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  • November 19, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    Atrocities, war…

    …and hot-button issues, that’s what this year’s Best Feature Documentary films are made of. Here’s the very serious Oscar shortlist:

    “Autism: The Musical”

    “Body of War”

    “For the Bible Tells Me So”

    “Lake of Fire”

    “Nanking”

    “No End in Sight”

    “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience”

    “Please Vote for Me”

    “The Price of Sugar”

    “A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman”

    “The Rape of Europa”

    “Sicko”

    “Taxi to the Dark Side”

    “War/Dance”

    “White Light/Black Rain”

    Iraq war themes are dominant this year, being central to at least four of the above films by our count, though we have to give a nod to a surprise comeback from World War II, atrocities from which have spurred into existence three of this year’s titles. Way to have staying power, WWII!

    So, no “In the Shadow of the Moon,” despite the astronomically (hyuck!) good reviews the astronaut doc received. No “God Grew Tired of Us” — the Lost Boys of Sudan being a bit 2003. And no “Into Great Silence,” though that’s not a shocker — Philip Gröning’s near-silent, meditative examination of monastic life is far artier than is this category’s usual skew.

    + 15 Docs Move Ahead in 2007 Oscar® Race (Oscars.org)


  • November 15, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    “Southland Tales.”

    We’ve still under the weather and are also having terrible trouble writing about “Southland Tales,” but don’t want to let it go without mention. So this isn’t going to be very coherent, which many would no doubt deem appropriate.

    There seems to be some alchemical disconnect between the movies Richard Kelly has in his head and what actually ends up on screen. We like “Donnie Darko” plenty, but can’t believe that anyone can glean the interpretations Kelly has offered in interviews and on DVD extras from what’s in the film alone. There’s not enough of it there on screen… and anyway, why would you want to? Those supplemental explanations just drag down something that’s better left happily oblique. If Kelly had managed to make clear everything he intended in the film, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good.

    Now, if Mr. Kelly were to stand next to the screen at every showing of “Southland Tales” and offer verbal footnotes, perhaps with backing of the three graphic novels that precede the film and allow it to kick off, “Star Wars” style, on book four, the whole thing would surely unravel, if not elegantly, at least in a way that made some sense. As it stands, though, “Southland Tales” is overstuffed, underexplicated, hubristically ambitious, uneven, bewildering and kind of awesome. We can’t imagine it’s going to please most anyone, and we have to admit our personal susceptibility to the fabulous disaster, but “Southland Tales” has wormed its way in our brain like few other films this year and is, without a doubt, one of our favorites.

    The basics are: It’s 2008, Texas has been bombed by terrorists, neocons run rampant in the upper echelons of the government, the U.S. is buckled down under a ‘roided-up Patriot Act and at war with Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Syria, the draft has been reinstated, oil is out of the question and Southern California is being powered by an experimental, laws-of-thermodynamics-defying invention called Fluid Karma, housed in a massive structure looming off the Santa Monica shore. This entire scenario is dropped on us in first ten minutes with the help of a animated overview, and from there the story lets forth a dozen tentacles following scattered characters: a famous actor with links to the Republican party and an inconvenient case of amnesia (Dwayne Johnson); a porn star with talk show and franchise ambitions who’s written a screenplay that foretells the coming apocalypse (Sarah Michelle Gellar); a Venice Beach-based radical activist group called the neo-Marxists; a scarred former actor turned soldier turned narrator, drug addict and sniper (Justin Timberlake); and a cop with, possibly, a twin and also, possibly, amnesia (Seann William Scott).

    How to explicate “Southland Tales”‘ unearthly pull? It comes in part because the casting is all in air quotes — The Rock, Buffy, Stifler, various SNL escapees, Mandy Moore, an almost unrecognizable Kevin Smith and the current king of the pop charts — but the acting is often as earnest as the over-the-top scenarios will allow, particularly Johnson and Timberlake, who manages to make a sequence in which he imagines himself as the star of a music video set in an arcade, lip syncing to the Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done,” bafflingly resonant. It’s also because the film seems like a hallucination born from years of apocalyptic Los Angeles imagery, the meeting point of “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Blade Runner” (both of which receive nods) and dozens of other tales on celluloid and in print that would have the city constantly on the verge of catastrophe and still soldiering on, cheerfully oblivious to the fact. And its in part because it fearlessly mixes T.S. Eliot references with the cheapest of dumb blond jokes, and because under a front of irony the film has its big sloppy heart out on its sleeve.

