LysLys Productions develops and produces a broad range of motion pictures and episodic entertainment. LysLys Productions’ principles draw from over two decades of experience in Hollywood that have produced motion pictures worldwide.
LysLys Productions’ CEO has had the pleasure of working with some of the finest talent in the world, many nominated for or winning Academy Awards.
For his debut feature Tom Quinn took the hours of footage he shot of family and friends talking about dealing with divorce for a psych class as inspiration to create a touching story that meshes domestic issues with the culture of his native South Philadelphia.
After placing 13th in Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade, which is held every New Year’s Day where local clubs in elaborate costumes compete for prizes and bragging rights, the South Philadelphia String Band are stuck in a rut as their losing ways have gone on for decades now. For Mike (Andrew Conway) and his son Jack (Greg Lyons) the pain doesn’t subside when they head home. Mike and his wife Lisa (MaryAnn McDonald) are separated and Jack and his younger sister Kat (Jennifer Welsh) are just starting to feel the tear in the family.
With a gritty handheld look, shot by Quinn, and great performances by Lyons and Welsh, the film follows a year in the life of the family as they struggle to stay together and Mike and Jack try to bring the string band back to its prominence. Quinn uses real Mummers and engrosses us in their community to create an authentic piece of regional filmmaking.
Along with directing and shooting, Quinn, a 25 New Faces alumni, also wrote the screenplay, edited, and produced the film (along with Steve Beal). Winner of the Grand Prize award at Slamdance in 2008, The New Year Parade was also nominated for our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards the same year.
Features include Quinn’s interviews he conduced of people who have gone through their parents getting divorced, a making-of piece, and a history of the South Philadelphia String Band and the Mummers.
Carnivalesque Films releases the DVD this week.
Matteo Garrone’s masterwork Gomorrah is notable for what it is not. There is no macho camaraderie amongst thugs in social clubs as seen on The Sopranos. And there is nothing romantic about ‘the life’ of mobsters. While American audiences have been accustomed to the portrayal of gangsters having facile access to money, power and women with seeming impunity, they will be treated to a coarser, realistic depiction of the Naples crime syndicate known as the Camorra. Based on the eponymously named novel by Roberto Saviano, Garrone’s film bears more than a passing resemblance to socio-economic and cultural milieu of Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, where squalor, death and hopelessness reign with no end in sight.
Five non-interrelated storylines take place in a colorless, prison-like Neapolitan housing project, itself a fiefdom of rival Camorra gangs. There is Pasquale, the fashion tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo), two young wannabes, Ciro and Marco (Ciro Petrone and Marco Macor), Franco, the waste management specialist (Toni Servillo), Don Ciro, the mob-bagman (Gianfelice Imparato) and Toto, the small associate (Salvatore Abruzzese). Each attempts to get on with their lives, knowing full well, there is no escaping from the tentacles of the Camorra, which influences every single one of their choices. None of the characters will have serendipitous encounters with each other and none can run to the government, which is noticeably absent, as is perhaps God in this part of the world. Each accepts as a fact of life, the Camorra as omnipresent and omnipotent. Either work with evil or be eliminated. Gomorrah focuses on the attempts of the victims to do what they must despite it all. Wider American audiences may not take to the lack of Hollywood flash in the film, but it will give them pause to think. They will think about the social conditions in which so many people live and shame the government into taking decisive action against organized crime.
The most fascinating of the DVD extras is the 60-minute segment entitled Five Stories, providing the behind scenes making of documentary for each of the … Read the rest
“A dolphin’s smile is nature’s greatest deception.”
That’s a line given in the beginning of Louie Psihoyos’s gripping documentary, The Cove. And the man who says it, Ric O’Barry, is one of the most intriguing subjects in a doc you’ll see this year.
Ric O’Barry captured and trained the five female dolphins that played Flipper in the 1960s TV series. He lived twenty steps from them for close to ten years. But everything changed when Cathy, the lead Flipper, committed suicide in O’Barry’s arms. The next day he was arrested for trying to free a dolphin from a marina and has spent the last 35 years trying to destroy the industry that he helped create.
Japan has brought the greatest harm to dolphins and Taiji, Japan is its torture room. This small, unobtrusive town — that if you glance at it looks like the biggest fan of the mammal — is, as O’Barry puts it, “the little town with a really big secret.” In a tiny lagoon in the town dolphin slaughtering takes place daily.
Caught and dragged into the lagoon by fisherman, the dolphins are paraded for trainers looking for bottlenose dolphins — looking for Flipper. The ones who aren’t sold are killed for their meat. 23,000 dolphins are destroyed yearly for their meat, which in Japan is given out in schools, though they are incredibly high in mercury.
O’Barry has spent decades trying to expose what’s going on in Taiji. He’s brought out the BBC, London Times, Time Magazine and countless activists, but all have come away empty handed. Bullied and annoyed by fisherman until they are forced to leave, there is still no proof, only speculation of what goes on in the cove.
Psihoyos, who along with being a renowned photographer, created a nonprofit foundation, the Oceanic Preservation Society,met O’Barry and after hearing his story decided to take on the challenge of revealing what really goes on in Taiji. Enlisting a motley crew of thrill seekers and activists, Psihoyos and his team head off to Taiji to discover the truth. Using high tech gadgets, … Read the rest
This powerful adaptation of a 1994 book by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam of the same title exposes the inhuman practice of stoning women accused of adultery, which supposedly continues to this day.
Jim Caviezel stars as Sahebjam, who after his car breaks down is towed to a small Iranian village where he’s approached by Soraya’s aunt (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who reveals to him the village’s dark secret. The film then is told in a flashback as we follow Soraya (Mozhan Marno) as she attempts to provide for her two sons and two daughters though she receives no support from her husband, who spends most of his time away from them with another woman.
When she won’t give him a divorce, Soraya is offered to work for a neighbor who recently lost his wife in the hopes she’ll earn enough money to provide for her children after a divorce. But her husband can’t wait that long and devises a plot to peg false charges of infidelity against Soraya — unsympathetic that if charged, his wife will be dragged to the middle of town, buried waste deep in the ground and stoned to death by all the men in town (including her father and sons!).
From the producers of The Passion of the Christ, they once again show the atrocities done to their character in hard-to-watch graphic detail (though at the height of the drama an interruption happens that seems to be taken straight from a Fellini film).
Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh (mini-series The Path to 9/11), the film has been banned in Iran, but has brought the attention of stoning to the UN, which late last year after the film was in theaters, condemned stoning and other human rights violations in Iran.
Aghdashloo gives a tour-de-force performance and Caviezel shines in the little screen time he has.
Released through Lionsgate, the DVD hits streets today.
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If you’re craving the look and feel of an indie from the ’90s then Tao Ruspoli’s debut feature Fix may be the disc you’ll want to pop in.
Chronicling a wild one day journey around Greater Los Angeles, we follow Bella (Olivia Wilde) and Milo (Ruspoli) as they shoot a documentary on Milo’s brother, Leo (Shawn Andrews), who they pick him up from jail and attempt to drop off at rehab before 8pm. The catch: they have to raise the $5,000 needed to get Leo in the clinic or it’s back to jail.
With an impressive soundtrack leading the way, we follow the three as they steal cars, dog, expresso machine and anything else they can find to pawn off (oh, and they sell some weed).
Shot in a first-person, handheld style, with fast-paced editing, it’s part road trip movie part gritty faux-doc. Certainly not the most original concept, the acting keeps you involved as well as its commentary on the less glamorous areas of the city.
At the end of the day, Ruspoli creates a touching love letter to Los Angeles.
Fix goes on sale today through E1 Entertainment.
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A maverick of the 1950s Hollywood system, with Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause already under his belt earlier in the decade, Nicholas Ray’s melodrama Bigger Than Life was perhaps his most structured work when it came out in 1956. Starring James Mason (who also produced) in a uncharacteristic — yet riveting — role, the film was virtually ignored by audiences when it opened, but with its look at American suburbia during the nuclear-era (and a precursor for highlighting the abuse of prescription drugs) it has since become a popular title of critics and cineastes alike.
The film opens with teacher Ed Avery (Mason) finishing up his last day of the school year before running off to work as a taxi dispatcher. Too proud to tell his wife what he’s doing, he’s also hiding debilitating chest pains. Finally overcome by the pain, he’s rushed to the hospital and learns he has a rare condition that may be cared for if he begins going on an experimental drug: Cortisone.
After an amazing montage of Ed tossing and turning in a hospital bed as he works through the pain while Ray inserting a graphic showing the increase of Cortisone and the decrease of pain until it finally settles at “No Pain,” Ed goes home good as new. Maybe too good. And before his wife (Barbara Rush) realizes, Ed has become hooked on the medication, with side affects that has made him a monster to her and their young son (who often wears a bright red James Dean-esque jacket).
What makes Bigger than Life ahead of its time is the way Ray uses not only medicine but the medical system to debilitate his protagonists. With the mountain of bills piling up because of Ed’s condition, Ray shows scenes where Ed or his wife could have contacted the doctor and questioned the treatment, but with fears of more bills they think otherwise. There’s also Ed’s second job and the family’s moderate lifestyle that proves this isn’t Leave it to Beaver.
And how can you not enjoy watching James Mason in a role … Read the rest
Not often does a director with an indie pedigree seamlessly segue into subject matter like… children’s literature.
But in many ways Wes Anderson has been training for the moment to use his hyper-stylized, extremely detailed storytelling to make a film like Fantastic Mr. Fox. Based on the Roald Dohl classic, Anderson (and co-writer, Noah Baumbach) use the book’s premise of a sly fox who outwits his farmer neighbors to steal their food to create a film that dazzles children and adults alike with it’s Andersonesque storytelling and stop-motion animation.
When we meet Fox — voiced by George Clooney with motormouth charm (similar to his character Everett in O, Brother Where Art Thou?) — his life is about to change as he learns he’s going to become a father and swears to his wife (Meryl Streep) that he will give up robbing chickens from coops and other dangerous stunts, though it’s obvious he still has a love for it.
Years pass and Fox — dressed in an Anderson staple: a tweed jacket — is going through a mid-life crisis. Unsatisfied as a columnist for the local paper, he’s obsessed to live in the big tree on a hill and his itch to rob the local farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean is becoming unbearable.
