Festivals
Tribeca '08: Rednexploitation! "Tennessee," "From Within," "The Wild Man of Natividad."
Friday, May 2, 2008 | 12:18 PM
After a few rounds on the festival circuit, you start to wonder if the road to indie inauthenticity is paved with Southern accents. "Tennessee" is a banner example of the type of film that aims for grit and heartstrings by way of regional blue-collar misery and ends up seeming as genuine as a McDonald's sweet tea. The second film from Aaron Woodley, who's actually Canadian — so Canadian he's David Cronenberg's nephew — is indeed about Tennessee, along with New Mexico, and the states through which you'd have to drive in order to get from the latter to the former. In "Tennessee," all marriages are abusive, everyone drinks their liquor straight and someone can be treated for leukemia without losing a hair on his pretty head. The film's about two brothers who set off on a road trip to Knoxville to find their estranged father, from whom they fled years ago when he started getting rough with their mother. But you don't watch the film for them. You watch it, with glee in your heart, for Mariah Carey, who plays Krystal, the singin', cryin' Texan waitress who's on the run from her overbearing State Trooper husband, and whose flirtatious mothering of the siblings makes you wonder if the film is going to head into "Y "Tu Mamá También" realms. (It doesn't.)
Tribeca '08: "Let the Right One In."
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 | 12:11 PM
Red on white on white, Tomas Alfredson's "Let the Right One In" is a moody, surprising Nordic pre-teen love story about a bullied boy, Oskar, and the girl who moves in next door, Eli — a vampire. And it's not the perky goth fable it sounds like it could be — Oskar's a monochromatic, friendless lad who plays with a knife and dreams of killing everyone who's tormented him, while Eli's eating habits leave her and the surrounding walls smeared with gobs of blood. Set in an ice-encrusted Swedish backwater, the film is centered in the apartment building in which the two children live, a thin-walled structure where everyone dwells claustrophobically close to one another in the midst of swaths of empty land. Eli and Oskar prefer to be alone, which is why they meet — both go out at night to the courtyard for solitude, though Eli's always underdressed and in bare feet. She reflects that she's forgotten how to feel cold.
"Let the Right One In" isn't told entirely from Oskar's point of view, but it does have the elliptical quality of the internal life of an only half-emergent adolescent — incidents swarm into sharp focus like unconnected memories. It's a coming-of-age story, but only for Oskar — Eli, played by the remarkable Lina Leandersson, with enormous eyes and a dour face, has the air of an old woman in a juvenile body, but is really just an eternal girl, frozen at 12. For Oskar, who likes stories of death and visiting his father in the country, and otherwise lives in metropolitan isolation, Eli arrives as a form of very dark salvation, and the formation and arc of their relationship is a knife-edge balanced mixture of the gentle and the disturbing, right through the film's splendidly bittersweet ending.
Elegantly lensed to capture both the poetically bleak, birch tree snow globe exteriors and shabbier interiors of the town, "Let the Right One In" is the kind of film you like better a few days after first seeing it. Or at least I did — by the very nature of its central connection, the film's at an emotional remove, and it took some time mulling it over to really appreciate the inherent and uncompromising cruelty in its version of the world. That the film may include the gruesome ending of a previous iteration of the relationship Eli and Oskar strike up is the most unsettling fact of all — after all, she's never going to grow up.
"Let the Right One In" has been acquired by Magnet Releasing, though no theatrical dates have been announced yet.
[Photo: "Let the Right One In," Magnet Releasing, 2008]
+ "Let the Right One In" (TribecaFilmFestival.org)
"Blindness" is in.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | 11:55 AM
"Blindness," the new film from "City of God"'s Fernando Meirelles, was one of the major omissions the industry was buzzing about when the Cannes line-up was announced last week. Now it looks like the film will be opening the festival — from the Toronto Star:
The Cannes Film Festival has selected Blindness, produced by Toronto's Niv Fichman, for its coveted opening night slot on May 14, the Toronto Star has learned.This dark $25 million epic - about an unnamed city struck by a unique plague in which 90 per cent of the population go blind - is a three-way co-production involving Brazil and Japan as well as Canada.
There still has not been any official word from festival headquarters in Paris, but yesterday the word spread in Toronto that the film's producers have been given the good news by Cannes officials.
The film was adapted by Don McKellar from Jose Saramago's 1995 Nobel Prize-winning novel, and stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, so it would be physically impossibly to stuff the project with any more prestige. There's no word yet as to whether the film will be in competition or not.
Elsewhere, Variety is reporting that that "Hunger," from British director Steve McQueen, is likely to be the opening film of Un Certain Regard, "physical hardship" between the apparent running theme amongst Cannes titles.
[Photo: "Blindness," Miramax Films, 2008]
+ 'Blindness' set to open Cannes (Toronto Star)
+ 'Blindness' tipped to open Cannes (Variety)
Tribeca '08: "Somers Town."
Monday, April 28, 2008 | 1:15 PM
35-year-old director Shane Meadows seems unruffled by the burdens of being the current great hope of British cinema. "Somers Town," his sixth film and best yet, is all the finer for its modesty — shot in black and white and coming in at a neat 75 minutes, the tale of the friendship between two teens in the North London neighborhood of the title reaches for nothing beyond its grasp and is, because of it, just about perfect.