    So “Southland Tales” is about L.A., it’s about the end of the world, it’s overtly a comedy but also helplessly mournful, it’s a genre mash-up particularly fixated on the ever-rewarding oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it’s, less successfully, a heavy-handed but fervent political satire. It’s also 19 minutes shorter than the version that was so poorly received at Cannes, and you can see the edges of a snipped storyline apparently involving Janeane Garofalo, who appears fleetingly toward the film’s climax. We’d like to see that first cut, but we’d also just like to see the film again. (We’re in the stalwart minority there — though our colleague Matt Singer did allow that he’d see it a second time… in a year.) Certainly it’s valiantly, foolhardily its own film, and it’s sure as hell like nothing else you’ll find in theaters, and that, we’d hope, would be recommendation enough.


  • November 13, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    IFC News: Baumbach, Burnett.

    We’re a little under the weather and have been remiss — here’s this week’s IFC News update:

    Aaron Hillis talks to Noah Baumbach:

    Even though Margot has some dislikeable qualities, you’ve said before that you hope audiences will understand her. Reverse Shot wrote about this film that “the compassion [Baumbach] once showed toward his neurotic characters, starting from his 1995 debut, ‘Kicking and Screaming,’ has turned into rancor.” In defense of that, would you personally want to spend time with these characters, and how mean-spirited do you see the film to be?

    A lot of us do spend time with these characters. People might not want to see that in a movie, but I think this behavior is a lot more common than what people let on or recognize. On the other side of it, I’m not writing about people I necessarily want to go hang out with. It’s certainly not why I’m writing about them. In a lot of ways, I think the question is wrong. I’m not saying yours is; you’re reading from a review. I don’t really know how to start talking about these people with “Oh, they’re unsympathetic.” First of all, I don’t think that’s true from even sensitive people’s criteria. Pauline is not a perfect human being, but I think she’s very sympathetic. I think Malcolm, the kids and John Turturro’s character are sympathetic. I have a lot of empathy for Margot, but I understand how people might… you know, I’ll give them a pass on that one. She dominates a lot of the movie, and I know that can be difficult for people, but in the movies and books I like, there is such a thing as an unreliable narrator. I suppose it fits in a Jim Thompson novel, but why not have it in movies that are actually closer to our lives, that are about real human interaction [rather] than trying to sympathize with hitmen, murderers, or some sort?

    On the podcast, we discuss motion capture and whether it should be considered animation.

    Michael Atkinson tackles “Berlin Alexanderplatz” and “Killer of Sheep.” On the latter:

    There’s no story, but there are people — mainly, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a poor slaughterhouse laborer with a loving wife and curious children whose life in the outer-urban wastes is in the process of bulldozing his pride and confidence. Burnett’s film proceeds from the very beginning as if every image and moment of Stan’s life is a mythic truth to gaze upon, and damn if it isn’t sweepingly convincing in the process. The action, for instance, of attempting to carry a disembodied car engine down a flight of tract-housing stairs has positively Sisyphean traction. It’s not a movie you pick dramatic highlights or even visual memories from; instead, it flows before you like a despairing folk song made real, a blues anthem older than movies or Burnett himself.

    Matt Singer reviews “Southland Tales” here (”For all its cleverness and evocative imagery, an incredibly uneven movie”) and “Margot at the Wedding” here (”[Baumbach] may have invented [a dysfunctional family] so convincingly screwed up, so far beyond repair that spending 90 loveless, awkward minutes with them could be seen as a waste of time”).

    And Christopher Bonet has what’s new in theaters. And we’re headed home to steep ourselves in tea.

    + IFC News


  • November 13, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    That’s so early 2007.

    Elevator must be out of order. Does Amy Taubin have the New Oxford American Dictionary on her side? While “mumblecore” manages to be a runner-up for 2007 Word of the Year (along with “bacn,” “cougar” and “tase”), the distinction ultimately goes to “locavore,” a word we have never heard aloud or seen used in print before today, but that apparently distills the zeitgeist of the year better than any indie film movement, whether it be burgeoning or one that “has had its 15 minutes.”

    Personally, we felt that our year would best be described by another runner-up, the beekeeper-scourge that is “colony collapse disorder.”