With his loyal friend/superintendent Kyle (Wallace Wolodarsky), an opossum, by his side, the two head out to rob the farmers. While back home, Fox’s son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) has to deal with being less fantastic as his father, and it things get worse when his much more athletically gifted and better looking cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) moves in with them. As Fox continues to have a blast robbing the farmers, things get serious when Boggis, Bunce and Bean set a trap to kill Fox, but are only able to shoot off his tale. Family squabbles are put aside as the Fox’s home gets destroyed by the farmers over the music of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” and the Fox’s and their friends (including Bill Murry as their attorney Badger) dig to find safety, and plan … Read the rest
If you thought you were crazy about American Idol, imagine if you grew up in an area of the world where singing and dancing were forbidden. Well, that’s what director Havana Marking highlights in her moving documentary which follows four contestants competing in the wildly popular TV show Afghan Star.
Since 1995 the Taliban have made it illegal to sing or dance in Afghanistan. But recently with the Taliban fleeing the country a freedom of expression has surfaced that’s unlike anything the country has seen in a brutal, war-torn 30 years. Starting in 2005 the TV network, Tolo TV, in Kabul capitalized on this liberation by creating the singing contest Afghan Star, which, like American Idol, travels the country searching for the best singers and then eliminates them until they get down to one. But unlike Idol the fandom over the singers is Beatlesesque, leading to the contestants having the loyal support from the regions they are from and dangers they had never contemplated.
Though Marking structures the film in the vein of popular competition docs like Spellbound or Wordplay — highlighting the trained musician (Hameed), controversial songstress (Setara), the heartthrob (Rafi) and the shy siren (Lema) — finding out who wins isn’t necessarily what keeps you in the film, it’s watching the rebirth of culture, the arts and the feel of community to a people who are climbing back to modernity.
When the film begins there are ten contestants left and favorites are beginning to emerge. Rafi often travels with an entourage as he walks the streets of his hometown, but is often cautious of doing interviews for the film in public or taking pictures with fans as the fear of the Taliban is still present, or just someone harming him who is against the “new Afghan.” Danger is also most evident to the two female contestants Marking highlights. Setara is a brash kid who has no fear on stage. This is highlighted when she’s eliminated from Afghan Star and while singing her final song takes off her headdress and begins dancing around the stage. … Read the rest
It’s hard to go head first into film noir and not regurgitate the themes, styles, dialogue and characters from the past. But Noah Buschel in his latest cleverly dances around the genre to tell a story of a man who’s hit rock bottom and how he unknowingly redeems himself.
Set in the modern day, Michael Shannon gives one of his best performances in a budding career as a gifted character actor with his portrayal as sauced Chicago private eye John Rosow. When we meet Rosow he’s extremely hung over and gets a call to do a job tailing a guy with little information on why but for a lot of money. Given instructions by the attractive Miss Charley (Amy Ryan), Rosow is onboard a train to L.A. As his job continues he begins to learn more on why the guy he’s following is so important and why he’s the best man for the job.
Okay, that sounds like all the noirs you’ve ever seen in your life.
But instead of following Rosow as he stumbles upon clues and inevitably shows he’s a much better detective than the bad guys gave him credit for, Buschel keeps the plot at bay for most of the film, instead concentrating on the complex Rosow and exploring how he got to where he is now. And Shannon makes this exploration a joy to watch; grunting, slurring and cracking wise through most of the film, he makes Rosow out as a guy who’s seen it all and has had enough of the job but can’t think of anything better to do. Think of a much more disturbed Harry Caul from The Conversation.
The mood is also set by the top notch work by d.p. Ryan Samul, and the predominant jazz score. You can almost smell the stale cigarettes as the music comes in when Rosow enters a bar.
There really is no grand villain in The Missing Person or sultry femme fatale, we’re in a world “beyond right and wrong,” as Rosow puts it in the end. A place where getting by is the only … Read the rest
Gaining attention on the regional fest circuit after premiering at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2008 (followed by a small theatrical release), Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker’s look at a strong-willed culinary arts teacher in Philadelphia as she molds her students through a school year is both uplifting and a love letter to elective classes in high school that are quickly disappearing.
Wilma Stephenson, teaching for close to 40 years by the time the filmmakers shoot her class at Frankford High School, is known through Philly as teaching with an iron fist. The first day of class, she announces to her kids that most of them won’t be around by the end. She screams, she gets in your face, but aren’t those the teachers we remember the most and made the biggest impression on us?
As the school year goes on, the students quickly realize that the skills they’re learning in the kitchen can prove to be rewarding not only for their future but becoming better people. And that’s where we see Mrs. Stephenson’s true side — a loving, caring, enthusiastic teacher who wants nothing but the best for her students.
But Grausman and Becker also look at the stories of the students in the class. Living in impoverished Northeast Philly, over 40% of students don’t make it to their senior year at Frankford. But for three students highlighted in the class, excelling in culinary arts could be their only chance to leave their hometown after high school. Grausman and Becker flash back and forth from the classroom to the houses of the students to find the struggles they go through back home — ranging from struggling with academics to being a surrogate parent, to holding a job after school — which builds the drama for the film’s conclusion where the class takes part in a competition by the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program where the best are rewarded life-changing college scholarships.
Unfortunately, classes like Stephenson’s are fading away, especially in public schools like Frankford. Where inner-city kids only see their way out through becoming sport phenoms, the loss … Read the rest
In 2004 Hal Hartley released a series of shorts he made from 1994-2000. Titled Possible Films, which is also the name of his web site where he sells his films and music, Hartley has compiled a second anthology that highlights his time living in Berlin, Possible Films, Volume 2. (He recently moved back to New York.)
The five shorts are similar in style (shot on DV) with many of them shot in the same apartment, vary from fiction to non, and were all made within a few years of each other. Exploring small ideas that couldn’t be fleshed out in feature form, Hartley creates intimate works that are honest and feel like they’re done by an artist doing it for the love of the craft, not looking for a quick buck. But would we think anything less from Hartley?
A/Muse (2009) - We follow an aspiring actress (Christina Flick) as she searches for an American ex-pat director living in Berlin so she can convince him that she should be his latest starlette.
Implied Harmonies (2008) – Here Hartley films a behind-the-scenes look at his production of Louis Andriessen’s opera la Commedia in Amsterdam and intercuts it with correspondence to his assistant (Jordana Maurer) back in Berlin about his struggles completing it.
The Apologies (2009) – Having to leave town to salvage his production of The Odyessy, a playwright (Nikolai Kinski) lets a young actress (Ireen Kirsch) use his apartment to rehearse. Hartley also composes the score.
Adventure (2008) – Hartley films he and his wife, Miho Nikaido, on a trip to Japan. There they think back on their 12 years of marriage by turning the camera on each other while shooting beautiful shots of the country.
Accomplice (2009) – Jordana Maurer returns to play an assistant of an artists who wants her to pirate video of an interview of Jean-Luc Godard.
Disc is released today through Microcinema International as well as a remastered edition of Hartley’s classic, Surviving Desire. Desire Disc also includes two short story essays done by Hartley in 1991 and interviews from Hartley … Read the rest
Legend has it when John Ford read the short story that would be the inspiration behind his first Western with sound, he immediately took it to his boss David O. Selznick, who, just as quickly as it was pitched to him, tossed it aside as a forgettable picture.
Lucky for us, Ford didn’t move on. He dug into his own pocket, made the film himself (and later sold it to United Artists), packed up the production and went out to Utah’s picturesque Monument Valley (which would be the site for many of his Westerns to come) — far from the prying eyes of the studio exes — and brought along a young actor known at the time for his B-movie work to be his star, John Wayne.
Still as exciting and enjoyable to watch today as it was when it was released to high critical praise in 1939, Stagecoach combines riveting performances, a basic premise and finally wrapped up with a thrilling conclusion (two in fact: a high speed fight with Indians and a three on one draw down on a deserted street). But what Ford inevitably showed was that the Western could tackle serious issues.
Following a group of stagecoach passengers as they embark on a journey through rough Apache territory while Geronimo is on the war path, Ford has the drunk doctor Doc Boone (played brilliantly by Thomas Mitchell), aloof gambler Hatfield (John Carradine), pregnant soldier’s wife Lucy (Louise Platt) and saloon girl Dallas (Claire Trevor), among others, to play out different personalities in the coach.
Then as the journey has already begun, Ford unveils his star in one of the most memorable entrances ever filmed. With a dolly-in to close up shot and a twirl of a rifle, Ford makes John Wayne an icon. Playing the vengeful Ringo Kid, Wayne would never have to worry about getting work again.
But it’s not just the talent along with the work of Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols that makes the film a classic, it’s also the visuals.
One riveting shot is during the shootout with the Apaches. Hatfield, with … Read the rest
Set during Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship in Chile during the 1970s, director Pablo Larrain mixes social commentary and the love for cinema to create a horrific (and darkly humors) tale with a tour-de-force performance by lead actor Alfredo Castro.
We meet Raul (Castro) as he shows up to a popular talent show prepared to take the crown as the Chilean Tony Manero. Yes, John Travolta’s legendary character from Saturday Night Fever. Unfortunately for Raul he shows up on the wrong week (they’re currently finding the Chilean Chuck Norris). A small man with little to say, we almost feel sorry for Raul and his quest. Once he realizes it’s the wrong week he rushes back to the movie theater to study Travolta’s moves. Even repeating his lines in English.
But quickly Larrain forces us to change our perspective of Raul as he goes on a string of murders and thefts to achieve his goal. Larrain channels the ruthless and brutal violence done by Pinochet’s goons around town into Raul’s psychopathic madness.
There’s the comedic, like Raul breaking glass and pasting broken pieces onto a soccer ball to create his disco ball, and the arguments over the number of buttons on Tony’s pants in the movie. Then there’s the unthinkable, like the local movie theater which suddenly stops playing Fever so Raul kills the projectionist and steals the print of Fever, and the junkman he kills so he can use his glass tiles to duplicate the floor on the Fever poster (he even defecates on a competitor’s suit).
Shot with striking handheld camerawork by DP Sergio Armstrong (The Maid), he uses the occasional out of focus shot to portray Raul’s distorted life (and our viewing of it).
But the film works because of Castro’s dedication to the Raul character, which can be compared to De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Playing it with a blind obsession that’s horrifying, comedic and impossible to look away from.
Currently on sale through Kino Lorber.
One of my favorite movies of all time, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, has been released on Blu-Ray and SD by Criterion today. Here’s a piece I wrote back in 2001 on the film in the context of a review of Simon Callow’s BFI monograph.
