center in Beit Hatikva. Problem is, there is no Arab Culture Center in Beit Hatikva — where the band hears Beit Hatikva, they should have heard Petah Tikva — and there's no chance of transportation out of the desolate little desert town until the next morning. The proprietor of a local café, named Diana (Ronit Elkabetz), takes a few of the members in and encourages her friends to do the same. The film follows the events of the night with amusement, sympathy and hope.

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

Tags: Eran Kolirin, The Band's Visit

By Matt Singer

It is very hard to care about something and then laugh about it. This is why so few movies or TV specials featuring stand-up comedians even attempt to explore the world beyond the stage, the spotlight and the microphone. If you're lucky, you get an opening sketch, maybe a few shots of the comedian arriving at the venue, and then right into the material. So much of the stand-up's persona is their casual, conversational tone; we know it's rehearsed, but we like to pretend it's not. Showing us that it's a job — and a hard one at that — can easily shatter that illusion.

And so it is something of a minor triumph (a very minor triumph) that "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show" pulls off the dual feat of giving you an honest this-is-what-it-takes portrait of the tough life of a stand-up alongside the actual material. The film takes us on the road with Vaughn and four of his comedian buddies, and while it showcases plenty of jokes from their acts, the film actually spends more time with the guys in between sets. It lets them discuss their backgrounds, express their frustrations and failures, and even introduces us to their sometimes disapproving parents.

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

By Alison Willmore

Joong-rae, an established (though not very well-off) director, corrals his weak-willed friend Chang-wook into taking him to the seaside for a few days so that he can work on his overdue script. Chang-wook agrees on the condition that he be allowed to bring his girlfriend along. The three set off in the morning in the friend's car, listening to music written and performed by the girl, Moon-sook, who's a composer and clearly a big fan of Joong-rae's work. They have stilted getting-to-know-you conversations. They find a place to stay. And then, as they dawdle outside, Joong-rae tells Chang-wook that he likes him because he's so trusting: "It's hard for a married man to bring his girlfriend out with him so openly." "I'm not his girlfriend," retorts Moon-sook. "You have to have sex for that."

"This is fun," says Joong-rae.

And so begins "Woman on the Beach," another of Hong Sang-soo's adept, acid-laced explorations of relationships, the gender divide and Korean masculinity. The audience is only given a vague sense of what Joong-rae's films are like, arty and sensitive enough that most of the women in the film are googly eyed upon meeting him. Moon-sook herself is harboring a crush, though after the three have spent an evening together drinking she observes that he's not like his films: "Sorry, but you're actually just another Korean man." This doesn't stop her from opening up to him as the night goes on, as they run and leave Chang-wook behind, walking the beach at night and ultimately trysting in an unlocked, empty hotel room. The next morning he's distant, and she's ready to let him off the hook, if also a little hurt. She and Chang-wook return to Seoul, and Joong-rae stays, calls her to apologize, and in passing picks up another woman staying at a nearby hotel.

Hong's characterizations are hard to take — they would be cruel if they weren't so fully realized, and if he weren't such a connoisseur of the acts of social sadism that can pepper our interactions with others. Joong-rae is a grand disaster of a man, the full extent of which the audience realizes alongside Moon-sook. He's insecure and needy, defensive and manipulative, prone to strident rages and, in the most cutting detail of all, to using the ensuing emotional chaos as fodder for his film. Process is never pretty. Moon-sook is charming and charmingly direct, though at one point she reveals that she's older than she appears; she acts and looks like a winsome girl. In fact, all of the characters seem in different degrees to be blustering children, until they suddenly reveal inscrutable back-stories littered with the wreckage of past relationships, romantic and otherwise.

"Woman on the Beach" is, if it's not clear from the above, a comedy, and it is very funny, though threaded through with a sense of despair at the apparent futility of human connection. Shot almost entirely on the beach and in the buildings facing it, the film has a chilly air to it that's partially the director's world view, and partially just inherent to the setting: There are few things sadder than an empty, windswept resort town once the season has ended.

[Photo: "Woman on the Beach," New Yorker Films, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Hong Sang-soo, Woman on the Beach

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.

By Dennis Lim in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cannes 2007, Cristian Mungiu, Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien

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.

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

Tags: Cannes 2007, Harmony Korine, Mister Lonely, Paranoid Park Gus van Sant

By Dennis Lim

When the prizes are handed out tomorrow, it's almost inconceivable that Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" will not be among the major winners. This superbly controlled melodrama is Lee's return to directing after a four-year stint as the South Korean minister of culture and tourism. Engrossing and unpredictable, his new film is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible, so the briefest of synopses will have to suffice. A young widow moves to her late husband's hometown of Miryang (the literal translation provides the English title); about a third of the way in, a catalyzing event propels her character — and the film — into entirely unexpected directions.

Jeon Do-yeon works through a remarkable spectrum of emotions in the lead role, and she has fine comic/empathic support from "The Host" star Song Kang-ho, as a local mechanic who becomes her befuddled suitor. Without getting too much into specifics: It's a film that both acknowledges the absurdity and understands the necessity of its heroine's actions. The idea of religion-as-salvation is handled even-handedly, with crucial skepticism and an absence of condescension.

