Screen Rush

2008-12-16T13:23:00.001-08:00

NEW STOMPING GROUND

A little tardy on this update, but please note that this blog is now hosted by my colleagues at indieWIRE. All future updates can be found at the new location.

thingy

2008-07-29T12:33:00.001-07:00

Cinematic Language PCB3

From: kino.eye, 1 week ago

Cinematic Language PCB3

view presentation (tags: podcamp presentation video technique)

Presentation given at Podcamp Boston 3, July 19, 2008.

SlideShare Link

2008-06-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

No sneezing pandas or desperate pleas to leave Britney alone plagued New York's IFC Center on Thursday night, when several web-based filmmakers gathered to screen and discuss their works. The event, titled "Where Internet and Film Collide," was co-hosted by the Independent Feature Project and IndieGoGo as a part of Internet Week New York, but none of the projects featured over the course of the evening resembled the lackadaisical style of your average YouTube phenomenon. Instead, the event brought strong examples of the ways independent cinema can flourish in cyberspace. The films themselves each had their own specific audiences, developed online through a variety of methods, but in every case, creative ambition paved the way to rigorous experimentation.

Two of the featured artists were no strangers to Stream readers: Our tech columnist, Jamie Stuart, screened two of his favorite shorts: NYFF45: Part Two, and 12.5 Seconds Later..., both of which he has discussed in his weekly column. Since the event was moderated by Filmmaker magazine editor Scott Macaulay, the producer of Stuart's New York Film Festival shorts, their conversation in front of the audience after his films were shown took on a personal tone. "I remember the first time we ever had a meeting," Stuart told Macaulay. "You asked me to bring along the scripts, and I was like, 'There aren't any scripts.' It's a combination of improvisation and editing." That pretty much sums it up: Stuart's NYFF shorts explore the frantic environment of media events with a lyrical edge, and NYFF45 gets it best, particularly when Stuart continually cuts from the jittery hands of anonymous photographers to glorious close-ups of Nicole Kidman (doing press for Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding). It's a surreal moment that underscores a specific kind of chaos associated with the crassness of celebrity obsession. Stuart summed it up: "I have no interest in reality. My goal is to pervert it."

Read more in Stream...

2008-06-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

"It's not terrific. It's tiresome." So concludes hotshot producer Joseph Levine in Albert and David Maysles' classic 1961 cinema verite documentary Showman, which received a rare screening last night at New York's IFC Center, concluding its annual "Stranger than Fiction" series. The hustling entrepreneur whose ferocious penchant for movie marketing forms the centerpiece of this intensely provocative work represents a dying breed. "As I look at it now, I think, 'Why spend so much time with a guy whose actions are not to be emulated?'" reflected Albert Maysles, the seventy-two year old surviving member of the filmmaking duo, during a post-screening Q&A.

2008-06-02T18:56:00.000-07:00

Calling Joe Swanberg a historic filmmaker might be pushing it, but his professional emergence has unquestionably coincided with historic developments. More than ever before, artists have discovered new outlets for exposure and distribution on the internet, and Swanberg has utilized both aspects. The twenty-six year old Chicago-based director has been churning out low-budget films about the day-to-day romantic dalliances of twentysomethings since 2005, when his first feature, Kissing on the Mouth, established him as a mainstay of the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin — and, by extension, the contemporary landscape of American independent cinema. Since then, he has completed three more features, two of which (Hannah Takes the Stairs and Night and Weekends) were purchased for theatrical distribution by IFC Films. Hannah opened last year, while Nights is scheduled to premiere on November 14. However, the primary venue that showcases Swanberg's observant profiles of young adult behavior lies in cyberspace.

Since 2006, Swanberg has been developing the web series Young American Bodies for Nerve, and the show recently began its third season, this time appearing for a larger audience on IFC.com. Conceived as short segments detailing the lives of a few struggling Chicagoans (including their sex habits, which Swanberg refuses to censor), Young American Bodies has brought attention to Swanberg's work outside of the festival circuit as he continues to direct features. Meanwhile, he recently launched a quasi-detective series called Butterknife for the film discussion site Spout. With his extremely specialized subject matter and incessant DIY approach, Swanberg rides the wave of new media without compromising his creative interests. In a phone conversation from Chicago, he spoke with Stream about his unique professional trajectory, the philosophies behind his output, and upcoming projects, including a collaboration with Oscar-nominee Noah Baumbach.

Read the interview in Stream...

2008-05-29T16:22:00.001-07:00

Nina Paley was not looking for an international controversy. Nevertheless, in April, when the now 40-year-old Jewish cartoonist screened her latest film, “Sita Sings the Blues,” at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, she said that’s precisely what she got.

Read more in the Forward...

2008-05-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

Like a demented child’s fantasy, Uwe Boll’s Postal fails to comprehend its own corrupt nature. I don’t fully understand or care about the German émigré’s brash confrontations with critics and the hatred leveled against his filmmaking (a petition to get him to retire has been circulating the web in the last few weeks), but the problem with Boll’s latest videogame adaptation for the big screen has less to do with his admittedly crappy direction than its indolent treatment of pertinent ideas.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-05-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

When Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last week, the fanfare fit Hillary Clinton's infamous mockery of Barack Obama: "The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing." Except, in this case, the majestic Palais des Festivals doors opened, the lights of flash photography came up, and a thousand voices called out to catch the attention of Indy pioneers Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford. You couldn't ask for a better homecoming (even the mob outside the press conference huddled close to television screens), and the frothy reception extended through the following weekend, when the first Indiana Jones film in 18 long years scored a whopping $151 million opening-weekend gross. The world of America's cherished pop hero is not a cheap one.

Except, that is, for Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb, the three Mississippi-born filmmakers living in it since their teenage years. When the trio set out to make Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation in 1981, they were all around the age of twelve, and couldn't have imagined the long gestation period that would culminate in international notice for their project. Made for no money on clunky camcorders, Raiders: The Adaptation does a surprisingly spot-on job of recreating the original film shot-for-shot (the kids even set their basement on fire to replicate certain explosive sequences), and the adolescent actors, offering their best impressions of Ford, Karen Black and the rest of the cast, add an additional context that turns the whole thing into an accidental coming-of-age story.

As the years went by, the team went into various different lines of work. Then, in 2003, horror director Eli Roth found out about the project and managed to pass it along to Steven Spielberg. A lengthy feature in Vanity Fair followed, and Raiders: The Adaptation became a cult phenomenon, screening all over the world. Zala left his job at Electronic Arts, joining Strompolos in founding a new production company. While Raiders: The Adaptation continues to have a life of its own, Zala and Strompolos have managed to leverage its success into a launching pad for their filmmaking careers. In essence, an innocuous fanboy tribute became a notably unique DIY strategy. A week after Raiders: The Adaptation had its Los Angeles premiere, Zala spoke to Stream about their newfound exposure, with an eye toward the future.

Read the whole interview in Stream...

2008-05-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

Yeah, we're homies.

2008-05-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's appropriate that the documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" received a special screening at this year's Cannes Film Festival, considering that its firm distribution deal really does seem like something special. During the latest Sundance Film Festival, "Wanted and Desired" became the first purchase after days of trepidation emanating from niche distributors -- an indicator of the dispiriting trend among buyers that continued into the Cannes Film Festival, although there was a slight burst of activity as the event comes to a close this weekend. The increasing difficulty to get American distributors interested is all the more evident now, with diagnoses for the problem spanning from broad cultural associations to specific issues popping up in the corners of the independent film landscape. With the dollar weak and alternative distribution venues on the rise, Cannes arrived like an intervention, bringing everyone under the same umbrella to figure out if they can come to terms with the problems at hand. So far, it looks like they're able, at the very least, to acknowledge them.

Read more in indieWIRE...

2008-05-25T20:22:00.001-07:00

After a long, virtually sleepless week of diving through the riotous choreography of film industry self-congratulation during the Cannes Film Festival, I left the south of France with my perspective of the business intact, even if my judgment felt a little frazzled. Above all else, Cannes deserves attention as a fascinating set of contradictions: Big and commercial, artistically inspired and enhanced by European lyricism, it works however you want it to work. As with any conflicting situation, there are valuable lessons to be learned. Here are a few that I picked up, with some notes from some of the enterprising personalities I encountered along the way.

Read the rest in Stream...

2008-05-25T20:22:00.000-07:00

2008-05-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

CANNES, France -- The presence of video-on-demand and streaming video companies at the Cannes Film Festival, a place where the giants of world cinema screen their works in staggeringly immense structures, might appear somewhat incongruous. However, a place so insistent on reminding people of its ongoing role in film history should embrace the inevitability of digital distribution. For that reason, the online movie rental service Jaman , which participated in several panels and hosted a party on the Croisette in Cannes this week, justifies its attendance by the very nature of its existence — and the Silicon Valley team doesn't shy away from that fact.

Read the rest of the article in Stream...

2008-05-19T03:36:00.000-07:00

2008-05-18T01:07:00.000-07:00

JIM JARMUSCH IS THE MAN

I just wanted to throw that out there.

More details in Stream later this week.

2008-05-17T03:03:00.000-07:00

CANNES, France -- Wandering around the dense collection of parties, promotional events and, yes, even movie screenings at the Cannes Film Festival, you can't help but feel the sheer scale of the place barreling down on your senses. The environment easily accommodates lavish expressions of power, with any number of celebrities and affluent investors flocking to private gatherings along the messy length of the Croisette to talk business over the finest rosé until dawn breaks. The festival and the marketplace swirl together as a furious spectacle. The international film industry these days is all about swimming with sharks.

