Indie film news, reviews, commentary, interviews, podcasts and more, updated throughout the week.
Seven More "Remakes" We'd Love Werner Herzog To Direct
By Matt Singer on 11/19/2009
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... MORE »
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"Everything else is pure theory": What-if Movies
By Alison Willmore on 11/13/2009
Filed under: ListsA 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... MORE »
20 Ways to Get Your "Arrested Development" Movie Fix*
By Matt Singer on 11/06/2009
Filed under: Lists*Until they actually make the movie Forget Scientology or Heaven's Gate. Today, the biggest cult in our country may very well be the teeming masses anxiously awaiting the return of "Arrested Development." After years of rumors and dashed hopes, it seems the beloved TV show will finally, for real, this time, be reincarnated on the big screen. But don't break out your Cornballers yet: the film isn't set to hit theaters until 2011. How will you last that long? While you can treasure your DVD collection of all three seasons (or, for that matter, catch re-airs on IFC), you'll probably... MORE »
The 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Movies
By Alison Willmore on 10/27/2009
Filed under: Listsh4.lucy-byline {margin-bottom: 33px;}When you sit down to a horror film, you know, at least on a basic level, what you're getting into. Whether or not the movie delivers, what you've been promised, and what you're braced for or looking forward to, are scares. Which is why, when we look back on those truly traumatic movie memories, the titles that come to mind often are not horror films at all. The most frightening movie moments can arrive out of nowhere, in the midst of where they shouldn't belong, catching you when you're vulnerable -- which is why there are a few... MORE »
No Country For Foreign Blockbusters
By Stephen Saito on 10/21/2009
Filed under: ListsEven though it's made $100 million in the rest of the world and is based on a global bestseller, it took months for Swedish murder mystery "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" to find a U.S. distributor. The film was finally picked up earlier this month by Music Box Films, known for previously saving the French crowdpleaser "Tell No One" after other distributors passed in fear of poor returns. In America, with few exceptions, the fact that a film is subtitled means it's destined for the arthouse. Populist entertainment -- action, romantic comedies, thrillers -- has struggled to find a... MORE »
The Family That Slays Together: Ten Domestic Slashers
By Matt Singer on 10/15/2009
Filed under: ListsIf you feel like you've seen this week's new slasher flick "The Stepfather" before, you probably have, even if you're not a fan of the 1987 original starring "Lost"'s Terry O'Quinn. That's because the family-bands-together-to-fend-off-the-one-member-who-turns-on-the-rest trope is at the heart of dozens of horror movies. Need proof? Here's a list of ten different types of immediate and extended family members and a notable cinematic example of each going medieval on their loved ones. Killer Mom I'd wager that everybody has said "My parents are crazy!" at least once in their lives. But the filicidal mother in 2008's "Baby Blues" is... MORE »
Five Rules for Great DVD Commentaries
By Matt Singer on 09/10/2009
Filed under: ListsWhenever someone asks me what my favorite DVD special feature is, I always pick audio commentary. But from talking with other cinephiles and casual film fans alike, I've begun to feel like I'm in the minority. I hear the same complaints, over and over, about filmmaker tracks: they're boring, they're uninformative, and so on. To which I always reply, you don't like them because you're not listening to the right ones. There are plenty of bad commentary tracks out there, but there are plenty of bad movies out there too; the trick is to find the good ones. From my... MORE »
"He Doesn't Have My Permission to Die Yet!": Twelve Evil Movie Wardens
By Matt Singer on 09/03/2009
Filed under: ListsNobody wants to go to jail. But if you've got to go to jail, just hope you don't do it in the movies. Odds are if you're going to movie jail, you're going to wind up at the mercy of some jerk warden (or captain or superintendent or game show host of a dystopian future) who wants to torture you for kicks. It happens time and again, most recently in this week's "Gamer" where poor Gerard Butler plays an inmate who finds himself as a running man in a death race against the southern-accented treachery of Michael C. Hall. In... MORE »
The Terrible Twos: Five Legitimately Scary Horror Sequels
By Matt Singer on 08/27/2009