François Truffaut queasily likened The Night of the Hunter, actor Charles Laughton’s 1955 directorial debut, to a “horrifying news item retold by small children.” Quoted in Simon Callow’s new British Film Institute monograph on the film, Truffaut goes on to offer a bit of middlebrow advice proving that the confluence of film criticism and box-office commentary is not solely a turn-of-the-century phenomenon: “Screenplays such as this are not the way to launch your career as a Hollywood director. The film runs counter to the rules of commercialism … it will probably be Laughton’s single experience as a director.”
Indeed, Laughton’s use of an Expressionist, theatrical mise en scene and flashes of burlesque humor to adapt David Grubbs’s best-selling blend of Southern Gothic and Grimms’s fairy tales resulted in newspaper attacks on the film’s “arty” direction. The reviews weren’t all bad but enough were; depressed and unfinanceable as a director, Laughton soon abandoned his planned adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Lack of critical support on its release coupled with Laughton’s retreat from film directing resulted in The Night of the Hunter’s peripatetic status within the Great Films canon. It’s the kind of glorious one-off that falls to the footnotes of film histories, even if it’s also the sort of masterpiece that other directors spend a career working up to.
Today the film’s influence remains scattershot. Although the LOVE/HATE tattoos on star Robert Mitchum’s hands are quoted in Do the Right Thing and Scorsese’s Cape Fear, the influence of Laughton’s Manichean children’s odyssey only occasionally pops up in films, such as Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse and, especially, the work of David Lynch in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. The film’s greatest influence may have been in the theater; The Night of the Hunter’s classic nighttime … Read the rest
In a recent edition of his ongoing online column “Movie Answer Man,” Roger Ebert was faced with the following reader-submitted query: “Since good movies can now be cheaply made, why aren’t we seeing more of the kind of arthouse films that were so influential in the ’60s and ’70s?” Ebert’s response, while relatively curt, was two-fold. “1.) It is very expensive to release, promote, and advertise any movie,” he began. Fair enough — as any independent filmmaker knows, simply getting your movie made is just one small initial hurdle…and as any viewer who watches contemporary independent films can sadly attest, the proliferation of feature films granted by the affordability of digital video production merely means that a larger number of filmmakers have an access to equipment that is wildly disproportionate with an originality of artistic vision. But the second half of Ebert’s response was more troubling: “2.) The younger generation of moviegoers has more limited tastes than the ‘movie generation’ of the ’60s and ’70s.” Ebert’s screenwriting credit on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – more than his Pulitzer for criticism – has allowed me to begrudgingly look past his infamous, almost-quarter-century-old pan of Blue Velvet, but on this new point, I’m afraid this might be one of those instances where a difference of opinion crosses a line into becoming an error of fact. But more on that in a moment.
“America Lost and Found: The BBS Story” is a new seven-film Blu-ray and DVD boxed-set from The Criterion Collection that compiles — with all of the Criterion imprint’s usual exhaustive supplementary bells-and-whistles (though, one suspects, not quite as exhaustive as it could have been had the project not originated as a “New Hollywood” set under the auspices of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, who ultimately turned it over to Criterion’s control) — a series of films made between 1968 and 1972 by an independent production company named BBS Productions, an organization who would ultimately redefine the relationship between American independent cinema and the Hollywood studio system. Given creative control by Columbia Pictures (then in rather dire financial straits, … Read the rest
Featuring Morgan Fairchild. AN IRREVERENT COMEDY AND OFFICIAL SELECTION TO HAWAII'S BIG
ISLAND FILM FESTIVAL. The film will premiere May 15th, 2009 at the Honu Theater in the Queens
Marketplace at the Waikoloa Resort.
Available on Director David Kaplans compilation DVD Little Red Riding Hood.
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Overture Films will release the film domestically on October 2, 2009, and Paramount Vantage will handle international distribution. As previously announced, Moore will return to the issue that began his career: the disastrous impact that corporate dominance and out-of-control profit motives have on the lives of Americans and citizens of the world.
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"Paper Heart" stars Charlyne Yi and Michael Cerra.
The music documentary by Davis Guggenheim (Inconvienient Truth), featuring The Edge (U2), Jimmy Paige (Led Zepplin), and Jack White (The White Stripes). It reveals how each developed his unique sound and style of playing favorite instruments, guitars both found and invented.
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Featuring Audrey Tautou, Benoit Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola, Marie Gillain, and Emmanuelle Devos. Coco Before Chanel is the story of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, who began her life as headstrong orphan, and through an extraordinary journey became the legendary couturier who embodied the modern woman and became a timeless symbol of success, freedom and style. The film portrays the formative years of Chanel's life, the years of Chanel spent discovering and inventing herself.
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ART & COPY is a film about advertising and inspiration. Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, SCRATCH, HYPE!), it reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time -- people who've profoundly impacted our culture, yet are virtually unknown outside their industry. Exploding forth from advertising's "creative revolution" of the 1960s, these artists and writers all brought a surprisingly rebellious spirit to their work in a business more often associated with mediocrity or manipulation: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney and others featured in ART & COPY were responsible for "Just Do It," "I Love NY," "Where's the Beef?," "Got Milk," "Think Different," and brilliant campaigns for everything from cars to presidents. They managed to grab the attention of millions and truly move them. Visually interwoven with their stories, TV satellites are launched, billboards are erected, and the social and cultural impact of their ads are brought to light in this dynamic exploration of art, commerce, and human emotion.
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Michael's new documentary opens in theaters October 2nd, 2009.
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THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE is adapted from writer-director Rebecca Miller’s novel of the same name. It is produced by Lemore Syvan from Elevation Filmworks, and Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner from Plan B Entertainment. Executive producers are Winchester Capital, Jean-Luc De Fanti, and The Salt Company partners, Cyril Mégret, Robert Bevan and Samantha Horley.
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Michael Moore talks about what may be his last documentary, Religion, what the media has created with their "Fictitious character 'Michael Moore'", 20 years of filmmaking, and life after his ground-breaking documentary "Roger and Me". In "Capitalism a love story" it feels like the sequel to "Roger and Me" including a brand new trip back to the headquarters of GM.
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Greenberg brings actor Ben Stiller together with Academy Award-nominated writer/director Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale") to tell the funny and moving tale of Roger Greenberg. Focus Features releases Greenberg in select cities on March 26th, 2010.
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Scene from film "I'm impressed by you"
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Scene from film "People don't call on my birthday anymore."
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A film by Susan Cohn Rockefeller featuring Nell Bryden and her band.
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Interview hosted by Adi Ezroni, with the cast of the film including Cassandra Lee Walker, Kira Gorelick, Kate O'Malley, Gwynn Galitzer, Nick Thorp, and Jorgen Jorgensen-Briggs. Film Written and Directed by Vincent D'Onofrio of Law and Order fame.
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James V. Hart accepts the WGA / Connecticut Film Festival Screenwriting Inspiration Award. Watch his inspirational acceptance speech at the Tarrywile Mansion in Danbury, CT. James may be best known for his many screenplays such as Hook, Contact, Dracula, and Muppet Treasure Island.
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Dan is the Co-Director of Photography of the award winning Documentary "The Way We Get By" - "...In a small Maine airport, strength and inspiration are given and received in equal measure.as group of senior citizens use hugs and handshakes to play a critical role in the Iraq war. Since 2003, nearly one million soldiers and marines from across the country have been greeted by seniors like Bill Knight, Joan Gaudet, and Jerry Mundy, who share their candid, wrenching stories."
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Pamela talks about documentary filmmaking and her latest doc "The Reckoning" about the International Criminal Court system.
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Bobcat meets with Corey of IndependentFilm.com and discusses his new film "Worlds Greatest Dad" (Sundance Premiere) starring Robin Williams. We talk about Stand up Comedy, Directing, "Shakes the Clown", the Sam Kinison controversy, and the rumor of "Police Academy 8".
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Paul recaps the festival including the many industry panel discussions and how the festival serves the comedy and film industry. This year saw the participation of comedy legends including Bill Cosby, David Alan Grier, Louie Anderson, Caroline Rhea, Jim Breuer. Best Director award was given to Todd Phillips (Director of "Hangover" movie) and Best Writing to Etan Cohen (Madagascar, Tropic Thunder). The panel discussions included many directors of comedy programming from CBS, FOX, ADULT SWIM, COMEDY CENTRAL, and several comedy writers from shows including David Letterman, The Daily Show, Steven Colbert.
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Aziz and Aubrey were in Montreal at the premiere of "Funny People" as part of the 2009 Just for Laughs Festival.
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At the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal. Todd recently directed the largest grossing rated R comedy film of all time, The Hangover Movie. At the Just For Laughs festival conference, Todd was the recipient of their Director of the Year award.
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Larry talks about his new project The Outlaw Emmett Deemus, working with Adam Sandler, his favorite acting roles, and his advice for aspiring Actors and Directors.
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Giancarlo, the M.C. of the awards ceremony, gives an amazing speech about what it means to be "independent" and the importance of independent film.
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Richard screened his new film "Me and Orson Welles", Participated in panel discussions, and accepted the highly respected Woodstock "Maverick" Award presented to him by Ethan Hawke.
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The Connecticut Film Festival recently asked Corey Boutilier of IndependentFilm.com to interview Rebecca Miller for a special screening of her new film. The advance screening was held in Danbury, CT at the Palace Theater on Main St. where part of her film was shot. Connecticut adopted film tax credits to attract filmmaking in the state which this film was able to enjoy. This special introduction video screened to a sold out audience with over 450 attendees. An impressive feat by CT Film Festival Director Tom Carruthers who organized the event in just two weeks which also featured appetizers, beer and wine. This film is distributed by Screen Media Films.
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The awards ceremony for the 2010 Woodstock Film Festival was amazing this year. So many great films and great presenters to announce the award winners. See several videos produced by IndependentFilm.com featuring highlights of the ceremony. The Gala Maverick Awards Ceremony was held on Saturday, October 2 at Backstage Studio Productions Arts & Entertainment Complex in Kingston, NY. Our first video features Keanu Reeves who receives the Excellence in Acting award presented by Vera Farmiga.
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Ed is known for casting and introducing new actors including in this film Kerry Bisheé and Matt Bush. In this video we thought it would be cool to interview Eddie in front of a Wurlitzer Juke Box.
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Opening night film Dislecksia, a documentary by Harvey Hubbell about understanding the learning disorder.
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Today we meet Indie Director Brian Doyle at the Cadillac Tribeca Press Lounge.