Read the rest of the story in Stream...

2008-05-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

CANNES CHATTER

Core issues raised as Cannes kicks off its first day

by Eric Kohn

"I don't think we went blind. I think we always were."

--Danny Glover in Blindness

CANNES, France -- Members of the press are divided into color-coded categories ranging from white to yellow badges in a system that vaguely sounds like class discrimination, but the media keeps on coming; movie stars hog the spotlight, but bump shoulders with obscure art house personalities on the red carpet; the sun beats down hard, but the weather is glorious. The innate paradoxes of the Cannes Film Festival, which began its sixty-first year on Wednesday, come from all directions. Often accused of celebrating materialistic enjoyment under the pretenses of championing film as high art, Cannes features a very particular dissonance of form and content. Sometimes, the chaos is glorious, but other times it's just plain chaotic.

Read more in Stream...

2008-05-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

Combining pop whimsy with nuanced characters, Joachim Trier's "Reprise" constructs a simultaneously moving and satiric portrayal of two young struggling writers, Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielson Lie), in Norway's chic modern professional scene. After a warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007 and a similar response later that year at New Directors/New Films, "Reprise" remained without distribution until producer Scott Rudin, a fan of the film, pressured Miramax's Daniel Battsek to purchase it. Incessantly lively, filled with contemporary references, and containing a number of creative flourishes to help give the heavier ideas a sense of levity, "Reprise" marks Trier's directorial debut. In a conversation with indieWIRE last week at the Soho Grand Hotel, the filmmaker matched the positive qualities that make his movie so distinct.

iW:A lot of movies about the writing process don't work. How did you work these two characters into a credible literary environment?

Yeah, it's a problem -- if you're going to have someone (in a film) read from the greatest novel, then you have to write the greatest novel. We're avoiding that. We're more interested in the dynamics of composition than we are in exploring exactly the contents of the books, but there are references to various writing traditions in the film, and a lot of those are, I guess, local references. They're a language-oriented literature, rather than the social-realist tradition. It's insinuated in the film that (Eric's book) 'Prosopopeya' has greater literary ambitions than being experimental, and it seems like the critics don't think it works. So we're playing around with a great literary person's desire to do the radically different story, which is kind of self-referential, because we're playing around with little things here and there. It's about very intellectual characters. We wanted to take that seriously, but we wanted to laugh a bit as well.

Read the rest of the interview in indieWIRE...

2008-05-13T22:31:00.001-07:00

CANNES, France -- The strikingly abnormal image of a blindfolded woman set against a black background adorning the poster for the 61st Cannes Film Festival was taken from a photograph by David Lynch. Ever the eccentric American artist, Lynch's career offers a distinct frame for understanding this monumental gathering of the film industry's greatest powers.

Read more in Stream...

2008-05-09T08:26:00.001-07:00

As a documentarian, Nick Broomfield has dissected American pop culture with films like "Biggie & Tupac" and "Kurt & Courtney." With his more recent forays into narrative feature filmmaking, he has broadened his scope to include global issues. "Ghosts" explored the dark world of Chinese migrant workers in the UK, and his latest work, "Battle for Haditha," which opened at Film Forum earlier this week, recreates the infamous 2005 incident where U.S. marines murdered two dozen Iraqi civilians in a small village, driven by rage after encountering a roadside bomb. An attempt by the military to cover up the role of the American soldiers in the slaughter didn't last long. Media scrutiny led to an internal investigation, and the events have now been thoroughly recorded in various reports.

Using real soldiers and Iraqis to recreate the event, the movie creates a raw, brutal portrait of wartime insanity. While "Haditha" escapes the pratfalls of rhetoric by taking a fly-on-the-wall approach, Broomfield clearly has a unique agenda: Unlike any other contemporary war film, the drama emerges from the action, rather than being superimposed on it. You'll find plenty of shouting, but no histrionics. Broomfield and actor Elliot Ruiz, an Iraq War veteran Broomfield cast as Corporal Ramirez, recently sat down with indieWIRE to discuss the main themes at work in the film.

iW: The central event of the film is based on real testimonies. Given your documentary background, why didn't you take that approach?

Nick Broomfield: I've been making documentaries for a number of years, and I think far too many people just stay in a groove and carry on what they've been doing for far too long. I think it's important as an artist, in whatever field you're in, to take on new challenges, try to tell stories in different ways, and develop your techniques into something new. When I did "Ghost," the film before this, I took a big risk by basically casting all non-actors using real locations, and shooting in a style that's not applied in traditional feature films. Feature films are still very much caught in this time warp of shooting master shots, close-ups, reaction shots - which is all a style that cinema verite is completely not about. Cinema verite is all about real time, long takes, uncertainty, the moment. I tried to keep all that in the style of making this film. At the same time, I tried to tell a story in a much more structured way. Obviously, it's a story that I don't appear in. I tried to forge a new technique of film, which I think is possible because of all the technological changes. I don't think you need to make feature films in the way they're made anymore. It comes out of a 1930's technology, and we've gone past it now.

Read the rest of the interview in indieWIRE...

2008-05-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

Today in Stream, my old colleague/drinking buddy John Lichman has a fantastically witty and informative interview with the dude and dudette behind the "Marvel/DC" parodies available on the internet. I discovered these sketches rather recently, and now I'm a devout fan. See what creator Michael Agrusso has to say for himself.

2008-05-08T19:29:00.000-07:00

The tragedy was in plain sight, but nobody thought it would hit this hard. As word spread today that Warner Bros. planned to close its specialty divisions Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures, shifting all projects currently in development to the larger studio and its recently absorbed subdivision New Line, a mournful tone took hold of the independent film industry. "It is a sad day when any film company, large or small, bites the dust," said President of THINKfilm Mark Urman. "One had heard and one had even considered that this was a possible scenario. It's still surprising when you see it in print."

The announcement reverberated throughout the day, as it became clear that all Picturehouse and Warner Independent employees -- seventy-four combined -- just lost their jobs. "This was a strategic decision that came after a lot of careful consideration," said Alan Horn, Warner Bros.' president and CEO, in an e-mail to indieWIRE. "We have been thinking about this for a couple of months, since Time Warner put New Line under our company." Following in step with a statement he issued earlier in the day, Horn argued that the decision resulted from a need to consolidate their interests. "To have three theatrical development, marketing, production and distribution arms, essentially serving the same function and even competing with one another on various levels does not make economic sense," Horn said. "That's a bottom line reality."

Read more in indieWIRE...

2008-05-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

Friends and colleagues (and some folks who fall into both categories) have been asking me what exactly I'm doing these days, what with my byline appearing in some half dozen outlets now on a regular basis, making it hard to find the common thread. Well, there is one, kinda. Around January, I became involved with a newly launched online magazine called Stream, which focuses on independent filmmakers using the internet as a major resource for production, marketing and other related areas. It's a great way to delve into new media discourse without getting bogged down with constant reporting on the corporate world (although there's a little of that), and I'm constantly amazed at all the artists out there becoming pioneers of fresh distribution models. History is now, people.

I add news updates and features to Stream on a daily basis, and we've got a wide variety of material, from filmmaker profiles to revenue reports to festival dispatches and more. The magazine is attached to a revolutionary online film search engine called The Looking Glass Guide that's well worth checking out.

In the meantime, I'm still regularly contributing to New York Press (although I'm just doing a few pieces a month now, rather than jotting down a couple reviews each week), and I've been doing a number of interviews, features and festival notebooks for indieWIRE.

I've also got a couple of magazine pieces on the stands now: A nifty survey of Christian cinema in Hollywood that I wrote for Heeb, a survey of some up-and-coming writer-directors for Moviemaker (print only), and an overview of New York City film production for The Hollywood Reporter.

On the more eccentric side of things, I wrote an essay about Jonas Mekas' A Letter from Greenpoint in the brilliant new issue of Reverse Shot, and Cinematical, a blog I've admired and learned much from over the years, has brought me on board to contribute posts throughout the week. Recent subjects range from Amy Poehler to movie accents to misogyny. Yes, misogyny.

2008-05-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

There was a time when only ruthless Hollywood producers had the power to bring cinematic visions to life. Now, it takes a village -- or, rather, a community. That's the idea behind IndieGoGo , the social network for funding independent film productions launched January 14 by Slava Rubin, Eric Schell and Danae Ringelmann. By allowing filmmakers to create profiles for their projects, build fans and get them to donate to the projects, IndieGoGo makes it possible to find an audience before a single frame is shot -- and allows them to get involved. "All you need is an idea in your head," explains Rubin, whose background in strategic planning combines with Schell's consulting experience and Ringelmann's industry work in the field of film and media finance. "We've all been passionate about independent film and helping artists," says Rubin, who works out of New York City while Schell and Ringelmann complete their MBAs at UC Berkeley.

Read more in Stream...

2008-05-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

BEING BILL PLYMPTON

“It became a morality tale by accident,” Bill Plympton says of his latest animated feature film, Idiots and Angels, which has two more screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 30 and May 3. Regardless of Plympton’s intent, the thematic consequence is right there in the title: Idiots and Angels follows a sadistic gun salesman ignorant to the struggles of those around him—until a pair of angel wings inexplicably grow on his back, and with them comes an emerging sense of responsibility.

