August 2008
The week on IFC.com: In praise of b-movie leads; "Lost"'s Ken Leung.
Friday, August 29, 2008 | 4:31 PM
A round-up of what's been happening on the rest of IFC.com:
+ List: If the Slipper Fits... Five Cinderella Reinventions - Matt Singer on five more unconventional takes on the Cinderella story, from Leonardo da Vinci as the fairy godmother to a cell phone filling in for a lost slipper.
+ Interview: Ken Leung on "Year of the Fish" - The New York actor best known for his role on "Lost" talks about superstition, his Chinatown childhood, being an Asian-American actor and his new film "Year of the Fish."
+ Video: Impact Film Festival at the DNC - IFC's political correspondents check in with filmmakers Stuart Townsend (there with "Battle in Seattle"), Stefan Forbes ("Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story") and the director of the Impact Film Festival, which has just wrapped in Denver and now heads to St. Paul for the RNC.
+ On DVD: "Please Vote for Me," "Primo Levi's Journey" - Michael Atkinson on Weijun Chen's documentary on a Chinese third-grade election ("there may not be a more potent new film to see this election year") and Davide Ferrario's cinematic tracking of Primo Levi's route upon being released from Auschwitz in 1945.
+ IFC News Podcast #91: A Salute to Manny Farber and Termite Actors - Taking a cue from both late critic Manny Farber's idea of termite art and from the movie doldrums of late August, Matt Singer and I pay our respects to our favorite working leads in good-bad films.
+ Opening This Week: Vin Diesel saves the world, Takashi Miike goes west - Neil Pedley rounds up what's new in theaters.
Rooftop shorts online: "A Loud Color", Brent Joseph's documentary portrait of a New Orleans man returning to rebuild the community center he opened one month before Hurricane Katrina struck. and "The Braggart," David Andalman's drama starring "The Legend of Lucy Keyes"'s Anna Friedman as a girl who brags to get attention, only to find that when it matters most, no one believes her.
[Photo: Ken Leung - "Year of the Fish," Gigantic Releasing, 2008]
In the works: John Lennon, the movie; "The Strangers 2: Strangerer."
Friday, August 29, 2008 | 10:42 AM
There've already been two recent films about his assassin, so it seems to be time to take on the considerable challenge of the man himself -- Turner Prize-nominated artist Sam Taylor-Wood will make her directorial debut with John Lennon biopic "Nowhere Boy," written by "Control" screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh and apparently focusing on his early life. Here's hoping that, like "Control," the film ends up with an unknown playing its subject. [Hollywood Reporter]
Rogue Pictures is working on a sequel to "The Strangers," with Liv Tyler expected to return, and general hopes it could become a "Saw"-style horror franchise. [Variety]
indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez paid a visit to some of the filmmakers shooting at the DNC, among them "Kurt Cobain About A Son"'s AJ Schnack, "A Lion In the House"'s Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, "We Are Together"'s Paul Taylor, "My Country, My Country"'s Laura Poitras, and "They Killed Sister Dorothy"'s Daniel Junge, working together on a documentary to be titled "Convention." [indieWIRE]
And Latino Review claims that Max Makowski, who wrote and directed the 2005 Sundance sad assassin film "One Last Dance," has been selected to direct that "Voltron" feature you never knew you wanted. [Latino Review]
Acquired: Sister company IFC Films has snagged Ole Christian Madsen's "Flame & Citron," a Danish drama about resistance members in World War II -- the film premieres at Telluride this weekend, and will be released next year. And Kino has acquired Amos Gitai's new film "One Day You'll Understand," which stars Jeanne Moreau as woman who won't tell her son about her parents, killed at Auschwitz. It premiered at Berlin, and is slated to open in New York on October 31. [Hollywood Reporter]
Self-distribution company Truly Indie's got its first feature -- "Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun" stars Ben McKenzie ("Junebug"... and who are we kidding? Ryan from "The O.C.") as a World War I soldier hit by an artillery shell. It hits theaters September 26th. [indieWIRE]
[Photo: John Lennon in "A Hard Day's Night," United Artists, 1964]
Odds: "Slumdog Millionaire" finds a distributor, Todd Solondz makes a sequel.
Thursday, August 28, 2008 | 5:47 PM
Danny Boyle's new film "Slumdog Millionaire," a comedy about a Mumbai orphan who gets on the Hindi version of "Who Wants to be A Millionaire?", was set to premiere at Toronto in distribution limbo after Warner Independent Pictures went away. No longer -- Fox Searchlight is partnering with Warner Bros. to give the film a theatrical release on November 28th. Meanwhile, at her blog at Variety, Anne Thompson writes that "One film that is negotiating a final distribution deal is Steven Soderbergh's four-hour-plus, two-part Che," and adds that "I'm betting that the film will wind up in the hands of 2929 Entertainment moguls Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, who backed Soderbergh's 2005 day-and-date experiment, Bubble."