    + Oxford Word Of The Year: Locavore (Oxford University Press Blog)


  • November 9, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    Odds: Friday - del Toro, Polanski, Coppola.

    "Fairy land was never like this!" Guillermo del Toro’s next film? "Champions," an adaptation of this ’60s Brit TV show about a team of secret agents who are rescued and given super powers by an advanced civilization when their plane crashed in the Himalayas. This will be a swing back to the commercial side for del Toro, who’s proven himself comfortable working in both. [Via Variety] And Roman Polanski’s next film will be "The Ghost," based on this novel by Robert Harris, a political thriller about a ghostwriter who uncovers dangerous secrets when working on the memoirs of a former British prime minister. [Via Variety]

    There’s interview runoff from Bruce Handy’s Vanity Fair profile of Francis Ford Coppola up online here. On revisiting and reworking past films:

    [E]ven now there’s a movie I’d love to get my hands on, just because I didn’t do the final shaping of it. It would probably never be seen but I’d just like to do it for myself. Finian’s Rainbow. [He directed the musical, which stars Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, in 1968.] I’d love to take 20 minutes out of Finian’s Rainbow because I just think it could be made so much better. [Via Movie City News]

    The critics aren’t raving about "Young Frankenstein" on Broadway, notes the AP.

     "Get Carter" fans are unhappy about the planned demolition of the multi-story Gateshead parking lot —  the Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park — featured in the film, scheduled to start this month, reports Arifa Akbar at the Independent.

    The films submitted for Best Animated Feature Film Oscar consideration are up here. It’s going to be another three nominee year.

    And Maria Bello tells Kevin Maher at the Telegraph "I think, maybe, I’ve picked roles that are a mix of the Madonna and the whore."

    Being raised Roman Catholic, these archetypes were strong in my life and difficult to break. So in the roles I’ve chosen I had to smash them in myself – I could never live up to either the Madonna or the whore, because I’m a mixture of both.

    + United Artists revives ‘Champions’ (Variety)
    + Roman Polanski returns with ‘Ghost’ (Variety) 
    + Coppola Without Hollywood (Vanity Fair)
    + Critics Are Cool to `Young Frankenstein’ (AP)
    + ‘Get Carter’ fans mourn for car park (Independent)
    + 12 Animated Features Submitted for 2007 Oscar® Consideration (Oscars.org)
    + Why the lady is also a tramp (Telegraph)


  • November 9, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    Critic wrangle: “Lions for Lambs.”

    There seems to be something admirable about how pugilisticly didactic Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs” is, with its spoonful of high-octane star Splenda to make the liberal guilt go down. And the film does have its unanticipated fans: Stephanie Zacharek at Salon acknowledges that it’s “self-righteous, didactic, dramatically and visually static and, in places, extremely boring,” yet also finds it works:

    Redford and [screenwriter Michael Matthew] Carnahan clearly intend it as a call to arms, which explains why the movie sometimes feels like a civics lesson, albeit one given by a moderately entertaining instructor. Still — like a good civics lesson — the picture adamantly spins out questions rather than answers.

    Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman writes that “Lions for Lambs is so square it’s like something out of the gray twilight glow of the golden age of television…Yet Carnahan’s writing ignites familiar issues with vigor and snap; there’s audacity in its attempt to seize us with nothing but a war of rhetoric.” Ella Taylor at the LA Weekly allows that “The movie is awful — and also oddly touching, even adorable in its dogged sense of responsibility, its stubborn refusal of style.” “Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the [new antiwar pictures],” writes David Edelstein at New York. “Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma.”

    And surprise defender Armond White at the New York Press declares that “As you think along with the film’s presentation of ideas and watch characters caught in moments of moral and political tension, Lions for Lambs starts to articulate the stress of this political era.” “Cruise, Streep and Redford do what movie star-artists are supposed to do,” he adds. (No “smug”? No “condescending”?)

    Elsewhere, a lukewarm Roger Ebert sighs “Useful new things to be said about the debacle in Iraq are in very short supply. I’m not sure that’s what ‘Lions for Lambs’ intends to demonstrate, but it does, exhaustingly.” Adds Anthony Lane at the New Yorker, “It winces with liberal self-chastisement: Redford is surely smart enough to realize, as the professor turns his ire on those who merely chatter while Rome burns, that his movie is itself no better, or more morally effective, than high-concept Hollywood fiddling.” Manohla Dargis at the New York Times writes that the film “tells us everything most of us know already, including the fact that politicians lie, journalists fail and youth flounders.”