Filed under: ListsThis week at the movie theater you have your choice of two different horror movie sequels: Rob Zombie's second film of a rebooted "Halloween" franchise (technically the tenth in the series) and a fourth "Final Destination" picture about teenagers caught in Rube Goldbergian death traps, with this one in 3-D and featuring the appealing conclusive title, "The Final Destination." Horror sequels are usually profitable, but rarely interesting. The element of surprise is a crucial part of horror movies, and it's awfully tough for any sequel, much less one for a horror movie, to surprise us. Unlike sequels for other genres,... MORE »
Starting Small: Ten Notable Shorts That Became Features
By Stephen Saito on 08/12/2009
Filed under: ListsWhile some filmmakers spend their entire careers maximizing the succinct pleasures of the short film, others start out by making shorts that they hope will maximize their chances of becoming a feature film director. This week alone will see the feature debuts of two directors who have turned their short films into full-length one -- Neill Blomkamp, whose 2005 socially conscious alien invasion tale "Alive in Joburg" has been turned into the Peter Jackson-produced "District 9," and Paul Solet, whose 2006 horror short "Grace," about a mother who refuses to give up on her miscarriage has morphed into a feature... MORE »
The Tough Guy Romantic Comedy
By Matt Singer on 07/23/2009
Filed under: ListsThere's something a little strange about the poster for "The Ugly Truth," and the sight of the stubbly, gruff face of Gerard Butler, affecting a sly grin and brandishing a heart at groin-level. This is the guy who carried "300" on his back (and maybe his washboard stomach) and, through sheer badness of his assness, inspired as many teenage boy quotations as any movie since "Austin Powers." In the interim, he's starred in Guy Ritchie's crime caper "RocknRolla," and he'll next appear in "Gamer," a film about a super soldier who becomes part of a dystopic video game. But for... MORE »
Vacillating Voiceovers: A History of Unreliable Narrators
By Matt Singer on 07/16/2009
Filed under: ListsWe trust the movies. We have to. Most of them only work if we look up at the images changing 24-times-a-second in front of us and believe that they reflect some sort of objective reality where a man can fly his house to South America or alien robots can transform into cars. Even when a movie is told entirely from a character's perspective, we assume that the intimacy cinema provides to hear a person's thoughts or see things the way they do affords us some safety from deception. We are wrong. People lie; the movies can too. Some movies take... MORE »
The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time
By IFC on 06/25/2009
Filed under: Listsdigg_url = 'http://digg.com/movies/The_50_Greatest_Trailers_of_All_Time'; They should be called leaders. We know them as trailers, but they don't trail anything; they play before the movie, not after it. The name dates to their earliest incarnation, when they actually did follow the feature. The documentary "Coming Attractions" dates the very first trailer to a 1912 Edison serial entitled "What Happened to Mary?" After each installment, a black card with white text would appear to inform audiences "The next incident in the series of 'What Happened to Mary' will be shown a week from now." Not exactly "In a world..." but it did... MORE »
When Films Fall Victim To Bad Timing
By Matt Singer on 06/04/2009
Filed under: ListsMotion pictures are years or even decades in the making. As much as we like to ascribe credit to directors who manage to capture the zeitgeist -- like when Sam Raimi uses a put-upon mortgage broker as the heroine of his new movie right in the middle of an economic crisis fueled by the collapse of the housing market -- the truth is, more often than not, a movie's cultural relevancy is a matter of luck and timing. In the case of "Drag Me To Hell," Raimi's film was eerily prescient, but just as often the opposite turns out to... MORE »
Meeting Mr. or Ms. Wrong
By Marin Gazzaniga on 05/26/2009
Filed under: ListsIFC.com's newest web series "Like So Many Things..." premieres today, and co-creators Marin Gazzaniga and Anslem Richardson offer up their thoughts on the best films about romances that are anything but easy. "Now it isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you, but, well, there haven't been any quiet moments." -- "Bringing Up Baby" Meeting Mr./Ms. Wrong movies come in many varieties. There are the star-crossed lovers who are kept apart by outside forces ("Romeo and Juliet"). Or the couple whose hate for each other is only masking the... MORE »
Five Rules For Making a Modern Spoof Film
By Matt Singer on 05/22/2009
Filed under: Lists"Dance Flick," from a group perhaps best described as the Wayans Brothers: The Next Generation (Keenen Ivory's nephew Damien Dante produced and directed the film, which stars his cousin Damon Jr.) opens today, the fifth parody movie (or spoof) since the start of last year. This astonishing burst of productivity has coalesced around a new set of rules for making spoof films that places them in stark contrast to watershed predecessors like "Young Frankenstein" or "Airplane!" Here are five reliable new school spoofing guidelines. There's a 50/50 chance these will work for "Dance Flick" too, though there's only a ten... MORE »
