IFC.com - Film News

Voicing Celebrity Concerns

2009-11-20T17:15:00Z

Movie stars sell movie tickets, but do they also sell video games? The latest title to put this question to the test is "Brütal Legend," a new action-adventure title set in a heavy-metal land of mythic creatures and crushing tunes that stars Tenacious D frontman and "School of Rock" maestro Jack Black as the voice (and likeness) of its head-banging hero Eddie Riggs.

Developed by acclaimed designer Tim Schafer (of "Grim Fandango," "Psychonauts") with Black's creative input, "Brütal Legend" is a heavily hyped game that's invested a lot in the popularity of Black, who's not only touted in ads as the lead but who even has shown up on red carpets dressed as Riggs. More so than any other recent game, "Brütal Legend" has pinned its retail hopes on players' fondness for its lead voice actor, a decision that says a lot about the industry's desire to market their games around recognizable voice talent.

But does anyone really give a hoot who's speaking their on-screen avatar's lines? The answer's still "Reply hazy, try again." The same goes as to whether having a celeb's participation really does anything to enhance a game's quality. There's no doubt that, at least when it come to movie tie-in games, having the cast carry through to the game helps maintain synergy. But in terms of stand-alone titles, the benefits of having celebrity voice actors is murkier, thanks to the many examples out there where celeb efforts either did nothing for the game or actually hurt as much as helped the overall product.

Signing a big name movie star to voice your game's protagonist or villain definitely carries with it a sense of credibility, all the more to make the argument that gaming is just a legit an industry as cinema, one with major talent getting involved. But as more and more actors turn their gaze to the console and PC arena, it's getting difficult to see what significant benefit, if any, is really enjoyed by games that choose to use them.

]]> The practice first took off in the '90s, when CD-based crud like "Night Trap" (starring Dana Plato) and "Wing Commander III" (headlined by Mark Hamill and John Rhys-Davies) erroneously assumed that having filmed cutscenes of real actors would enhance the gaming experience. But the modern trend to hire accomplished actors really kicked into gear with 2001's "Grand Theft Auto III" and, to an even greater extent, its 2002 sequel "Vice City." Featuring Dennis Hopper, Ray Liotta and Samuel L. Jackson (among many others), "Vice City" has a star-studded cast to match its over-the-top scale, one made up of actors whose badass personas perfectly meshed with the game's gonzo thug-life material.

There can be an artistic danger in relying too heavily on celeb voice actors, as seen in the case of animation. Following the lead of DreamWorks' "Shrek" series, the majority of animated films have started pushing their A-list voice cast in the same way they would any in-the-flesh leads, which can get in the way of the fiction that their characters are "real" as opposed to performed "roles" -- "Hey, that's Seth Rogen voicing the adorable gelatinous blob!" Games haven't, at least until "Brütal Legend," gone quite that far, but it's a future fast approaching.

My favorite AAA game from 2008, the time-usurping post-apocalyptic RPG "Fallout 3," offered up the vocal stylings of Liam Neeson, Malcolm McDowell and Ron Perlman, all of whom provided fine work that had absolutely no bearing on my attitude toward the game. Similarly, Eliza Dushku's starring role as "WET"'s sexy mercenary Rubi didn't make a lick of difference, not because her work was terrible ("adequate" would be a more appropriate assessment), but because the game's interests aren't in serious drama (or engaging scripting) but choreographed action.

The list goes on -- Patrick Stewart in "Oblivion," Tim Curry and Jenny McCarthy in "Red Alert 3," Linda Hunt in the "God of War" franchise -- and the conclusions are usually the same: actors can be solid in games, but their efforts rarely elevate or desecrate a title's general value, except in those many instances (mostly, again, with movie tie-ins) when the celebs' voice acting is so lifeless, stilted and disconnected from the action at hand that it calls attention to their lousy contribution.

Lukas Moodysson's Mammoth Undertaking

2009-11-20T15:40:00Z

Sweden's Lukas Moodysson burst onto the international film scene with 1998's "Fucking Åmål" (or, as it was cowardly renamed in English-speaking countries, "Show Me Love"), a carefree, naturalistic drama about a reluctant romance between two small-town teenage girls. Just as ebullient is his 2000 period satire and popular favorite "Together," which focuses on the dysfunctional relationships and values of '70s left-wingers living in a commune, after which Moodysson began pursuing darker, moodier fare. 2002's critical darling "Lilya 4-ever" couldn't get much bleaker, tracing a Russian girl's journey from drop-out to prostitute to kidnapped sex slave. Following that were two avant-garde experiments: 2004's shockingly explicit take on amateur porn, "A Hole in My Heart," and his 2006 stream-of-consciousness curiosity, "Container."

Though American actress Jena Malone provided narration to that last film, Moodysson's new drama is also his first English-language production, mostly. "Mammoth" splits between three related storylines in New York, the Philippines and Thailand. Gael García Bernal and Michelle Williams star as a well-to-do, workaholic couple whose daughter is mostly cared for by their Filipino nanny (Marife Necesito), who also works hard to support her young boys back home. Bernal's character, a savvy web guru, has boarded a flight to Thailand, where he strikes up an uneasy friendship with a local prostitute, while Williams' surgeon wife becomes attached to a dying boy who isn't her own. I spoke with Moodysson about whether he'd continue to work in English for the commercial benefits, if he sees similarities between "Mammoth" and "Babel," and how he feels about the film's unprofessional reception at the Berlin Film Festival.

You've said the film is about families and how we behave towards children, our own and other people's. To me, though, it's more about globalization and the dynamics between the haves and haves-not. Is that a fair interpretation?

Yes. It's boring to make films about only one thing, so there are a lot of different layers. One is definitely about class struggle. I started with someone cleaning an apartment, and I was interested in the whole idea of who cleans our homes today in the Western world. They are mostly women, and very often they are from the poor parts of the world. I was interested in how it feels just to be someone who cleans someone else's home and takes care of someone else's children, the sacrifices she has to make, rather than just the political aspects of it.

]]> But you've been more attracted to the political than the personal in your recent films, it seems. Do you prefer to keep your personal interests and your filmmaking goals separate?

I don't, no. I try to combine as many as possible. The difficulty sometimes is that you have to separate things when it comes to storytelling, otherwise, it's just chaos. And sometimes I want to portray chaos, but most of the time, I want to tell some kind of story. I try to weave a [tapestry]. If I wanted to make ["Mammoth"] a really political film, it would've been much angrier. I see it as a very sad film, quite warm, more of a meditation than an accusation.

You once said, "I'm not particularly interested in probing the depths of my soul; I'm more into probing the world around me." Are those ideas mutually exclusive?

I'm not sure if I agree with myself there. [laughs] I think it was something I said in retrospect when talking about how I changed from being a poet to becoming a film director. I'm not sure if it's true anymore because I feel that you have to dig really deep inside yourself and combine that. Otherwise, you're talking to a journalist, and the journalist... I don't have a problem with journalists. I couldn't be a journalist, but as an artist, I have to let the world pass through me before I can turn it into something. I can't only take a picture of the world and be happy with that. I have to filter it through me. My soul and the world, they combine.

Comparisons have been drawn between this film and "Babel," another globe-hopping, multi-thread narrative co-starring Gael García Bernal. Is there any validity to that reference point?

Well, I haven't seen "Babel." I hadn't seen it before [writing the story], and then someone read the script and said that there were some links. So I decided not to see the film because I try not to be inspired by films. I think Gael wouldn't have liked to be in "Mammoth" if he had seen too many comparisons.

Do other art forms inspire your filmmaking?