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Since I’ve never attended the Toronto International Film Festival, or the long-running doc series Stranger Than Fiction, I was shamefully late to discover the curatorial wizard behind-the-curtain by the name of Thom Powers. But ever since Powers’s programming became, for me, the highlight of this year’s Miami International Film Festival he’s been firmly on my cine-radar. So when I noticed he’d be returning as artistic director of DOC NYC (which runs Nov. 2-10) I thought, “Oh, no.” I didn’t have time to cover DOC NYC right before I flew to Amsterdam to tackle the mother of all nonfiction fests IDFA! (DOC NYC’s close proximity to IDFA and also CPH:DOX is the worst thing one can say about it.) I couldn’t squeeze in its 100-plus events, panel discussions, 52 features and 40 shorts. I didn’t have the hours to spare for the opening night gala screening of Into The Abyss with Werner Herzog in person (nor for guests Charlotte Rampling, Jonathan Demme, Barbara Kopple, D.A. Pennebaker, etc.). I didn’t have the time, but I did have the addiction. And Thom Powers is the nonfiction world’s dealer with the best docs.
And while I was ultimately able to catch a great number of DOC NYC’s engaging selections, from Nelson George and Diane Paragas’s Brooklyn Boheme, which uses famous talking heads – including Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Rosie Perez and Branford Marsalis – to make the case for Brooklyn’s Fort Greene section being the closest thing the late 20th century had to the Harlem Renaissance; to Gwenaëlle Gobé’s This Space Available (inspired by the director’s father’s book, Emotional Branding – author Marc Gobé also serves as co-producer), which delves into the controversy surrounding the “visual pollution” caused by billboards and other forms of out-of-control advertising; to Jon Shenk’s TIFF-hit The Island President, which follows the Obama-charismatic President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives as he fights to save his country before climate change turns it into a 21st century Atlantis, only a handful of films stuck with me for days afterwards. But interestingly, I found my reaction had less to do with … Read the rest
The Hawaii International Film Festival fittingly wrapped up its 31st edition last week with Alexander Payne’s Hawaii-set-and-shot comedy/drama The Descendants, with a gracious Payne in town for the screening (no George Clooney, alas, though a life-sized Clooney cardboard cut-out was certainly a massive hit in the lobby). “Wine always tastes the best in the region it was grown and made,” noted Payne to an appreciative audience. “I hope that this film plays best in Hawaii.”
Judging from audience response, Payne got his wish; the film (to be released nationally November 15) won the festival’s Audience Award for Narrative Feature, with many viewers praising its respectful take on author Kaui Hart Hemming’s source novel, as well as its catchy all-Hawaiian soundtrack. Taking the Audience Award for Documentary Feature was Aloha Buddha, Bill Ferehawk and Dylan Robertson’s fascinating look at the complicated history and unique present of Japanese Buddhism in Hawaii, while the Audience Award for Best Short went to Mitsuyo Miyazaki’s slick Tsuyako, involving a love affair between two women in post-war Japan.
Earlier that week, in the restored 19th-century glamour of the Hawaii’s Governor’s Mansion, festival staff, guests, and press gathered for the announcement of the jury awards. Prashant Bhargava’s Patang (The Kite), a tale of family secrets revealed and denied during the extraordinary kite festival of Ahmedabad, India, took the “Halekulani Golden Orchid Award” for Narrative Feature; its vibrant Super-8 footage of the festival and its organic feel for the city itself turned what could have been a familiar melodrama into a rich exploration of place and spectacle.
Earning the award for Documentary Feature was Adam Pesce’s Splinters (pictured above), deceptively clad as a surfing film about the sport’s rise in Papua New Guineau but more pointedly an engrossing, endlessly surprising examination of social hierarchies, clan rivalries, and economic and cultural change within the region. In recent years a wave of sports films set in unusual locations have appeared at festivals—Skateistan, about skaters in Kabul, for instance, or God Went Surfing With the … Read the rest
The Jack the Ripper weather that blanketed part of the 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam this year seemed poetically apropos. Rushing from P&I screenings, to public showings, to private viewing booths I often felt like I was lost in a heavy fog of docs. In addition I took great advantage of the many behind-the-scenes and inside-scoop events — most free to the public — that gives this biggest doc fest in Europe its accessible community vibe. I watched a Talk Show with tabloid-deep Nick Broomfield discussing his Sarah Palin: You Betcha! over a live Internet feed. I attended in person a much more fascinating Meet the Makers with Steve James (ironically, the very same morning I learned that The Interrupters — which I’d predicted would nab this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary — shamefully got booted from the Oscar shortlist), who was being honored with a retrospective on top of presenting his own Top 10 compilation. I caught another Talk Show at the Escape Club with Joe Berlinger — who announced that it was the first time out of the country for his accompanying invitee and longtime Paradise Lost series subject, the recently freed Jason Baldwin. (Berlinger and Baldwin were followed by guest Vikram Gandhi, whose Kumaré was my top pick at DOC NYC.)
I also stopped by the young and vibrant Flemish Arts Centre De Brakke Grond to check out Exhibition: Expanding Documentary 2011. Although I wasn’t able to take a virtual walk through Brussels courtesy of CREW, a Belgium-based collective of artists and scientists, I did manage to engage with Condition One, Danfung Dennis and Patrick Chauvel’s DocLab Competition entry. Their immersive project allows the viewer to take a choose-your-own-field-of-vision adventure through confrontations in Libya, New Orleans, Thailand or NYC (specifically the Occupy Wall Street protest) via headphones and an iPad suspended from the ceiling.
Later on I hit another Talk Show jam-packed with globally diverse guests, including the director of a love letter to Holland’s most famous music venue (Paradiso, An Amsterdam Stage Affair); the creator of a very personal Doc U … Read the rest
A few years back, the Zurich Film Festival burst onto the map, but for all the wrong reasons. In 2009, Roman Polanski, en route to the festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, was apprehended shortly after landing on Swiss soil. He was never extradited to the United States to stand trial for his mid ’70s sexual escapades with the then underaged Samatha Geimer in Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood Hills home, and now he’s free, having returned for the seventh edition of Zurich’s increasingly important film festival. He screened his “film memoir,” which I simply loathed for its canned, staged quality, its lack of genuine insight into the man and his times. Made by ex-Polanski producer Andrew Braunsberg, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir had its “secret” world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival. Hot off the heels of Polanski’s lukewarm Yesmina Reza adaptation Carnage, it is the lesser of these decidedly less than stellar Polanski related productions, but enough with that, I’ve already said enough about it on these pages.
Boasting a record number of significant premieres “within the German-speaking realm” of hot international titles in Cannes, Toronto and Venice, Zurich featured both narrative and doc competitions for international and German-language films, although the size of those sections was dwarfed by its rampant Gala premieres and Special Screenings, which make up a more than sizable chunk of the programming. Is that smart? I’m not sure.
A preponderance of Galas seems to lessen the impact of those events, making them less noteworthy and eye catching, while limiting how much attention the competition films get. Sure, they get some big stars to show up (There’s Laurence Fishburne! Look, Sean Penn) and there were some interesting performances in some mostly flawed films by major filmmakers (Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman’s somewhat unfocused, fascinating Rampart, Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’ moody, but unfulfilling The Deep Blue Sea, everyone involved in the minor Cronenberg that was A Dangerous Method, all of which made their way to Zurich after finding splashy premieres elsewhere) and a few genuinely … Read the rest
There’s no better time of year to be in Palm Springs than early January. The air is rejuvenating, the desert landscape alluring, and amidst all the easy living, PS kicks annually kicks off film festival season. Now in its 23rd year, the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) prides itself on appealing to both the first-time moviegoer and the seasoned connoisseur. For the former, there were easily digestible films like Lasse Halstrom’s Salmon Fishing In The Yemen, which opened the Festival, and the Tilda Swinton-starrer We Need To Talk About Kevin; for the latter, the 276-minute Taiwanese film, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. For those looking to kill an entire weekend watching one documentary, the festival obliged with Mark Cousins’s 15-hour epic, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey.
In the last couple of years, the Festival has pared down the number of foreign film Oscar submissions. According to Festival director Darryl Macdonald, “It was becoming clear that some of these films weren’t measuring up to the quality of programming we wanted to present.” Altogether, 188 films from 73 countries ran during the 10-day Festival, including 40 of the 63 foreign language Oscar entries. Macdonald declared that “The balance of programming was stronger than ever.” With more than 130,000 filmgoers and 220 filmmakers (writers, directors, and actors) in attendance, the PSIFF remains a movie lover’s paradise.
Given its proximity to L.A., the Golden Globe Awards, and Sundance, the Festival has never been shy about courting Hollywood glamour, with the Convention Center hosting its annual Black Tie Awards Gala honoring notable films, stars, and directors from the previous year’s films. This year, the star wattage was hotter than usual, with Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Michelle Williams, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, and the ensemble cast from Young Adult, among others, walking the red carpet. For some, the excitement proved too much: a 65 year-old man collapsed and died while watching the red carpet festivities. Inside, the sight of Brangelina turned the normally blasé PS crowd into giggly autograph hounds; they besieged the couple’s table with cameras … Read the rest
Blogging from last year’s Sundance I wrote that “if I could give an award to the camera delivering the most impact on screen at Sundance 2011, it would go to RED One.”
That was then. In the 12 months since, ARRI’s Alexa has all but conquered TV series production in the U.S., and now you can add a dozen low-budget indie films at Sundance too, like the bittersweet romcom Celeste and Jesse Forever, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg and photographed by David Lanzenberg.
Sony’s new budget-friendly F3 made a splash at Sundance as well, responsible for Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer, shot by Kerwin Devonish, and Colin Trevorrow’s puckish Safety Not Guaranteed, shot by Benjamin Kasulke, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Trevorrow said his 2.40 aspect ratio was the result of vintage Panavision lenses used to achieve what the director called “a 1970′s Hal Ashby look.”
For me, however, the camera that cast the longest shadow at this year’s Sundance was the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, whether or not it was actually used. Let me explain.
Nearly all large single-sensor motion picture cameras today, including those responsible for Sundance 2012 premieres, use Super 35-sized sensors, including Alexas, RED Ones, Sony F35s, F3s, FS-100s, and Canon 7Ds. The major exception is the Canon 5D, which uses a significantly larger sensor.
Super 35 matches the original 18 x 24 mm “full” camera aperture used to expose 4-perf 35mm film in the silent era. As it happens, the APS-C sensor found in some DSLRs is also a match—why Canon’s 7D makes the list.