    “For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the point of all this onscreen palaver is supposed to be,” writes Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer. “Of course, we should all be better human beings. So what else is new? And is a time-coded movie talkfest the best way to persuade us?” Dana Stevens at Slate suggests that “Lions for Lambs appears to have been created by someone who’s never seen one of these newfangled contraptions called ‘movies,’ or for that matter, witnessed that phenomenon known as ’speech.’” Slant’s Nick Schager adds that “it runs a brisk 88 minutes in large part because it doggedly, frustratingly refuses to truly delve into the issues it brings up, mistaking newspaper headline-based speeches full of tired talking points for thrilling, incisive debate.” And we’ll give the last word to Nathan Rabin at the Onion AV Club, who concludes that “All talk and zero characterization, it doesn’t even feel like a real movie. Just because a film’s premise is ripped from the headlines doesn’t mean it needs to feel like an op-ed piece.”


  • November 9, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    Chart: Anatomy of a haircut metaphor.

    In interviews and Q&As, Josh Brolin has been fond of recounting how, after Javier Bardem received his signature "No Country For Old Men" villain bob, the two went out drinking in Santa Fe, and a broody Bardem complained to him "Man, I’m not going to get laid for three months!" So how exactly would one describe this year’s most discussed film haircut? Let’s consult the critics:

    The Chigurh 'do.

     

    "Call it."Prince Valiant: Stephen Hunter, Lou Lumenick, Peter Rainer, Nick Schager, Stephanie Zacharek

    Beatles/Monkees: Randy Cordova, Andrew O’Hehir, Anthony Lane, A.O. Scott

    Dutch boy: Michael Phillips, Zacharek

    Buster Brown: Rex Reed, Kenneth Turan

    Pageboy: Lisa Schwarzbaum, Ty Burr

    Richard III: Armond White

    Cousin Itt: Scott Foundas

    Lon Chaney in "London After Midnight": Glenn Kenny


  • November 9, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    Critic wrangle: “No Country For Old Men.”

    "It'll do till the mess gets here." Even the New York PressArmond White likes the Coen brothers’ "No Country For Old Men," adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy: "It would be pathetic to reduce/praise No Country as a thriller. The Coens’ technique goes far beyond that. Moss, Chirgurh and Bell’s appointments with mortality lift the film from plot mechanisms to a confrontation with fate." Solid to delirious praise from most of the rest of our usual round of critics. We particularly liked this, from A.O. Scott at the New York Times:

    [T]he most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

    "’No Country for Old Men’ is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made ‘Fargo,’" adds Roger Ebert. "This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely." From Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly:

    It’s easy to imagine how the Coens, whose Achilles’ heel has always been their predilection for smug irony and easy caricature, might have turned McCarthy’s taciturn Texans into simplistic western-mythos archetypes: the amoral criminal, the righteous peacekeeper, and the naive but basically good-hearted rube in over his head. Instead, they’ve made a film of great, enveloping gravitas, in which words like "hero" and "villain" carry ever less weight the deeper we follow the characters into their desperate journeys.

    Keith Phipps at the Onion AV Club deems the film "a strong return after a few years off" for the Coens, while Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly writes that the film "reverses [their] slide into arch pastiche, brilliantly." Glenn Kenny at Premiere suggests that "the picture represents a high-water mark for the Coens. It’s their best picture, and could well turn out to be the best picture of the year." And of the ending, which goes in directions you might not expect, Michael Koresky at indieWIRE writes that  "The Coens close the film with what might be the most take-your-breath-away ending since Richard Linklater both refused and granted our wishes with "Before Sunset"’s final fade-out."

    Among the less-sold: Anthony Lane at the New Yorker is impressed by the technical skill of the film, but is left emotionally cold: "[T]here remains a nagging sense that the Coens are not so much investing their emotions in a cinematic genre—in this case, the Western revenge drama—as picking it up, inspecting it, and then setting themselves the task of constructing a perfect copy." So is Slate’s Dana Stevens, who declares that "while it may be their most ambitious and successful film in years, remains just a Coen brothers movie, a curio to collect rather than an experience to remember." Stephanie Zacharek at Salon adds that the film "feels less like a breathing, thinking movie than an exercise."

