Indie film news, reviews, commentary, interviews, podcasts and more, updated throughout the week.
Better than a Poke in the Eye with a Stick
By Michael Atkinson on 03/08/2010
The Oscars may be just a horse-race between larcenous, ego-queen jockeys riding $100 million braindead nags, but even so, sometimes the right movie wins. Often the wrong movie wins, and other times we can be thankful a middling movie or actor wins by the grace of fate so that another movie, a real populist crater, doesn't. With these you can almost feel the hand of divine intervention come down and coax the Price Waterhouse envelopes open like an accountant's zipper. Yesterday, the perfectly serviceable if rather Top Gun-ish "Hurt Locker" won instead of "Avatar," and so we were saved from... MORE »
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The Spirit Awards Get "Precious"
By IFC on 03/06/2010
Filed under: Features"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," director Lee Daniels' film about how an abused Harlem teenager pulls herself away from her degrading home life with help from a teacher, a social worker and a hospital nurse, swept the 2010 Spirit Awards tonight, winning best feature, director, first screenplay, supporting female (for Mo'Nique) and female lead (first timer Gabourey Sidibe). Crowd favorites "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" and "(500) Days of Summer" won the prizes for best documentary and best screenplay, while Scott Cooper's "Crazy Heart" was designated best first feature. Lynn Shelton's comedy "Humpday" won the John Cassavetes... MORE »
The Blind Spot
By Charles Taylor on 03/04/2010
Filed under: Features"God save us from the good intentions of well-meaning white liberals." That was Morgan Freeman years ago at the press junket for "Driving Miss Daisy" explaining to some concerned Caucasian that, no, it wasn't retrograde to depict an elderly black character in the American South of the '50s and '60s not acting like Huey Newton. God didn't do such a hot job for Bruce Beresford's movie -- that graceful, sly two-hander is still talked about as if it were some antebellum fantasy of black servility. But if, as Pauline Kael said, there's a separate God for the movies, then perhaps... MORE »
Nothing Else to Do?
By Stephen Saito on 03/01/2010
Filed under: FeaturesAt UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater this past Saturday, Boston Phoenix critic and filmmaker Gerald Peary confessed to a crowd that included David Ehrenstein and David Ansen and filmmakers Mel Stuart (the original "Willy Wonka") and Allan Arkush ("Rock 'n' Roll High School") that it's been 16 years since he's last been in Los Angeles. Here's hoping the discussion that followed, coming after a screening of his doc about film criticism "For the Love of Movies," doesn't scare him from coming back. On a panel moderated by Anne Thompson, Peary sat idly by for most of the lively hour-long talk that... MORE »
Spring Preview: A Repertory Calendar
By Stephen Saito on 02/16/2010
Filed under: FeaturesRepertory theaters on the coasts are truly offering a window onto the world this spring, with Jia Zhangke and Bong Joon-ho retrospectives, as well as New French Cinema in New York, "Freebie and the Bean," "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" and Jason Reitman's favorite films invade Los Angeles, and the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin is offering a fond farewell to the video cassette. But consider this a hello to seeing classics, oddities and rarities on the big screen over the next few months. Cities: [New York] [Los Angeles] [Austin] More Spring Preview: [Theatrical Calendar][Anywhere But a Movie Theater] New York... MORE »
Spring Preview: Anywhere But a Movie Theater
By Stephen Saito on 02/16/2010
Filed under: FeaturesMore Spring Preview: [Theatrical Calendar][Repertory Calendar][Jason Reitman's Favorites] Over 85 films will be filing through arthouses and multiplexes between now and the end of April, but nearly triple that number will be accessible from the comfort of home, whether it's on demand, online or on DVD. Here's what will be hitting televisions, computer screens, Netflix queues and store shelves this spring. On Demand Once you get through the masterful six-hour "Red Riding Trilogy" currently available on demand through May, IFC Films and their Sundance Selects label have quite the collection of festival favorites available to beam directly onto your TV... MORE »
Spring Indie Film Preview 2010
By Stephen Saito on 02/16/2010
Filed under: FeaturesFans of Ewan McGregor, Kristen Stewart and James Van Der Beek (!) will be seeing double this spring, as arthouses and multiplexes host an array of indie films ranging from the travails of septuagenarian New Yorkers looking for love ("The Last New Yorker") to 13-year-old assassins on the hunt for their first kill ("Kick-Ass"). If real life is more your speed, there are new documentaries about reviving animation strips (the Disney doc "Waking Sleeping Beauty") and stripping down (the burlesque history "Behind the Burly Q"), while foreign wonders like the French crime epics "A Prophet" and "Mesrine" mix with Korean... MORE »
Can Sundance's Hits Fly Outside Park City?