Yeah. I read, listen to music and look at art much more than I see films. I don't know if it's a problem to make films and, at the same time, be able to appreciate films. I get a bit distracted by them all, and the fact that this is what I'm doing, it's quite difficult for me. I used to be a [film buff]. I had a sort of bulimic period when I went to film school when I tried to see absolutely everything that was ever made. I didn't succeed, but nowadays, I see very little.

Seven More "Remakes" We'd Love Werner Herzog To Direct

2009-11-19T22:27:00Z

Controversy has followed Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" right from the start. When word got to director Abel Ferrara that his original "Bad Lieutenant" film was being remade by Herzog and star Nicolas Cage, the outspoken director wished the other outspoken director would "die in hell." Herzog's response? "I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is. But let him fight the windmills, like Don Quixote." To which Ferrara shot back, "I'd rather chase windmills than steal other people's ideas. It's lame."

Ferrara's protectiveness is understandable, but his outrage is a little excessive, particularly given that, as Herzog's insisted all along, the new film is a remake in title only. The central premise may belong to Ferrara; this particular execution, with its sweaty atmosphere and iguana hallucinations, is all Herzog. The result is like watching a jazz musician riff on someone else's composition. You appreciate both the original author's intent and artist's interpretation simultaneously. It's something Herzog has done before, too, first in 1979 with his rendition of F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" and again just a few years ago, when he remade his own documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly" (1997) into the narrative film "Rescue Dawn."

In all of these cases, Herzog's remakes don't negate the original, they build upon them, layering Herzog's unique obsessions atop the existing material (or in the case of "Little Dieter"/"Rescue Dawn," giving the director a chance to work through his obsession once more). As far as we're concerned, Herzog has carte blanche to remake any and every film in his own inimitable style. When you start to imagine the possibilities, they all start to sound good. To wit, here seven examples we'd pay to see. And there are many, many more.

"Predator" (1987, John McTiernan)

Adrien Brody was recently cast in the remake of "Predator" that's going to be executive produced by indie genre guru Robert Rodriguez. After penning the script, Rodriguez handed the directing gig on to "Vacancy" filmmaker Nimrod Antal, which is a shame; this material is tailor-made for a Herzog remake. We're talking about an antagonist who's described at one point in the '87 original in the line, "She says the jungle... it just came alive and took him." The cruelty of nature is a frequent Herzog theme, with the jungle a frequent setting. He's never been a big science fiction guy, but that's fine; his version would just tone down the Predator's alien origins and instead present the creature as a more ambiguous force of primal, ecological terror. In "Rescue Dawn," the jungle is the prison; in Herzog's "Predator," the jungle would be the killer too.

Still, he shouldn't have any problem adapting the original storyline to suit his personal taste: just as in John McTiernan's version, mankind, represented by the elite American soldiers and their enormous weaponry, think they're hot shit, and the Predator comes along to remind them of their place in the universe. Herzog could bring back his "Rescue Dawn" star Christian Bale, giving the more believably ferocious actor lines to growl like, "If it bleeds, we can kill it," which come to think of it, already sounds quite Herzogian.

]]> "2012" (2009, Roland Emmerich)

It's a bit surprising, given Herzog's distrustful attitude towards nature, that he hasn't made a true disaster movie yet. Then again, many of his fiction films are disaster movies in miniature, stories of destruction on a small scale that are often caused or at least hastened by mean old mother nature. As Herzog himself put it in "The Making of 'Nosferatu,'" "All my films come out from pain. That's the source. That's where they come from. Not from pleasure." The disaster movie -- where onscreen pain becomes the foundation of audience pleasure -- could prove fertile ground for Herzog, and something like the recently released "2012," where the entire planet spontaneously erupts into chaos and every manner of ecological disaster befalls mankind simultaneously, seems like ideal source material.

Since Herzog is known for his intense focus, we wouldn't expect him to recreate Roland Emmerich's more macro take on disaster, nor would we expect to see him reaffirm the power of the nuclear family in the midst of global extinction (more likely, he'd just kill everybody off). Best of all, can you imagine the sort of quotes in the press from Herzog about the Mayans and their predictions and the conspiracy theorists who spread them? The possibilities are almost too delicious to comprehend.

"Twilight" (2008, Catherine Hardwicke)

Herzog already tackled vampires in his version of "Nosferatu." So you know he likes the bloodsucker milieu, and I'm guessing he'd like the material too. Not that his version would look much like Catherine Hardwicke's glossy, romantic take on Stephenie Meyer's epic romance between human teenager Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen. Herzog's "Nosferatu" exhibited a deep skepticism about the traditional vampire narrative and its erotic overtones. Receiving a vampire's bite in the Herzogiverse isn't sexy, it's disgusting; the Count himself is a walking cadaver whose physical features eerily resemble the legions of plague-carrying rats he beds down with every morning. That makes Herzog the perfect choice to make a version of "Twilight" that examines the underlying creepiness in a story about a 100-year-old creature swapping spit with a 16-year-old girl. Naturally, Herzog's Cullen wouldn't be anywhere as handsome as the current onscreen Edward, Robert Pattinson. He'd need a contemporary actor who could bring some of the angular corpsiness that Klaus Kinski provided back in 1979, somebody like Adrien Brody. Pair him with a starlet like Evan Rachel Wood, who's already proved herself capable of feigning romantic interest in a man decades older than her in Woody Allen's "Whatever Works," and you have the makings of a classic.

Breaking Down Pedro Almodóvar

2009-11-19T14:45:00Z

The pop art films of Spain's Pedro Almodóvar have certain trademark qualities (a vibrant, glossy look, melodrama blended with irreverent comedy and high camp, queer-friendly hedonism) that have made him an international critics' darling for over two decades. His filmography is peppered with modern arthouse classics like "Law of Desire," "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," "All About My Mother," "Talk to Her" and "Bad Education," but, even having turned 60 this year, Almodóvar has no intention of slowing down.

A follow-up to 2006's "Volver," his fourth collaboration with Penélope Cruz is "Broken Embraces," a romantic, neo-noirish drama that flashes forward and back between the '90s and today. Lluís Homar stars as a middle-aged screenwriter who gave up his career as a filmmaker once a car accident rendered him blind. Through an outrageous series of recalled memories and time-fractured reveals, the shaggy tale of his affair with Cruz's aspiring actress and the wealthy producer who came between them is meticulously pieced together, sometimes during films-within-this-film. In true Almodóvar fashion, the final result is an audacious genre-hopper that worships Cruz's beauty, not to mention desire itself and the art of making cinema. With some help from a translator, Almodóvar chatted with me about personal touches, images too sacred to be filmed, and how his life has changed since becoming a sexagenarian.

"Broken Embraces" chronicles a love destroyed by jealousy, fate, deceit and the power of creative control. Do even your thorniest screenplays ever start with a single character, theme or image?

Initially, I had the [beach] photograph that appears in the film that I took nine years ago. When I developed it, I realized there was that couple of lovers embracing at the foot of the picture. I got the impression that there was a secret not only behind that, but in the island of Lanzarote itself. Of course, the story had many different sources. You need more than one idea to develop a script. But in my case, they never came all at once. I take these stories with me and write them down over many years, and once I've gathered a certain volume of notes, that's when I start writing the script. My method of writing is actually more similar to a novelist than a professional scriptwriter. The reason I make a film every two years is that I always have a number of ideas in the works, and they develop gradually.

]]> The film is also largely about filmmaking, yet you've said that the unfinished comedy within this film, "Girls and Suitcases," is not meant to stand in for your "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." It's still fairly reminiscent, so I'm curious to know how personal this film is to you.