Todd Solondz, whose last film was back in 2004 -- "Palindromes" -- will be making "an untitled part-sequel, part-companion piece to his controversial dark comedy 'Happiness.' " [Variety]
Manoel de Oliveira was heckled at the Venice opening ceremonies? "And rather shamefully for the locals, 99-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, director of the opening short, was heckled by an audience member (presumably because he gave his speech in French)," [Guardian]
Charles Ferguson's Iraq doc "No End in Sight" will be up on YouTube in its entirety, the "the first widely released feature film" to do so, according to the press release, from September 1st through the election on November 4th. You'll be able to find it here.
[Photo: Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," Fox Searchlight, 2008]
+ Toronto Watch: Movies like Che Seek Attention, Home (Variety)
+ Solondz off to Werc Werk Works (Variety)
+ A gala dinner at Venice is like a massive wedding where all your relatives have had plastic surgery (Guardian)
+ SEE "NO END IN SIGHT" HERE IN ITS ENTIRETY FROM 9/1 - 11/5/08. (YouTube)
Timing is everything.
Thursday, August 28, 2008 | 5:23 PM
Mike Scott at New Orleans' Times-Picayune notes the impeccable taste Lionsgate is showing in releasing "Disaster Movie" on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29th:
Around these Katrina-scarred parts, Aug. 29 is still -- and will be for some time -- a black-armband kind of day.For Lionsgate studios, however, Aug. 29 isn't quite as sacred. For them, the third anniversary of the day the levees were breached and New Orleans slipped under is something on the order of perfect timing: a ripped-from-the-headlines release date for the big-screen, low-concept spoof "Disaster Movie."
Oops. [Hat tip to Nikki Finke]
Also in honor of the occasion, Slate's rerunning Josh Levin's unsparing piece on "Disaster Movie"'s spoof-specializing director-writer team Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer from earlier in the year, when "Meet the Spartans" graced theaters with its presence:
Isn't it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie? Perhaps, but it would've been unforgivable to make Meet the Spartans any longer than an hour. This was the worst movie I've ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a "movie" and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline under the weight of too many pop culture references.
[Photo: Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's "Disaster Movie," Lionsgate, 2008]
+ 'Disaster Movie' a case of disastrous timing (Times-Picayune)
+ Meet the Charlatans (Slate)
"Kurt Russell is to the right of Attila the Hun."
Thursday, August 28, 2008 | 4:48 PM
Quotes from the interview circuit:
"No one seems to mention that the President of the United States in Escape from New York is British! [Laughs] We made up some story about him being the love child of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. That didn't make it into the movie because Kurt Russell is to the right of Attila the Hun. He actually doesn't think we should have to pay for roads--unbelievable. But we're friends because we respect each other's work ethic. He's a wonderful guy; I love him."
--John Carpenter on political disillusionment at Time Out New York.
"You know, at a certain point, especially in a movie like The Big Lebowski, you've got to think ahead. At a certain point, we had to sit down and say, 'All right. it's gotta be somebody's fucking toe.' And that was before we actually got to the scene that discloses it, but well after the toe itself showed up."
--Ethan Coen on the brothers' screenwriting process, in an excerpt from "The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film" published at Film In Focus.
"It's realistic but it has special effects. It's a mix between Cronenberg and -- I don't know what--um... the Dardenne brothers!"
--François Ozon describes his next film, "Ricky," at the Guardian.
"Very few people swagger here. They're driven by ambition, but they don't have to broadcast that all the time."
--Michel Gondry (interviewing alongside girlfriend Gabrielle Bell, whose comic provided the transplanted source material for his section of "Tokyo!") on the difference between New York and Tokyo, at the Japan Times.
"As an Arab-American woman, I am of course aware that the title of my book is an ethnic slur. Indeed, I selected the title to highlight one of the novel's major themes: racism. In the tradition of Dick Gregory's autobiography Nigger, the Jewish magazine Heeb, or the feminist magazine Bitch, the title is rude and shocking, but it is not gratuitous."
--"Towelhead" author Alicia Erian on why the title for the film adaptation of her work shouldn't be looked at as offensive, at The Hot Blog.
[Photo: Kurt Russell in "Escape From New York," AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1981]
Product placement.
Thursday, August 28, 2008 | 4:25 PM
There's an interesting piece at the Guardian from David Cox, who sees end times-signs in the fact that Shane Meadows' "Somers Town" (which, I know, enough already) was paid for by Eurostar: "A fateful Rubicon has been crossed," he declares.
Meadows didn't extract money from Eurostar to facilitate a project of his own. He agreed to place his skills at the service of one of theirs. Of course, plenty of directors make commercials, and there's nothing wrong with that. Advertising tries to sell us something, and it doesn't pretend otherwise.Somers Town, however, carries no warning message, like the 'Advertorial' banner atop of every page of a sponsored newspaper supplement. Corporate authorship isn't acknowledged until the very last line of the credits, and then simply by the word 'Eurostar' attached to a copyright symbol in tiny type. For its £750,000 or so, the company bought not just an advertisement, but the capacity to disguise its advertising as art. A pretty good deal by the current standards of the ad market.