Meadows reunites with Thomas Turgoose, the fierce little thirteen-year-old he made the star of "This is England" after the kid demanded for five pounds in exchange for his audition. Two years older, a bit longer and leaner and at an awkward halfway point in adolescence, Turgoose is still an amazing find, brash and fearless and possessed of an expressive baby face and a irresistible laugh. He plays Tomo, a runaway from Nottingham who arrives in London with nothing more than a bag that's quickly stolen, and who takes up with Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a quiet Polish boy living with his father. Tomo's great talent is an untrammeled ability to impose on others, which he uses to cadge himself a place to stay with Marek, who anyway doesn't put up much of a fight. Marek likes the company, even if he has to hide Tomo from his father, who works all day and spends his nights drinking with other local Poles. The boys spend their days doing odd jobs for a local, semi-shady businessman, stealing Tomo a comically inappropriate outfit from the laundromat, and wooing the older, amused French waitress at a local diner with rides on a found wheelchair.
"Somers Town" was funded by Eurostar — the train service to Paris figures in at the end of the film. It's an odd fact that, taken with the short run-time, would seem to make "Somers Town" a difficult film to place in theaters, which is regrettable. "Somers Town" doesn't feel remotely like an ad; it feels, in fact, freer of burdens than any film I've seen recently, a scruffy and stupendously warm story of life in an unpretty part of the city with no lessons to teach or morals to impart.
"Somers Town" currently has no U.S. distribution.
[Photo: "Somers Town," Works International, 2008]
+ "Somers Town" (TribecaFilmFestival.org)
Tribeca '08: "Playing."
Friday, April 25, 2008 | 12:36 PM
For his tenth feature, "Jogo de Cena" (Playing), documentarian Eduardo Coutinho placed an ad in the paper calling for Rio de Janeiro women over the age of 18 with stories to tell to come to an audition. Naturally, everyone has a some kind of story to tell, but the subjects he selected were all particularly driven to perform, either because of a burning need to recount something that happened to them in the past or because they harbor aspirations toward acting. "Playing" is composed entirely of interviews conducted on a bare stage, monologues of women's stories in tall type, of heartbreak, of faith, of children lost or estranged, of departed lovers, of missed parents and their stand-ins. Coutinho's twist is that half of the women we see aren't the owners of the stories they tell. They're actresses interpreting the accounts, some of whom, like "Central Station"'s Marília Pêra, might be recognizable to audiences here.
Coutinho isn't the first, or the second, or the hundredth director to poke his finger through the gauzy fabric that separates fiction filmmaking from fact and wiggle it around. But "Playing"'s seemingly simple premise makes for an intriguingly layered and sometime plainly fascinating film in which your assumptions about whoever's on screen are constantly being undercut. Some stories the film revisits, revealing that their first telling was a dramatization, while others toggle between the teller and the reteller. My favorite tale was delivered by a woman with seeming absolute conviction who, at the end, turns to the camera and adds a "she said" that's almost an affront. We're never shown the original source.
It's the act of performance that most attracts Coutinho — how do you play a real and ordinary person? Do you imitate her, interpret her, add to the material she's given you? The actresses often tear up where the subjects won't, something they're forced to defend afterward — Coutinho dissects their choices with them, wanting to know why, for instance, one of them cries when describing the death of her son when the child's own mother didn't do so in the original interview. These talks yield a discussion of crying on camera that may sum up the film as a whole — tears are seen as an undeniably authentic display of emotion, one actress points out, which is why so many players on television and film like to show them off. But that's not true to how people actually cry — real tears, she explains, you blink back and try to hide.
"Playing" currently has no U.S. distribution.
[Photo: "Playing," VideoFilmes, 2007]
+ "Playing" (TribecaFilmFestival.org)
Peter Scarlet talks Tribeca.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 5:26 PM
Having taken advantage of none of the past weeks' advance screenings, I'm going to be heading into many a Tribeca film come tomorrow, and possibly turning around and heading right back out of a few, given my luck in the past with parsing the festival's daunting line-up.
All of IFC.com's Tribeca coverage, including interviews and videos, will be gathered here; in the intro piece, below, Matt and I talk to the fest's executive director Peter Scarlet.
More Cannes: Un Certain Regard, midnight and special screenings.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 12:35 PM
Here's the official announcement from the festival. (See this previous post for the competition line-up.)
Another addition to the big out-of-competition premieres: Korean director Kim Ji-woon's western "The Good, the Bad, and the Weird" — "The Host"'s Song Kang-ho is "the Weird." You can find the full line-ups for Un Certain Regard and the midnight and special screenings are after the jump. A few call-outs: "Wendy and Lucy" is the new film from "Old Joy" director Kelly Reichardt; James Toback chugs along, making films I have so far been totally unable to appreciate; and Jennifer Lynch, whose "Surveillance" is one of the midnight movies, is the daughter of David Lynch and hasn't made a film since her infamous 1993 debut "Boxing Helena." (You can find a trailer for "Surveillance" here.)
An Ebertfest without Ebert.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 10:28 AM
It seems Roger Ebert won't be making it to the 10th anniversary of the Illinois film festival he established after all. He writes:
After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip.Sigh. I was really happy with this one. The films, the guests, the friends. Chaz, Nate Kohn, Mary Susan Britt and I had all the pieces in place. The only tweak I didn't have time for was a proper full-length review of "Shotgun Stories." It was on the to-do list. What I'm using now is what I wrote after seeing it at the Chicago Film Festival. The rest is almost a turn-key operation---the little festival that runs itself, with the help of countless volunteers.