By Dennis Lim in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Cannes 2007, James Gray, Lee Chang-dong, Secret Sunshine, We Own the Night

By Dennis Lim

There is without fail an onslaught of entries at any major international film festival that falls under the ever-expanding rubric of feel-bad cinema. In that department, the bar has been set dauntingly high at Cannes this year by Austria's king of pain Ulrich Seidl. "Import/Export," his first Cannes entry and his fiction feature since 2001's "Dog Days," incorporates two of the most distinct characteristics of contemporary Austrian cinema. It emphasizes geographic, if not economic, mobility and it mixes fiction and nonfiction (using non-pros and real locations, including a porn studio and a geriatric ward, in a fictional scenario).

In the "Import" segment, a nurse and single mother journeys from her frigid, dead-end Ukrainian existence to scarcely more hospitable Vienna, where she finds work tending to spoiled brats and cleaning up after the senile and infirm. In "Export" (the stories never dovetail but are evocatively intercut), an Austrian lunkhead and his piggish stepfather venture into the former Soviet bloc, delivering gumball machines and participating in gruesome tableaux of abjection. Unblinkingly photographed by Ed Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler, the film isn't much of an advance for Seidl's bludgeoning, depressive sensibility, but the leavening measures of compassion and absurdist humor are more pronounced than in the past.

By Dennis Lim in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Bela Tarr, Cannes 2007, Carlos Reygadas, Harmony Korine, Import/Export, Mister Lonely, Silent Light, The Man From London, Ulrich Seidl

By Dennis Lim

One easy conclusion to draw so far: the Americans are having a good year. The films of David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino and the Coens have been among the most warmly received competition entries. Down the Croissette, the Quinzaine is screening two of the best films from Sundance 07 — Robinson Devor's "Zoo" and Gregg Araki's "Smiley Face" — and has world-premiered two more fine American indies: Tom Kalin's unerringly intelligent true-crime provocation "Savage Grace" and Ramin Bahrani's Queens-set street-kid slice of life "Chop Shop."

My favorite film by an American director so far — although it was shot and financed in Italy — is Abel Ferrara's "Go Go Tales," screening out of competition as a midnight selection. A wild and wildly allegorical comedy, it's set in the course of one long, eventful night at the declining Paradise Lounge strip club. Beleagured proprietor-emcee Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe) is behind on the rent (landlady Sylvia Miles is threatening to turn the premises over to Bed Bath & Beyond) and facing a nearly mutinous crew of go-go dancers (among them Asia Argento, who gets to tongue-kiss a dog). But he continues to dream big, holding on with a mix of tenacity, blind optimism and belief in community that are, more than ever, the necessary traits of the struggling artist.

By Dennis Lim in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Abel Ferrara, Cannes 2007, Go Go Tales, Gus Van Sant, Michael Moore, No Country for Old Men, Paranoid Park, Sicko

By Dennis Lim

Continuing the festival's directors-abroad trendlet: Olivier Assayas' Hong Kong and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Paris are, without question, more credible, lived-in locales than, say, Wong Kar-wai's Memphis. (We'll get to Michael Moore's Canada, Britain and France later.)

These relocating directors seem to be operating on a broadly similar midcareer impulse, a desire to snap out of old habits, or wed them to new perspectives. Assayas' lurid, invigorating thriller "Boarding Gate" is less a transition than a stopgap, an attempt (after "Springtime Past," a project about provincial life in France, was put on hold) to take his place in what he terms "the new order of film finance." Accordingly, it's a scaled-back, quick-and-dirty production — the opposite of "Clean" (in several ways), a B-movie mutation of "demonlover" and "Irma Vep" with a few unavoidable nods to "Scarlet Diva," the globe-trotting, ass-kicking calling card of its inimitable star Asia Argento.

By Dennis Lim in Features, Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Asia Argento, Boarding Gate, Cannes 2007, Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Olivier Assayas

By Dennis Lim

"My Blueberry Nights" is turning out to be the worst-reviewed film of Wong Kar-wai's career, but Cannes attendees who were counting on an opening-night triumph had better luck last night — at the Directors' Fortnight, which kicked off with Anton Corbijn's "Control," an electrifying biopic of Ian Curtis that delivers everything Wong's film promised and more: pop-star glamour, knockout cinematography, tragic-romantic grandeur.

A tribute to the late Joy Division frontman, the Dutch-born rock photographer's debut feature is as loving as a fan's mash note and as laconic as its doomed hero. (The title of the source book, "Touching From a Distance," by the singer's widow Deborah Curtis, nicely sums up the film's approach.) Curtis's story, briefly outlined in Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People," is well known to many and intimately familiar to Joy Division devotees — he killed himself in 1980, at 23, on the eve of what would have been his band's first U.S. tour. "Control" doesn't exactly shed new light on Curtis' life and death, but it's a dream match of filmmaker and subject. Corbijn got his break working for the NME in the late '70s, shooting Joy Division and other seminal British post-punk acts, and his trademark aesthetic — angsty achromatic chiaroscuro — perfectly fits the band's.

By Dennis Lim in Festivals, Reviews | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Cannes 2007, Control, Control Wong Kar-wai, My Blueberry Nights