Cox does acknowledge the retorts that immediately come to my mind -- that every film that isn't paid for out of the filmmaker's own pocket has outside obligations to work with, whether they're studio, government or, ahem, advertiser expectations. But he calls for an upholding of the "separation of editorial from advertising," as seen in print and broadcasting -- which, given the current state of the media, is like suggesting that because your roof is leaking you should take shelter at your neighbor's house, which is on fire. "Somers Town" is just the nearest example of a line that was crossed, at least in the U.S., years ago -- see (well, don't see) 2005's "Supercross: The Movie," produced in partnership with Clear Channel Entertainment, also responsible for the televised races for which the film is an incoherent advertisement.
Incidentally, Brandcameo's Product Placement Awards are trying to stake out a spot in that depressing, if prescient, area, declaring the year's best and worst incidents of product placement, including "Iron Man"'s Burger King up/down:
It wasn't enough to have Tony "Iron Man" Stark scarf a few BK burgers straight from the bag. Taking product placement to a whole new level were Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr.'s comments to Empire Magazine stating that it was a trip to Burger King that convinced him to clean up his life. Though, in true product placement tradition, the brand doesn't always get to control how it is placed: "I have to thank Burger King. It was such a disgusting burger I ordered. I had that, and this big soda, and I thought something really bad was going to happen."
[Photo: "Somers Town," The Works International, 2008]
+ Cinema sells its soul (Guardian)
+ 2008 brandcameo Produce Placement Awards (Brand Channel)
Telluride's quiet year.
Thursday, August 28, 2008 | 1:33 PM
The unique Telluride Film Festival, which (in)famously asks that you place your trust in it, purchase your pass and book inordinately expensive lodging in its small Colorado mountain town before ever knowing what films will be there, kicks off Friday, and has just announced its line-up.
Due to the writers strike, this year's festival seems to be low on major premieres -- "Juno" and "Walk the Line" are among the films to have first screened there, though this year's sneak peeks are still a secret. Paul Schrader's "Adam Resurrected," a film about a circus performer (Jeff Goldblum) forced to perform for the head of a concentration camp, will premiere there, as will Tim Disney's "American Violet," a drama starring Will Patton and Tim Blake Nelson. Plenty of films from Cannes, including "The Good, The Bad and the Weird" and "O'Horten," are also in the line-up.
Filmmakers David Fincher and Jan Troell, actress Jean Simmons and critic Richard Schickel are the nominees, while the year's guest director is Slavoj Zizek. Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE has the full line-up.
[Photo: Bent Hamer's "O' Horten," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008]
+ Leigh, Fincher, Schrader, and Youssou Ndour in Telluride Spotlight; Hollywood & Indiewood Lacking (indieWIRE)
"Burn After Reading": The trades say yes! And no!
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | 1:58 PM
The early reviews of the Coens' "Burn After Reading," which opens the Venice Film Festival tonight, are out, and they're up, down and all over the place.
Todd McCarthy at Variety thinks the film finds the brothers C retreating "to sophomoric snarky mode," bemoaning the fact that the "seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters."
The Coens' script, which feels immature but was evidently written around the same time as that for "No Country," is just too fundamentally silly, without the grounding of a serious substructure that would make the sudden turn to violence catch the viewer up short. Nothing about the project's execution inspires the feeling that this was ever intended as anything more than a lark, which would be fine if it were a good one. As it is, audience teeth-grinding sets in early and never lets up.
Kirk Honeycutt at the Hollywood Reporter is far more positive, though he does caution that "Those who relish this movie might treat this as the second coming of 'The Big Lebowski'; those who don't might wonder at a story in which no character has a level head."
The key thing is that every actor is riffing on his or her screen persona. The guys who pulled off all those casino heists, the smart-cookie South Dakota police officer, the stars of many Sundance films -- yep, they're all idiots. One of the film's funniest lines comes when a CIA officer listens to a report of everyone's behavior, including murder and an attempt to leak the memoirs to the Russian embassy -- rather prescient that last plot point! He shakes his head and asks an agent, "Report back to me" -- he frowns and pauses -- "when it makes sense."
Lee Marshall at Screen International loves the film, though he doesn't believe much should be expected from it:
A beautifully produced mix of spy story, US zeitgeist satire and relationship drama, Burn After Reading cons the audience into seeing depths - and Fargo parallels - that don't really exist. The consumate, near-throwaway ending sets the record straight: it's a feelgood comedy so enjoy the ride and don't take it all so seriously.
Andrew Pulver at the Guardian writes that, compared to its star presence at the festival, "[t]he film itself may be a bit of an afterthought," and that compared to "No Country," it's a "bit of a bantamweight: fast moving, lots of attitude, and uncorking a killer punch when it can."
And for Shane Danielsen at indieWIRE, it's just fine, and perhaps doomed to be so:
It's a decent movie, undeniably entertaining to watch, but afterwards you struggle to remember much about it beyond a general sense of fun being had -- most of it onscreen. Yet even if it were better, even if it were very good indeed, it would still have its work cut out for it. It will inevitably be compared to the Oscar-winning, life-and-death-weighing masterpiece that preceded it, and found wanting.