It's hard to express what it means to me that the festival is in my hometown. People never seemed to think I quite had a job. "And how is Roger?" my mother's friends would ask. "Is he still just... going to the movies?"
In other news, it seems Ebert has joined the ranks of the bloggers. Here's his other post to date, on Arthur C. Clarke's fondness for Cinemania and his helpfulness as an Answer Man source.
[Photo: A past Ebertfest, Roger Ebert's Film Festival, 2008]
+ Ebertfest 2008: My heart is in Urbana (Roger Ebert's Journal)
Cannes 2008: The Competition.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 7:30 AM
At long last! Premiering out of competition will be, as expected, "Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull," as well as Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and everyone's favorite "Kung Fu Panda." The closing night film may still be the already announced "What Just Happened?" from Barry Levinson — or maybe not — and the opening night film has yet to be announced.
Some of the goodies down below — Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut "Synecdoche, New York," the one American film many had called ahead of time; Clint Eastwood's Changeling"; Steven Soderbergh's "Che," which, given talk that the director wanted either both "Guerrilla" and "The Argentine" at the festival or neither, is presumably both; and new films from the Dardennes, Desplechin and Wenders. "Waltz with Bashir" is animated, "Gomorra" is a contemporary mob dram and "Serbis" is the first Philippine film in competition in 25 years.
IN COMPETITION
UC MAYMUN Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, TurkeyLE SILENCE DE LORNA
Director: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, BelgiumUN CONTE DE NOEL
Director: Arnaud Desplechin, FranceCHANGELING
Director: Clint Eastwood, U.S.ADORATION
Director: Atom Egoyan, CanadaWALTZ WITH BASHIR
Director: Ari Folman, IsraelLA FRONTIERE DE L'AUBE
Director: Philippe Garrel, FranceGOMORRA
Director: Matteo Garrone, Italy24 CITY
Director: Jia Zhangke, ChinaSYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Director: Charlie Kaufman, U.S.MY MAGIC
Director: Eric Khoo, SingaporeLA MUJER SIN CABEZA
Director: Lucrecia Martel, ArgentinaSERBIS
Director: Brillante Mendoza, PhilippinesDELTA
Director: Kornel Mundruczo, HungaryLINHA DE PASSE
Director: Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas, BrazilCHE
Director: Steven Soderbergh, U.S.IL DIVO
Director: Paolo Sorrentino, ItalyLEONERA
Director: Pablo Trapero, ArgentinaTHE PALERMO SHOOTING
Director: Wim Wenders, Germany
[Photo: "Changeling," Universal Pictures, 2008]
+ Cannes unveils Competition lineup (Hollywood Reporter)
Janet Pierson takes over SXSW.
Monday, April 14, 2008 | 2:40 PM
Fresh off the wires:
SXSW is pleased to announce that Janet Pierson has accepted the position as Producer of the SXSW Film Festival and Conference, the Austin, TX based event founded in 1993.Matt Dentler, who has acted as SXSW Film Festival Producer since 2004 will be moving to New York City to pursue a new career to head the marketing and programming operations of Cinetic Digital Rights Management.
[Co-founder and Senior Director of SXSW Film Louis] notes that "SXSW Film has been privileged to have Matt Dentler working for it; the event has benefited extraordinarily from his leadership. We are very excited about his new job at Cinetic working with John Sloss and are all looking forward to his continuing the work he has accomplished at SXSW Film as a creative force in film."
Pierson's had a long career in indie film, having co-created "Split Screen" and been involved in dozens of features, among them "Slacker" and "Clerks" — she's also a blogger. But I'm sure I'm not the only one to be sad to see Matt move on — he was instrumental in carving out a major place and voice for the SXSW Film Festival in a crowded indie landscape over the past few years.
[Photo: Janet Pierson, snagged from the Austin Film Society]
+ Janet Pierson Named SXSW Film Producer (PR Newswire)
Sarasota.
Monday, April 14, 2008 | 12:30 PM
I was lucky enough to get to spend the past few days at the Sarasota Film Festival, which was a kick-ass mix of an ambitious and wide-ranging film line-up from programmers Tom Hall and Holly Herrick, lavish, gown-and-tux-and-shrimp cocktail parties, and downtime on the beach. I was on the jury for the Narrative Feature Competition, along with John Kochman of Unifrance and Ligiah Villalobos, writer/producer of "La Misma Luna." After some solid deliberation, we ended up giving the prize to Lee Isaac Chung's very fine "Munyurangabo," which follows a pair of boys, one an orphan and the other estranged from his family, as they travel from Kigali on a journey to avenge the former's parents. Shot in Rwanda with nonprofessional local actors, the film certainly has nods to African cinema, but I think that Holly made a good point in describing it as having more in common with American indie film. "Munyurangabo" premiered at Cannes and also won the narrative grand jury prize at the 2007 AFI Fest, but hasn't managed to secure distribution. I'm guessing it'll continue to make the fest rounds, and it's well worth seeking out.