This original 35mm motion picture format devised by Eastman and Edison 120 years ago is the classic one around which most motion picture camera and lens technology developed, as well as technique and cinematic language.
35mm motion picture film also gave rise to two still formats: a 4-perf frame (same as motion pictures) and a larger 8-perf frame that traveled sideways. The Simplex still camera of 1914, for example, snapped both formats.
8-perf eventually prevailed for stills because … Read the rest
Two weeks ago I was on the phone to a lab in Canada, who were holding our film, telling them that 6 lab rolls of Una Noche were missing. The movie was supposed to premiere in Berlin in a matter of days. I proceeded to go through every frame of footage in the NYC lab double-checking to see if the shots were there. They were not. I did not tell anybody. I did not want to believe it myself. When the colorist, Martin, told me that we might have to use black slates with “missing shot” written on them, my breathing spontaneously accelerated and I felt my blood rush to my head. The Berlinale was starting in a couple of days. I did not have the movie, never mind my flight to get me there. I put another call in, this time to the head of the film lab in Canada. The reels were suddenly found in a storage box and rushed down to NYC.
I met the people who had been organizing the Generation section and who selected Una Noche. I am so thankful. Ela Beume fought to get the actors’ visas. We were, at this stage, eighty percent sure the actors would be coming from Havana. There was still one permit missing for them to leave the country. We didn’t know whether they made it onto a flight until they … Read the rest
Film festivals encourage connecting dots that don’t necessarily exist, a logical by-product of seeing four films a day. In covering this year’s installment of Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival (a lovely documentary festival whose actual atmosphere I’ll discuss in the next post), I’d like to accordingly divide the films into two broad categories. In the second post, I’ll talk about (very loosely/speciously categorized) personal, dewy stories of love; in this initial dispatch, I’d like to discuss films which look at lives regulated by top-down political decisions and climates.
The most obvious example is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s staggeringly well-controlled Abendland (“evening land”), a nighttime excursion (though it’s so often indoors this isn’t obvious) across the sick European continent. Like fellow Austrian moralist Ulrich Seidl, Geyrhalter despairs morally and politically, and he isn’t afraid to film ugly situations with a clear, static eye. As in his last two films — Our Daily Bread and 7915 km — people’s daily routines are dictated by corporate concerns beyond their control. Bread was about mass-scale food production, 7915 examined a trans-African racing event’s unpleasant foot print on the villages it passes through.
Abendland’s subject is nothing less than every possible situation in which large numbers of people are sorted, organized and supervised. The situation can be as intimate and laudable as the labor of nurses in nursing units for premature/damaged babies (an incredibly hard-to-watch sequence full of seared red flesh and bodily deformations), or as infuriating as watching London’s supervisors idly use their CCTV cameras to spy at-will on anyone on the street.
In the opening scene, a camera awkwardly lurches 360 degrees on top of a van, a seemingly uncontrolled technological element in entropic action. It’s controlled inside by a man wielding a slightly awkward joystick: he’s looking for people, though all the pristine night-vision brings up is a rabbit. The gap between the man’s micro-hand movements and the massive implications of what he’s doing reminded me of Harun Farocki’s Serious Games I-IV., split-screen installations of American soldiers recounting their war experiences to help built PC-ish simulations for training and other examples of … Read the rest
Although in the winter most Stateside independent filmmakers set their sites on Sundance and SXSW, while international directors target Rotterdam and Berlin, the cold hard reality is that the majority of cinema’s craftspeople aren’t going to have their labors of love accepted into even one of these fests. (Forget about being wined and dined by the Weinsteins.) That’s the bad news. The good news is that as indie fests increasingly become less populist and more Miramax-ish, regional festivals around the globe are looking to step up to the plate.
I’ve covered a number of these homegrown events, many times basing my choices on recommendations from friends and colleagues. Such was the case with the Sedona International Film Festival, which takes place in Arizona’s famous – and infamously kooky – red rock country. Surrounded by majestic mountains seemingly sprung from Middle-earth, and boasting a population for whom “Vortex” is a household word (the local chamber of commerce’s website even has a link to the Sedona Metaphysical Spiritual Association), this high-desert destination seemed as good a place as any to make some unique discoveries.
It was actually one of my non-blood relatives, a longtime shorts programmer, who alerted me to Sedona’s “It’s the accommodations, stupid” factor – i.e., that SIFF is one of the very few festivals to offer the same stellar lodging to all attendees regardless of a movie’s running time. (How many short film directors get a golf course attached to their comped hotel? Seriously.) Another friend, who happens to be the local beat reporter, mesmerized me with tales from last year’s edition, which not only featured invitees Nicolas Cage, Jonathan Winters and Gary Sinise, but a rip-roaring drunk Rip Torn showing up to every party. (What I wouldn’t have given to see Nic and Rip chowing down together at all the free buffets. Alas, instead I spent my time strenuously avoiding Peter Bogdanovich and the Sorvino clan for fear that a publicist would try to rope me into conducting an interview.) Then there was the lure of visiting ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts, founded by Sacred Sexual … Read the rest
In its ninth year, the True/False Film Festival sold over 37,000 tickets. This is my third year attending, but no serious growing pains have been felt with the increasing numbers of first-time attendees: screenings start on time, it’s not overwhelmingly difficult to get into anything if you have an advance ticket, and the programming is unusually trustworthy. (If anything, True/False has a terrific track record of exhuming gems lost in the festival cycle; it’s a good doc fest-of-fests, but a great festival for discovery.) The festival encourages/lubricates sociability without distracting from daily film-watching.
This year seemed special even by the standards set in previous years. The main reason I attend is to see major films that won’t get their due in New York, and True/False keeps delivering in optimal environments. One of last year’s discoveries was At The Edge Of Russia, a equally formally-accomplished counterpart to Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer with a slier sense of humor. It’s great filmmaking that only received outdoor exhibition in New York. True/False’s commitment to stellar, bright projection and loud, clear sound in all of its (indoor!) venues (most of them non-theaters converted for the fest, all within close walking distance of each other) presents its curated line-up in the best possible conditions. On Sunday, I came out of an auditorium from a movie that ended at 5:13 and went right back in for a 5:30 show, and both films could have been part of a conventionally “major” festival’s competition slate. The True/False Weekend is, invariably, one of the year’s highlights; this installment was no exception.
A “sneak preview” is a premiere that declines the term, allowing other festivals to pounce on the distinction. Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet’s Only The Young is a major feature debut, an unostentiously accomplished teen not-really-coming-of-age tale that’s great to find unveiled in such relaxed circumstances.
No shot composition is repeated even in the most returned-to houses and bedrooms; the whole film wears its formal deftness lightly, disposing of any portentousness in quick cuts. Teens Garrison and Kevin are skateboarders introduced slo-mo tunnel action, bathed … Read the rest
Don’t be fooled: Paranoia, alienation, and irrepressible ghosts of the past are some of the common threads among the features in the 41st edition of New Directors/New Films. No one could mistake it for a series of frothy comedies or unchallenging genre fare: feel-good is hardly an operative term. What is unmistakable is that, to my mind, it remains the finest, most original film festival in New York. These mostly first and second films from around the world are edgy but accessible, fresh but polished. A combination of fiction, docs, and animation, they are not intended to soothe but rather to throw you off balance in a positive way. I’m not sure why, but this is the most impressive New Directors I have seen in my 30 years of following it. The quality is high, the films diverse, and, to be blunt, for the most part the dogs seem to have vanished.
I watched 15 features and missed 12, so my observations lack statistical validity. So I decided not to make sweeping generalizations about the choices, and force the titles into sub-categories that may help the author keep his head screwed on but are just not valid. I will review the 12 I found impressive. That leaves three additional titles that I did see but with which I could not engage, try as I might. After much thought I decided not to address them: These are new films, possibly offering something that I am not ready for. We all know how subjective our responses to cinema can be. I hope you see something in them I did not, but I do feel it only fair to name them: The Ambassador, Hemel, and An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. I hope to be proven off base.
The order of the 12 reviews is very loosely based on the strength of the film, number one being the best, for example. But this is such an exceptional group that you could scramble the titles and their ranking would still ring true. What is unquestionable is the value of New Directors. … Read the rest
New Directors/New Films is known for bringing some of the freshest, boldest films to light, and not necessarily just for New York audiences. Arthouse theaters around the country often make selections from this well-regarded festival’s programming. The relatively high-brow co-presentation of the The Museum of Modern Art and the The Film Society of Lincoln Center is not, however, generally considered a place to discover new genre film, despite its reputation for supporting ballsy young upstarts. Yet perhaps the increasing cultural and cinematic significance of sufficiently well-made genre films is now keeping them from being overlooked by the festival that saves many a movie from being overlooked; this year’s ND/NF includes The Raid: Redemption, a stylishly heart-pounding action flick from Indonesia which is also out in select theaters today. Considering even some dedicated genre fans and critics have yet to become familiar with Southeast Asia’s distinctive, burgeoning contributions to the fields of horror, action, and slasher flicks, this playful bit of programming evinces particular foresight.
While The Raid may be the only film in the festival that is genre in the strictest sense, here’s a selection of other ND/NF films that should appeal to those of the genre persuasion.
FEAR AND DESIRE (Stanley Kubrick, USA)
This isn’t exactly a genre film, and isn’t exactly new. (Perhaps the folks at ND/NF decided that screening a repertory film at an envelope-pushing festival for new work would be the ultimate transgressive programming move.) Regardless of the reasons for its place in this festival, and the fact that Kubrick has repeatedly tried to disown and “disappear” the film since it’s 1953 run, it’s thrilling to see this on the big screen (rather than on YouTube, where Robert Altman’s recently unearthed first film, Modern Football, currently resides). Critics theorize that the typically unnerving war drama is either a precursor of Paths of Glory or the original second portion of Full Metal Jacket.
THE MINISTER (Pierre Schöller, France)
This tight, tense political thriller focuses on a French cabinet minister in charge of national transportation with legitimately good intentions that … Read the rest
“Location, location, location” could very well serve as the tagline for the Bermuda International Film Festival. Set on a paradise island surrounded by spectacular pink sand and Technicolor-blue waters in the North Atlantic, it’s only a couple hours’ plane trip from NYC (or less if you can hitch a ride with the private-jetting Mayor Mike). This gracious and warmly welcoming fest – a reflection of the country’s unbelievably gregarious and helpful population (pull out a map and you’re just as likely to have a total stranger walk you to your destination as point the way) – is now in its 15th year yet exhibits the vitality of a young up-and-comer. Due to an economic crunch that nearly wiped out the 2012 edition, this BIFF was a scaled down version of former incarnations that still managed to screen over 80 flicks from around the world, mostly in a single venue (the Liberty Theatre, a nondescript cinema a few minutes walk from Front Street, the capital of Hamilton’s hopping main drag). And like the smartest, most tenacious indie producer routinely prove, size matters less than passion and the will to make every dollar – yes, this British protectorate conveniently accepts American currency – count.