[Photo: "Burn After Reading," Focus Features, 2008]
+ Burn After Reading (Variety)
+ Film Review: Burn After Reading (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Burn After Reading (Screen Daily)
+ A tightly wound triumph (Guardian)
+ Personalities Aside, Venice Follows up on a Masterpiece (indieWIRE)
In the works: Aaron Sorkin and Facebook are now friends.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | 1:43 PM
Aaron Sorkin has a Facebook page. It says that Aaron Sorkin is writing a Facebook movie:
Welcome. I'm Aaron Sorkin. I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name--which I find more flattering than creepy--but this is me. I don't know how I can prove that but feel free to test me.I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she's been dead for 33 years.)
Rudin has confirmed this with Dan Kois at New York's Vulture blog, shaking my world view with regard to people claiming to be celebrities on the internet. What if that really was Gore Vidal trying to get me to sign up for a $50 Macy's gift card on MySpace?
Sorkin's last produced screenplay was "Charlie Wilson's War"; he also scripted "The Trial of The Chicago 7," loosely based on Brett Morgen's doc "Chicago 10," a project still in search of a director. [New York]
Signs that we are an empire in decline: After years of tepid Hollywood remakes of little-seen Asian films, China is about to see their first remake of a (relatively) little-seen Hollywood film -- "Cellular," that Kim Basinger/Chris Evans/mobile phone thriller, has been remade as "Connected," with Benny Chan directing and pumping up the juice: "In my movie, I added many elements that Hong Kong action movies do best -- human combat, action, flying cars," The film opens in China September 25th. [Hollywood Reporter]
Audrey Tautou will play Coco Chanel in biopic "Coco Avant Chanel," with Anne Fontaine directing. The film's slated for release next year -- until then, you can always catch Shirley MacLaine playing the fashion icon in the Lifetime Original Movie. [Variety]
Austin Chick, whose pre-9/11, post- dot-com bubble drama "August" vanished almost immediately from theaters earlier this summer, will next direct a Hamptons-set thriller about pretty 20-somethings fighting over illicit cash. "I'd like to continue doing more specialty movies in the future, but with the business hitting such hard times I wanted to try something a little different," he says. [Hollywood Reporter]
Acquired: Sony Picture Classics has snagged the rights to "Paris 36," a period film from "The Chorus" director Christophe Barratier. No release date yet, but the film will premiere at Toronto. [Variety]
And here! Films has picked up Olaf de Fleur's "The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela," a docudrama about a Filipino transsexual that won the Teddy Award for Best Feature at Berlin this year. The film opens in New York and L.A. on September 26th. [indieWIRE]
[Photo: Aaron Sorkin, courtesy of Facebook]
+ CONFIRMED: Aaron Sorkin Creates Facebook Page, Writing Facebook Movie (New York)
+ 'Cellular' gets a return call in China (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Warner Bros. dons 'Chanel' biopic (Variety)
+ Screen Gems, Austin Chick in scream team (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Sony to distribute 'Paris 36' (Variety)
+ here! Takes "Queen" (indieWIRE)
"I knew then that the SOB was going to be a 'star.' "
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | 3:51 PM
The world in quotes:
"I knew then that the SOB was going to be a 'star,' "
--Christopher Plummer's thoughts (and judicious use of quotation marks) on having to give understudy William Shatner a chance at his role in a 1956 stage production of "Henry V," after a one-night stand dislodged a kidney stone and put him in surgery, at Page Six.
"The event for London could never have the same political clout as Beijing; we should find a way to be self-advertising. Considering the British traditions of free speech and the individual, and the British suspicion of organised crowds, we would want to avoid the Leni Riefenstahl connotations which were there in Beijing. And the ceremony was too long."
--Peter Greenaway on how London should handle its Olympic opening ceremony, at the Telegraph.
"I'm very unhappy with the film. I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn't respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience."
--Mathieu Kassovitz (who, we must always remind you, once directed "La Haine") tries to distance himself from "Babylon A.D.," at AMCTV.
"I take things that come my way. When I go do acting jobs, I really miss standup, and when I'm on the road for a while, I need to go act. If I'm in an Ashton Kutcher movie here and there, I know it's really against my style, but I'm not so elitist. One day I hope to be that, don't get me wrong; I'd love to be so snobby."
--Zach Galifianakis on choosing roles, at Paste.
"I didn't want to [see those parallels] because of how I felt politically, but I couldn't help it. I was reading these books about W., and I took out a pen to record the similarities between me and him: He and his father, he and his mother--I grew up with a very strong mother, too. But professionally, I was never embittered by the whole process like he was."
--Josh Brolin on, like the character he plays in "W.", having a famous dad, at New York.
"You're black with a British accent, and they're like [he makes a face] 'Say that again?'... I was trying so hard to desperately pretend that I was American. I just walked around all day practising my accent and seeing if I could fool people, like bus drivers."
--Idris Elba on moving to America, at the London Times.