The narrative line-up was very international — I was also happy to get a chance to see "California Dreamin'" and "The Edge of Heaven," and to run into plenty of filmmakers from SXSW, many of whom had films in the Independent Visions competition. The other prizes:
The 2008 Best Documentary Feature Competition Award sponsored by Sky Sotheby's was presented to "Stranded: I Have Come From A Plane That Crashed On The Mountains" by Gonzalo Arijon.A Special Documentary Jury Prize was presented by the Documentary Feature jury to "To See If I'm Smiling" by Tamar Yarom.
The 2008 Independent Visions Competition Award, sponsored by Heineken, was presented to "The Pleasure of Being Robbed" by Joshua Safdie.
An Independent Visions Special Jury Prize for Cinematography was presented to "Medicine For Melancholy" by Barry Jenkins, Cinematography by James Laxton.
Sponsored by Bombay Sapphire, special recognition goes to winners of our Audience Favorite Awards for Best Narrative Feature, Best Documentary, Excellence in World Cinema, and Best Short Film. Each category carries a $1,000 cash prize presented to the filmmaker.
Bombay Sapphire Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature to "Fugitive Pieces" by Jeremy Podeswa.
Bombay Sapphire Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature was presented to "Of All The Things" by Jody Lambert.
Bombay Sapphire Audience Award for Best in World Cinema was presented to "Christmas Story" (Finland) by Juha Wuolijoki.
Bombay Sapphire Audience Award for Best Short Film was presented to "La Corona" by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega.
Fellow fest jurors Matt Dentler and AJ Schnack have also posted thoughts on their pick.
[Photo: "Munyurangabo," Almond Tree Films, 2007]
+ I Have Come From A Plane That Landed in Austin (Matt Dentler's Blog)
+ A Note About Jury Duty (All These Wonderful Things)
The New York Asian Film Festival strikes back.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 | 9:51 AM
My favorite sign of summer — the New York Asian Film Festival is, as they put it, "back like a bad dream." It'll be running from June 20 through July 6 this year. The line-up so far (descriptions theirs):
SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO - we unleash the beast a full month before it hits movie theaters: Takashi Miike's berserk, bloody, out-of-control English-language spaghetti western, guest-starring Quentin Tarantino. Full of female gunfighters, clockwork wheelchairs, razor sharp samurai swords and tiny fetuses growing inside blooming flowers this is the Takashi Miike movie Variety calls "one of his wildest ideas yet." And they're right. (A co-presentation with Japan Society's Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)
Manhattan GoGoGo.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 | 10:43 AM
The Wachowski brothers' "Speed Racer" has been confirmed as the Tribeca Film Festival's closing night film. It'll screen Saturday, May 3rd at the BMCC TPAC in Lower Manhattan, and "several of the cast members will be in attendance." Sayeth the press release:
"Warner Bros. has been a big part of the Festival many times over the years and we are thrilled that the Wachowskis and producer Joel Silver are bringing Speed Racer to us this year to close the Festival," said Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival.
Well, it's not the strongest of New York tie-ins, but maybe Emile Hirsch and the chimp can traverse Manhattan in the Mach Five in order to promote the event. See that wacky trailer here.
[Photo: Emile Hirsch in "Speed Racer," Warner Bros. 2008]
+ Trailer: "Speed Racer" (Apple)
Tribeca: Look who's directing now.
Monday, March 31, 2008 | 6:41 PM
I've been shamefully avoiding looking over the Tribeca line-up until now because it's just so damn big. Finally, the deed is done, and it seems a good time to give a few shout-outs to some unexpected names showing up as directors:
I Think I Thought, directed and written by Matthew Modine: "To think, or not to think, that is the question in I Think I Thought," the program helpfully tells us of this short. Modine's actually directed a few shorts before (in addition to his direct-to-DVD feature debut, "One Last Score"). The first, 1993's "When I was a Boy," was co-directed by "Little Children"'s Todd Field, while 1994's "Smoking" was written by David Sedari, and 1997's "Ecce Pirate" was shot at the same time as "Cutthroat Island."Irish Twins, directed and written by Rider Strong and Shiloh Strong: The actor best known as Shawn Hunter of "Boy Meets World" teams up with his real-life sibling to direct and star in a short about how "brothers Michael and Seamus come to blows over their father's ashes."
Gunnin' for That #1 Spot, directed by Adam Yauch. (USA): The Beastie Boys' MCA sheds the Nathanial Hörnblowér alias under which he's been credited for his past directorial work and leads with his real name in the doc about Rucker Park's "Elite 24" tournament.
Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha, directed and written by Melvin Van Peebles: Van Peebles hasn't directed a feature since 2000's "Le Conte du Ventre Plein," which never made it to these shores for a theatrical release. "Confessions" is a semi-autobiographical tale starring Van Peebles as a man "who's always on the move--but always returns to New York."
Charly, directed and written by Isild Le Besco: 25-year-old French actress Le Besco drew arthouse attention for her role in Benoît Jacquot's "À tout de suite," but she's also directed a doc (about Parisian neighborhood Le Marais) and another feature, "Half-Price," which premiered at Tribeca in 2004. "Charly," like "Half-Price," is set in a world in which children have created a life for themselves.
Sita Sings the Blues, directed and written by Nina Paley: Long-time cartoonist and animator Paley takes on a feature-length film that combines the tale of the break-up of her marriage with the Ramayana.