I absolutely want to say all about myself. One of the most important elements, despite the fact that it goes on in the characters' backgrounds, is that they all work in cinema. Lena actually gives her life up in order to ensure that a film is finished, and I am as romantic as that. I think I would give my life up to finish a film. For instance, the main character, the film director, has many of my own pictures. The style of all the clothes he wears in the '90s, those are all my own clothes, and some of his furniture is mine, too. Once he's blind, he wants to watch some DVDs, and he says he wants to listen to Jeanne Moreau's voice. All the directors he mentions, and Moreau herself, are some of my favorites. What's most important about this director is his attitude, his philosophy towards his work, when he says that you have to finish a movie, even if it's in the dark.

"Women on the Verge" is present -- obviously it's a very free adaptation -- but the reason for that is that I wanted to strike an opposition between the circumstances the characters are living in and the backdrop of comedy, to heighten how dramatic their situation is. If Penélope's character arrived on set absolutely devastated by her own situation and was playing a drama, it would be a lot easier for her to do that than if she had to start playing a light comedy. That was trickier for her to do. [When we] see a few fragments of that film, I chose to use my own material since it was the most practical option, the cheapest, and I could feel very free with it. But it wasn't until after we shot "Girls and Suitcases" that I realized that I've not only reviewed my own work, but it was a sort of déjà vu, because I thought that [we'd] been invaded by all these ghosts from the ship years ago. It was a very peculiar experience.

Not to be a jinx, but if you lost your eyesight, how would you continue trying to work in cinema?

When I mentioned the things that I identify with in this character, there are some that I don't entirely identify with. I would never abandon a film for love. Or, probably, I would try to resolve the issues with the person I loved, but I would never walk away from a film on the editing table. I wouldn't want to tempt fate, but you never really know how you're going to react in this extremely tragic situation. But at least, in theory, I would definitely finish the movie. I would try to find out what happened and why the movie was so bad when it opened originally, but aside from those circumstantial considerations, I would probably keep on directing. I would direct theater.

Dystopian Visions

2009-11-18T19:35:00Z

On our last day in Denmark, a few of us in the CPH:DOX American contingent stopped by Christiania, Copenhagen's hippie paradise and self-proclaimed autonomous zone. In stark contrast to the cobblestones and slick Scandinavian design of the main city, Christiania is dirt paths and DIY housing, a neighborhood based around abandoned military barracks that were taken over by squatters in the early '70s.

It was too early for much to be going on, but on the main drag the cannabis market that's made the area a favorite for backpackers and a constant source of controversy was already open, with stalls displaying giant blocks of hash for sale, while a few nearby stands offered rasta wear. A dog trotted by, and a few dreadlocked Danes warmed their hands over a trashcan fire.

"Maybe it's just me, but this all seems incredibly 'Children of Men,'" I said.

Or maybe it was just that dystopia was on everyone's mind, being a strong undercurrent in the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival program. These days, dark visions of the future and docs pretty much go hand in hand, since nonfiction film has become hopelessly entwined with social issues.

With one of the most progressive, boundary-pushing, eyebrow-raising lineups you're going to find in a documentary festival, CPH:DOX actually actively strives to get away from the idea of docs as just journalism, or as just a means of galvanizing viewers toward activism -- to promote, as the programmers stressed, "the documentary as cinema, and the documentary as art." Which ultimately meant that doses of impending doom came not with a lecture, but with artful vision -- these are, after all, unavoidably troubled times.

]]> Take "Videocracy," Erik Gandini's brilliant jaw-dropper about the ties between Italian politics and Italian television that could hold its own with Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah" in a disturbing double feature depicting the country as careening towards "Blade Runner." At its center is the elusive figure of Silvio Berlusconi, who's both Italy's Prime Minister and its major media mogul, and, in Gandini's view, the man responsible for infecting the nation with a terminal fixation on boob tube celebrity.

That's the kind of ambitious scope that usually defeats a project before it even begins, but "Videocracy" works astoundingly well because it's styled as an essay, without the pretense of objectivity. Gandini narrates and makes a sort of stream-of-consciousness case for his conception of Italian today, luxuriating in a Lynchian score and hypnotic footage of glittering, never-quite-graspable talk and game shows, brightly lit sets, scantily clad dancing girls and applauding audiences -- television as a sweeping sedative.

"Videocracy" hops between interview subjects, often favoring them with wordless still portraits in their chosen surroundings. There's Rick Canelli, the singing martial artist who aspires to be a combination of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ricky Martin, but who meanwhile is a factory worker who still lives with his mother. There's Marella Giovannelli, the woman who lives next door to Berlusconi's vacation villa on Sardinia, and who makes a living taking flattering photos of his party guests and making them available for purchase. There's Lele Mora, the country's most powerful agent, who never seems to leave his all-white house but who nevertheless manages to pull strings via cell phone -- his ring tones are hymns to Mussolini, of whom he's a proud fan.

And then there's Fabrizio Corona, the mesmerizing/repugnant head of a paparazzo ring that sells incriminating photos back to the celebrities in them. Others might call this extortion, which is what Corona gets indicted for, but when he gets out of jail, he reinvents himself as an opportunistic, nihilistic truth-teller and vaults into the realm of celebrity he used to despise, guesting on talk shows, launching a t-shirt line and making a series of paid nightclub appearances. In "Videocracy"'s money shot (though not its literal one, in which Corona lies in bed, surrounded by a pile of cash), he showers and then preens, nude, in front of the mirror, suiting up and soaking himself in cologne, dead-eyed and directly out of "American Psycho." An unmentioned attendant is there in the bathroom with him the whole time, but then again, so is a camera crew. As "Videocracy" makes clear, in this world, shame is for the weak.

A more tangible type of forbidding future is on view in "Cities on Speed," four hour-long docs from Danish filmmakers, each set in a different megacity, that had their premiere at CPH:DOX. Bogotá, Cairo, Mumbai, Shanghai: all face serious urban stresses as their populations explode -- well, presumably so, in the case of Bogotá, as that was the one I didn't get to see. The best of three I did catch was "Mumbai Disconnected," an examination of attempts to remedy traffic problems in India's largest city.

Dancing Souls

2009-11-18T13:00:00Z

Envy me, because Werner Herzog's "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" is more fun to write about than it is to watch, and it is barrel-of-monkeys fun to watch. Everything about it is wrong, so wrong that categorizing it that way is meaningless, but wrong nonetheless, down to its title (that awkward "the" on the film's opening title card, that anachronistic and irrelevant "port of call," the subtitle itself, erroneously suggesting sequel-hood, etc.).

Of course, the film has no relation to the 1992 Abel Ferrara film, except it involves a police detective who is "bad," insofar as he dopes, gambles and isn't very effective as a cop. In the first film, the character's self-immolation was an existential passion; here it's... I don't know what it is. Herzog was brought on as a director-for-hire (which is very wrong, in the grand cultural scheme of things), after screenwriter William Finkelstein ("Doogie Howser," "NYPD Blue") was enlisted to sorta, kinda, remake Ferrara's film, the producers' initial intention. Star Nicolas Cage decided it would take place in New Orleans because he likes the city. One head-shaker after another. One imagines that by the time Val Kilmer was signed on for a worthless supporting straight-man part, the whole project was a giant rolling snowball of wrongness, headed inexorably toward us.

Oh, but if only movies were tidy little jigsaw puzzles, the assembly of which is either complete or not, rather than, sometimes, messy, impulsive, psyche-eating juggernauts within which visionaries, imps and opportunists have a unstable chemical romance and burn the place to the ground. Herzog's long and great career, after all, can be seen as one long timeline of deliberate and horrifying accident-making, and so in that sense, if few others, "Bad Lieutenant" is quintessentially Herzogian. It's the first time in the man's fictional films we've smelt the singed carbon of self-parody, or at least tongue-in-cheekness, but in Werner's world, the film itself can be scanned as another absurd, grotesque pageant, like the procession in "Even Dwarfs Started Small," or Bokassa's gold-plated ceremonies in "Echoes of a Somber Empire."