[Photo: William Shatner in "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous," Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005]
Hands on a Hard Body: "It's a contest, they say, of stamina..."
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | 11:43 AM
"Hands on a Hard Body" director S.R. Bindler has put his riveting 1997 doc about a Texas car dealership competition up in its entirety on Google Video -- you can watch it here. The film's been out of print on DVD for ages -- a narrative remake was slated to be Robert Altman's next production until his passing, a project that's likely since faded away. Bindler, incidentally, directed and co-wrote his friend Matthew McConaughey's new film "Surfer, Dude," set to open in Austin next week.
While you're at it, Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" is up with the usual "limited commercial interruption" on Hulu here. And Tod Browning 1932 "Freaks" is streaming on Archive.org here (and on Google Video here), and has been generating pointed debate as to whether or not the film actually is in the public domain. According to some, the rights to the film were purchased and released into the public domain in the '80s by Church of Satan founder, former carny and fan of the film Anton LaVey.
[Photo: "Hands on a Hard Body," Idea Entertainment/J.K. Livin/Wessex Entertainment, 1997]
+ Hands on a Hard Body (Google Video)
+ The Night of The Hunter (Hulu)
+ Freaks (1933) (Archive.org)
"Salò" returns to earth.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 | 10:23 AM
The original 1998 Criterion release of "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom," Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious, oft-banned final film (he was murdered shortly after its completion), was withdrawn because of licensing issues, making the DVDs that did make it onto the market fetishized objects unto themselves, commanding hundreds of dollars on eBay and Amazon, more if still sealed. The film became overshadowed by its own rarity. But today Criterion finally rereleases the film in a two-disc set with three accompanying docs, interviews and essays from, among others, Neil Bartlett and Catherine Breillat.
So how does "Salò" hold up in these days when the teens take in torture while munching popcorn at the multiplex and even Kermit the Frog is down with coprophagia? Well, Ain't It Cool's Harry Knowles reassures that it's still "Fucked beyond all belief." Dennis Lim, writing at the LA Times this weekend, writes that "its extreme, claustrophobic force is undiluted":
The 1970s was a hotbed of scandalous art cinema, but "Salò" -- unlike such X-rated shockers as "Last Tango in Paris" or "In the Realm of the Senses" -- has not been tamed by the passage of years. If anything, there is a cruel, chilling timelessness to both its imagery and its logic. The shock hasn't worn off in the slightest.
From Bruce Bennett at the New York Sun:
In the context of a sad contemporary cultural atmosphere that tolerates repugnant and childish torture-porn entertainments such as Eli Roth's lowbrow "Hostel" and Gaspar Noé's highbrow "Irreversible," Pasolini's essential diagram of "the anarchism of power" remains a far more perverse yet infinitely more compassionate and personal work of art than anything created in its turbid, tragic, and, for better or worse, highly influential wake.
At FilmCritic.com, Keith Breese suggests "Watching Salo is very much akin to reading Sade's novel: You get the point very quickly and after you've gotten the point it's hard to justify continued attention." At Slant, Eric Henderson notes that in her essay "Catherine Breillat--dependable old Catherine Breillat--surmises that the movie was not meant to be shocking."
[Photo: "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom," 1975 - Criterion]
+ Harry's DVD Picks & Peeks - 4th week of August DVDs: HEROES, Errol Flynn, Nightmare Before Christmas, Salo, Cannibalism & more!! (AICN)
+ 'Salò' on Criterion: 1975 film still a shocker (LA Times)
+ Pasolini's Cruel Masterpiece (NY Sun)
+ Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom (FilmCritic.com)
+ Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Slant)
+ Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Criterion)
Trailering: NYC, Chinatown, the RAF and Auschwitz.
Monday, August 25, 2008 | 5:05 PM
Here's the teaser for "New York, I Love You," Gotham's answer to the 2006 anthology film "Paris, Je T'aime." It's still unfinished, but the trailer -- which includes both a Regina Spektor song and one from Feist, surely breaking some kind of indie waif proximity rule -- does contain an irritating abundance of characters generalizing about the city. "This is the capital of everything possible," declares one, not realizing that any true portrait of New York would involve far fewer frou-frou proclamations like that and more dollars and cents discussion of real estate. Fatih Akin, Yvan Attal, Shunji Iwai, Scarlett Johnansson and Brett Ratner are among the twelve directors contributing, as is Shekhar Kapur, who took on the installment left unfinished by the late Anthony Minghella. The film's screening as a work in progress at Toronto, and won't reach theaters until February 13th of next year.
There's a trailer for "Year of the Fish," David Kaplan's rotoscoped, Chinatown-set reinterpretation of Cinderella, here -- it opens this Friday.
Here's a German trailer for Uli Edel's "The Baader-Meinhof Complex," a film about the Red Army Faction starring "The Lives of Others"' Martina Gedeck, "The Downfall"'s Bruno Ganz and "Youth Without Youth"'s Alexandra Maria Lara. It hasn't yet premiered, but has still been a source of controversy due to the studio and PR firm's attempt to block what would presumably be bad buzz by imposing a 100,000 euro fine on any post-press screening journalist caught writing or talking about the film before the week of its opening. David Hudson at Greencine Daily explains; the film opens in Germany on September 25th.