A Shout-Out to the Silent Sidekicks
By Matt Singer on 05/07/2009
Filed under: ListsThey say in every successful relationship, there's a flower and a gardener -- a star and an extra -- and that people gravitate toward those who'll let them inhabit their instinctive roles. A similarly symbiotic dynamic is often set up, in film and comedy, between a main character and his or her silent sidekick. The silent sidekick is a somewhat exotic species, but there are enough of them and enough similarities in the function they have played in some famous films and infamous comic pairings, that we decided to take a closer look on the eve of "The Brothers Bloom,"... MORE »
"Wanna hear a story... city boy?": The Ten Best Horror Westerns
By Sean Axmaker on 04/22/2009
Filed under: ListsWesterns. Horror films. Two great genres that go great together? You would think so. Westerns and horror films are, more than any American film genres I can think of, viscerally grounded in mortality, the vulnerability of human flesh and the primal drive of survival instinct. Whether facing wild animals or bloodthirsty monsters, cold-blooded gunfighters or psychotic madmen, roving bands of raiders or packs of zombies, the heroes of these films fight to live. "It feels like a natural connection. They're two of the most cinematic experiences that you have watching a movie," notes director J.T. Petty. He should know --... MORE »
Five Actor-Musicians Who Don't Suck
By Brandon Kim on 04/17/2009
Filed under: Lists"There's something about the guy that makes me uneasy. He's not going to say fuck stick in front of the children, is he?" --John Ritter as mall manager Bob Chipeska, referring to Billy Bob Thornton's Santa Willie, in "Bad Santa" When Billy Bob Thornton recently tripped out in Joaquin Phoenix-rivaling fashion on a Canadian radio interviewer, he inadvertently gave one the worst performances of his acting career -- unless we set aside his inability to adapt and play along and judge that bitter character by how incredibly unsettling he was. In that case, it may well rank among his best.... MORE »
Dead Alive: Bringing Popular Characters Back to Life in Sequels
By Matt Singer on 04/16/2009
Filed under: ListsFans of the gleefully excessive Jason Statham action film "Crank" know that it concluded with an impressively ballsy ending: Statham's Chev Chelios gets his revenge but -- SPOILER ALERT! -- falls out of a helicopter in the process. In "Crank"'s final shot, he falls into a car, bounces on to the pavement, twitches and... dies. It was certainly a surprise -- a pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless -- when the IFC.com staff first got word of a sequel, this week's "Crank: High Voltage." Statham was pretty clearly not alive at the end of that first movie, but, as the... MORE »
10 Brief Blasts of Radiohead in Pop Culture
By Michelle Orange on 04/10/2009
Filed under: Lists[This article is part of our Radiohead Fanatic Fortnight -- check out our box set giveaway here.] As this week's earlier list illustrates, Radiohead's music has inspired a number of videos shot with the artistry of a short film. Something about the band's dramatic, intensely emotional sound calls out to the screen, and a number of both film and commercial directors have responded. Below are some of the best and most notable uses of Radiohead's music in films and ads. (The band, big fans of Naomi Klein's "No Logo," don't license their music to big corporations, but they have donated... MORE »
Six Studio Journeymen We Wish Would Return to Their Indie Roots
By Stephen Saito on 04/09/2009
Filed under: ListsThere was a reason to feel queasy after watching the trailer for "The Hannah Montana Movie," and it wasn't just the sight of Miley Cyrus fighting off Tyra Banks for a pair of garish high heels. No, it was seeing the end credits that read "Directed by Peter Chelsom." That name may not mean much to most, but for those who discovered Chelsom during the mid-'90s by way of his trilogy of Blackpool-set showbiz dramedies -- the short "Treacle," 1992's "Hear My Song" and his best, the 1995 Jerry Lewis-Oliver Platt father-son vaudeville comedy "Funny Bones" -- an adaptation of... MORE »
When Missing Actors Return to the Franchise Fold
By Matt Singer on 04/03/2009
Filed under: ListsThis week's "Fast & the Furious" is the fourth film in an eight-year-long franchise, but only the first to reunite all four stars from the original cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster. (Walker alone starred in 2003's "2 Fast 2 Furious," while Diesel made an uncredited cameo in 2006's otherwise unrelated "Tokyo Drift.") Speaking about the film this week with the New York Times, Diesel said "It's kind of tricky to revisit a character so long after the fact. But it's very cool on a lot of levels to be able to go back to high... MORE »