Like Plympton’s best works, dialogue is non-existent, replaced by the expressive quirks of his fluid line drawings and abstract comedy. Where quintessential Plympton shorts—such as the Oscar-nominated Guide Dog—express a vivacious, chaotic glee, the new feature contains a relatively contemplative feel.

Read more in New York Press...

2008-05-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

Click the image for a larger view.

For some reason, I find this hilarious.

I just realized that I forgot to sign this one, so please don't steal my idea.

2008-05-02T09:49:00.000-07:00

CULTURAL SATURATION IN THE NEW WORLD

NEW YORK, New York -- Eight years have passed since Mike Figgis' Timecode first appeared in American theaters, combining soapy drama with Hollywood satire, using the highly ambitious arrangement of four screens to reveal multiple scenes at once -- but, despite claims to the contrary, the British filmmaker doesn't think his romp with mini-DV cams heralded a new age. "The digital revolution has hit, but behind the scenes," the frequently witty and insightful Figgis told the audience at the DGA Theater in midtown Manhattan earlier this week, appearing for the Tribeca Film Festival's "Tribeca Talks" series. "Film is still the best way of making a big movie...but, in the meantime, digital has crept into our lives."

Mike Figgis' 'Timecode' (2000)

Figgis certainly isn't opposed to the technology -- he wrote a great book about it -- nor does the sixty-year-old director display any trepidation towards the internet. Quite the opposite, actually: He helped start the online social networking community Shooting People, which helps connect filmmakers across the globe. Still, Figgis said he has serious reservations about the so-called democratization of filmmaking caused by the popularity of digital aesthetics. "Digital technology has accelerated the problem of cultural saturation," he said, rather bleakly. "You see a steady progression toward the lowbrow."

Read the rest of the dispatch in Stream...

2008-04-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

DAMN YOU, DORITOS! DAMN YOU TO HELL!

My colleague and buddy Zack Sultan has a brilliant piece in Stream today about his disdain for user-generated contests. He uses Doritos' Super Bowl ad campaign as his main example. An excerpt:

"The Doritos Model confers genuine benefits on the participant, even beyond the promise of interstellar publicity and hefty cash prices. Making an ad sharpens the focus of many young filmmakers who don't yet know how to use their freedom wisely (witness the gray sludge of scantly edited and conceptualized web-cam dispatches that clog the arteries of most video sharing sites). Submissions to these contests are frequently more thoughtfully constructed, and even more artful, than the typical 'auteur' project you stumble across on YouTube."

2008-04-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

IN HARMONY'S WAY

Much time has passed since Larry Clark discovered Harmony Korine skateboarding in Washington Square Park and hired him to write "Kids." In its wake, Korine exploded into the mainstream as a radical artist with a bad boy streak. His first two features, "Gummo" and the Dogme '95 entry "Julian Donkey-boy," divided critics and furthered his reputation as a fiercely independent figure. Just when his world seemed to be moving too fast, Korine left New York City for his native home in Nashville, got married and made a new movie to reflect his comparatively happier state of mind.

"Mister Lonely" stars Diego Luna as a disillusioned Michael Jackson impersonator whisked off by a faux Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) to a strangely fascinating commune of like-minded characters. In a separate storyline, Werner Herzog plays a priest whose team of nuns inexplicably learns how to fly. In e-mail exchanges over several months and during an interview last week in New York City (where "Mister Lonely" is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival prior to its May 2 release), Korine discussed the themes of the movie, his general filmmaking philosophies, and the dubious case of the Malingerers. IFC First Take opens "Mister Lonely" in limited release Friday.

indieWIRE: Have your expectations for the way the film is received changed since last year's Cannes premiere?

Harmony Korine: I try not to think about it too much. I have never been good at gauging reactions to my films. I remember thinking "Gummo" would be embraced by the public in much the same way as "Bambi" was when it first came out. I am always wrong about such things.

iW: There's a point in the film when the story gets significantly bleaker. Did you always intend to have reality intrude on the movie's surreal sense of beauty?

HK: Yes, this is one of the central themes of the film. Reality always seems to trounce the dream. Nothing too good lasts too long. Fuck it and enjoy while you can.

Read the rest of the interview in indieWIRE...

2008-04-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: A TIMELY SELECTION

NEW YORK, New York -- A web celebrity making his big screen debut, a pioneer of internet-based film marketing who keeps making small movies, and two remarkably original animated features that only their radical creators could think up: Such are the joys of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. After opening last Wednesday with Baby Mama, the massive New York City gathering premiered dozens of tiny independent titles, many of which arrived with the sort of unlikely back stories you'll never find in Hollywood fare.

Bart Got a Room tells an amusing if familiar coming-of-age story, sporting strong performances from William H. Macy, Cheryl Hines and newcomer Steven Kaplan--but YouTube star Brandon Hardesty steals the show in a supporting role. Daniel Myrick, already in history books as co-director of The Blair Witch Project, continues working on an independent scale with his supernatural thriller The Objective. Famed indie animator Bill Plympton has ventured into deeply complicated morality issues with his painstakingly rendered noir Idiots and Angels, while cartoonist Nina Paley brings years of Flash experience to fruition in her provocative feature Sita Sings the Blues. I won't try to argue that any of these projects share similar themes, because they don't. However, fitting the standard for a well-programmed festival, this quartet bears the fruits of individual efforts and unflagging, singular ambition.

Read the rest in Stream...

2008-04-28T05:33:00.000-07:00

A MEKAS MENTALITY

In fifty years of tooling around, Jonas Mekas hasn’t changed his groove. Once the Super 8 camera provided him with the means to capture New York in all its gritty permutations, and now the mobility of cheap digital technology has made this goal even easier. Writing in his film column for the Village Voice in 1963, Mekas predicted that “the day is close when the 8mm home movie footage will be collected and appreciated as beautiful folk art, like songs and the lyrical poetry that was created by the people.” More than a prophetic statement, it was a declaration of aesthetic intent. Ever the fierce guardian of independent cinema, shielding it from the deleterious pressures of studio product, Mekas recognized cinematic redemption in the formal properties of thriftiness.

Read the rest in the new issue of Reverse Shot...

2008-04-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

ERROL MORRIS AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDEFor close to thirty years, Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris has consistently churned out some of the most provocative inspections of the American psyche ever put on film. His work is always profound, whether it's existential, political or personal: He uses animal death to explore the transience of all life in Heaven's Gate, explores the psychology of working in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and launches straight into the concept of war criminality with The Fog of War, which finally won him an Oscar.

Now, he's back in the ring of topicality with Standard Operation Procedure, an in-depth study of the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal with testimonies from practically all the soldiers featured in the infamously photographs. A highly stylized work of forensic cinema, with a haunting score by Danny Elfman, Standard Operating Procedure (which opens on Friday) gets a special screening tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival, where Morris will attend and take questions. I caught up with him at a Manhattan hotel yesterday for a pointed discussion about the way new technology has affected his work.

Read the rest of the interview in Stream...

2008-04-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

DOING IT DALLAS STYLE

Still reeling from SXSW, I headed back down to Texas last week for the AFI Dallas International Film Festival, covering the young gathering in two pieces that are up now at indieWIRE: Read about some of the small discoveries here, and various recuts and undistributed stuff here.

While the town isn't nearly as chaotically energizing as Sundance, it's still a great environment for watching movies with general audiences. Thanks to John Wildman, Levi Elder and the rest of the AFI Dallas team for helping me out.

As I mention in the second dispatch, Polyphonic Spree played a kickass show at the House of Blues on Saturday night. Here's a sample, courtesy of yours truly:

2008-03-04T16:22:00.000-08:00

SETTING THE FLOW FOR STREAM

Above: WonderlandStream.com

I'm spending a lot of time now contributing to the development of a new online magazine called Stream, which covers filmmaking from an online perspective. That means it champions filmmakers willing to push the boundaries of new media to get their work seen (our models are people Lance Weiler, the Four Eyed Monsters team, and other people not scare of using the web as a primary distribution and marketing tool). The magazine is attached to a highly original online video site called Wonderland. Surf on over and check 'em both out.

2008-02-29T21:41:00.000-08:00

TOON TRIAL

Brett Morgen talks Chicago 10

Brett Morgen's "Chicago 10" revisits the tragic events outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when Yippie protestors were brutally beaten by police officers during a protest riot. Morgen, who co-directed "The Kid Stays in the Picture," takes an unconventional route in re-counting this tragic piece of American history in the '60s, telling the story of the subsequent trial as a cartoon (with voiceover work by Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo and others), and blending it with footage of the riots. In the interview, Morgen shares his experince with showing the film to both the young and mature alike, and why he' sick of why people ask him about Chicago 10 vs. 7. The movie opened the Sundance Film Festival in 2007 and hits theaters this weekend via Roadside Attractions.

indieWIRE: You've been making a lot of effort to generate youth interest in the film. Was this always the plan?

Brett Morgen: The social outreach was very youth-oriented, but the trailer, to me, is not very youth-oriented. In terms of distribution, part of the challenge for "Chicago 10" has been trying to nail down the core audience. I made the film, somewhat obviously, for a youth audience. The reaction that we had from Sundance from most distributors was, "We love the film, we think this film will play like gangbusters for kids, it's going to cost us $10 million to market it and we don't know if they're going to show up." The more conservative approach to marketing this film is to go for the boomers.

Read the rest of the interview in indieWIRE...