John Boyne's children's book "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy living in Berlin during World War II, whose soldier father moves the family to "Out-With" after being promoted by "the Fury," a location change that prompts the bored narrator to befriend a lad living beyond a fence with a group of others wearing identical striped pajamas. The trailer for the film, here, by nature has to be a lot less coy than its source material with regards to being about the Holocaust. The novel, a bestseller, has been accused by some of being, well, twee, which isn't a desirable quality in films on the subject -- though the trailer, which offers glimpses of Vera Farmiga and David Thewlis as the mother and father, seems to indicate that fable quality has been toned down. A.O. Scott, reviewing the book for the New York Times in 2006, made the Benigni comparison: "Like that film, this novel uses a child's perception -- tinged with wonder and never entirely alive to the reality of evil -- as a way of manipulating the emotional tone."
[Photo: "New York, I Love You," Palm Pictures, 2009]
+ "New York I love you" Teaser (Dailymotion)
+ Year of the Fish (Apple)
+ Stunning Full Theatrical Trailer For DER BAADER MEINHOF KOMPLEX! (Twitch)
+ The Boy In the Striped Pajamas (Apple)
Zack and Miri go to Austin.
Monday, August 25, 2008 | 1:41 PM
I've never been to the Toronto Film Festival. We've traditionally left it the realm of IFC Canada -- but this year I am headed to Fantastic Fest in Austin, and couldn't be more pleased.
The country's fiercest genre festival has already announced two waves of films; among the selections the U.S. premieres of "Ong Bak" director Prachya Pinkaew's "Chocolat," meta Muscles from Brussels mockumentary "JCVD" and "Deadgirl." The most recent round of news is that king fanboy Kevin Smith will be bringing "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" there as the opening night film, to be followed up by the Air Sex World Championship.
[Photo: "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," Weinstein Company, 2008]
+ Kevin Smith to Kick Off Fantastic Fest 2008 (FantasticFest.com)
The week on IFC.com: Azazel Jacobs and The Clash, Woody Allen and sex.
Friday, August 22, 2008 | 4:47 PM
A round-up of what's been happening on the rest of IFC.com:
+ Feature: An Appreciation of Anna Faris - R. Emmet Sweeney wonders when the comedienne "capable of out-dumbing Judy Holliday and out-ditzing Carole Lombard" will finally get her due.
+ Feature: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (in Woody Allen's Movies) - Matt Singer on the 40 years Allen has spent making "movies about sex without ever actually featuring it."
+ Interview: Azazel Jacobs on "Momma's Man" - The director of the acclaimed Sundance feature starring his real-life parents as something like themselves would rather just talk about The Clash.
+ Video: Ludivine Sagnier - A quick interview with the star of "A Girl Cut in Two" and the upcoming "A Secret."
+ On DVD: Lech Majewski, "Brand Upon the Brain!" - Michael Atkinson on the Polish filmmaker who "may be one of the most pretentious filmmakers alive and working. Or is he a visionary?"
+ IFC News Podcast #90: Our Fall Indie Film Preview - Matt Singer and I pick the ten fall indie films we haven't yet seen and are most looking forward to.
+ Opening This Week: Tori Spelling does H.P. Lovecraft, Steve Coogan's sexy Jesus - Neil Pedley rounds up what's new in theaters.
Rooftop shorts online: "Rocket Science!", an animated B-movie spoof directed by Sam Morrison; and "Mister Smile," Fran Krause's short drawing "from the tropes of B-movie horror films, classic children's animation and especially 'Night of the Hunter.' "
[Photo: Viggo Mortensen in Lech Majewski's "Gospel According to Harry," Kino, 1994]
Critic wrangle: "Trouble the Water."
Friday, August 22, 2008 | 4:25 PM
Another Sundance film, this one the winner of the Grand Jury Prize, also hits theaters today -- Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's documentary about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, "Trouble the Water," uses footage shot by Lower Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Robert to chronicle the devastation of the storm. And reviews would indicate it does so aptly: Jim Ridley, writing at the Village Voice, calls it "history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield," and adds that "[t]he resilience of the movie's subjects--survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV--irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine." Manohla Dargis at the New York Times finds that the filmmakers "have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts's visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama."
"In many ways, I think Kim Roberts' authorship, not just of her amazing storm footage or her music but of her life, is the true subject of 'Trouble the Water,'" suggests an impassioned Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "We can have a 'national conversation about race' until we all turn blue and keel over from boredom -- Did we have it already? If so, what did we say? -- but people like Kim and Scott Roberts don't generally have their own voices, or any other kind of autonomy." "In one scene," writes New York's David Edelstein, "Kimberly and fellow refugees line up for FEMA assistance at some kind of ranch, where a sign overhead points to Gate B--CATTLE ENTRANCE. You can't make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving."