Throughout my week covering BIFF I was constantly reminded of something my colleague Brandon Harris had once written about another stellar boutique fest, Tucson’s Loft Film Festival: that it wasn’t “going out of its way to become something (most festivals, like the ambitious people who run them, are hardly ever satisfied with what they actually are). It is something.” While many of the features selected (a great deal distributed by Sony Pictures Classics) arrived with the cache of Cannes or Best Foreign Language Film nominations at the 2012 Oscars (the lineup including the well-deserved winner, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) attached, BIFF wasn’t dressed to impress. The festival team’s goal seemed simply to bring the cinematic best to a vibrant movie-loving community that otherwise might never get to experience something like Wim Wenders’ Pina in 3D. (With a total population of around 65,000 this island country is hardly … Read the rest
Once-in-a-lifetime experiences abounded at this year’s Sonoma International Film Festival, a boutique event in the heart of northern California’s wine country – complete with complementary wine and cheese before every screening (and a trailer featuring an animated, tap-dancing wine bottle named Tipsy whose tagline read, “Is everything out of focus, or is it just me?”). Held early April, a week apart and an hour’s drive – yet a world away – from that longest running festival in the U.S., SIFF serves as a worthy reminder that attending non-market-driven fests not only allows one the opportunity to discover overlooked diamonds amongst the seemingly rough cuts, but to enjoy chance encounters that have been programmed out of the older and slicker fests. While the films themselves might not have the cachet associated with the big boy on the Bay (save perhaps for the opening and closing night bookended Luc Besson flicks, The Lady and Radu Mihaileanu’s The Source) SIFF’s random weirdness factor proved absolutely intoxicating (no pun intended, really) to this non-drinking cinephile.
First there were the venues, within easy walking distance of the historic downtown Plaza, my favorite being the Sebastiani Winery Barrel Room where a screen and seats were arranged adjacent to the cavernous wine tasting area, the entire Tuscan setup surrounded by lush vineyards. Then there were the events, such as La Quinceañera Film Fiesta (in honor of SIFF’s 15th birthday), a program of Latino-themed shorts and features that also had its own actual fiesta in The Backlot tent next to City Hall. That’s where I stood in line behind the Award of Excellence recipient Christopher Lloyd – star of Jonah Ansell’s inventive animated short Cadaver, as well as Greg Garthe’s overeager-to-please feature Last Call. Though even seeing the guy who played a psych patient in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, “Reverend” Jim on Taxi and “Doc” Brown in the Back to the Future series snacking on chile rellenos seemed rather run-of-the-mill compared to the Scottish-themed, Friday night dinner I lucked into. (Or rather SIFF’s dynamic and unbelievably on-the-ball publicist got me into.) That … Read the rest
Truth-Telling from Mississippi to Israel to China to Texas
Yes, truth is the essence of documentaries. But whose truth? What truth? In dangerous times, truth is elusive. When pain lingers, truth digs deeper into the obscure. Regardless, sometimes truth must come out. Sometimes there is no choice. Sometimes even fear is no match for truth — such as in Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story.
In 1965, filmmaker Raymond DeFelitta traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi to shoot a documentary for NBC News on
racial tensions in the South. DeFelitta initially planned to capture the conflict from the perspective of Southern whites, yet the highlight of his film turned out to be a brief monologue by an African American.
Booker T. Wright‘s presentation was candid and honest, even poetic, and strongly biting. In articulating the unpleasant truth about a Black American living in racist Mississippi, Booker became a human face for a system of racism that refused to end.
After his words were broadcast nationally, Booker lost his job as a waiter in a white restaurant, was physically assaulted by the local police — landing him in the hospital — and was killed, most likely for his words of truth.
Forty years later, the filmmaker’s son, Frank DeFelitta, returned to Greenwood and with Yvette Johnson, the granddaughter of Booker T. Wright, explored the repercussions of his father’s film. Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story is an emotional journey into an ugly past and an incisive examination of a courageous African American who was both typical and extraordinary. Gripping and sad, yet exhilarating, Booker’s Place reminds us that progress is possible in America, but that the cost may be high.
Instead of a community’s truth, The Flat explores a family’s truth. Israeli filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger’s grandmother passes away at 98 and her Tel Aviv apartment, which had remained a personal museum to her beloved Germany that she escaped (with her husband) during the Nazi onslaught in the 1930s, is emptied by her family. This is done unsentimentally and without curiosity, until grandson Arnon is stirred by the possessions, questions their meaning, and initiates an … Read the rest
Over the course of one long night, a cadre of lonely men — which includes an overbearing, barely competent police chief, a handsome and thorough doctor, a cautious district attorney, several drivers, civil servants, grave diggers, and two brothers accused of homicide — drive through the hills of rural Anatolia in search of a body buried at a spot the young and frightened siblings can’t quite recall. We glimpse their sorrows, their vanities, their brief bouts of interconnectedness, but mostly we watch their boredom. Still the crime gets solved, motivations are revealed, a small but significant cover-up is enacted. Along the way, we get a rare chance to watch life as it’s actually lived, rendered with such beauty, clarity and care that one wonders why all movies aren’t so attuned to the visceral mysteries of everyday pain.
Although Nuri Bilge Ceylan forged his reputation as one of the most exciting new practitioners of “Slow Cinema” to emerge during the late ’90s, the Turkish filmmaker’s engrossing films, which have reached their apex with his masterful Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, have increasingly found their basis in the outlines (if not the rhythms) of genre filmmaking. Not that this has earned him any notoriety in our genre-obsessed American movie culture. That this incredibly gifted filmmaker, whose style leans heavily on Antonioni but seems to have a dexterity, an interest in apparitions and a socio-national identity all its own, is not more well known stateside is some sort of misdemeanor offense. Were it another era, the cinema of Ceylan would already have been hailed as essential viewing for those trying to understand the intersection between the West and Islam that is modern Turkey.
The 52-year-old Istanbul native won a trip to the 1995 Cannes Film Festival with his very first short Cocoon, but it wasn’t until his third feature, Distant, appeared at the festival in 2002 that he began to acquire an international following. That was followed by a run of films that are as impressive a body of work as anyone assembled in the aughts, including his shattering 2006 relationship … Read the rest
Big-time professional wrestling has long been a lucrative business, but for the men of Lincolnton, North Carolina’s Millenium Wrestling Federation, the social cohesion and outlet for their imagination the sport provides is their primary compensation. As chronicled in director Robert Greene’s fantastic new documentary Fake It So Real, wrestling has never seemed as intense and physically costly. Yet Greene is not interested in mining the sport for tales of snake-bitten men reaching for a glory that will never come; this isn’t a doc version of The Wrestler. Woebegone men are few and far between in this world, despite the fact that Lincolnton seemingly doesn’t provide much in terms of career prospects. A sense of community and mutually-appreciated craft pervades the scene.
Fake It So Real is Greene’s second festival hit in as many years. His debut film Kati with an I was nominated for the Gotham Award‘s Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You in 2010 after premiering at the True/False Film Festival. Fake It So Real premiered there in 2011 before going on to play many of the circuit’s most well-regarded doc and regional fests, including Sarasota and CPH:DOX. The film opens this coming Friday at Brooklyn’s ReRun Gastropub Theater.
Filmmaker: Did your interest in wrestling, like so many adult males in their twenties and thirties, begin in your childhood in the ’80s, as the popularity of the sport was expanding?
Greene: I am a huge wrestling fan through and through. I was born in ’76. My dad still calls it “wrasslin.’” He still wants to think about it as being real! I’m a wrestling nerd. I surf websites about wrestling. The first wrestling I recall watching was Wrestlemania II, because of the whole Mr. T appearance; I was somehow AWOL during Wrestlemania III, which featured the famous match between Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan. For Wrestlemania IV, V and on and on, I was hooked. I was a huge Ultimate Warrior fan. My enthusiasm dropped off as the ’90s wore on. I knew about the great Bret Hart/Sean … Read the rest
A model hybrid of seemingly effortless form and true-to-life action is the astonishing Miss Bala, by 42-year-old Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo. His earlier, teen-focused works, Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode, while they are expertly crafted (and especially alluring for those with a penchant for handheld camera and super-8), were a tad heavy-fisted for the subject matter, as if they were laden with an extra injection of testosterone. Could it be that in making Miss Bala (bala means bullet, and is a pun on Baja) about grown-ups and placing a 23-year-old woman (and her POV) front and center, he has, in the best way, both softened and retooled his creative hand?
The play of light and dark pushed beyond the usual boundaries, frequent panning and reframing that respect characters and their dilemmas, and long, sometimes baroque takes testify to his growth as a filmmaker with a more subtle yet ultimately stronger aesthetic. Hungarian cinematographer Matyas Elderly, who worked in his home country with the smooth, unhurried Kornel Mundruczo (Delta, Tender Son), aided in the transformation.
Naranjo has a strong feel for architecture, his characters dramatically shot against structures and interior detailing. He knows how to move them efficiently and dramatically through the spaces in between, whether inside a huge auditorium (a marvelous scene full of confetti and mariachi music, when the protagonist wins the Miss Baja California title), a claustrophobic bedroom, the patio of a grand hotel, or the inside of a car. At the same time, he captures the the right, and generally most striking, angles of her elongated ex-model’s torso and face with planes worthy of Picasso.
At the drama’s center is Laura (Stephanie Sigman), a reserved, poor, but naturally glam 23-year-old who lives outside Tijuana, functioning as mother for her father and beloved younger brother in their shack of a home. She hopes that winning the pageant will help her earn money. Her noble goal is to pay for the kid’s education.
In a chi-chi nightclub where her pushy best friend and fellow contestant takes her to meet important people, she becomes the only witness to a massacre of police and American … Read the rest
Zack Parker’s Scalene is a small midwestern gem of a psychological thriller, with several moments that are as shocking as any that will find their way to commercial movie screens all year. Parker and his co-writer, longtime collaborator Brandon Owens use two storytelling devices that have gone in and out of vogue — out-of-sequence and multiple-perspective recounting of events — to marvelous effect. Shot in the filmmaker’s home state of Indiana, it is a heady and tragic mind bender, one that has been unduly overlooked by the major American fests while having had a long run on the regional circuit.