The full Tribeca schedule and line-up are here.
[Photo: "I Think I Thought," Matthew Modine, 2007]
+ Tribeca Film Guide (TribecaFilmFestival.org)
SXSW 2008: "Stop-Loss."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 | 6:00 PM
"Stop-Loss," Kimberly Peirce's first film since 1999's "Boys Don't Cry," tears itself into tortured pieces trying to be an impossible combination of things — an Iraq War film for the MTV crowd; Serious Cinema that's also a goggle-eyed aesthetic appreciation of Channing Tatum's hot bod, Ryan Phillippe's pretty face and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's expert broodiness; a celebration of the troops' badassery that doesn't condone their actions against collateral citizens; an issue flick that nevertheless sometimes earnestly recalls "Top Gun." Peirce's younger brother enlisted and went to Iraq, and she's reverent of the choice, which puts her in a bind — "Stop-Loss," unable to take a stance against the war its characters have signed up to fight, settles for being against its titular policy, which allows for enlisted soldiers to have their contracts extended without their consent by order of the President. In other words, the film's main beef isn't having to fight or get maimed or possibly die, it's having to do more than your fair share of it.
SXSW 2008: "Nights and Weekends."
Monday, March 17, 2008 | 9:10 AM
There's a meta-mumblecore movie just begging to be made that's set amidst the group of people who've been making mumblecore movies, and it would start off at the tense premiere screening of "Nights and Weekends." Co-directors, writers and stars Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg presented their third feature together to (and later took part in a candid Q&A in front of) a crowd half made up of friends and acquaintances uncomfortably aware that things had gotten ugly during the making of the film. In a mini-movement that's eluded agreed-upon definitions beyond the fact that its films are the collaborative creations of collections of friends, it was both stinging and poignant to see a film about a break-up that coincides with the break-up of a creative partnership. And "Nights and Weekends" is good, the best thing that Swanberg — who's on his fourth film in four years, and the first in which he's shared a co-director credit — has produced in his young career, maybe because his influence is balanced out by Gerwig's, and maybe because this is the first in which the shadow of adult life encroaches on the post-college bubble that's been both the playground and bane of his work.
Austin says goodbye.
Friday, March 14, 2008 | 10:02 PM
If you'd like to recreate the SXSW experience in the comfort of your own home, you can find two of the "Burger Hut" SXSW trailers that played before the start of each fest film up on YouTube. The "Close Encounters" one is good, but it's the "Glengarry Glen Ross" one that has my heart.
I've stuck a fork in this festival (though there are plenty of reviews and interviews piled up to be doled out over the next few days) but my colleague Jim Shearer's still in Austin covering the madness that is the music portion of the fest. Check out his dispatches at the Indie Ear blog.
+ SXSW '08 Burger Hut Trailers "Close Encounters" (YouTube)
+ SXSW '08 Burger Hut Trailers "Glengarry Glen Ross" (YouTube)
SXSW 2008: "Medicine for Melancholy."
Thursday, March 13, 2008 | 9:10 AM
The details of Barry Jenkins' righteous "Medicine for Melancholy" — fixed-gear bikes and messenger bags, bottled iced tea and late night tacos, Rainbow Grocery and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, old Victorians and housing rights discussions — evoke a life I once lead so strongly that watching the film sent me into sense memory flashbacks. A bittersweet paean to San Francisco and its indie scene, "Medicine for Melancholy" is also a vivid semi-love story and a contemplation of race and gentrification in the city — and to answer the question that was posed to producer Justin Barber at the Q&A after a screening and turned by him to the crowd, no, it's not a mumblecore movie, for all that it's about a pair of twentysomethings spending the day talking. It doesn't look like one, and it has too much solidity and forthrightness; the characters actually confront their own emotions and each other, they have social and political concerns, they fight.
(When this subject was raised, the audience was vehement about not applying that label to this film — at 2008 SXSW, the bloom is off the mumblecore rose.)
They — 'Jo (Tracey Heggins) and Micah (Wyatt Cenac), along with director/writer Jenkins — are also black, something unseen in the kingdom of mumblecore and not exactly common in the larger world of indie culture of which it's a part. As Micah puts it, of the seven percent of San Francisco that's black, maybe one or two percent are part of their scene: "You ever realize just how few of us there really are?" It's that awareness that drives him to track her down after a one-night stand and to win her over into spending a meandering Sunday riding to the Museum of the African Diaspora (the one part of the film that leans a little heavily on its themes), cooking dinner, giggling about Rick James over a joint and going out dancing. He's charming, but has a chip on his shoulder, and she's not really sure what she's doing — her boyfriend, white, is away in London. The film is desaturated to the point that the only colors that come through, mostly reds, are muted, giving it a pensive feel, but also standing as a visual reminder of Micah's sense of isolation. "Medicine for Melancholy" is something like a movie mixtape, with a soundtrack from smallish bands rising up to carry us from scene to often ecstatic scene — it was shot in HD, but doesn't look it — to an end that's, fittingly, melancholy. It's an assured and impressive debut from Barry Jenkins, and one of the great finds of the festival.