For Nick Schager at Slant, "The directors' unwavering concentration on their two subjects' plight simultaneously brings the calamity down to a human scale and, consequently, enhances the depth of the tragedy. It also, however, allows for an artless depiction of sacrifice, compassion, altruism, and hope amid misfortune." Noel Murray at the Onion AV Club, however, allows that "Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus," while Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE believes that the "thankfully infrequent miscalculations" of newscast clips featuring FEMA director Mike Brown and George W. Bush are balanced by "revealing moments and painfully experienced truths."
[Photo: "Trouble the Water," Zeitgeist Films, 2008]
The Roger Ebert of our age.
Friday, August 22, 2008 | 2:35 PM
Or could he be more the Gene Siskel? Clearly, he's aiming for both... Ben Mankiewicz better watch his back.
The new season of "At the Movies" starts September 6, for anyone playing along at home.
+ Video: My break out in "House Bunny" (BenLyons.com)
Critic wrangle: "Momma's Man."
Friday, August 22, 2008 | 12:30 PM
The theaters have been so awash in stories of stunted development that it seems unfair to summarize "Momma's Man," the third feature from Azazel Jacobs, the best film I saw at Sundance and one of my favorites from the year to date. But yeah, it is about how a 30-something man-child (Matt Boren) essentially moves back in with his parents -- except, in this case, the father and mother are played by the director's real-life pop and mom, avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his gravely compelling wife Flo. The film's shot almost entirely in the crazily cluttered downtown loft in which Azazel grew up and in which his parents still live. It sounds both indulgent and like a sitcom set-up, and it's neither -- Jacobs has made a film that crystallizes that desire I'd guess most of us have had at one time or another, to reduce yourself back to an inculpable aspect of your parents' already-formed lives, to wrap the debris of your childhood around yourself like a duvet and to refuse to turn your thoughts forward to the shoulds waiting for you there.
Anyway, reviews are good to great -- J. Hoberman at the Village Voice, a longtime friend of the family, discloses that "I cannot evaluate Momma's Man with an outsider's clarity," but still declares the film "one of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote." "[B]uried beneath the poignant clutter of this occasionally familiar stunted-youth-in-life-transition tale is a surprisingly complex, elegantly detailed meditation on creativity and artistic growth," adds Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. Writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times:
"Momma's Man" is an extraordinarily tender film -- Mr. Jacobs and his camera dote on his parents -- but it's more complex than the valentine to Mom and Dad I originally had it pegged as when I first saw it at Sundance," From some angles the loft comes across like a phantasmagoric playground, but it doesn't appear to offer a lot of room to stretch, much less to grow. Yet, as the repeated two-shots of his parents imply, Mr. Jacobs is also acknowledging a simple truth about parents and children too rarely broached in American movies, particularly in an indie scene enslaved by juvenilia: There's more to your parents than you.
"Above all, 'Momma's Man' feels like an intensely personal consideration of the impermanence of things -- not just childhood, but also neighborhoods, cities, entire ways of life," muses Scott Foundas at Variety, while Salon's Andrew O'Hehir agrees that, among other things, "It's a story about realizing for the first time that someday, a lot sooner than you think, your parents and your childhood home will be gone." Noel Murray at the Onion AV Club, a little less ebullient, writes that Jacobs hasn't reinvented the wheel, but that the film is "a welcome change of pace regardless."
And the New York Press' Armond White is practically positive, given "Momma's Man"'s hipster pedigree. He offers up a coveted Spielberg comparison -- "This story of Mikey leaving his wife and child in Los Angeles to return to the nest of his parents' Tribeca loft shows personal commitment much like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan" -- and finds that the fact that the director "recognizes Mikey's regression separates Momma's Man from most self-absorbed indie films," before concluding that nevertheless "Momma's Man isn't Baumbach-rotten, but there's no elucidation that transcends its artsy 'realism.' "
[Photo: "Momma's Man," Kino, 2008]
Drinking with Guy.
Thursday, August 21, 2008 | 5:14 PM
Will Lawrence at the Telegraph sits down with director Guy Ritchie at The Punchbowl, the pub he and Madonna purchased earlier this year, where Ritchie tries to be optimistic in the face of the fact that his new film "RocknRolla" might not get much of a marketing push, the dismal reception his last films received and, surely, the season's rumors of marital strife and baseball-related cuckolding. On "RocknRolla," and how "Revolver" was, apparently, too smart for its own good:
"This will be much more popular than Revolver. It's simpler and it's fun. After Revolver, I'm not sure that everything needs to be an analysis of the deeper motivation as to why we get up in the morning."The majority of times I go to the cinema, I want a bit of everything. I want to be challenged intellectually, and then again I don't want to be too challenged intellectually."
He seems to be feeling a bit better when he sits down to a drink with the Sun's Gordon Smart, and tells him he has sequels ready to go: "I'm really proud of the film - I've written a second and sketched out a third. If RocknRolla goes well we'll be back for another."
[Photo: Gerard Butler in "RocknRolla," Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008]
+ Guy Ritchie - husband of Madonna - is back (Telegraph)
+ Rolla toaster (NY Sun)
"It was all in the script, and that is why Joan did the movie."