2008-02-29T11:49:00.000-08:00

LOONEY PROTEST

Chicago 10

With the desperate street theater enshrouding the last Republican National Convention already looking like a retreating nightmare, political protestation has surely entered a new era. Whether he’s pure rhetoric or the real thing, Barack Obama gets crowds bouncing with a positive streak: The “Yes We Can!” campaign has an inclusive ring that such polarizing edicts as “Four More Years” can’t touch. Finally, feisty young liberals can dance to an upbeat tune. The question of how long until the record starts skipping is secondary to whether or not it means anything in the first place. Chicago 10, Brett Morgen’s highly original documentary about the Yippie massacre outside the Democratic National Convention of 1968, reminds us that this isn’t the first time vivacity, rather than urgency, dictated activism.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-29T11:48:00.001-08:00

SEALED OFF

Jar City

As procedural thrillers go, the Icelandic drama Jar City is better than the average American genre entry, but that’s not saying much. Baltasar Kormákur directs this dark investigative work like a heavy contemplation of identity, where the solution is secondary to the atmosphere. Miles away from the David Fincher school of by-the-numbers solutions, the movie finds its center in murky ambiguity.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-29T11:45:00.000-08:00

A LITTLE BIT OF THE ULTRA-VIOLENCE

Violent Saturday

Melodrama abounds in Richard Fleisher’s Violent Saturday, the incessantly amusing 1955 noir screening this week at Film Forum, but it’s basically a red herring. Much like Dog Day Afternoon did two decades later, Violent Saturday gives the bank robbery an ensemble touch, with a story set in the kind of petite town that opens up nicely to vignettes. Most of the movie consists of build up, but the payoff makes it worth the wait. The residents struggle with soap opera woes, but the glorious Cinemascope—and the threat of something major lurking around the bend—elevate their plights. The would-be robbers, lead by a calculated Stephen McNally and the hilariously mean-spirited Lee Marvin, have concocted the perfect plan. It’s only fitting that they’re eventually thwarted by the innocence they hope to outwit.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-27T11:37:00.000-08:00

QUEENS KID

Chop Shop interview with Ramin Bahrani

Ramin Bahrani looked ecstatic when his sophomore feature, Chop Shop, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Turning around to face the cheering crowd, the New York–based filmmaker was greeted by an enthusiastic Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian auteur whose neorealist aesthetic had a profound impact on the 32-year-old Bahrani. His debut, 2005’s Man Push Cart, told the solemn story of a fallen Pakistani rock star resigned to selling coffee on the streets of New York. Chop Shop (opening this week at Film Forum) is another localized tragedy, documenting the struggles of an impoverished 12-year-old Latino (Alejandro Polanco) slaving away in a Queens-based auto-body shop and coping with the desperation of his older sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzales). Bahrani discussed his original method and the larger purpose of his art.

Read the rest of the interview in New York Press...

2008-02-27T11:34:00.000-08:00

MEDIA AS MASSACRE

The Signal

Technology is one of the few major preoccupations of modern society that predates 2001. At the box office, sci-fi dread has a populist appeal: The Matrix imagined life as a computer-processed nightmare, and Minority Report suggested imperfection in the utopian dream of systematically ending violence. The recent commercial success of Cloverfield showed that Hollywood could easily exploit 9/11 anxieties for entertainment value, overruling the need for narratives exploring the frighteningly intangible threat of media saturation. Fortunately, there’s The Signal, the brilliant independent production from a close-knit gang of Atlanta-based filmmakers released this week. It takes this frequently neglected issue to task with McLuhanean efficiency, but it’s also one badass horror film.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-15T08:58:00.000-08:00

GOREY GATHERING

The Lost

Before Chris Sivertson guided Lindsay Lohan through the unintentionally hilarious highlight of her career in I Know Who Killed Me, he had already developed a proficient style of visceral filmmaking in his preceding directorial effort, The Lost. Viewing this earlier independent work gives context to the big-screen joke that followed it: Say what you want about the amazingly miscalculated sequences that turn I Know Who Killed Me into an epic highlight reel of craptastic abuse, but there was a definite skill to the splendiferous sleaze. There’s even more of it in The Lost, which screens February 13 at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in anticipation of a March DVD release.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

FINDING FORMAN

Milos Forman: A Retrospective

The funny moments in a Milos Forman movie are nearly indistinguishable from the sad ones. Not a prophet of doom as much as a chronicler of contemporary despair, Forman meshes satire with realism and wields irony as a cultural weapon. From his early efforts as a progenitor of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s through his landmark contributions to the golden age of American cinema in the 1970s and continuing in his recent works, Forman has maintained a consistently dour tone. The humor emerges as a natural reflex—nervous laughter over the uncertainty of our times.

Read more in New York Press...

2008-02-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

RESURRECTING ROMERO

Diary of the Dead

As a cinematic pioneer, George A. Romero remains uniquely selective. For nearly 40 years, the father of the modern zombie movie contributed a humble quartet of undead squalor to the newly revived genre, applying anthropological focus to the collapse of civilization. In his latest entry, Diary of the Dead, the aging director returns to his starting point and sets the now-legendary story of a zombie outbreak in the present. The times have changed, but his unflinching portrait of humanity’s innately self-destructive tendencies hasn’t frayed a bit.

For his fifth outing, Romero chose to ditch the original timetable: The first four zombie films, beginning with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and culminating with Land of the Dead in 2005, adhered to a chronological progression. The world gradually adapted to its debilitating plague, and so did the infected. In Diary, Romero pits the zombie epidemic against the digital quirks of the new millennium (the survivors download a news report of the outbreak off the web), which completely shatters the real-time logic of the earlier entries. In doing so, however, he makes a valiant attempt to resurrect their original impact.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-15T08:52:00.000-08:00

MOTION SICKNESS

Jumper

Doug Liman is no John Woo. Where the Hong Kong émigré tears through scenery and plot alike with a "ballet of bullets" in his mindlessly gripping action productions, Liman creates a more generalized choreography of motion. From Go to ridiculously overblown studio products like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the director tells stories with constant forward motion. Whether it's running, punching, fucking, combusting or any other spectacularly expeditious movement, Liman's movies progress with the incessant need to move from point to point, sequence to sequence, without letting the story get in the way.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...

2008-02-15T08:47:00.000-08:00

UNDERSTANDING THE BATTLE

Ezra

"War is a crime," says the traumatized teenage lead in Ezra, "but I did not start it." Standing before a hardened “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in Sierra Leone to answer for crimes of brutality he committed as a soldier for an unnamed warring faction that kidnapped him as child, Ezra (played with measured intensity by Mamoudu Turay Kamara) is persistently direct. His world, however, never coalesces with such specificity. Alternating between Ezra's militant upbringing and the trial where he must confront it, the movie refuses to establish a real location or political backdrop. Although it's clearly set in South Africa, Ezra's sweeping declarations could refer to anywhere. Vaguely situated in the Twilight Zone of national unrest, the main trapping of Ezra is imprecision.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...

2008-02-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

REMEMBERING ROY

Roy Scheider, the actor perhaps best known for his lead role in Jaws but also responsible for many memorable performances of the last three decades, died yesterday in Arkansas. He was 75.

To me, Scheider’s passing has far greater reverberations than the untimely demise of Heath Ledger. It signals the loss of a major artist whose fully developed body of work remains wholly distinct from the formulaic trajectory of so many leading men. He was refreshingly believable as the hardened police chief vainly attempting to guard an unsuspecting town from the monstrous creature lurking off shore in Steven Spielber's 1975 classic. And yet Hollywood formula didn’t sit that well with him: You could find him as a pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman’s withdrawn sidekick in The French Connection, but never a one-man army or incredulous hustler. The Jaws sequel was his sole miscalculation, but he followed it up with All that Jazz, Bob Fosse’s surrealist musical that remains potent to this day. The vibrant movie concludes with the show-stopping “Bye Bye Life,” where Scheider’s Fosse-like character bodes farewell to a troubled existence with a mixture of excitement and melancholia. It could be played at the actor’s funeral.

Read the rest of the tribute in New York Press...

2008-02-11T08:57:00.000-08:00

WHITE BOY HUMOR

Trevor Moore and his colleagues in the raunchy sketch comedy group Whitest Kids U’Know were early viral sensations, posting videos of their offbeat bits online during the baby days of YouTube. They got a lot of media coverage last year when a Budweiser ad featured a slapping joke that seemed heavily derived from their own work, but that was hardly a hindrance. The group has developed a steady group of fans that allowed their upstart stature to solidify into a career. Now they’re minor television stars, with a movie project that just wrapped and the televised version of their performance beginning its second season on IFC tonight at 11 p.m. Trevor spoke with New York Press about the experiences of then and now.

Read more in New York Press...