[Photo: "Medicine for Melancholy," Strike Anywhere, 2008]
+ "Medicine for Melancholy" (SXSW)
+ "Medicine for Melancholy" (Official site)
SXSW 2008: "Wild Blue Yonder"
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | 9:37 PM
Cinéma-vérité and the first-person documentary go to war in "Wild Blue Yonder," and vérité wins — this engrossing car wreck is an unintentional argument as to how difficult it is to successfully include yourself in your own nonfiction film. "Wild Blue Yonder" is about "a daughter's search for her father," as the filmmaker, Celia Maysles, puts it — that father is David Maysles, who with his brother Albert made seminal docs like "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter," and who passed away in 1987, when Celia was 7. Judith Maysles, Celia's mother and David's widow, fought it out with Albert over the rights to the Maysles brothers' films in an ugly court battle that ended in a settlement and the rights of all of the films, including "Blue Yonder," the film David was working on at the time of his death, becoming solely Albert's. The lawsuit pretty much ended communication between Maysles Films and Celia and Judith, until Celia decided to bridge the gap in the making of this, her own debut film.
SXSW 2008: "The Order of Myths."
Sunday, March 9, 2008 | 2:52 PM
Tradition is rooted in history, and history is littered with things we'd rather forget. Mobile, Alabama's Mardi Gras celebration is the oldest in the U.S., and some aspects of it, like a customary float depicting Folly chasing Death around a broken column, can't fully be explained even by those who grew up there. Others, like the fact that the celebration, the pride of the city and the generator of $227 million of income a year, is blatantly and surreally segregated into separate parades and pairings of Mardi Gras kings and queens for the black and white populations, can be broken down without much effort. But most of the people interviewed in Margaret Brown's superb documentary "The Order of Myths" instead perform an exquisite verbal dance around the issue, citing tradition, roots, history and the debatable fact that everyone prefers it this way. "The Order of Myths" is a tender, unsparing portrait of Mobile's Mardi Gras, but it's also a tremendously rich examination of how people carry on from day to day while negotiating the minefields of the past.
Helen Meagher, a coltish blond with a sweet-natured smile, is designated queen of Mardi Gras by the MCA &151; the Mobile Carnival Association, an all-white, old school Alabama organization. Stefanie Lucas, a glowingly round-faced elementary school teacher, is proclaimed queen by the all-black, slightly newer but just as entrenched MAMGA — the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association, once the Colored Carnival Association. As the film follows the queens and their accompanying kings through the fittings, coronations, lunches and balls leading up to the parades, it dips into the past, recent and further back. Helen comes from a long line of property owners and, once, slaveholders, one of whom commissioned the last slave ship to come from Africa over 50 years after the slave trade has been outlawed. Stefanie's ancestors arrived on that ship. Elsewhere, the costumes of some of the secret "mystic" societies who make up the parades recall, without question, those of the KKK; an outspoken debutante discusses her own liberal nature and free spirit while gradually being seduced by all of the pageantry; a few paeans are composed to moon pies; and the MAMGA king and queen pay an unprecedented visit to the MCA coronation.
It's heady material, but Brown doesn't let it bear the entire burden of the film. "The Order of Myths" is beautifully composed and shot, and, even better, delicately edited — while none of the subjects are let off easy, none are given unfair treatment. Parallels that could have been hammered in are allowed to breathe — someone discusses the city's love of the old oak trees that line the streets and makes a note of how they represent, literally, the area's roots; later, we see an image of a 19-year-old man who was found hanging from one of those trees in 1981, one of the country's last reported lynchings. A reveal, late in the film, of the filmmaker's own connections to Mobile and the carnival draws the film's fond and rueful tone together. Only someone who came from this world would have this kind of knowledge and access, and only someone with a bit of remove would be able to present it in such sharp detail.
[Photo: "The Order of Myths," Margaret Brown, 2008]
+ "The Order of Myths" (SXSW)
SXSW 2008: "Bi The Way."
Sunday, March 9, 2008 | 2:02 AM
There's an interesting doc to be found somewhere in the recent surge in the cachet of showing an openness to sometimes bat for the home team, or at least make out with the shortstop on a friend's couch after a few beers. "Bi The Way" is not it. The first film from Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, "Bi The Way" would like to be an exploration of our nation's shifting sexual mores, but it's so unfocused that it never really manages to argue its thesis, one that some of its own interviewees are hesitant to endorse. Is bisexuality actually on the rise? A slo-mo replay of the Britney-Madonna VMA kiss does not an argument make. Closer looks at a few subjects — an 11-year-old from an unconventional family, a male dancer getting into his first relationship with another man, a theater type with mother issues, a teenager girl, a couple exploring bringing in a third — are surrounded by interviews with academic and journalistic talking heads, and by footage of the filmmakers on a road trip, talking to people across the country about bisexuality. It's a very literal approach to capturing the cultural zeitgeist, I suppose, but stooping to footage of how your scouting process involves asking a Utah fast food drive-through attendant where one would find a bisexual Mormon doesn't come across as a cute joke, it comes across as an insulting flaunting of lazy filmmaking.
But the film does contain one fascinating figure — Josh, a kid on the cusp of puberty who's the son of "Tarnation" director Jonathan Caouette from an early fling with a female friend. Raised by his mother, but in touch and on good terms with his father and his father's boyfriend, Joshua can seem disturbingly grown up and over-informed, but also extraordinarily free, a child sprung from an experimental petri dish of openness and supportiveness in which his determining of his own sexuality is as close as it can come to being no big deal.