Thursday, August 21, 2008 | 4:12 PM
The world in quotes:
"It was all in the script, and that is why Joan did the movie. She loved it. It's Death Race, right? And Joan Allen, three-time Oscar nominee, The Notebook, The Upside of Anger: she is always seen as the moral center of films...And I thought how interesting to take someone who is usually the moral center of movies and make her the exact opposite. But I knew that if I am going to get Joan Allen in the movie I am going to have to write a fucking good role, because she is stepping outside of her comfort zone a little bit and doing something she has never done before. So I did a ton of research on prisons, prison governors, women in prison, and then we sent her the script. She really liked the script. I went and had a cup of tea with her in New York, and by the time we had finished, she had signed on to do the movie."
--Paul W.S. Anderson solves the mystery of how he got Joan Allen to star in "Death Race," at Premiere.
"[L]et's just say that, by the end, it was cleared out two-thirds. This is like an eighty-seat theater. It's a small theater. And everybody in there is, as far as I can see, is the wealthy-wealthy Utah. You know, like, jade and leather, that cowboy wealthy. And so there's a third left, and no applause, like absolutely no applause, and I go up there, and the first question is, 'Why would you ever shoot in a place like that?' "
--Azazel Jacobs on one of the earliest screenings of his film "Momma's Man," shot in his childhood home, at Hammer to Nail.
"I love horses. I've learned from them. Just watch how a horse walks. It does it without self-consciousness. I've seen so much, so much human self-consciousness, since an early age, in this business of acting. In truth, actors are possibly the most self-conscious people on Earth."
--Christian Bale, equestrian, at the Japan Times.
"I had told Jeff Ayeroff at Warner Bros that I wanted the time on some project or another to do a big animated piece. He showed me Michael Patterson's animation from a short film and gave me the a-ha track. I went away and, inspired by a comic book from my youth, wrote the idea about a girl entering the comic dimension. The image of the animated hand reaching out from the page was the first thought. It gave me goose bumps, which I knew at the time was a good sign."
--"Choking Man" director Steve Barron on the inspiration behind his revolutionary rotoscoped 1985 video for a-ha's "Take on Me," at the Hollywood Bitchslap.
"One of the things I like about the Judas Goat sequence was that I had the feeling--which might have been completely anthropomorphic--that when the Judas Goat turned left, and the lambs turned right [into the slaughterhouse], he looked very happy."
--Frederick Wiseman on "Meat," Moving Image Source.
[Photo: Joan Allen in "Death Race," Universal Pictures, 2008]
Oh, Mr. Lee.
Thursday, August 21, 2008 | 10:47 AM
When asked about the omission of a seemingly obvious interview choice for "The Black List: Volume One" by Steven Zeitchik at the Hollywood Reporter, Elvis Mitchell said "Spike Lee is kind of the go-to guy. And Spike Lee is very good at promoting Spike Lee. We wanted to show people you might not see as often." Which seems more than fair enough, particularly in light of Lee's summer newspaper spat with Clint Eastwood that so delicately illustrated the director's ability to race-bait and drum up publicity at the same time.
Still, over at the Onion AV Club, Nathan Rabin turns in a 2,000-plus word reconsideration and defense of the film that found Lee at the height of his go-to guyness, 2000's "Bamboozled." It's a great piece that outlines much of my frustration with/love of Lee's work, and actually has me wanting to rewatch a film I found excruciatingly shrill the first time around:
Lee long ago appointed himself the indignant conscience of black America, a role that has won him countless detractors. The irony, of course, is that after Do The Right Thing, his magnum opus and a film defined as much by its ambiguity as its rage, Lee's best films have had primarily white casts: Summer Of Sam, The 25th Hour, Inside Man. Lee has shown infinitely more mastery as a filmmaker and storyteller than as a polemicist. It's his films that try to say something profound and sweeping about Black America--She Hate Me, He Got Game, School Daze, Girl 6--that have gotten him into trouble.With Bamboozled, Lee channeled the ornery, muckraking spirit of Peter Finch in Network and hollered, "I'm mad as hell about television's treatment of black America, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Finch's legendary catchphrase is referenced repeatedly in Bamboozled, a film that joins Network in Movie Jail for crimes against subtlety. Having just suffered through the 213-minute director's cut of Nixon, I can assure you that Oliver Stone deserves eight consecutive death penalties for his even more egregious crimes against subtlety. Bamboozled is as subtle as a jackhammer. But sometimes you have to yell just to make yourself heard.
[Photo: "Bamboozled," New Line Cinema, 2000]
+ The joy of having Elvis (and Timothy) in the building (Hollywood Reporter)
+ My Year Of Flops, #116 Case Files And A Mule Edition: Bamboozled (Onion AV Club)
Mourning Manny Farber.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 | 2:04 PM
More on the passing of critic Manny Farber:
J. Hoberman at the Village Voice (alongside a reprint of his 1981 essay "Termite Makes Right"):
Farber wasn't like other critics. He didn't proselytize