The film opens with Janice, expertly played by Margo Martindale, character actress extraordinaire, in her first starring turn after winning an Emmy for her role in FX’s Justified, arriving at the suburban home of Paige (Hanna Hall, who once played Forrest Gump’s daughter) and brutally assaulting her. The film then jumps back in time to the past, where we slowly learn what caused this horrific event. As we learn over the course of the next hour-and-a-half, it is Janice’s disabled son Jakob (Adam Scarimbolo) whom Paige had been hired to watch over, who is the source of the trouble. Parker coaxes fantastic performances out of Scarimbolo and especially Martindale, whose anger and heartbreak are palpable from the film’s earliest moments.
Scalene is Parker’s third feature, following the 33-year-old director’s Inexchange (2006) and Quench (2007). It finishes its run at the Brooklyn’s ReRun Gastropub Theater this week.
Filmmaker: What provoked you to tell this brutal and bleak story in such an unusual, structurally sophisticated way?
Parker: The idea came about on two fronts. This is my third feature. It came about because of the response to my other two, which were quite polarizing among critics and audiences. There were people who really responded favorably to the films, and then there were some who truly hated them. On Netflix and IMDb you would see people saying these are the worst movies ever made. I was just sort of taken aback by how polarized and drastic the reaction to them … Read the rest
A rising star of the under-40 British indie director set, Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace) may not yet be a recognizable name in the States, but years from now his latest film, the brain-bending, spookily enigmatic The Kill List may well be regarded as a milestone in the horror genre. It isn’t just that Wheatley has concocted an ingenious new way of frightening audiences—the film’s ending shocked and thrilled viewers at South by Southwest, who flocked to the Internet to praise its unholy attributes—but that his free blending of seemingly incompatible genre conventions seems so natural as we enter the psychic landscape of his characters. The Kill List opens in an aggressive domestic mode not too distant from the dreary kitchen-sink realism of the late ’60s: edgy thirty-something Jay (Neil Maskell) and his outspoken wife Shel (MyAnna Buring), who have a young son too often present for their marital squabbles, are having a ferocious row about their finances. He’s incredulous that she has spent 40,000 pounds he had stowed away in their home; she assails him for being out of work the past eight months. Moments later, they are snuggling; their relationship is tight and loving, we come to understand, if turbulent. When they are joined for dinner by Jay’s best friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his raven-haired companion, Fiona (Emma Fryer), we learn that the two fellows are professional hit men, and that something went traumatically awry for Jay on his last assignment in Kiev. With some prompting from Shel, who is close enough to Gal to confide her anxieties, Jay agrees to meet with a powerful and intimidating new client who assigns the duo a list of people to knock off.
Obviously old hands at the dirty-deeds business, Jay and Gal have a relationship every bit as intimate and volatile as Shel does with her husband; he’s a coiled spring who unleashes his obscure fury on a smut peddler and harmless merrymaking Bible thumpers alike. With a few deft moves, Wheatley subtly shifts the film from gut-punch domestic drama to heady thriller. But it’s when his killers … Read the rest
A low-key drama that articulates the ennui of a returning servicewoman after a tour in the Middle East, Liza Johnson’s Return strikes a delicate balance between familial melodrama and suffering vet pic. Light on exposition and heavy on expert thesping, it features a striking performance by Linda Cardellini, once the most sly and attractive of the awkward high schoolers on Freaks and Geeks, and now a fully mature screen actress making the most of her copious talents. We meet her character Kelly at the airport, freshly arrived in Ohio after a stint in an unnamed theater of war, and only slowly begin to understand the broad disconnect she has with her plumber husband (Michael Shannon) and two young girls.
Unable to adjust to life at home, she doesn’t exhibit the classic PSTD symptoms, but an underlying sense of purposelessness and dissatisfaction overcome her in their modest house and at her job in a warehouse. As her indulgences in swearing, drinking and loud rap music grow into a larger inability to maintain social affability in nearly any context and her awareness of her husband’s activities in the year she’s been away comes to fruition, Cardellini’s Kelly must figure out whether there is any longer a home to be salvaged, or simply a place as alien as the desert she may secretly yearn to get back to.
Helmer Johnson is a multi-dimensional artist who has worked as a professor and curator while making a series of acclaimed short films. Her short film South of Ten was the opening night short at the 2006 New York Film Festival, and her gallery work and installations have been exhibited at MoMA, the Walker Arts Center and the Centre Pompidou as well as major European film festivals such as the Berlinale and Rotterdam. Her feature debut Return, which had its world premiere at last year’s Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, opens this Friday.
Filmmaker: A lot of your short work features non-actors. How did the experience of working with trained performers alter your working methods?
Johnson: For the last five years … Read the rest
Back in 2008, Alaskan director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean was awarded Best Short at the Sundance Film Festival for his period film Sikumi, about a murder and its aftermath in an Inuit community. MacLean, one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” that year, had set the buzzed-about tale in his frozen Arctic hometown of Barrow, the historical seat of the Iñupiaq people, casting locals and shooting out on the ice in subzero temperatures. (Sin Nombre writer-director Cary Fukunaga lensed the film.) Last year at Sundance, MacLean unveiled On the Ice, a feature-length movie loosely based on the short film; while the basic set-up remained the same, the story had a contemporary setting where hoodie-wearing Inupiat youth striving to emulate their hip-hop icons gambol about town on snowmobiles instead of dog sleds. MacLean shifted gears to jittery suspense as well in order to explore the moral complexities of guilt and responsibility within a traditional culture. The film, gorgeously shot by DP Lol Crawley (Ballast), went on to win the Best First Feature Award at the 2011 Berlinale.
Teenage pals Qalli (Josiah Patkotak) and Aivaaq (Frank Qutuq Irelan) come from a close-knit community in northern Alaska, balancing the expectations of their elders with the natural rebelliousness of youth. Qalli’s family is stable and supportive of his efforts to head off to college; Aivaaq, who has an edgier vibe, lives with his alcoholic mother and is contemplating finding a job so he can take care of his pregnant girlfriend. Though such circumstances differentiate them, they maintain a tight relationship. As an all-night house party gets underway one evening, they agree to meet mutual friend James (John Miller)—a rival of Aivaaq’s—for a seal-hunting trip the next morning. When Qalli arrives at the meeting point, the meth-high boys are already locked in a fistfight, and he intervenes, an incident that leads to James’ violent death. Everyone back in town grieves for the missing teen, buying Aivaaq and Qalli’s claim that James fell through the ice, leaving the friends to quietly agonize over their decision to abandon the body … Read the rest
Although you’ve probably never heard of him, writer and professor Gene Sharp is one of the foremost scholars on grassroots, non-violent protest movements. The son of an itinerant preacher, the Ohio-born octogenarian, whose writings have informed the tactics of protest movement leaders from Serbia to Iran and the Ukraine to Syria, teaches at UMass Dartmouth. He lives a life of relative quiet and solitude, at least when revolutionaries from around the globe aren’t clamoring for his advice. In Ruaridh Arrow’s documentary How to Start a Revolution we get up close and personal with Sharp, who has drawn the direct ire of dictators and plutocrats on the far left and far right, from Hugo Chavez to the late Slobodan Milosevic.
Arrow’s film takes us from the quaint Boston offices that Sharp maintains with his assistant, Jamila Raqib, to various conflict points across the globe, where Arrow profiles the very people who put Sharp’s formula of unrelenting non-violent civil disobedience into action. In so doing, he links a broad cross-section of social and political movements together under the rubric of Sharp’s techniques. At the same time, he reveals to us a man of seemingly impeccable moral rigor, who, from the time he was jailed for protesting Korean War conscription (long before the anti-war movement in the States gained steam over a decade later), has been committed to non-violent political struggle.
Trained as a newspaper journalist, Arrow got his start in broadcasting producing news segments for the U.K.’s SkyNews, before he moved on to Channel 4′s Frontline-esque Dispatches series. He has produced documentary programs for the The Financial Times and the BBC. During the Egyptian Revolution, he reported regularly from Tahrir Square. His feature debut, How to Start a Revolution premiered at last fall’s Boston Film Festival, where it won a prize for best documentary. It opens at the ReRun Gastropub Theater on Friday.
Filmmaker: How did you first learn about Gene Sharp’s work and how did your interest in his work evolve into the desire to make this film?
Arrow: I’m originally a newspaper journalist. … Read the rest
For his harrowing debut feature, Australian director Justin Kurzel (Blue Tongue) took on a sensationalistic serial-murder case that rocked the northern suburbs of Adelaide in the early aughts. Known across the country as the “bodies in barrels” case, the Snowtown murders spurred controversy and launched a lengthy investigation that resulted in the conviction of a charismatic drifter, John Bunting, along with three accomplices, including a teenage boy he had taken under his wing. Attached to the project by Warp Films Australia’s Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, and working from a script by Shaun Grant, Kurzel brings psychological verisimilitude and a gritty naturalism to the details of this true-crime story, achieving cinematic truth alongside semi-journalistic accuracy drawn from book accounts, court transcripts, and interviews in the community. The Snowtown Murders won a FIPRESCI Prize at the 2011 Cannes Critics’ Week, as well as top honors at the Australian Film Institute Awards, for best director, actor, screenplay, and editing.
Cast almost entirely with local nonprofessional actors, Kurzel’s film drops in on the benighted community of Salisbury North, where downcast youth Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) lives with his chain-smoking mother Elizabeth (Lousie Harris) and two half brothers in a squalid estate home. When infectiously charming John (Daniel Henshall) rides into town and begins to date Elizabeth, he takes an interest in cleaning up the area of ostensible predators, drug addicts, and perverts, beginning with a neighbor who has taken naked photos of Jamie and his siblings. John recruits Jamie in harassing the man, first with light vandalism, then eventually dumping a bucket of crushed kangaroo parts on his porch until he moves out in a panic. John’s energetic confidence and zeal for justice mobilizes the community, who gather for alcohol-fueled watch meetings to vent their frustrations and identify morally suspect individuals. Into this maelstrom of prejudice floats laconic Jamie, who has found a dubious role model in a man whose demonic influence on him escalates. Forced to shoot a dog execution-style, Jamie is then recruited to witness the protracted killing of his half brother, who John learns has been raping his young charge.… Read the rest
Jiro Ono, the world’s most acclaimed sushi chef, is not one to rest. As hard working an octogenarian as you’re ever likely to encounter on screen, Jiro is a celebrity in Japan, but little known here in the States. That is likely to change thanks to director David Gelb’s portrait of the man, his two sons and the philosophy of diligence, hard work and perfectionism they demonstrate in Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
A hit at last year’s Berlinale and Tribeca Film Festival, it depicts the rigorous work ethic that Jiro, who began making sushi professionally shortly after World War II, insists upon from himself and his staff of apprentices. Captaining an incredibly small restaurant that seats less than a dozen, only serves sushi and requires reservations up to a year in advance, Jiro has passed on his passion for sushi to his two sons, both of whom are budding sushi chefs themselves.