]]> Amid the chicanery -- which only begins with an impulsive leap into Katrina floodwaters, and crests, perhaps, in the hallucinated presence of fat iguanas at the scene of a stakeout -- there's the brittle skeleton of a standard TV police procedural plotline, tracking down drug-cartel killers, by way of interrogations and evidence-hunting. Forget it, because although Herzog couldn't quite, he obviously sighed with relief whenever he concocted a means to detour away from Finkelstein's script (the iguanas, snapping at the camera to the tune of bluesman Sonny Terry's "Old Lost John," as Cage glares at them from the background, serve such a purpose).

The remaining 75% of the movie is comprised of the pas de deux between Cage and Herzog, as the two try almost anything that pops into their heads. Cage's Terence McDonagh begins with a back injury, which nets him a Vicodin habit, which quickly graduates to crack and smack -- hilariously, this heavy load of recreationals does not represent a "Leaving Las Vegas" death wish, but is merely a comically spiraling addiction scenario, fueled by itself, not by primal angst. ("I did what I thought was coke," he explains woozily to hooker girlfriend Eva Mendes, "but it was heroin and I have to be at work in an hour.")

McDonagh isn't terribly irate about anything, and he doesn't spend much time loathing himself -- he's just a dolt, a sloppy cop more worried about his access to his department's property room and its stashes of powder (a great running gag) than his job or, really, anyone else's well-being. Herzog never before seemed to be a filmmaker interested in the drama of addiction and recovery, and here he's not either: he's just letting Cage's mayhem play out like any natural force run amok, as if the Hollywood filmmaking machine and the ego fireworks of one of the world's most bankable stars is a warped spectacle on the level of the dancing chicken in "Stroszek."

But even that doesn't "work" -- we know how to watch a high-wire, no-rules actory tear. Cage is strangely subdued most of the time, and never approaches the incendiary lunacy of his earlier peak moments, in "Vampire's Kiss," "Peggy Sue Got Married" or "Wild at Heart." Have so many stolid action movies tamped down his pilot light? Beyond an early conniption in a pharmacy, and a slew of late scenes in which crack reduces him to a yowling mess, McDonagh manages to keep his behavior under check, despite eventually lurching around with a rather Karloffian glower when having a hard time finding a fix, speaking as if he has a mouthful of bad dentures built from soft wax. For insurance, the film is stocked with other Industry eccentrics and inebriates, from Kilmer to Fairuza Balk, Michael Shannon, Brad Dourif and Jennifer Coolidge, and the vague conjunctions with David Lynch's filmography seem organic and inevitable. (Lynch produced Herzog's next film, "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done," with several members of "Bad Lieutenant"'s cast.)

Herzog has never been deft at comedy, and has rarely tried, and so this film has the ramshackle air of one made in an experimental spree, strapping a camera to a crocodile for a roadside P.O.V. (this after a lovely tableau of crushed croc roadkill, a blood trail and a car wreck), letting Cage frame out his scenes as if he were a stand-up comic imitating Klaus Kinski in Herzog's "Nosferatu the Vampyre," envisioning a drug thug's post-shootout "soul" breakdancing, and so, crazily, on. In the most trivial ways, "Bad Lieutenant" is an anemic shadow of Ferrara's knucklebuster, but for the most part, it is an animal apart, bristling with a set of conflicting and half-baked agendas, and as spellbinding as a Ferris wheel coming off its pylons.

Bad Boys Grow Up

2009-11-17T12:35:00Z

Let's start with a few images: A psycho jive artist dancing around as he cuts a man's ear off. A retired bullfighter slumped in front of a television set, masturbating furiously to slasher movies. Scenes like those, from Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" and Pedro Almodóvar's "Matador," pretty much secured the bad-boy reputations of their creators. Tarantino came to be regarded as a hyped-up pop culture junkie spritzing bloodshed and movie references in equal measure. And Almodóvar was thought of as something like the post-Franco John Waters, mixing '50s Hollywood-style melodrama with cheerful hedonism awash in sex and drugs.

But at this year's New York Film Festival, it was Almodóvar's latest, "Broken Embraces," that was chosen for the stately closing night slot. And about a month or so before the festival, Tarantino's latest film, the epic World War II adventure "Inglourious Basterds," became the unlikeliest hit of the year. What links both of these films is that, for each filmmaker, they represent a point at which they demonstrate a mastery of craft equal to the Hollywood films that inspired them.

]]> It's not to take away anything from Tarantino or Almodóvar to say that their affinity to classic Hollywood narrative is more obvious right now because Hollywood movies are in such lousy shape. Spectacle, juvenilia and movies that look as though they were made by someone with ADD have taken over. Stories don't make sense, action sequences are incoherently shot and edited (there's often no telling where characters are in relation to each other) and by the time audiences go in on opening weekend, they've been so saturated by trailers and ads that they've already seen the most surprising moments of the movie they're about to watch dozens of times. And then, after the hype and the weekend grosses, everything becomes old news on Monday morning and the next week's round of hype begins.

It wasn't always clear that Quentin Tarantino was going to stand apart from the shallowness of contemporary American movies. But the "Kill Bill" movies, though containing more action set-pieces than all his previous work put together, showed a mature confidence that was new. The story was a quest for revenge, but the movie worked as an extended metaphor for putting away the past. Uma Thurman's Bride isn't just killing her enemies; she's parting with almost everything that's made her who she is -- which is why the entire epic climaxes with a breakup scene. Tarantino has always used nonlinear storytelling and multilayered narratives. By "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," he's come to rely almost completely on dialogue, and not compendiums of pop culture references but long, character-driven interrogations.

Even "Death Proof," Tarantino's half of the trash-movie homage "Grindhouse," was a declaration of independence from the current movie scene. It'd be wrong to say that the movies Tarantino referenced were in any way innocent -- they were too calculated, too sadistic for that. But there was less bullshit to them. Put it this way: the exploitation filmmakers who lured in audiences with promises of the leading lady taking her shirt off or blood-splattered action seem to be scamming a buck with a lot more honesty than the studio merchandising execs who sell toys at Burger King, or the publicists who get correspondents on the networks the studios own to interview a new movie's stars as if that constituted news.

A popular movie that doesn't follow that pattern is an anomaly. This summer, at J.J. Abrams' retelling of "Star Trek," you could almost hear the audience sigh over the luxury of seeing beloved characters given the chance to talk to one another, and at having a story with a coherent emotional arc. As they did a few years before at "Casino Royale," moviegoers were watching something that wasn't going to evaporate the moment they left the theater.

Disposable junk is largely what Hollywood makes now. The pictures nominated for Oscars, the ones the studios have always pointed to as evidence of their interest in making quality films, have become, in terms of the audience they attract and how they figure on balance sheets, niche movies. Even an expensive picture like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" isn't thought of as having potential to break out. The days when the big hits, like "In the Heat of the Night" or "The Godfather," could also be Oscar winners are far in the past.

And American indie movies haven't filled the void. To submit yourself to the half-baked whimsy of yet another ensemble comedy with patented quirky characters, or to another 90 minutes of shaky-cam and characters who look as if they can't be bothered to shave or iron their clothes, seems like a denial of the wit and style and beauty that drew us to movies in the first place. I couldn't face Katherine Dieckmann's "Motherhood." The trailer depressed me. I didn't want to watch Uma Thurman, one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the screen, reduced to a frazzled frump dealing with strollers and playdates. I can see that in Park Slope.