By Anthony Kaufman on 02/10/2010
Filed under: FeaturesThe high altitudes of Park City, UT -- home to the Sundance Film Festival -- have been known to cause dehydration, insomnia and an overappreciation of certain independent movies. What sparks standing ovations and multi-million dollar acquisitions in the rarefied confines of the snowbound town doesn't always carry over into the outside world. For every "The Blair Witch Project," "Super Size Me" or "Precious," there's a "Hustle and Flow," "Hounddog" or "Hamlet 2." Where do you draw the line between hype and reality, sleep deprivation-induced passing crush or bona fide true love? A really great film that will resonate with... MORE »
The New Serial Cinema
By Anthony Kaufman on 01/28/2010
Filed under: FeaturesFilm serials go back to the earliest days of cinema -- think "Perils of Pauline" cliffhangers or the exploits of French criminal mastermind "Fantômas," unspooling in theaters in weekly installments. More recently, a new kind of serial cinema has emerged. Less reminiscent of those silent movies or the Hollywood franchises of Harry Potter or James Bond -- themselves a kind of large-scale, ever-expanding serial -- these news works are film compilations more akin to the networked complexity of the best of contemporary episodic television. It's no surprise then that the latest example of the form, the British import "Red Riding... MORE »
Hollywood's Femme Fatality Rate
By Charles Taylor on 01/21/2010
Filed under: FeaturesIn the mid-'70s, when women (among them Claudia Weill, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Darling) were getting the chance to direct mainstream movies, Pauline Kael cautioned against expecting great things right away. Filmmakers needed a chance to learn and develop, she said, and there was always a chance they might not, or might simply become proficient hacks. It didn't matter, she was quoted as saying, whether there was a king or a queen on top of the garbage heap. Daphne Merkin's profile of Nancy Meyers in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back was an attempt to claim that... MORE »
Ranting in Pictures
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 01/20/2010
Filed under: Features"'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' was the most disappointing thing since my son." That's the daffy opening line of filmmaker Mike Stoklasa's "'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' Review," an insightful, rudely funny takedown of George Lucas' prequel. And it's as good a place as any to start an appreciation of a hybrid of the video essay and the mash-up -- an emerging format that's often more entertaining than the work it cannibalizes. Let's start by distinguishing straightforward mash-ups and video essays from works created by Stoklasa and his siblings-in-spirit. The term "mash-up" was first applied to musical works that combined... MORE »
Telling Tales of Nonfiction Filmmaking
By Alison Willmore on 01/18/2010
Filed under: FeaturesDocumentarians carve stories out of the ebb and flow of real life, making the struggles of a Canadian metal band into a rousing tale of standing by your dreams, or finding echoes of "A Chorus Line" in the backstage process of putting together a Broadway revival of the show. So it's no surprise that the 2010 Cinema Eye Honors, which took place on Friday in New York, were filled with their own anecdotes about nonfiction films and the process of making them. The venerable Albert Maysles, in a salute to influential Canadian filmmaker Allan King, who passed away earlier this... MORE »
"House": The Ultimate Midnight Movie?
By Matt Singer on 01/14/2010
Filed under: FeaturesIt took 33 years for Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi's film "House" to make its way to U.S. theaters, which is just as well. This movie was ahead of its time in 1977, it's ahead of its time now, and will continue to be ahead of its time until some point in the future when humans communicate telepathically and sleep in nutrient-rich fluid baths. I would call it a new contender for the title of ultimate midnight movie, but midnight feels about three hours too early for something as deranged as "House." This phantasmagoric head-trip has to be one of the... MORE »
Love of the Irish
By Matt Singer on 01/12/2010
Filed under: FeaturesDid you know that every leap year, on February 29th, women may propose to men in Ireland? I didn't either, but apparently they can (and apparently they can't the rest of the time, which is kind of weird, but... whatever). Or at least that's the case in the new film "Leap Year," in which Anna (Amy Adams) seizes upon this obscure Irish custom to finally propose to her longtime boyfriend (Adam Scott). But in order to reach him in Dublin, she needs to hitch a ride with a handsome guy named Declan (Matthew Goode). Will she be able to make... MORE »
The Unbearable Rambo-ness of Being
By Anthony Kaufman on 01/07/2010
Filed under: FeaturesGod didn't make Rambo; I made him! In the '80s, Americans found a new brand of movie hero that corresponded precisely with Reagan-era conservative values. Ripped, vengeful and violent, action stars like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson and a beefed-up Bruce Willis helped reestablish myths of rugged individualism, militarism and machismo through an awesome display of fire power and pectoral muscles. The bang-bang decade that saw the releases of "First Blood," "Die Hard," "Lethal Weapon," "The Terminator," "Robocop," "Top Gun," "Batman," "Predator" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" may seem like a distant memory in these leaner Obama days.... MORE »