Getting Versed in Versus Movies
By R. Emmet Sweeney on 03/31/2009
Filed under: ListsThere has to be no easier movie pitch than unveiling a "versus" in the title. Everyone, even studio heads, has at one time or another dwelt on the existential question of "who would win in a fight?" The conflict is clear, the characters are established, the action implied -- all they have to do is sign on the bottom line. Sci-fi has especially benefited from the built-in allure of this most savage of titling decisions -- from the endless "Godzilla" fight cards to the recent "Alien vs. Predator" franchise, mano y mano monster throwdowns have made a mint at the... MORE »
The Sneak Song-and-Dance: Musical Scenes in Non-Musicals
By Michelle Orange on 03/26/2009
Filed under: ListsAs anyone who sat through this year's Oscars knows, according to Hugh Jackman, Beyoncé, and, well, that chick from "Mamma Mia!", musicals are back. It's a somewhat desperate refrain we've been hearing for almost a decade now, one that began with the success of "Moulin Rouge" in 2000. Since then, we've had "Chicago," "Dancer in the Dark," the "High School Musical" trilogy (going on tetralogy? -- is anyone keeping count?), and "Nine," the "8 1/2"-inspired musical due out this year starring Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard and directed by "Chicago"'s Rob Marshall. Still, Wolverine's claim is... MORE »
Four Inevitable Disney Live-Action Remakes
By Matt Singer on 03/12/2009
Filed under: ListsThis week's "Race to Witch Mountain," starring Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino, is the latest remake-- ahem, modern reimagining from Walt Disney Studios. Though the Mouse House's animated classics remain sacrosanct (if the jumping-off point of direct-to-DVD sequels), the live-action library has been pillaged for endless redos intended for theaters or the Disney Channel, which is where a previous remake of "Escape to Witch Mountain" starring Robert Vaughn and Brad Dourif premiered in 1995. Nothing is safe from the remake button over at Disney, so here are four more properties we fully expect to receive the same treatment in the... MORE »
On the Late Show: Talk Show Hosts in Movies
By Matt Singer on 03/03/2009
Filed under: ListsThis week, the world of late night television experiences its biggest shakeup in years, as Jimmy Fallon takes the reigns of NBC's "Late Night" from Conan O'Brien, who, at the start of June, will take over "The Tonight Show" from Jay Leno, who moves on to start his own talk show at 10pm. With talk show hosts on our minds these days, it seemed like a good time to look back and see how they've fared on the silver screen. Qualifications for inclusion were simple: the talk show host in question has to be best known -- and most successful... MORE »
Getting in the Act: 11 Novelists Who Found Their Way Into the Script
By Michelle Orange on 02/26/2009
Filed under: ListsRock stars want to be movie stars and movie stars want to be rock stars; models want to be designers and designers want to tooth-tug Keira Knightley's ear on the cover of Vanity Fair. These are known facts, demonstrable often to a shudder-inducing degree. What to make, though, of the latent career ambitions suggested by the humble novelist's propensity for cameos? Do they all want to be comedians? Professional winkers? Or just slightly richer? From Saul Bellow playing the "Man in Hallway" in an adaptation of his novel "Seize the Day" 30 years after it had been first published to... MORE »
Mike Doughty's Top 12 Cheap Videos
By Mike Doughty on 02/25/2009
Filed under: ListsCheck out the world premiere of Mike's new video "Put It Down." What the world needs now is videos, cheap videos. MTV doesn't play them, and VH1 only plays them before noon on weekdays, but we're still watching them, on YouTube and everywhere else. Before the record business started tanking, they were laying out big bucks for mega-productions; now budgets are more modest. Rightfully so, I think; one of the worst things to happen to videos was when, as the art of video-making started to come into its own, MTV began putting the names of the directors on the video,... MORE »
Ten Performances We Can't Wait to Watch This Spring
By Matt Singer on 02/24/2009
Filed under: ListsZiyi Zhang in "Horsemen" Directed by Jonas Akerlund Opens March 6 The trailer and the premise -- a detective on the trail of a killer (or killers) murdering people in homage to each of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- make this look like one JASK-y movie (that's "Just Another 'Se7en' Knockoff"). But then there is the against-type casting of Ziyi Zhang (or Zhang Ziyi; there's so much continued confusion over how this poor woman prefers to be credited that even the "Horsemen" trailer and poster disagree about it) as a suspect in the case. Western audiences are mostly... MORE »