2008-02-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

THE BAND PLAYS ON

The Band's Visit

Eran Korlirin has not made a political statement with his debut feature, The Band’s Visit, but it still maintains an unavoidable topicality. The Israeli filmmaker stuffs his motley characters into a cheerfully simplistic jam: A whimsical bunch of Egyptian brass musicians en route to the Arab arts center become stranded in a vapid Israeli settlement, where they make awkward attempts to play nice with the hardened locals. Deadpan hilarity ensues—with a few healthy doses of melancholia—but the shadow of foreign animosity enshrouds every quirky vignette-like sequence, precipitating a metaphor stronger than anything overt about Korlirin’s breezy intentions.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

THE HILTON CONDITION

The Hottie and the Nottie
Fool's Gold

Sometimes it’s the title, and sometimes the star—but in the case of The Hottie and the Nottie, both affect the perception of the movie as a zestfully lightheaded affair. The marketing gods haven’t lied to you, but they have fudged some of the details. Paris Hilton plays the same brainless set of curves that her media-saturated persona implies, but the doltish image nearly works in the context of this acutely slight romantic comedy. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly good, but certain measured elements of the genre create something surprisingly passable.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2008-02-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

HOW BACH GOT HIS GROOVE BACK

The Silence Before Bach

If classical music were a weapon, tranquility would be its ammo of choice. With the capacity to lull listeners into utter complacency, the lighter works of classical composers tactfully disarm the senses. In The Silence Before Bach, Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella examines the art and craft of making music with the same lightness of being emanating from the art itself. There’s no plot, action or anticipation, but Portabella holds our attention by tracking the connecting strands of sound.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...

2008-02-01T09:19:00.001-08:00

SUNDANCE SHUFFLE

A recap.

Everyone at the Sundance Film Festival this year agreed: It’s no easy task to tell a good story. There’s always reason to complain about the annual Park City gathering for growing commercialized, overpartied or just too damn cold—but the recent spate of rants focused on the movies. While the documentary categories gleamed with calculated topicality and observant portraiture, quality among the narrative features was sparse. Fortunately, a relatively barren creative landscape left ample room for several contemplative works to blossom as heralded discoveries, and only a few remain in the chilly festival void without theatrical distribution.

Read the rest of the recap in New York Press...

2008-02-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

CHICK FLICK GOES EAST

Caramel

If the gently amusing Lebanese romcom Caramel primarily intends to neutralize the mass media perception of its home country, then the deed is done. Considering that Lebanon has been represented at the movies in recent years with deleteriously suggestive titles like In the Battlefields and Under the Bombs, the effervescent aura of Nadine Labaki’s debut feature suggests an alternative perception of Middle Eastern life. In this light ensemble piece, it looks like anywhere else. Almost.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

2007-12-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

BITING THE BULLET

Oswald's Ghost

The selling point of Oswald’s Ghost, Robert Stone’s documentary about the enigmatic blue collar Texan generally regarded as the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is its refusal to dispute the safest assumption. Stone doesn’t argue in favor of Lee Harvey Oswald’s innocence, nor does he make an attempt at the tired route of disproving the lone gunman theory. Those and other radical notions are put to the test with a collage of talking heads (mostly journalists) threaded throughout the movie, but Stone isn’t championing a revisionist history—he’s merely fascinated by it. Rather than endorsing conspiracy theories, Oswald’s Ghost studies them as anger-driven symptoms of cultural obsession.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-12-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

FAMILIAL BRUTALITY

The Savages

Whether presented as entertainment, drama or entertaining drama, death has maintained a longstanding relationship with cinema. But when it dictates the story, rather than complementing it, a severe case of tonal imbalance tends to overlap the rest of the picture. In The Savages, Tamara Jenkins’ sophomore feature after 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills, the morbidity conveyed by a pair of grown siblings coping with their father’s dying days practically qualifies as grief porn—but, since the movie only teeters on the brink of a pity party without relishing the mood, the grief doesn’t venture beyond the point of softcore sadness.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-12-01T14:09:00.000-08:00

PLAYING WITH PUPPETS

Protagonist

Confused minds think alike in Jessica Yu’s Protagonist—or, at least, that’s what we’re supposed to believe. Yu’s analytical documentary has an intentionally narrow view of human narratives, lumping together the misguided journeys of four men to highlight the conceptual parallels between them. Rather than letting the contrast stand alone, Yu ties things together with a slyly academic approach, integrating scenes with wooden puppets to re-enact the plot and cite thematically relevant passages from fifth century playwright Euripides. The technique actually suits these oddball tales, which come readymade for grim dissection.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-12-01T14:05:00.000-08:00

GETTING GOTHAMIZED

No one can accuse the Independent Feature Project of rigidity. Faced with a chorus of conflicting cheers and boos over last year's Gotham Awards nominees and winners, IFP's board sat down and scrutinized the reviews of their most visible, annual affair. Defining independent film may be a tired subject, but defining what deserves honoring at the Gothams -- which will be held at Brooklyn's Steiner Studios tonight -- is a subject up for yearly debate, and yearly change. Above all, board members wanted to avoid the free-for-all process that led to the nomination of 2005's "The Departed" as best feature.

Read the rest of the feature in The Hollywood Reporter...

2007-11-24T09:35:00.000-08:00

TYLER PERRY CHARACTERS SHOW CRUISE WHO'S BOSS

Eerie, isn't it?

2007-11-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

FOGGY LOGIC

The Mist

The most annoying performance of the year is in our midst, and it’s in The Mist. Frank Darabont’s adaptation of the Stephen King short story about goofy-looking monsters that invade an isolated town features Marcia Gay Harden as a haranguing prophet of doom so obnoxiously over-the-top that she makes Jim Jones look like Jesse Jackson. Harden’s Mrs. Carmondy would bring the whole production down if it weren’t already flawed for other reasons.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

RENEWING NORMAN

Who is Norman Lloyd?

A movie called Who is Norman Lloyd? better answer its own question. Fortunately, the conventional documentary using that title does just that. A kind, engaging portrait of the 94-year-old veteran actor Lloyd, the movie (directed by Matthew Sussman) applies the Forest Gump effect to show business, revisiting seminal moments in the history of stage and screen production while inserting Lloyd into the legacies of widely acknowledged artisans like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir.

Read the rest of the review (incorrectly attributed to Armond White) in the New York Press...

2007-11-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

CRIPPLED GIMMICK

IT IS FINE! Everything is Fine.

If Crispin Glover made his latest experimental odyssey to satisfy his own grotesque dreams, it would be easy to bemoan the senselessly twisted vision as it appears in the plot. But IT IS FINE! Everything is Fine, the second entry in Glover’s “It” trilogy (preceded by What is It? in 2005) derives a nightmarish sexual fantasy straight from the source.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-15T11:32:00.000-08:00

REVISITING REITMAN

His directorial prowess led to the endearing marriage of slapstick comedy and supernatural lunacy known as “Ghostbusters,” but once upon a time, Ivan Reitman was merely a scared little Jewish boy. He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1946, shortly after his parents, Leslie and Clara, barely managed to survive the Holocaust. Their life together in Central Europe fell apart when Clara was sent to Auschwitz and Leslie became a fugitive. Following the war, the Stalinization of Czechoslovakia left virtually no tolerance for the religiously observant Reitmans, and the family made a desperate escape to the decidedly more hospitable environment of Toronto. Arriving there in 1950, Leslie and Clara found decent work at a local Laundromat. Two decades later, Leslie opened a carwash. “We came here penniless. I didn’t speak the language,” Ivan Reitman recalled shortly before being inducted into the Canadian Walk of Fame earlier this year. “There’s something about being from a smaller place that makes you more polite.”

Read the rest of the story in the Forward...

2007-11-14T12:22:00.001-08:00

HEADING SOUTH FOR THE NARRATIVE

Southland Tales

Even if Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales weren't so fiercely politicized, it would still be a tremendously polarizing work of art. Set in an alternate 2006 reality where World War III began the previous year with the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Abilene, Tx., and society has become riddled with paranoid surveillance, the film succeeds as a series of contextualized paraphrases rather than a unified story. Kelly creates vague situations just crazy enough to function according to their own logic, allowing momentary lapses in its steadfast incoherence; much of Southland Tales relies on paradigmatic symbolism, easy to read in individual clauses despite not quite gelling together.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...

2007-11-14T12:17:00.000-08:00

BELIEVING IN BILLY

What Would Jesus Buy?

Early in the new documentary What Would Jesus Buy? (opening this weekend at Cinema Village), New York City staple Reverend Billy holds up a stuffed Disney character and declares, “Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist!” to a very bemused department store crowd. Preachers love to parse the curious nature of sin, but few pundits have honed a unique and broadly appealing stance of the caliber put forth by the heated founder of New York’s Chuch of Stop Shopping. With a spirited choir echoing his rants, the Reverend (aka Bill Talen) rallies against the misguided cultural marriage of religion and economic consumption. It’s hardly your average fire-and-brimstone rant: Neatly embedded in the Reverend’s strident enunciations of unholy behavior lies the clear-cut delivery of brilliant performance art.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

PLAYING WITH THE WRONG TOYS

Mister Magorium's Wonder Emporium

There was more energy, emotion and excitement in Christopher Walken’s toy store song-and-dance sequence with Michelle Pfeiffer in Hairspray than all the cheeriness and bright colors filling the screen throughout Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. A misguided kid flick that’s exuberant without achieving coherence, Magorium follows the waning days of the titular toy peddler (Dustin Hoffman), a strange wizardly fellow planning to transfer ownership of his magical shop to his cutesy assistant (Natalie Portman). Writer-director Zach Helm fills scenes with the organic trinkets in Magorium’s store, but he doesn’t give it any greater significance beyond the hodgepodge of clever special effects. Hoffman puts on the weirdest performance of his career, playing the crazed Magorium with vigor matched only by his goofy hairstyle, but there’s nothing in the story to match that otherworldly sprightliness. He’s like Willy Wonka without the chocolate.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

DISEASED ADAPTATION

Love in the Time of Cholera

Adaptations tend to pare down their sources, hacking away at the verbose qualities of the written word in order to extrapolate something movie-like. In Mike Newell’s envisioning of Love in the Time of Cholera, however, much of the production effort seems dedicated to synopsizing the prose of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel. The result is an extravagant costume drama with a heavy bag of visual splendor, but nothing that really distinguishes it as an original work of art. Scenes play out as though the descriptive rhythms of Márquez’s style were scrawled on the back of lavish animated postcards.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

PIGGING SCABS

A great cover story in the New York Press reveals the desperate people who responded to a phony Craigslist ad seeking writers willing to work while the WGA continues its strike. A swift, amusing read and a very original way to tackle a story in danger of growing old before its central issues get resolved. I snapped the cover photo (a variation on the one above) during a visit to the strike rally outside the News Corp. building last week.