Monsters Vs. Aliens: James Cameron's Love/Hate Relationship with Technology
By Matt Singer on 12/29/2009
Filed under: Features[Major spoilers ahead for "Avatar" and other James Cameron films.] Like all of James Cameron's six previous films, "Avatar" is a war of worlds both literal and figurative. Colonists from the planet Earth do battle with the native inhabitants of a moon named Pandora over the right to mine a rare and powerful mineral. Cameron casts the struggle as a conflict between the technological world (the humans and their advanced military) and the natural world (the natives, known as the Na'vi, who share a symbiotic relationship with their environment). Given that the humans are characterized as greedy and violent while... MORE »
The Best Films of 2009
By Alison Willmore on 12/21/2009
Filed under: FeaturesMatt Singer: We entered 2009 with a new president who promised to bring our country hope. But looking back at the year in film, I don't see a lot of hope; I see a lot of grief and despair. Oh sure, the box office charts were dominated by your now-typical assortment of franchises, spin-offs, reboots and sequels -- a major cause of grief and despair for some -- but you also had enough apocalypse movies to fill a book on Biblical prophecy. Even some of the obligatory superheroes got dark: the world (spoiler alert!) doesn't end in "Watchmen," but it... MORE »
The Year's Most Cinematic Games
By Nick Schager on 12/17/2009
Filed under: Features, GamesThroughout 2009, the intersection of video games and films has been a seething hot spot, both culturally and for business. And though this marriage is fraught with plenty of potential hazards -- best seen in the unkillable and still usually awful game-to-film adaptation -- there's no denying that's plenty of room for both mediums to share and grow. Games tend to be more successful when they focus on their essentials, and films usually thrive when they don't try to hard to duplicate their interactive competitors, but there are no hard-and-fast rules for this developing relationship. And there's no reason to... MORE »
It's Time to Meet the Muppets, Again
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 12/15/2009
Filed under: Features"Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody" debuted on the Muppets' newly inaugurated YouTube channel just three weeks ago. But nearly ten million views later, it already feels like a signpost that we'll look back on fondly -- a goofy capper to a rotten decade, a bridge to whatever lies ahead, and perhaps a future time capsule, a reminder of what it felt like to be alive at this strange time. It's a pop culture upper in a league with two classic bubblegum chart-toppers that heralded the shift from '60s darkness to '70s hedonism: John Lennon's "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and the... MORE »
Chart: The Season of "Man"-ly Movies
By Matt Singer on 12/12/2009
Filed under: FeaturesThe movies are typically a male-dominated medium, but things have been even more man-ly than usual lately. You can't throw a rock at the theater these days without hitting a marquee advertising a movie with the word "Man" in the title. (Not that we're encouraging you throw rocks in movie theaters, mind you. Merely a figure of speech.) By our count, there have been at least eight different "Man"-ly movies this year, and at least one more high profile one coming in 2010. How can anyone be expected to tell any of the "men" apart, especially when so many of... MORE »
The Naughts: The Film of the '00s
By Michael Atkinson on 12/11/2009
Filed under: FeaturesI'm not sure if "Adaptation" is emblematic of the American-film '00s -- I'm afraid that the real culprit might be one blockbuster or another, exemplifying at this stage our fears instead of our hopes -- but it's certainly an endlessly resonating high-water mark, a mirror-hall launch that Godard could've loved, and which preemptively folded all commentary about it, positive or negative, into its self-knowing structure. Director Spike Jonze never dropped the ball, and Nicolas Cage was surpassingly brilliant, but it's Charlie Kaufman's bomb test, successful enough to establish him, in a stroke, as the most original and fecund screenwriting talent... MORE »
The Naughts: The Director of the '00s
By Alison Willmore on 12/10/2009
Filed under: FeaturesSteven Soderbergh had a remarkable 12 films in theaters between 2000 and 2009. That includes two shiny Oscar winners, "Erin Brockovich" (which nabbed Julia Roberts a statuette) and "Traffic," and a potential third, "The Informant!"; all three installments of the blockbuster "Ocean's" franchise; three fast-and-loose video experiments ("Full Frontal," "Bubble" and "The Girlfriend Experience"); an anti-period piece period piece ("The Good German"); an anti-biopic biopic ("Che"); and a sorely underrated remake/distillation of a sci-fi classic ("Solaris"). And that's not even counting his contribution to the 2004 omnibus "Eros," or the ten episodes of HBO series "K Street" he helmed. By... MORE »
The Naughts: The Romantic Pair of the '00s
By Charles Taylor on 12/09/2009