Out of Exile

2009-11-17T10:17:00Z

The first vampire film to ever win a prize at Cannes, Park Chan-wook's "Thirst" places the ethical questions of human-community parasitism front and center, as you'd expect from a man whose most famous films are slow-pig-sticking ordeals of retribution and moral poisoning. Park's resume is also notorious for its merciless pop-movie extremism, and at times (as in the still rather spectacular "Oldboy") you can't help noticing a basic conflict between his Chandleresque exploration of life-or-death moral justice and his lurid sensationalism.

Going all genre in "Thirst" has obvious advantages for Park; the built-in conflicts are both familiar and as old as the hills. Still, few vampire narratives outside of, say, John Hayes' "Grave of the Vampire" (1974) expressly take on the responsibility of the predator to the prey as Park does -- his hero (Mr. Korean new wave Song Kang-ho) is an earnest priest who volunteers for an experiment with an Ebola-like virus and appears to die (after puking blood through his flute), except that the transfusion he got mysteriously resurrects him.

That's where Park gets interesting -- Song's guileless holy man becomes sucked into an idiot boyhood friend's weird family, which includes a controlling mega-mom and a "sister" (Kim Ok-vin) whom, we learn, was actually adopted as a child and then kept as her drooling "brother"'s de facto sex toy and wife. In the meanwhile, the non-homicidal priest survives by sucking on the IVs of comatose patients (and, occasionally, pint bags of blood, sipped like a Capri Sun), a situation that changes, slowly and with serious growing pains, when he and Kim's embittered, used waif align their outsider identities and begin a passionate affair.

]]> There will be blood, and snapped necks, and roof-jumping, and puddles of more blood. Frankly, vampires are such an overworked cultural idea of late (who would've thought that they'd survive after 70 years of Lugosis, Hammers, Rollins, Anne Rices, "Lost Boys," Coppolas and their uncountable ripoffs?) that Park's first hour smells of boilerplate, guilt issues or no guilt issues. But then the film turns a subtle but savage corner, the narrative slides into the hair-raising dogfight of surreal irony and anxiety we always knew it would, and the image of the two lovers feeding from each others' slit wrists is only the beginning of the struggle between devotion and predation.

Yes, the parallel to junkiehood is suggested, but not belabored, and I wish that Park hadn't bought into all of the modern vampire iconography (in particular, the super-strength, another tired trope enabled everywhere by digital effects). But "Thirst" is also vintage Park, insofar as every shot has a wallop to it, and his layered imagery is always surprising. His joke shots turn out painful, and his serious art-film tableaux always have a sardonic gag buried in them; when, early on, Song's priest suddenly jumps out of a window, Park obviates effects (indulged in later) by simply cutting to a roof perspective, looking down three or more stories at the street where our beleaguered hero lies atop a parked car, trying to pull his head out of the windshield.

Park's movies have always been psychodrama-intensive marathons for actors, and Song cements his position as the reigning presence on Korean screens in a largely reactive way -- his face is naturally structured as if it's always caught in the middle of a catastrophic quandary (put to good use as well in Bong Joon-ho's "Memories of Murder" and "The Host"). But the whirlwind here is Kim, whose twisted, surly, lonesome, power-drunk nowhere girl is an inspired and eye-gripping piece of work, a trod-upon victim of Eastern misogyny transformed into first, a homicidal-minded James M. Cain-style femme, and then a buzzed vampiress exacting her glorious revenge upon the world. The genre stuff is decidedly secondary to the characters' agonizing evolutions, and their ordeals are suffered not so much for the sake of blood, but for love.

The John Wooniverse

2009-11-16T22:49:25Z

After a less-than-stellar run in the U.S., director John Woo heads to China for "Red Cliff," a period war epic starring Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Chang Cheng and others in what's the most expensive Asian production to date.

On this week's IFC News podcast, we look at Woo's career and his signature stylings, at the immensely influential run of Hong Kong crime dramas that spawned the "heroic bloodshed" genre, and at his hits and misses stateside.

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This week's keyword game prizes come courtesy of "Anvil! The Story of Anvil," now available on DVD.

When Viral Marketing Goes Wrong

2009-11-16T16:33:00Z

"2012" may have destroyed the box office this weekend, but it also did plenty of damage to NASA, who received thousands of letters and phone calls from concerned citizens that the world was going to end in just over two years -- so much so that NASA set up a site to specifically debunk their fears. Roland Emmerich's latest disaster flick would've inevitably inspired some to panic regardless, but these calls got an assist from Sony's viral marketing campaign for the film, which included a web site devoted to The Institute for Human Continuity that, among other things, offers visitors an opportunity to register for a lottery to increase their chance of survival when the apocalypse strikes. The move inspired some, like Stuart McGurk at the Guardian to look at the ways viral marketing "can go bad." I'd like to add to the pile four more risky movie marketing maneuvers that bombed, sometimes literally:

"Spider-Man II" Bases

Although it didn't strike fear in the hearts of the general public, baseball fans cried foul when Sony signed a deal with Major League Baseball to place the Spider-Man II logo on bases and in on-deck circles in 15 stadiums in June of 2004. At first, the MLB declined the offer of putting Spidey-style netting behind home plate as the netting to catch foul balls because they thought it would distract the players, but the league felt okay with the bases having a Spidey diamond in the center. As MLB president Bob DuPuy said to ESPN, "This is not a step toward wallpapering the ballpark," but that's exactly what fans believed it was. They complained profusely until the MLB nixed the plans at the last second. (It didn't help Sony's cause that "Spider-Man II"'s director Sam Raimi is a baseball purist who previously directed "For Love of The Game.") Geoffrey Ammer, then-marketing head of Columbia, told ESPN, "We saw some of the polls on the Internet that said that 71 and 81 percent of the fans didn't approve of it." But hey, who could blame them for covering all their bases?

"Captivity" Billboards

What better way to push a movie starring the voluptuous Elisha Cuthbert than to see her imprisoned, wrapped in gauze with a tube of blood being pumped from her nose? It was at the height of torture porn's popularity in 2007, but most Angelenos and New Yorkers were turned off by the billboards for "Captivity," which outlined the four steps of the horror film's plot -- abduction, confinement, torture and termination -- in prominent locations. After Dark Films CEO Courtney Solomon claimed the billboards were a result of a printing error, telling the L.A. Times "I don't know where the confusion happened and who's responsible," before adding later in the same interview that the film was "about something that happens to 850,000 people in this country a year." Joss Whedon and future "United States of Tara" writer Jill Soloway weren't convinced that After Dark was raising awareness for female abduction and campaigned to the MPAA to have the film's rating removed, which would effectively limit the studio's ability to advertise at all. The billboards were taken down at significant cost to After Dark and the Roland Joffe horror flick never found an audience.

]]> "Mission Impossible III" News Racks

In 2006, Paramount decided to install digital music equipment into Los Angeles Times news racks that would play the "Mission: Impossible" theme song when opened, but when wires from that equipment weren't completely contained, those going about their morning routine thought they might be in for an explosion like the one that sent Tom Cruise blasting through that train tunnel in the first "Mission: Impossible." The Los Angeles arson squad destroyed one such news rack after hearing a complaint and soon after, the 4,500 news racks in L.A. county, which were equipped with the theme music that starts with signature sizzle of a match, were dismantled. Said Mark Kurtich, the then-senior vice president of operations for the L.A. Times, "I think Paramount is pretty happy about [the publicity they received]." It didn't help the film, however, which was the lowest grossing in the franchise.