2007-11-11T11:35:00.000-08:00

KILLING AND CHRISTMAS

Fred Claus/Divorce, Italian Style

There’s no question that Fred Claus, an insipid comedy from Warner Bros. about Santa’s wayward sibling, has all the ingredients of a bad movie, but the flaws are revealing of a larger problem. Unable to sustain its one-note premise, the story foolishly revels in the mythology of Christmas to mask comedic vapidity. The trick doesn’t work. With Vince Vaughn in autopilot as foul-mouthed clod Fred, the movie carries the illusion of subversive storytelling, but it really plays nice.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-11T11:30:00.000-08:00

LEARNING TO BREATH

Choking Man

In Steve Barron’s Choking Man, an ultra-low budget production about urban alienation and immigrant despair, griminess is a form of solace. As the soft-spoken protagonist, an Ecuadorian kitchen worker named Jorge (Octavio Gómez), slowly wastes away washing dishes in a Queens diner, the leftovers from patrons’ plates dominate his field of vision and catalyze his daydreams. Barron uses bright yellow animations to represent Jorge’s avoidance of his mundane reality, a dreary world of brown and grey tones where his own presence never feels quite solid. Language and timidity are his primary foes. His vindication comes from abstractions.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-11T11:27:00.000-08:00

PENCIL DRAMA

Steal a Pencil for Me

Holocaust survival tales have never lacked dramatic tension. History is an easy crutch when it comes to the construction of hazardous scenarios, whether they’re profound or facile: Both Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful build staying power out of their relationships to events beyond their specific storylines. In Steal a Pencil for Me, the new documentary about a couple whose concentration camp experiences were preceded by their romantic entanglement, the survival narrative pulls together an ubiquitous significance, whether or not you actually care about the couple’s romantic adhesion.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-11-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

COEN COUNTRY

No Country for Old Men

The summative superlatives being aimed at No Country for Old Men belie the film's individual significance. An adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of twisted thievery and murder in a decaying corner of West Texas in 1980, the movie only shares superficial qualities with the previous work of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. As a result, the stream of hyperbole declaring No Country to be the Coen brothers’ finest accomplishment -- accolades (including my own) that have enshrouded its reputation since it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year -- don't do justice either to the film or its creators' oeuvre.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...

2007-09-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve barely landed in Toronto and I’m already being reminded why I’m here. “So,” begins my portly middle aged cab driver. He seems to speak English fluently, once I manage to decipher his dense French accent. “You’re here for the film festival, aren’t you?” Damn, am I that obvious?

Now hopelessly unveiled as a foreigner, I have no reservations about admitting that it’s my first time visiting the city. My affable chauffeur promises an informal tour along the way to my hotel, but the best he can muster is pointing out the “nice view of skyscrapers” from the highway and the arena where the Blue Jays play.

OK, one thing is immediately clear: The surrounding environment of the Toronto International Film Festival doesn’t offer serene naturalism like Sundance or glimmering European cohesiveness a la Cannes, but it does have a hefty reputation as one of the world’s finest annual gatherings of top notch film industry vets and casual cinephiles alike. It’s also one of the last big festivals of the year (Telluride wrapped last week) and the final major one to feature world premieres (the New York Film Festival, which fills the last week of this month, has no premieres).

There are plenty of awesome-sounding movies on schedule this year, with buzz circulating faster than bees in turbulence (sorry, easy comparison). Hotly anticipated titles include I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ esoteric ode to Bob Dylan, Sean Penn’s adaptation of Into the Wild, and The Visitor, an intriguing immigration drama from the director of a sweet indie film starring Peter Dinklage that came out a few years ago called The Station Agent. In between are oddities like Werner Herzog’s Antarctica doc Encounters at the End of the World and some Canadian film called Young People Fucking. It’s going to be an interesting nine days.

I vow to anyone dedicated enough to check out my regular updates at this here site that I’ll keep you informed on nearly everything at TIFF that zips past my retina at 24 frames per second (or something like 30 frames, if it’s shot on digital video—precision counts in movieland.). Present time constraints prohibit me from going into too much detail at the moment, but let me just throw this out there: There are 271 feature length films from 55 countries screening at the festival this year (thank you, TIFF fact sheet). Of those, I’ve caught 33 titles at various other festivals around the globe, in addition to early press screenings in NYC and a few DVDs. That amounts to roughly 12% of the festival’s line up, which I figure isn’t a bad way to get things going. I’ll be lucky to raise that figure past 30% by the end of the event.

I’m going to keep a log of everything I’ve seen, complete with brief remarks that may vary in terms of their level of critical finesse (it all depends on my respective levels of fatigue and timeliness), but the evolving list should give you a sense of the festival’s variety and quality, and hopefully offer a peak at some neat low budget discoveries. For now, I bid you adieu—but first, in no particular order other than the arbitrary way that I wrote them down, a rundown of what I’ve seen so far. It’s just an assemblage of words at the moment, but I promise to fill in the blanks soon:

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

THE BRAVE ONE

VERY YOUNG GIRLS

FINISHING THE GAME

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

JIMMY CARTER: MAN FROM PLAINS

COUNTERFEITERS

ALEXANDRA

CHOP SHOP

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT

MISTER LONELY

THE BAND’S VISIT

PARANOID PARK

RUN FATBOY RUN

SMILEY FACE

THE VIRGIN SPRING

THE POPE’S TOILET

AND ALONG COME TOURISTS

THE MAN FROM LONDON

THE VOYAGE OF THE RED BALLOON

YOU, THE LIVING

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

PERSEPOLIS

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

THE BANISHMENT

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

SECRET SUNSHINE

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING

WITH YOUR PERMISSION

CHRONIQUE D’UN ETE

THE ORPHANAGE

XXY

OPERATION FILMMAKER

FUGITIVE PIECES

2007-04-16T13:51:00.000-07:00

AGAINST THE GRIND

“Why is it called Grindhouse?” The question came from the back of the room during a panel discussion at Austin’s SXSW Film Festival last month. Robert Rodriguez peaked out from behind his Mexican fedora and didn’t hesitate. “Grindhouse confused people at first,” he replied. “They thought, ‘Well, it’s a horror movie called Grindhouse, so there must be a house where they grind people up.’ It’s called that because of grindhouse cinemas. They were called that—I think that the reference was that they would show double or triple features that were just grinded together.”

Rodriguez—who collaborated with noted cinephile Quentin Tarantino to create a retro double bill—nailed the salient answer, minus the gritty details. The micro-budgeted productions of grindhouse yore didn’t have the strength of affluent distribution companies to bring them wide audiences, partly explaining why they ended up in places like the trashy theaters sprinkled throughout Times Square. There they were ground together with pornography and primarily watched by lewd characters in search of dark rooms to indulge their hedonism. If the recent box office disappointment of Grindhouse itself recalls the miniscule awareness of original grindhouse movies, then the movie has managed a brilliant bout of performance art. It helps define the B-movie appeal: Devout audiences are willing to sit through anything thrown their way, as long as it gives them a good time. The people who choose to see Grindhouse—and stick around—prove their dedication. In that sense, grindhouse refers to a state of mind—sort of like New York, where the theaters left an indelible imprint on the Deuce.

Read the rest of the article in the New York Press...

2007-04-16T13:46:00.000-07:00

NO THRILLS

Disturbia

With his 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated that nobody was qualified to revisit the director’s work except Hitchcock himself. Great art generally doesn’t fare well under anyone’s guidance other than that of its source. Just take a look at some of the recent examples of mangled riffs on Hitchcockian concepts: Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho felt vapid and aimless; a made-for-TV take on Rear Window, starring wheelchair-bound Christopher Reeve, could use the subtitle Death of Superman. So, I’m not too pumped for the reported studio remakes of The Birds or Strangers on a Train.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-04-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

FAST FOOD

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters

Fans of Cartoon Network’s late night Adult Swim programming recognize “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” as a colossal achievement in surrealist aesthetics. The show zips through bite-sized animated storylines with incessantly zany inspiration, and the credits roll before you can wrap your head around the whole absurd ordeal. Centering on the peculiar adventures of sentient fast food, the average episode builds to a crescendo of silliness by taking various muddled premises to their overwhelmingly bizarre extremes. Always intentionally ridiculous, it’s usually great fun—and, for its core contingency of baked viewers, really profound, man. Not to condescend to the faithfully stoned: “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” is a trip. Which makes its feature-length incarnation, aptly titled Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, into a befuddling journey.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-04-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

ROADS CONVERGE

Red Road

There’s no shortage of contenders when considering cinematic masterpieces to which the spectacularly unsettling drama, Red Road, deserves comparison. Critics have name-dropped a flurry of entries in the thriller genre to validate the movie’s immediate canonization: Rear Window, The Conversation and Michael Haneke’s Cache all make recurring appearances in the plethora of positive reviews. Considering its nuanced portrait of a troubled woman (Kate Dickie) engaged in voyeuristic obsession, Red Road undoubtedly earns its entrance into that prestigious crowd—but director Andrea Arnold insists on being coy in response to the accolades.