Filed under: FeaturesI knew what she looked like by heart this time. That scrap of newspaper she was on should have been worn ragged by now, the number of times I'd pulled it out and looked at it when I was alone in the place. -- Cornell Woolrich, "The Black Angel" It's the fear as much as the tenderness. It's the desperation in the way they clutch hands in a darkened theater, and the sensuousness in the way they caress each other in bed. It's the contradiction of having found yourself by stepping into a mystery, and the cruelty of discovering that... MORE »
The Naughts: The Song of '00s
By Brandon Kim on 12/08/2009
Filed under: FeaturesThe film industry may be currently going through a crisis, but it's got nothing on the music biz. Over the past decade, there was a paradigm shift in the industry and huge, fundamental changes in the way people discover, buy and listen to music. Ten years ago, the idea that everyone would cease going to record stores to flip through plastic discs and would instead buy music digitally, completely devoid of a physical medium, only existed in a fringe world called Napster. Now record stores are all but gone, and the album as an art form exists only in the... MORE »
The Naughts: The Documentary of the '00s
By Aaron Hillis on 12/07/2009
Filed under: FeaturesSometimes superlatives need to be slung, such as when speaking of the richest, most ambitious and exciting decade yet for nonfiction film -- and, really, what other variety could back up that boast? To nail down a single doc as the preeminent work that typifies these years is no easy task, especially since the best of the bunch attacked specific subjects with laser-like precision and idiosyncratic techniques. (Sit tight, the lede is about to be buried.) The '00s legitimized the allure of the "pop doc," a trend that shoehorns potentially lackluster material into glossy narratives. Spelling bees were transformed into... MORE »
The Naughts: The Actress of the '00s
By Michelle Orange on 12/04/2009
Filed under: FeaturesIf time is an avenger, then the Naughts have had it both ways with Nicole Kidman. In the span of a decade, Kidman was transformed from arm candy into an artist -- the rare movie star who made genuinely interesting choices -- eclipsing her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who filed for divorce in 2000, with an Oscar win and the embrace, finally, of her peers on her own terms. However, as the '00s limp to a close, Kidman seems to be succumbing to a personal vendetta against time: by manipulating her face into a mask -- a waxworks ideal of "Nicole... MORE »
The Naughts: The Critics of the '00s
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 12/03/2009
Filed under: FeaturesFilm criticism as we know it tends to fall into a handful of time-worn categories: an expression of one's personality, politics and taste, with traces of social critique and memoir (Pauline Kael, James Agee); or a kind of performance art on the page, using individual films, actors or filmmakers as springboards for sustained riffs on art and life (Manny Farber); or a scholarly attempt to draw connections between films and film movements, rank filmmakers by aesthetic significance and put works in historical context (Andrew Sarris). All these approaches have merit. But when you zoom out from the here-and-now and think... MORE »
The Year of Apolitical Cinema?
By Anthony Kaufman on 12/03/2009
Filed under: FeaturesIn 1989, Spike Lee picked up a trashcan and hurled it into the front window of Sal's Pizzeria, stirring chaos in Bed-Stuy and sending movie audiences into a tizzy about race relations in America. That same year, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma were reopening heated debates about Vietnam ("Born on the Fourth of July," "Casualties of War"), while Steven Soderbergh and Peter Greenaway were making us squirm by challenging conventional moral codes ("sex, lies and videotape," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover"). Jump ahead 20 years: today's watercooler cinema holds nary an ounce of subversive content.... MORE »
The Naughts: The Television Show of the '00s
By Nick Schager on 12/02/2009
Filed under: Features"It's not TV, it's HBO" goes the tagline, and in the '00s, TV was "The Sopranos," a series that not only defined a channel but, more fundamentally, a decade's worth of living-room drama. When David Chase's series about the titular New Jersey crime family debuted in 1999, it came equipped with a conceit that seemed, dare I say, a tad too cute -- a mob boss balancing his two "families," and buckling under the stress of it all? Yet cute was something the program almost never wound up flirting with, instead carving out a position as both a key member... MORE »
The Naughts: The Buddy Pair of the '00s
By Matt Singer on 12/01/2009
Filed under: FeaturesNobody in the film business has had as good a decade as the folks at Pixar Animation Studios. They released seven films in ten years, all of them box office hits, all of them critical successes. Four of them won Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature (and the past summer's "Up" stands a good chance to make it five). Because of the studio's incredible run of creativity, Pixar filmmakers are often asked to explain the secret of the company's success. In an interview with Movie City News' David Poland, "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E" director Andrew Stanton cited a meeting the... MORE »