Gelb, who studied film at USC, first became obsessed by sushi as a youngster when his father Peter, the manager of the Metropolitan Opera, would take him on business trips to Japan. The now 28-year-old director co-directed the short Lethargy, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Edward Burns, with Daddy Longlegs co-director Josh Safdie when they were both just 18 years old.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures, opens this Friday in Manhattan.
Filmmaker: You’ve said elsewhere that you initially set out to make a documentary about sushi culture. How did you end up focusing solely on Jiro?
Gelb: I started out shooting little test segments, feeling out the style of the film and also hoping I might be able to raise some money with them. I shot a short on my favorite L.A. sushi chef Nozawa. He actually just retired last week. That was kind of a big deal — I don’t know if you saw the huge piece in the Times about Nozawa?
Filmmaker: I didn’t.
Gelb: He’s one of the most interesting sushi chefs in the United States as well … Read the rest
Capturing the moment a work of art is born, or rather the arduous process through which a particular masterwork begins to reveal itself to a painter or sculptor, is an old subject for cinema. Hollywood in the classical and postwar era loved biopics, bringing to the screen highly romanticized, larger-than-life portrayals of everyone from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, Michelangelo to Toulouse-Lautrec. There are fewer great films that focus single-mindedly on the creative process, however. Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse is one, a masterful film about a fictional artist whose laborious, continually frustrated efforts to paint his beautiful young muse are rendered in minute documentary detail and large swaths of real-time concentration. On the documentary side, Victor Erice’s Quince Tree of the Sun (aka Dream of Light) is an enthralling depiction of Spanish artist Antonio López’s perennial efforts to faithfully depict the way light hits a tree in his garden every autumn, slyly combined with one or two fictional techniques, as if the impurities in the artist’s work had become the director’s own.
Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter Painting delivers precisely what the title of the film promises: for most of the film, we witness one of the world’s most celebrated and prolific artists at work in his studio, creating a series of large paintings, and the effect is mesmerizing. Richter applies layer after layer of paint to his canvases, first with brushes and then with his redoubtable giant squeegee, continually altering the surface and expression of his spontaneous abstracts, which become richer and more mysterious with each pass. Richter, a laconic, gentle artist who has never allowed anyone to film or observe him while he is at work, is openly discomfited by the camera, telling the director at one point, “We have to talk about the film.” Occasionally, Belz inserts brief cut-outs of interviews with the Dresden-born painter from the late ’60s and early ’70s, after his defection from East Germany, impressing upon us the continuity of his thinking about art as well as his reluctance to expound upon its most secretive inner qualities. Glimpses of Richter navigating the klieg … Read the rest
One of the United Kingdom’s most lauded stylists, Terence Davies has carefully crafted a body of work that fits squarely into the class-conscious, post-neorealist tradition of British cinema, working without much fanfare or regard for the exigencies of commercial filmmaking that the age and his stature would seem to demand.
Now in his mid-sixties, Davies has in the last 30 years quietly established himself as one of the finest British filmmakers of his generation. He is not a cinephile and his lugubrious, sublimely photographed and insidiously hard-hearted narratives — such as 1988′s Distant Voices, Still Lives, which will screen as part of a career retrospective at BAMCinematek this week, and 1992′s The Long Day Closes, which will receive a two-week repertory engagement at the Film Forum starting later this month — draw as much from his own innate sensibility and preoccupations, and a lyrical and meditative film grammar that seems all his own, as they do from the works of literature he cites as influences and increasingly draws his narratives from.
His newest film, The Deep Blue Sea, based on the Terence Rattigan play of the same name, stars Rachel Weisz as a suicidal judge’s wife who embarks upon a dangerous affair with a Royal Air Force pilot in the aftermath of World War II. After a prestigious festival circuit roll-out that included engagements in Toronto, San Sebastian, Zurich and London, the film found its way to Manhattan at MoMA last week. It opens on commercial screens this Friday.
Filmmaker: How did you first settle on adapting The Deep Blue Sea?
Davies: The producer Sean O’Connor asked if I’d like to adapt a Rattigan play. I said, “I don’t want to do The Browning Version,” because the Anthony Asquith version is so good. I didn’t want to do Separate Tables because the Burt Lancaster, Delbert Mann version from the end of the Fifties is also very good. So I read the whole canon and I thought I could do something with The Deep Blue Sea. That’s what happened.
Filmmaker: Had … Read the rest
The 2011 winner of the Filmmaker-sponsored Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You IFP Gotham Award, Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh’s Scenes of a Crime is a powerful social justice documentary that uses its feature-length format as its most powerful argument for the innocence of Adrian Thomas, a New York man currently inprisoned for the shaking death of his infant son. Over the course of the film’s 88 minutes, we go beyond the soundbite, watching long stretches of Thomas’s interview by two detectives — a grilling that resulted in a confession that specialists in police interrogation believe was coerced. Scenes of a Crime is the engrossing flipside to prime time crime shows, which inevitably end with tearful, cathartic mea culpas. Here, filmmakers Hadaegh and Babcock structure their film as a compelling, character-based mystery, dramatically revealing how, and why, people may say things about themselves and their actions they don’t actually believe. In addition to the Thomas footage, Hadaegh and Backcock talk to the detectives, experts on both sides, medical specialists, jury members, and, finally, outside of the interrogation room, Thomas himself. While they clearly have an opinion, the filmmakers present both sides of the argument against Thomas, allowing the viewer space to imagine him or herself as one those 12 people who decided Thomas’s fate.
Scenes of A Crime is the second feature by the Los Angeles-based filmmaking team. Their first, 2003′s A Certain Kind of Death, looked at the fate of those who die without next of kin. This new film, which opens Friday at New York’s Cinema Village and April 13 at L.A.’s Laemmle’s Music Hall, is an entirely independent production, financed by the filmmakers after their years working in TV documentary. In addition to the Gotham Award, the film won the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at the DOC NYC Festival in the Viewfinders section. I spoke to them last November, as the film screened at our “Best Film Not Playing…” MoMA series, about the movie but also moviemaking as a couple.
Filmmaker:… Read the rest
Deeply shrouded in mystery, the election of the Pope is a strange amalgam of modern democracy and ancient ritual. It is also a circumstance that seems ripe for farce. At least Nanni Moretti, perhaps Italy’s most revered contemporary filmmaker, seems to think so. His newest film, We Have a Pope, which premiered last year in Cannes as Habemus Papam, is an often funny, sneakily moving investigation of the Vatican’s less-than-infallible process of choosing the divine, and one man’s rejection of his supposedly divine calling. Starring Michel Piccoli as a would-be Pope who disappears after his election and Moretti himself as the psychoanalyst charged with helping the new Pope through his post-election panic, We Have a Pope finds the director, as he did in 2006′s veiled Berlusconi biopic Il Caimano, pondering the inner life of one of Italy’s most powerful, iconic men.
Since his 1976 feature debut, I Am Self-Sufficient (Io sono un autarchico), Moretti has steadily built his reputation as Italy’s answer to Woody Allen, a dialogue-driven comedic filmmaker who tells accessible tales of urbane neurotics and oddballs in a straightforward way. He acts in most of his productions as well as writing and directing, and quickly gained fame for a filmmaking style which veers from broad comedy to tackling subjects not known for their levity. His acclaim grew internationally in the 80s, as he won the Silver Lion in Venice for his 1981 film Sogni d’oro and the Silver Bear in Berlin for his 1985 film La messa e finita. His most well known films on this side of the Atlantic are 1993′s Caro diario (Dear Diary) and 2001′s La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room), with the latter winning the Palme D’Or in Cannes, where Moretti will serve as the Jury President for the upcoming 65th edition.
We Have a Pope opens Friday through Sundance Selects.
Filmmaker: For most of your career you told small stories, yet in your last couple of features you’ve increasingly focused on most sophisticated tales of very powerful men. What’s driven … Read the rest
Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín (Tony Manero) was born in 1976, three years after the coup d’état that toppled democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and ushered in the long, brutal regime of General Augusto Pinochet, whose chokehold on the South American nation lasted until 1990. Although Larraín is currently shooting the second season of Prófugos, an action-drama series for HBO Latin America about cocaine cartels — “it’s like playing a with a big toy,” he avers — the Pinochet era has continued to fascinate him. The chaotic, thunderous birth moments of this dark and deeply corrupt period in Chile’s late-modern history provide the setting for the writer-director’s latest feature, Post Mortem, a comically dour love story–cum–allegory of political madness that debuted at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. Mario Cornejo (Alfredo Castro) is a laconic mortician’s assistant whose mannered obsession with aging cabaret dancer Nancy Puelma (Antonia Zegers, in a crypto-seductive role that recalls Isabella Rossellini’s in Blue Velvet) turns sour and irrational as the wheels of history disrupt the social order. Like the protagonist of Tony Manero, a disco-crazed sociopath who kills repeatedly in order to realize his dream of performing a Saturday Night Fever–inspired sequence on television, Mario is a stoic cipher. His morality is archaic —“I don’t sleep with women who sleep with other men,” he matter-of-factly informs his curiously smitten co-worker Sandra (Amparo Noguera) — and gradually becomes opaque as events overtake him.
History may have a straight face, but Larraín finds bits of mordant humor in all the absurdity that surrounds his characters. (Mario’s low-key confrontation with Nancy’s irritable manager at the Bim Bam Bum club ends, for instance, when he silently and gingerly overturns a giant plate-glass window.) With his co-writer Mateo Iribarren and close collaborator Castro (an accomplished theater director and television actor in Santiago who starred in Tony Manero and also appeared in Larraín’s debut, Fuga), Larraín has found a way to work simultaenously on an emotional and symbolic register, fusing them into somber melodrama. Thematically, too, Post Mortem is complex. Early on and throughout the … Read the rest