[Photo: "Bi The Way," Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, 2008]
+ "Bi The Way (SXSW)
+ "Bi The Way" (Official site)
SXSW 2008: "Humboldt County."
Saturday, March 8, 2008 | 1:27 PM
Term I wish someone cleverer than me would coin: one to describe that kind of movie in which a free-spirited (and ever so lightly damaged, like a can of discounted tomatoes) girl latches on to a glum male protagonist and hauls him off to introduce him to joy and laughter — see "Garden State," see "Elizabethtown," see everything in between. "Humboldt County," the feature debut of Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky, starts off looking like yet another entry in this genre, with Fairuza Balk playing Bogart, an actress/singer who swoops into L.A. to offer the promise of salvation to depressed med student Peter (Jeremy Strong), whose strict professor father (Peter Bogdanovich) has just failed him in his final class. But after taking Peter home to Humboldt with her after a one night stand, Bogart fades out of the film, which turns instead into a love story between Peter and a way of life — a ramshackle, dilated-pupils day-to-day funded by the illicit farming of marijuana. Brad Dourif, always a loopy pleasure, is a curmudgeonly physics prof who fled academia for a life in the woods with his spacey wife (Frances Conroy), his stepson Max (Chris Messina) and Max's sprite of a daughter (Madison Davenport).
"Humboldt County" involves a whole bunch of gawkish gazing at a rose-colored representation of the neo-hippie Humboldt lifestyle — constant weed consumption, a local school funded by a community pool of pot plants, an outhouse, gas lamps and plenty of wide-lensed shots of the eye-poppingly gorgeous landscape on this sparsely settled stretch of northern California coast. But despite all the "Look how kooky!," the film's genial and pleasant, and the expected transformation of the exaggeratedly buttoned-up Peter into a flannel-wearing expert on DIY irrigation systems is balanced by the less conventional way the film's main relationship becomes the friendship between him and the prickly Max, who's smart enough to see that the life his family is living is both an escape and a trap, and who's gambling on an oversized crop to lift him out of the cycle. Yes, you can stay too long at the party, and eventually the hubristic Max gets his comeuppance, driving Conroy and Dourif into unwieldy monologues and mild overacting — unable to recommend either the outlaw-farmer thing or the rejoin-the-system one, "Humboldt County" settles instead for making the case, vaguely, for doing something in between. Or at least taking a summer off to get really high and look at the ocean, which sounds none too shabby to me.
[Photo: Jeremy Strong in "Humboldt Country," Embark Productions, 2008]
+ "Humboldt County" (SXSW)
+ "Humboldt County" (Official site)
Austin says hello.
Friday, March 7, 2008 | 1:06 PM
The picture to the right is of Lady Bird Lake and the Congress Avenue Bridge, from beneath which swarm thousands of bats each night. But what I really wish I'd memorialized in image form is the mesa of Rudy's creamed corn I consumed last night, which had to have contained a gallon of cream, several sticks of butter and a few pounds of cream cheese — just thinking back on it, I tear up a little in nostalgia and at the thought of the years it's shaved off of my lifespan.
So: Arrival in Austin, accomplished. Eating obscene amounts of barbecue and the accompanying even unhealthier and more delicious sides, accomplished. Weird celebrity sighting (dude from ZZ Top, checking into the Four Seasons), accomplished. The 2008 SXSW Film Festival kicks off today — I'm off to get my badge. Be on the lookout for interviews from myself and Stephen Saito over at the film news site, and reviews here at the blog.
SXSW 2008 lines up.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008 | 11:55 AM
indieWIRE has the line-up for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival.
There's some Sundance stuff there, including Nanette Burnstein's "American Teen" and Morgan Spurlock's "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" But it's the slew of premieres this year that are really impressive -- among them "Bulletproof Salesman," the new doc from "Gunner Palace" co-directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein; "Explicit Ills," the directorial debut of actor Mark Webber; "Nights and Weekends," from festival darling Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig; "Yeast," from "Frownland" star Mary Bronstein; and Michael Almereyda's "New Orleans, Mon Amour." And making their way from Berlin are Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones doc "Shine a Light" and Julian Schnabel's Lou Reed doc "Lou Reed's Berlin."
+ SXSW Unveils '08 Lineup (indieWIRE)
NYAFF 2007: "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A."
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 | 3:41 PM
You hear "Takashi Miike made a gay prison love story" and you think... well, we're not sure what you think, but we imagine it's probably blood splattered, sexually incomprehensible, and includes someone cackling maniacally in the background. Of course, the only thing you can really generalize about Miike's films is that he sure makes a lot of them; "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" (more literally translated as "4.6 Billion Years of Love") comes on the tail of "violence across the ages" epic "Izo," an episode of "Ultraman Max" and fabulous, traumatic children's film "The Great Yokai War," which screened at last year's NYAFF. "Big Bang Love" is, unlikely enough, a pensive, symbolism-laden art film that regards its delinquent protagonist pair with rueful tenderness and bemused sorrow.