"Aqua Teen Hunger Force" Boston Bomb Scare

Again, terrorist threats aren't exactly the best way into the hearts and minds of potential audiences, but that's exactly what people in Boston were led to believe when they saw electronic light boards featuring "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" characters called Mooninites, crescent-shaped cartoon creations waving a middle finger to anyone who passed by. Like those who installed the "Mission: Impossible" news racks, the duo responsible for the installation of the lightboards didn't do a very good job of hiding the wires and as a result, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested by the Boston police for causing a public panic. The lightboards had the dual purpose of promoting the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" show as well as the upcoming feature film. Cartoon Network executive vice president Jim Samples was forced to quit after TBS, the network's corporate parent, paid $2 million to settle the bomb scare claims in Massachusetts. As for Berdovsky and Stevens, they pleaded not guilty to charges of disorderly conduct and placing a hoax device and at a press conference after the hearing, would only answer questions about their hair. Which was fair, since they put the dread in Boston's security locks.

[Additional photos: "Spider-Man II" base, courtesy of ESPN; "Captivity billboard, courtesy of /Film; L.A. County Sheriff's Department inspecting a Santa Clarita MI3 newspaper rack, courtesy of The Signal; Cambridge Mooninite, courtesy of Wikipedia, all used without permission]

Twilight of the Bad Lieutenant

2009-11-16T13:36:00Z

Holiday festivities are about to kick into full gear, but you wouldn't know it looking at this angst-ridden release slate, since the closest we come to Christmas is Nicolas Cage's "Bad Lieutenant" doing a lot of "snow." Instead, planets are discovered, new moons rise and suns set.

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"Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans"
Ever since Nicolas Cage was shown clinging to his "lucky crackpipe," cinephiles have been jonesing for Werner Herzog's re-imagining of Abel Ferrara's arthouse cop thriller. After months of backbiting between Ferrara, who suggested that the film's producers "burn in hell," and Herzog's admission that he had never seen the original film, audiences will finally see Cage in the shoes of Terence McDonagh, the hopped-up, hopelessly bent detective who shakes down suspects and random pedestrians on the trail of an elusive kingpin responsible for the brutal slaying of five Senegalese immigrants.
Opens in limited release.

"The Blind Side"
Having solidified her rom-com career this summer, Sandra Bullock gets more serious this fall as a feisty champion of the less fortunate in this drama from "The Rookie" writer/director John Lee Hancock, based on the early life of NFL offensive lineman Michael Oher. Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, a God-fearing Tennessean who takes the gentle giant (Quinton Aaron) off the streets of Memphis and, with the aide of her husband (Tim McGraw) and Kathy Bates' no-nonsense tutor, sets about rebuilding his shambolic education and turning him into an NFL-quality left tackle.
Opens wide.

]]> "Broken Embraces"
Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz, one of the very best director/star partnerships, reunite once more for this genre-splicing love story, flitting from light to dark with all the trademark cinematic verve we've come to expect from the Spanish auteur and his muse. A pretzel-plotted saga of love lost and revenge sought, the story tells of Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), a blind filmmaker who, upon learning of the death of his former friend and producer Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez), is approached by the man's resentful son to write a script eviscerating his late father in fiction. The picture drifts back to the early '90s as Blanco recalls the time both he and Martel vied for the affections of a wannabe actress/call girl (Cruz). In Spanish with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Defamation"
With the dark shadow of the Holocaust still hanging over Israeli culture, documentary filmmaker Yoav Shamir examines the roots of anti-Semitism and tags along with a group of Jewish-American leaders and a class of Israeli high school students for a diversity of perspectives on the subject. What Shamir finds is a controversy over the victim complex that the term promotes, who it benefits and how this perceived menace has become seriously big business for those who claim to want to erase it.
Opens in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"Fix"
Documentarian Tao Ruspoli turns on his handheld camera for his first narrative feature, which not so coincidentally follows Milo and Bella, a couple of documentarians (Ruspoli and Olivia Wilde) who chaperone Milo's skeezy brother Leo (Shawn Andrews) on his final day before a court-imposed stint in rehab for their latest film. Quickly discovering that he doesn't have the money to pay for treatment (which means prison instead), the couple reluctantly dabble in drug dealing themselves to come up with the cash in a down and dirty fusion of "Go" and "The 25th Hour," all to a soundtrack of Black Prez and Ima Robot, among others.
Opens in limited release.

"Frontier of Dawn"
Veteran French helmer Philippe Garrel directs his son Louis in this throwback to the heyday of the French New Wave, a drama sprinkled with elements of the supernatural that charts the fine line between blissful intoxication and insanity. Garrel Jr stars as François, a young photographer left reeling from the suicide of Carole (Laura Smet), an actress with whom he had an affair. A year later, François is looking to marry and move on, but is plagued by visions of the ghostly Carole, beckoning him to join her in the land of the dead. In French with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

"Loot"
A real-life treasure hunt, this debut from director Darius Marder dug up the best documentary prize at last year's L.A. Film Festival and was recently nominated for a Cinema Eye Honor. With only the sketchy details of two World War II vets' less-than-reliable memory as a guide, Marder follows Lance Larson, an amateur treasure hunter, as he scours the once bombed out rural locale of an Austrian village and the dense jungles of the Philippines in search of buried riches that the soldiers plundered 60 years earlier.
Opens in New York.

"Mammoth"
Celebrated Swedish writer/director Lukas Moodysson looks to garner an international audience with this, his first English-language feature, a transcontinental affair encompassing a trio of thematically linked narratives that invites obvious comparisons to "Babel." In New York, Michelle Williams and Gael García Bernal's bored millionaire married couple all but surrender the upbringing of their child to their live-in nanny (Marife Necesito), whose presence, in turn, leaves her own children in the Philippines without her. The situation is further exasperated when Bernal's video game mogul travels to Thailand, where he comes into contact with a streetwise sex worker (Run Srinikornchot), who does what she has to in order to take care of her child. In English and Tagalog and Thai with subtitles.
Opens in limited release.

"The Missing Person"
"Revolutionary Road" star Michael Shannon stars as a well-groomed private eye hired to follow a man who was believed to have died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in this Sundance alum written and directed by Noah Buschel. Amy Ryan, Frank Wood and Margaret Colin co-star.
Opens in New York; opens in Los Angeles on November 27th.

"Everything else is pure theory": What-if Movies

2009-11-13T09:44:00Z

A coin flip splits the new movie "Uncertainty" in two. That's how a young couple (played by Lynn Collins and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at a turning point in their relationship decide which way to go on the Brooklyn Bridge. Who picks heads over tails ultimately isn't important, because the film follows both paths -- in one storyline, the two head to Manhattan, find a cell phone in a cab and become embroiled in a thriller, while in the other, they go to a family barbecue in Brooklyn and navigate more personal dramas. Which reality is the "real" one? The title should give you a clue.

"Uncertainty"'s not the first film to explore those what-if musings we've all indulged in, the ones that every holiday season drive George Bailey to an angelic vision of what the world would be like if he'd never existed. But it is one of a select group of movies to be structured around that idea of forking paths, of returning to a certain point and trying things another way, or in another setting, or just another frame of mind. Here are a few more films built around alternate realities.

"Sliding Doors" (1998)
Directed by Peter Howitt

A girl steps in front of Helen Quilley (Gwyneth Paltrow) as she's running down the stairs and she misses her subway. Then, as chimes twinkle on the soundtrack, the film rewinds before our eyes, the girl is pulled out of Helen's way, and she narrowly makes it onto the train. Missing a train doesn't seem like that big a deal, but it is in "Sliding Doors," where that split second has enormous and even fatal consequences for Helen. To borrow the train metaphor, from that moment, Helen's life travels down two diverging tracks. In one, she arrives home in time to find her boyfriend Gerry (John Lynch) cheating on her, which leads to her move out and start a relationship with a man she met on the Tube named James (John Hannah). In the other, she's mugged and gets home too late to discover Gerry's affair, so she continues the relationship with him instead of James. Director Peter Howitt cuts back and forth between the two Helens, contrasting the one who makes the train and lives a romantic life with a new job, a new man and a new haircut with the one who doesn't and leads a sad life supporting a man she doesn't realize is unfaithful. Though he plays with symmetries, Howitt gives the two Helens' stories wildly different outcomes; suddenly, the seemingly "unhappy" timeline becomes the more desirable one. Such an ending would be dramatically unsatisfying in a traditional movie, but in one about the random nature of life, the deus ex machina feels entirely appropriate.