Read the rest of the feature in the New York Press...

2007-04-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

THE REAL WARHOL

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

He was doing just fine until he left Ohio and came to New York. That’s the verdict provided by the sister of quintessential avant-garde artist Jack Smith in Mary Jordan's inquisitive documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. Her perception of his life, as someone far away from the Sixties counterculture that famously birthed Andy Warhol, serves to explain both the radicalism that fueled Smith's work and the futility that ultimately led to his undoing. Jordan pulls together a variety of talking heads and combines them with plenty of footage from Smith's eclectic creative accomplishments, resulting in a fairly tame collage masquerading as a movie. But to parse such abstract and frequently confounding forms of expression requires a certain amount of sobriety, which Jordan competently provides.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...

2007-04-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

MOVIE MARRIAGE

After the Wedding

Defining the qualities that make actors into talented artists requires a clear understanding of the elements that create their range. Sean Connery, for example, will always play James Bond, which either helps or hurts his later work. Samuel L. Jackson has devolved into cartoon riffs on his earlier performances. Neither man demonstrates a lack of ability—but the specific limitations of their careers are predicated on the roles that appear to most appropriately suit their abilities. Danish actor Mads Mikkelson is a different story altogether. In the last few years, Mikkelson has played a dangerous Bond foil in Casino Royale, a thug seeking redemption in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher II and now portrays the soulful manager of an orphanage in Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding. That sort of chameleon versatility doesn’t come along very often.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-04-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT SAMMY

Budd Schulberg's classic novel What Makes Sammy Run? is the quintessential showbiz tale. Schulberg exposed the brand of selfish ego that beat at the heart of the Hollywood industry. It seems like perfect fodder for a motion picture--but even Ben Stiller couldn't seem to get it off the ground. Read more about it here.

2007-04-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

VULGAR. VISCERAL. VERHOEVEN.

It was late at night in Holland when Steven Spielberg called Paul Verhoeven, paving the way for one of the most insubordinate creative minds in the history of the movie business.

“He didn’t realize it was three o’clock in the morning,” recalls Verhoeven, now 68, looking back on the impetus that led to his immigration—and, eventually, indispensable Hollywood guilty pleasures like Basic Instinct. “I had a very nice conversation with him. He said, ‘Come to the United States. Your country’s much too small for you. You have to work here.’ It took me some time to conquer my fears, [but] finally I came, and he introduced me to several studios.”

Continue reading about Paul Verhoeven in the New York Press...

2007-03-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

CRAVEN NOT A COWARD

Wes Craven has been recognized as a leading horror director since the triumph of The Last House on the Left in 1972. He’s responsible for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, launching two of the most lucrative franchises in the history of the genre. In 2006, Alexandre Aja vividly remade The Hills Have Eyes, Craven’s classic tale of monstrous savages attacking a Californian family. The movie’s warm reception among horror fans stirred Craven to revisit the story he invented 20 years ago, so he cowrote The Hills Have Eyes 2 with his son Jonathan.

NYP: Horror is regarded within the industry as immensely profitable, which sometimes obscures the fact that making these movies is an artistic process. How do you go about presenting the creative elements of the horror genre?

Wes Craven: It doesn’t usually enter my thoughts. Once you start worrying about convincing people that what you’re doing is legitimate, you’re stultifying it. I think there’s been a gradual change where a lot of fans who fell in love with horror around the time of Nightmare on Elm Street are now either critics or studio guys. So, from around Red Eye—or maybe Scream—you talk to studio executives who are fans and have been all their lives. Before that, studio heads wouldn’t even be associated with it. They knew it made a lot of money, but you felt like once you left, they thought, “That guy must be really fucked up.”

Read the rest of my interview with Wes Craven in the New York Press...

2007-03-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

COLD OUTSIDE

First Snow

First-time director Mark Fergus’ slow-moving drama, First Snow, plays out like a vivid short story packed with shadowy characters and terse, involving scenes. Its central gimmick recalls the silly contrivances of EC Comics, with hints of supernatural elements providing a platform for a series of dreamy vignettes (appropriately, Fergus is one of the scribes on Marvel’s developing Iron Man feature). The filmmaker makes it work mainly by staying true to the seedy protagonist, a narrow-minded money-hound named Jimmy Starks (Guy Pearce) whose flimsy confidence slowly melts around him.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-03-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

HEADED SOUTH

If New York’s dense assemblage of moviegoers ever faces extinction, someone should call Austin for reinforcements. The youth-oriented city sports a flourishing film culture united by its Alamo Drafthouses, where audiences can order drinks and food from their seats without losing sight of the screen. Such multitasking suits Austin’s evolving South by Southwest Film Festival, which opened the nine-day movie and music orgy on March 9. Programmer Matt Dentler did a stellar job this year with a diverse selection primarily composed of documentary and horror cinema. The two areas of filmmaking have nothing immediately in common—save for microbudgets and inspired starving artists.

Continue reading about South by Southwest in the New York Press...

2007-03-15T20:48:00.000-07:00

GETTING HITCHED

Alfred Hitchcock: 3-Disc Collection

Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation has developed, over the years, into the legend of an essential genius. Masterpieces like Psycho are considered a part of the director’s body, glued to his physique alongside his trademark rotund silhouette. All that hype can contaminate the actual experience of his films. Hitchcock pioneered many of the suspense mechanisms that sustain contemporary genre filmmaking, but it’s tough to decipher how he manages to create such marvelous thrills when you’re already buying into his wizardry in the opening credits.

Fortunately, the origin story remains lucid: The recent Alfred Hitchcock Box Set helps give context to Hitchcock’s better known works. The collection contains five features (gloriously restored by Studio Canal) from Hitchcock’s early career in the United Kingdom. It’s a fascinating gathering of silent and early sound films originally released between 1928 and 1931, a few years before he made his pilgrimage to America. Die-hard Hitchcock fans will take issue with notable exceptions, including his breakout accomplishment, The Lodger. But anyone unfamiliar with this period in Hitchcock’s career will certainly marvel at early signs of his ingenuity.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-03-15T20:45:00.000-07:00

A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND

The Earrings of Madame De...

Ask any rabid cinephile: Max Ophüls’ The Earrings of Madame de… is a masterpiece of film form. A solemn romance set in early 20th century Paris, the story is tame and elegant, but Ophüls tells it with marvelous panache—all sweeping cameras and majestic mise-en-scene. I don’t buy Andrew Sarris’ assertion that this is “the greatest film of all time,” but its lyricism surely deserves attention: Earrings recounts tragedy with sincere attention to each of its characters. Nobody wins in the end, and you feel bad for everyone. But Ophüls combines an immersive atmosphere with fierce moral dilemmas so that the experience stays richly rewarding throughout.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-03-15T20:43:00.000-07:00

THE DEFINITION OF "IS"

Exterminating Angels

Audiences confused by the detailed sensuality in Exterminating Angels should understand something: French filmmaker Jean-Claude Brisseau has essentially created autobiographical porn. The director went to trial late last year to face charges from disgraced actresses who claimed he forced them to masturbate for him while auditioning for his 2002 thriller Secret Things (they didn’t land the roles). Indeed, Brisseau seems to have coaxed several women into pleasuring themselves during private rehearsal sessions, but if you believe the stance put forth in Angels, his motives were entirely professional. The court’s verdict was a suspended jail sentence and a hefty fine, but now viewers have the option of judging the case for themselves.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-03-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

MONSTER MASH

The Host

When a talented emerging filmmaker directs an inarguably great work, those keeping track of such things tend to make comparisons to antecedents. So it comes as no great surprise that, in the months following the North American premiere of The Host at the New York Film Festival, critics compared Korean director Bong Joon-ho to a Jaws-era Steven Spielberg. On the surface, all the signs are there: An unspeakably horrible monster emerges from the sea and terrorizes an entire city; bureaucratic red tape hinders the establishment's operation to save lives; only a brave few souls gather the wits to launch a grassroots campaign and face off against the deadly beast. But where Spielberg invented the language of the modern blockbuster, The Host brilliantly deconstructs it.

Continue reading about The Host in The Reeler...

2007-03-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

LOW BUDGET BATTLE
The story behind 300

When Zack Snyder presented his plans for adapting Frank Miller’s popular 300 comic book series to studio heads at Warner Bros., they expected another Gladiator. The plot suggested as much: An expressionistic retelling of the bloody Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC—which led to the decimation of the belligerent Spartan army at the hands of Persia’s enormous forces—Miller’s 300 plays out almost exclusively on the battlefield. Snyder, however, wasn’t interested in replacing Miller’s epic vision of chaos with expensive locations and stunts. Instead, the director envisioned a movie shot entirely in front of green and blue screens, adding the surrounding environment during postproduction. The final result brings to life the high contrast, densely colored landscapes of Miller’s book, engulfing viewers in a completely fabricated universe. The radical approach befuddled tradition-minded members of the Hollywood system, who viewed the pitch with typical concerns for budget and physical constraints.