Shiro (Masanobu Ando) is, at the film's outset, dead -- strangled -- and Jun (Ryuhei Matsuda), who was found with him, immediately confesses to the crime. From there the film stutters back to when the two arrived at the prison, blood-splattered from the respective murders they've each committed and eyeing each other as they're stripped and processed. Shiro is all rage and violence, while Jun is remote and affectless, and Shiro falls into protecting Jun from the other inmates. It's no "Oz"-style relationship, though, and it's not, despite the heated pans down Shiro's tattooed form, physical; the two have an immediate and unspoken understanding of each other expressed through the sweetly vulnerable conversations they have in their few moments alone. The world of "Big Bang Love" is otherwise cold and methodical, from the sparse, abstract sets that recall Lars von Trier to the circling investigation into Shiro's death that shapes the film.
Looming outside the prison are a rocket ship and an ancient pyramid. One is a way to space and the other supposedly leads to heaven, we're told -- they're the most overt instances of the film's reoccuring application of astral imagery to emotion. It's as if in "Big Bang Love"'s desolate setting science is the inadequate sole language available to describe human connection, and the damaged young men experiencing such things are as foreign and incomprehensible as alien beings.
"Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" will screen at the IFC Center June 28 at 7:00pm and July 5 at 6:45pm. It has no US distribution.
+ "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" (SubwayCinema.com)
+ "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" (IMDb)
NYAFF 2007: "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay."
Monday, June 18, 2007 | 12:50 PM
Park Chan-wook (mostly) trades in the vengeance for offbeat romance in "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK," a love story set in the most adorable mental institution in all of Korea. Lim Su-jeong plays Young-goon, who's committed following a possible suicide attempt after she's convinced herself that she's actually a cyborg and therefore do not need to eat. Pop star Rain is Il-sun, who suffers from the delusion that he's
disappearing and that he also has the ability to steal aspects of people's personalities. It's meant to be fanciful, but Park both engages the fact that little sympathy or understanding is given to those suffering from mental illness in many parts of Asia -- Young-goon's mother doesn't understand why her daughter can't just act normal enough to not disturb the customers at their family-owned restaurant -- while displaying no particular understanding of mental illness himself. The craziness of everyone in the asylum has a direct cause, whether it be parental abandonment, societal pressure or just a particularly traumatic event (however you choose to define that -- in one case, it's failing an audition for the Edelweiss Boys and Girls Choir, which would be a dire blow to us as well).
Park is a prodigious pop filmmaker, and while "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" doesn't zip along like his earlier work, it offers a snappy, sun-soaked view of the shelter from a unkind world that group delusions have provided the institution's residents. The film would be slight even without the failings mentioned above, but Lim, wafer thin and capable of producing some decidedly uncutesy rictus expressions, does manage to find flashes of genuine sadness in her character's suffering. Park, meanwhile, having gotten his chirpy jollies out, will next move on to vampire movie "Evil Live."
"I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay" will screen at the IFC Center June 24 at 6:20pm and June 30 at 8:15pm. It has no US distribution.
+ "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay" (SubwayCinema.com)
+ "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay" (IMDb)
NYAFF 2007: "The Banquet."
Monday, June 18, 2007 | 10:58 AM
Somehow, the historical martial arts epic has become the Chinese answer to the Merchant Ivory film, steeped in prestige, crafted for international consumption, and skipping over complicated contemporary issues to revel in an earlier time period when people wore prettier, more complicated clothing. "The Banquet," directed by Feng Xiaogang, is a Gertrude-centric "Hamlet" transposed to tumultuous 10th century China and cut through with generous dollops of balletic, wired-assisted fight scenes. It's a categorically sumptuous film -- from cavernous palace halls to the elegant unfurling of blood in forest stream, there's no chance at visual extravagance passed up. It's not enough to make up for the film's almost complete lack of vitality, but it sure is nice to look at.
"The Banquet" has more than a little in common with Zhang Yimou's "Curse of the Golden Flower" -- both are focused on women furiously manuevering for their own survival in the viperous, gilded courts of ancient China, and both were supposed to star Gong Li, who passed on "The Banquet" due to scheduling conflicts. In her place is Zhang Ziyi, who's seems more like a kitten playing at being a big cat as Empress Wan, once a court maiden in love with Prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu), but chosen as a bride to the emperor instead, causing the unhappy Wu Luan to leave the court to immerse himself in theater and music. At the film's open, the former emperor has been murdered with the "Hamlet" poison of choice (ear!), and Wan has taken up with his murderer, the new emperor (Ge You), in order to protect herself and Wu Luan. Various machinations and assassination attempts follow as the prince arrives at court, culminating in a midnight banquet at which everyone's agendas are bloodily revealed.
The famous choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (the man behind "The Matrix" films as well as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and dozens of others) put together the action sequences, which director Feng shoots in slow motion so luxuriant it's hard not to giggle. Poetic? Sure. Silly? Totally. When a genre is shoulder to shoulder with self-parody, it might be time to give it a rest. Nevertheless, Zhang and Wu have excellent thwarted chemistry, even expressed via a loving swordfight. Zhou Xun (of "Suzhou River") gets the best (if also, in retrospect, most foolish) death scene in a film heavy with them as the Ophelia character.
"The Banquet" will screen at the IFC Center June 22 at 8:15pm and June 27 at 8:45pm. It has no US distribution.
+ "The Banquet" (SubwayCinema.com)
+ "The Banquet" (IMDb)