"Me Myself I" (1999)
Directed by Pip Karmel

It's an old relationship that Pamela Drury (Rachel Griffiths) can't forget in Pip Karmel's Australian comedy, or maybe just the possibilities that come with it. Lonely, successful and thirtysomething (like so many a rom-com heroine!), Pamela finds herself wondering what her life would have been like if she'd married Robert Dickson (David Roberts), the man she dated over a decade ago. That could-have-been universe comes (literally) crashing into hers in the form of another Pamela (also played by Griffiths) who, it turns out, did marry Robert and has three kids with him, and who swaps places with our tragic singleton, dumping her into a world of housework, conjugal relations and the expected fish-out-of-water hijinks. "Me Myself I" may offer its main character a look into another world, but it doesn't offer much insight into its own. There's no explanation for the existence of Alt Pamela -- which is fine, and comfortably within the bounds of movie whimsy. Not fine is the fact that both its portrayals of married and single life are hopelessly cliché-ridden. But Griffiths is and has always been an immensely watchable actress. She manages to bring more shades of gray to this film than it really deserves.

]]> "Blind Chance" (1987)
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

"Sliding Doors"' concept and structure obviously owe a debt to Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Blind Chance," another film about the variety of directions life might take based on the simple act of either catching or missing a train. In "Blind Chance," though, the protagonist follows three distinct paths instead of "Sliding Doors"' two, and the stories are played consecutively instead of simultaneously. In the first and longest sequence, a med school dropout named Witek (Boguslaw Linda) catches his train. While on it, he encounters an old Communist, and eventually decides to join the Party. In the second sequence, he narrowly misses the train and knocks over a policeman in the process. Sent to jail, he meets members of the anti-Communist underground and eventually decides to join their group. In the third and shortest sequence, he misses the train by a wider margin, and finds Olga (Monika Gozdzik) looking for him on the platform. They begin an affair and Witek decides to return to school, become a doctor, and start a family. "Sliding Doors" examines how luck affects our romantic destinies; "Blind Chance" explores its impact on our politics. Witek's three lives represent three political alternatives: either action on one side or the other or complete abstention from the process. The fact that such an inconsequential event propels Witek toward such radically different outcomes suggests that for Kieslowski, belief, like life in general, is based as much as chance and proximity to others as it is on careful consideration or debate.

"Melinda and Melinda" (2004)
Directed by Woody Allen

Woody Allen is a celebrated atheist, but he does believe in God, at least in his fiction. On the surface, Woody Allen's multiverse movie "Melinda and Melinda" is about a couple of playwrights debating the nature of existence by using the same set-up -- a troubled woman crashes a dinner party -- to tell two different stories. Really, what they're doing though is playing God with the life of Melinda (Radha Mitchell), tossing her from one calamity to the next. The playwrights argue whether life is inherently comic or tragic and try to prove their point through their individual interpretations of Melinda's life. In doing so, we see how God might behave if He were working out of a sense of humor or a sense of sadism. Though "Melinda"'s competing fictions only share one character, many events, locations and even lines of dialogue reoccur. In both, someone craves a single malt scotch. In both, someone tries to commit suicide by jumping out a window. So does that make life funny or sad? Wallace Shawn, who plays the comedy writer, gets the final word: "Comic or tragic, the most important thing to do is to enjoy life while you can," he says, "because we only go around once and when it's over, it's over." Here is Allen the atheist, telling us exactly what the doctor told a young and depressed Alvy Singer in "Annie Hall." But then Shawn continues, "When you least expect it, it could end like that!" With a snap of Shawn's fingers, the movie is abruptly ended. Here is Allen, the believer, saying that when you make a movie, you get to play God, at least for a little while.

Ben Foster: Shooting "The Messenger"

2009-11-12T09:45:00Z

Few young actors are blessed with wildly eclectic bodies of work, but 29-year-old Ben Foster has utilized his trademark intensity to play a bisexual art-school student (TV's "Six Feet Under"), a drug-addicted hoodlum ("Alpha Dog"), a winged superhero ("X-Men: The Last Stand"), a Wild West sociopath ("3:10 to Yuma") and a wannabe vampire who steals the show in "30 Days of Night." In his juiciest role to date, the Boston-born actor stars in "I'm Not There" screenwriter Oren Moverman's terrific directorial debut, "The Messenger." Foster plays Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, a jaded Army vet who has just returned to the homefront after being wounded in Iraq.

Paired up with the hard-nosed Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), Will is assigned to be a Casualty Notification Officer, a job that, in its own way, may be more difficult than combat. It's an emotionally authentic story of friendship and coping with unexpected jolts of humor, and Foster is sitting pretty to nab an Oscar nomination for his tightly wound but subdued performance. The day after the film's New York premiere, I sat down with him to discuss a certain hippie with a big heart, why "The Messenger" isn't really a military drama, and his cooking abilities.

In preparation for the role, you met with wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. What was most surprising about your interactions with them?

How young they are. They're kids. You have this concept in your head of the indestructible character of the warrior, but these are boys and girls. They've got so much light in them, and they're not coming from a political side, either. A lot of them were talking big smack about the last administration. We did this at the end of the Bush reign... of fire. There was a lot of contact. Seeing the wounds up close, touching the wounds -- these are experiences you take with you, and you can't get the pictures out of your head.

]]> Why do you think some soldiers fight when they're politically opposed to a regime that's sending them off to war?

There are so many reasons. It can be full blown patriotism. It can be "I just want to make my dad proud." It can be "I want a better education," "I need to get out of this town," "I want to travel," "I want to shoot some shit" or "I want to be a hero." There are so many grays of why someone would enlist. But they're all very brave and motivated individuals, and we're not taking proper care of them. Walter Reed certainly is, at least to our experience, really doing a great job rehabilitating. But that's one spot, and we have 40,000 more troops going back. There's a lot of responsibility we have to take as a country.

That reminds me of a line Harrelson says in the film about the Army being the best family you can possibly have. Is that a half-truth, in terms of taking proper care of the soldiers?

We talked to these guys who got blown up, and they were almost embarrassed -- they wished they could be back in the theater of war, back with their buddies, making sure that they don't get shot. So it's this selfless act, and you're looking at this kid who is missing an arm, a leg, he's blind in an eye, and all he wants to do is get back out there. Not for the politics of it all, but for his guys. In that sense, it's so intimate. It's familial. In terms of the best family ever, sure, families are complicated. We don't always know how to express love with our own families. Human beings, we're clumsy. We've got a lot of heart and we don't know how to maybe share it or take it. There's definitely a family element, but all families are fucked up somewhere.

The complex camaraderie between Will and Tony is certainly about not being able to express feelings. They're soldiers; men who don't cry. How did such a sobering experience play out with Harrelson, who is known for being a fun-loving goof?

We shook off the ghosts quite a bit. You know, you have to. [Our connection] was instant, he's one of those guys. You can't not love Woody Harrelson, he just has that thing. He picks his dramatic roles very carefully. What did I tell somebody? "Who are you doing the movie with?" I say, "Woody." "Oh, that's so rad! What's it about?" I'm like, "Casualty Notification Officers." They're like, "What?!" He makes strange choices, he's accessible, he's funny, he's got these eyes, but it's his heart. Woody's heart is so big and he's careful with it, but he gave it. He let it rip on this one. For him to go so against his own type, a self-proclaimed hippie from Hawaii who's actually from Texas, to play someone so... I don't even know what he is. He's a beast. And I love the man to the bone.