“They were like, ‘Are you going to go to Morocco to shoot?’” recalls Snyder. “It’s sort of standard for them.” Snyder just went to Canada, used three small sets, and shot the whole thing on a relatively mild budget of $60 million. “We used a pretty basic technology,” he says. “Putting an actor in front of a screen is not a revolution. The weather man has the same basic technology.”

While computers have been inextricably bound to the blockbuster formula since Jurassic Park, Snyder’s project is the latest in a recent trend that introduces a new implementation of technology into the filmmaking process: While the simulated world plays a key role in the quality of the action sequences, the technique also finds quieter, dialogue-driven scenes placed within computerized environments. Given that anyone with access to basic editing programs can achieve greenscreen and bluescreen effects, Snyder’s chosen method has more in common with stage design than pricey special effects work.

Continue reading about 300 in the New York Press...

2007-03-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

LOST AND FOUND

Lost
Wednesdays @ 10:00 p.m., ABC

How many lame puns can you make out of the realization that ABC’s impenetrable drama “Lost” is losing ratings?

Exactly one, which explains the difficulty in quantifying the value of a show that battles television convention while simultaneously embracing it. When “Lost” premiered in late 2004, Americans had developed a newfound sense of ideological partitioning: Bush II gained reelection, the war abroad reached its first birthday and 9/11 seemed like a fever dream. Along came this fantastical show about a plane crash, of all things, that tapped into the nation’s universal sense of despair and confusion within the broader framework of isolation (being marooned on a mysterious desert island). Its initial success, retrospectively speaking, was inevitable.

Continue reading about "Lost" in the New York Press...

2007-02-28T14:08:00.000-08:00

CARTOON NETWORK

The fringes of pop culture converged at the Javitz Center for the New York Comic Con last weekend, creating a fan-filled orgy of awesomeness. Mainstream celebrity appearances (for example, Stephen Colbert promoting his irreverent cartoon Tek Jansen) were less noteworthy than the sheer celebration of synthesizing imagination with entertainment. Fame took a backseat to fandom, particularly when Kevin Smith moderated a panel featuring cast members from “Battlestar Galactica”: The characteristically frank filmmaker admitted that the show’s quality might be indirectly linked to his lack of involvement in its production.

Continue reading about New York Comic Con in the New York Press...

2007-02-28T14:05:00.000-08:00

SHOWCASING SHOHEI

Pimps, Pigs and Prostitutes: Shohei Imamura's Japan

The reason that Japanese New Wave filmmaker Shohei Imamura, who died last year at 79, never made a big splash in American is simple: Western audiences tend to enjoy their Far East entertainment with a strong dose of Orientalism. The director, whose massive body of work gets showcased in a comprehensive retrospective at the BAMcinematek starting this week March 2, handled sordid themes that could qualify him as Japan’s Martin Scorsese. Although such a comparison doesn’t take into account that Imamura emerged a generation earlier than his American equivalent and built a steady filmography that continued into the 21st century.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-02-28T14:03:00.000-08:00

DARK MATTERS

Black Sun

The idea that a documentary could assume the perspective of a blind man initially seems paradoxical. Movies, after all, are essentially a visual art form; remove the image and the remaining elements become an entirely different medium. Cinema had already made a global impact when audio became de rigueur for most productions in the late ’20s, and many people felt that talkies carried the transience of a passing fad. It’s nice to hear Al Jolson sing, but does anybody care to know what Charlie Chaplin sounds like? It takes the illusion of motion to involve audiences in the act of viewing.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-02-28T13:58:00.000-08:00

COMING OUT AND COMING DOWN

Grey Matters

How many times must we be subjected to opening montages of the New York City skyline before filmmakers realize that it’s a trite and pretentious device? True, Woody Allen's memorable introductory sequence to Manhattan, which displays every famous hotspot under the sun against George Gershwin’s inimitable "Rhapsody in Blue," holds its own as a lyrical expression of urbanity. But that's Woody Allen; his movies are off-putting when they’re not in New York. The first few minutes of Gray Matters showcase a slew of familiar architectural sights from the metropolitan area, with all the pizazz of a tourist brochure. It's enough to set eyes rolling even before the plot kicks in; and in this case, that’s saying something.

Read the rest of the review in The Reeler...

2007-02-22T08:29:00.000-08:00

INDECENT EXPLOSION

Days of Glory

War films almost unanimously adhere to the opposing tones of triumph and tragedy. (Dr. Strangelove and its jeering ilk deal more directly with the larger existential irony of an impending apocalypse.) The first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan tend to leave audiences feeling desecrated as the harrowing experience of D-Day becomes viscerally realized before them. From there, the movie begins a gradual uphill climb to the opposite end of the continuum. The final image, a magnificent American flag waving in the breeze, signifies the optimism in honoring the memories of fallen soldiers. Consider that model against Days of Glory (or Indigènes as it’s known overseas). This downbeat saga also recalls the heroism of World War II fighters who opposed their Nazi foe, but their efforts went unnoticed—and their sacrifices were forgotten.

Continue reading about Days of Glory in the New York Press...

2007-02-16T10:42:00.000-08:00

OF WEALTH AND WOES

Danny Glover set an appropriately contemplative tone for the sold-out crowd at Film Forum on Wednesday night: He kicked off the New York theatrical premiere of the improvisational drama Bamako by recalling his origins as a human rights activist. "When I was a young student, I read African Socialism," the veteran actor said, referring to the writings of the revered former Tanzanian president Julius Nyere. "It's the reason I ended up majoring in economics, [and] thinking that at some point I would go to Tanzania and work with the government in some capacity."

Then Glover -- who has, for every rash Lethal Weapon installment, donated twice as much effort to righteous global initiatives -- read an excerpt from his original inspiration. "What is needed is that the people care for each other's welfare," went the passage, in part. "It is not efficiency of production, nor the amount of wealth in a country, which makes millionaires; it is the uneven distribution of what is produced."

Continue reading about Bamako in The Reeler...

2007-02-15T21:39:00.000-08:00

EASY STREET

Avenue Montaigne

Call it the Robert Altman aesthetic: A large cast of diverse performers come together within the confines of a single, unifying location; their characters possess varying degrees of education in accordance with their age and class, and universal emotional turmoil unites their fraught experiences. It’s a daring proposition, but it can work beautifully (Altman’s Short Cuts) and disastrously (Paul Haggis’ Crash). The technique falls to the middle of this spectrum in Avenue Montaigne, a light movie with heavy intentions.

Read more about Avenue Montaigne in the New York Press...

2007-02-15T21:37:00.000-08:00

FALLING APART

The Decomposition of the Soul

November 9, 1989: Down went the Berlin Wall, dragging the weight of the entire German Democratic Republic along with it. Authoritarian governments fall hard, and this one hit rock bottom with the resounding thud of oppression that had lasted half a century. The government's clandestine security team, the Stasi, had developed wildly demoralizing techniques of deconstructing the ideological resolve of citizens imprisoned for supposedly harboring politically subversive opinions. When the regime collapsed, Stasi officials destroyed numerous incriminating documents, but for the prisoners subjected to the tortuous mind games, the experience remained firmly imprinted on their psyches. This cruel psychological permanence provides filmmakers Nina Toussaint and Massimo Ianetta with the abstract framework of The Decomposition of the Soul, an experimental documentary that fascinates despite its structural flaws.

Read more in The Reeler...

2007-02-07T14:26:00.000-08:00

THE SUNDANCE BID

The first rule of Sundance is that you talk about Sundance. A lot. More than 20 years have passed since Robert Redford’s institute for upstart filmmakers absorbed the annual responsibilities of the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and incessant chatter of industry and media types continues to circulate around the intimate resort town, full of sound and fury. It started, arguably, when the scraggly 26-year-old director Steven Soderbergh skyrocketed to national acclaim after the success of sex, lies, and videotape at the festival in 1989. Echoing the revitalized American cinema of the early ’70s, small movies suddenly appealed to studios. As the legend goes, Sundance became a launch pad for aspiring craftsmen eager to dive into the whirlwind of fame.

Continue reading about Sundance in the New York Press...

2007-02-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

SEDGWICK FACTORY

Factory Girl

Forget all that blabber about whether or not there’s real sex in Factory Girl. If Sienna Miller and Hayden Christensen really go all the way—their murky love scene makes that seem unlikely—it would be the most elegant thing about this misguided biopic. For all the appreciable intentions of director George Hickenlooper, you can get a better feel for the sad demise of Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick from the clips available on YouTube.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-01-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

SHOCKS YOU CAN'T REFUSE

Shockproof/Mafioso

Don’t get lost in the gimmickry of Shockproof. The 1949 noir is a cinematic ventriloquist act. Although directed by Douglas Sirk—still a few years away from crafting his trademark Technicolor melodramas—the conflict bears a crunchier bite than the suburban dissatisfaction later found in Imitation of Life and other Sirk classics—due to Samuel Fuller’s solo credit on the screenplay. Fuller penned a tragedy tracking ill-fated love between a parole officer and his client, the sort of hardboiled formula that the filmmaker would eventually perfect. He sold the script to a producer and the project landed in Sirk’s lap. The two men didn’t meet, and it seems that Fuller never even caught the final product (“I didn’t see Doug Sirk’s film—is he a good director?” Fuller asked an interviewer in 1967). The finished work contains recognizable flourishes from both contributors, but it turns to a sloppy blend.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...

2007-01-19T14:03:00.000-08:00

PARKED IN PARK CITY

I'm blogging at Sundance. Check it out.