Everybody's (Sorta) Fine

2009-11-12T09:03:27Z

"Everyone's been asking how we're doing this week," film critic-turned-AFI programmer Robert Koehler said, shortly before a screening of Juan José Campanella's Argentinean murder mystery "The Secret of Their Eyes." "And the answer is our sponsors." Indeed, thanks to chief sponsor Audi, AFI has responded to an economy that's been particularly unkind to film festivals with free tickets that have ensured capacity attendance to most, if not all, of their screenings at the Mann's Chinese Theaters in Hollywood.

Even the more obscure titles that Koehler and his team have programmed, like Philippe Grandrieux's "The Lake" or the Spanish Berlinale winner "The Milk of Sorrow," have seen solid attendance. But the fact that so many have been asking the question is more telling than the answer -- with a changing audience profile (a Bugs Bunny impersonator wandered into Tuesday's screening of "Youth in Revolt" in full costume from entertaining on the Hollywood Walk of Fame right outside) and speculation about what the great turnout might even mean for the future of the festival.

The strange mood was passed on to the festival's one true world premiere, "Everybody's Fine," which could hardly describe the bittersweet nature of the evening. The week before, the film's distributor Miramax let go of their president, Daniel Battsek, and was reduced to a smaller operation. Shortly after he was appointed, Battsek surprised everyone by coming out swinging when he took over from Miramax founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein with a streak of hits like "The Queen" and "No Country for Old Men." He seems, strangely, to have come full circle in making a film that Harvey would've gladly greenlit in his day as his swan song for the company. In fact, Harvey did distribute the 1990 Giuseppe Tornatore film that "Everybody's Fine" is based on.

]]> There are worse ways to go out. Without Miramax, there aren't many places left to put out this kind of cinematic comfort food that the major studios have abandoned in favor of financing would-be blockbusters and that edgier independents have rarely shown an interest in. (For those who still wax nostalgic about Miramax's days as part of that second category, this has been a tragedy long settled.) And if there was ever a director to handle such material, it's Kirk Jones, who proved a particularly human touch with 1998's "Waking Ned Devine" before stumbling with the excesses of food fights and facial boils in the kiddie comedy "Nanny McPhee."

"Everybody's Fine" indulges both those impulses, with the former unfortunately giving into the latter in the story of a retired widower (Robert De Niro) who tires of his daily routine of puttering around the house and sets off to surprise each of his four kids who have settled around the country. Contrary to the actual De Niro, who introduced the film in typical brevity by saying, "Well, okay, I have to say something," Frank is a talkative type, prone to having wistful conversations without everyone around, musing to his fellow train passengers about the PVC coating he applied to the miles of phone line that they pass, wondering about the good news and the bad news that have come across "my wires."

Little does Frank know that there's plenty of bad news being splashed across those wires by his children, who have a far easier time talking to each other than to their demanding dad. As Frank visits Chicago to see his ad exec daughter Amy (Kate Beckinsale), Denver for his classical musician son Robert (Sam Rockwell) and Las Vegas for his dancer daughter Rosie (Drew Barrymore), he's unaware that his unsuccessful first visit to see his troubled son David in New York is a major cause for concern to the rest of the family that serves as the film's throughline.

While Beckinsale, Barrymore and Rockwell all give their characters more definition and vibrancy than they probably deserve, "Everyody's Fine" is really just a showcase for De Niro to do his best "About Schmidt" impression. Though he tries admirably, he's stuck with Jones' obvious allegiance to Tornatore's original film, which dabbled in dream sequences and flashbacks that weren't entirely successful in emphasizing the patriarch's disconnect with his children even in 1990 or from the guy who worked his magic on "Cinema Paradiso." Interestingly enough, Jones, a Brit, said before the premiere that that it took him a long time to have "the courage to make a film here [in the U.S.]," which makes his strange choice to remake an Italian melodrama something altogether foreign.

As for Bob and Harvey themselves, the brothers Weinstein had three films to present at AFI -- "The Road," "Youth in Revolt" and the Toronto pick-up "A Single Man," and while I can only speak for the latter two, the films connected in a way that has been rare for the pair's much-maligned post-Miramax era. However, the success of "Youth in Revolt" didn't come easy.

What the Success of "Precious" Means for Black Indie Cinema

2009-11-11T09:42:00Z

Serious African-American cinema scarcely exists. It arrives in fits and sputters, in the occasional legends (Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks), outliers (Charles Burnett, Julie Dash) or mavericks (Spike Lee). But demanding cinema based around the black experience are largely absent from American screens, displaced by gangstas, guns and masquerading comedians in drag or fat suits (Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy). The film industry has always loathed challenging movies, no matter the race, ethnicity or gender of their subject matter, but for black creators, making artistic cinema and getting it seen is a near insurmountable task. Can Lee Daniels' "Precious" change all that?

The Sundance-winning, Oprah-backed and Tyler Perry-supported "Precious" broke all box office records for a limited release last weekend, grossing $1.8 million on just 18 screens. The film will expand nationally in subsequent weekends. According to distributor Lionsgate, "Precious" drew an equal share of both black and white audiences -- a testament to its broad appeal. However, despite its enormous sales, "Precious" is, so far, the exception, not the rule, and while African-American filmmakers are excited by the movie's early success, they also retain a mix of skepticism and hope for the future.

Some filmmakers remain cautious, because despite "Precious'" dark subject matter -- rape, child abuse, poverty, HIV -- its very content also conforms to many black cinema stereotypes. As New York Press critic Armond White so viciously penned, "Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show." Ultimately, the film is also inspirational, with a traditional upward arc and a resolution that leaves viewers feeling good about themselves -- hardly the tenets of challenging cinema.

]]> "'Precious' is the sort of black film we've gotten used to seeing," says Barry Jenkins, the San Francisco-based director of "Medicine for Melancholy." "A gritty story of urban struggle and strife -- there's nothing wrong with that, but why aren't there other films filling out this portrait of what it's like to be black in America today? Whatever backlash there is against 'Precious,' it's not about the film itself -- it's about the dearth of films to complement it."

For Jenkins, it was in February 1997 when the industry got the proof it needed to give up on alternative black cinema. "I always cite 'Rosewood' as the example," he says. "John Singleton wanted to make a serious film about a serious event in American history" -- a racially motivated massacre that took place in 1923 -- "and not enough people went to see it. And the very next weekend, 'Booty Call' came out, which was made for a fraction of the money, and it did amazing business. It's simply all about dollars and cents."

But Jenkins says the early 2009 release of his no-budget identity-politics rom-com "Melancholy" showed that audiences are hungry for different perspectives on African-American life. Though the movie only played in a handful of cities and the theatrical gross was a tiny $112,000, the film's run was held-over in New York and had strong per-screen averages in San Francisco for 16 weeks.

"There just isn't a precedent for how you release even a quirky [black] film," says Jenkins, who has a new project set up at Focus Features. "Medicine" wasn't even released in urban centers like Atlanta, Philadelphia or Chicago, "because we've gotten to this point where there's the sense that black people aren't interested in movies about black people unless they fit into a specific type of black film," he says. "But what would have happened if the 'Medicine' trailer ran before [Tyler Perry's] 'Madea Goes to Jail'?"

"Mississippi Damned" producer and editor Morgan Stiff also blames the industry for a lack of imagination. From the time that Stiff pitched the project -- the story of a down-and-out family in a rural southern town -- at the American Film Market in 2007 to the conversations she's had with distributors this year, she's consistently come up against the same resistance: without a star on the order of Beyoncé Knowles, the film is dead in the marketplace's uncharted waters. "The issue is that studios and distributors don't know how to market a black film and are not open to new models to reaching audiences, in general," she says.