    David Edelstein at New York calls it "a near masterpiece" but also "a cosmic bummer": "No one, not even Jones’s sheriff, has comparable weight, and so, in the end, cruelty, chaos, and resignation swamp everything—including the Coens’ evident delight in their crackerjack thriller set pieces and soulfully weird actors." Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer echoes that "I cannot look at it and write about it in any other way than as an exercise in cosmic futility," though he concludes that he’s not sorry he saw it. And Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader writes a fascinating if frustrating pan in which he essentially deems the film’s perceived nihilism a kind of perverse panacea for a trouble national psyche. He places Chigurh alongside Hannibal Lecter as figures that are "a savior of sorts, a saintlike holy psycho who made us feel less uneasy about wanton slaughter," writing that "the picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is… so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity."

    As for us, we’ve shrieked our love for this film out enough already. Our review from Cannes is here; we’re eager to see how it’ll do at the box office. It’s hard to believe any other film this year will receive comparative praise, but it also seems a little too dark, too strange for mainstream or award success. We’d love to be proven wrong.


  • November 7, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    Odds: Wednesday - Moby Gratis, historically inaccurate chest hair.

    "We mortals have many weaknesses..." Maybe it’s the strike, but it’s awfully quiet out today. We’re headed to a company offsite tomorrow — back on Friday.

    Moby, who could certainly be called, with all fondness, a soundtrack whore, is offering up 44 unreleased tracks to indie and student filmmakers for free at MobyGratis.com. He adds that "if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that’s generated being given to the humane society."

    250 photographs by Leni Riefenstahl were stolen from storage in Cologne, reports Naomi Kresge at Reuters.

    "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" is a "just a travesty of history," writes historian Alison Weir at the Guardian:

    As a portrait of Elizabeth’s reign and Britain’s war with Spain, it is grossly inaccurate. The film’s locations - cathedrals and bare stone walls - are 300-400 years out of date. The costumes are sloppy, too: anybody who appeared at court had to be formally dressed. You could never get into the Queen’s presence, as Clive Owen’s dashing Walter Raleigh does, wearing an open-necked shirt.

    But what kind of director would Shekhar Kapur if he let historical niceties do away with a chance to give the world a glimpse of Owen ’s boldly unmanscaped torso?

    George Clooney gets into a shoving match with Fabio at Madeo, via Page Six. Some days you’re the Cary Grant of our time, others you find yourself getting slappy with the model for the cover of "Wild Scottish Embrace."

    And at the Onion AV Club, Scott Tobias interviews Tom Perrotta, the author of the novels that were adapted into "Election" and "Little Children." Perotta’s latest, "The Abstinence Teacher," is also being adapted for film, with "Little Miss Sunshine"’s Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris attached to direct.

    + MobyGratis.com (MobyGratis.com)
    + Leni Riefenstahl photos stolen from German firm (Reuters)
    + Another view (Guardian)
    + CLOONEY, FABIO GET PUSHY (NY Post)
    + Tom Perrotta (AV Club)


  • November 7, 2007   Published ~ 17 years ago.

    Neglected, animated.

    We’d rather not start on Oscar talk yet, because there’ll be plenty of time for it in the upcoming months and because we don’t care. Still, the LA TimesPatrick Goldstein has an interesting, brief interview with the cheerily diplomatic Pixar creative chief John Lasseter, who’s also a member of the Academy Board of Governors, in which they discuss why it’s so hard for an animated film to get taken seriously.

    According to Metacritic.com, “Ratatouille” remains the best reviewed American movie of the year. Yet none of the Oscar pundits even mentions it as a best picture contender. Doesn’t that bug you?



    You’d love for me to complain, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m not. But I will say I’m proud that the academy has an Oscar that celebrates the best animated feature.



    It used to be the best you could hope for was a musical nomination. I guess you have to view it as akin to the best foreign language film. You’re still eligible for other categories, even if it doesn’t happen very often.

    Variety has a whole section on the topic of Oscars and animation: Ellen Wolff notes that some categories (like writing) are more available to animated films than others, particularly directing: “Ratatouille”’s Brad Bird complains that “Obviously you’re not standing there with a megaphone in virtual land, but we still have to analyze whether people can follow an emotion through a film. We still deal with camera angles and the rhythm of shots.” Iain Blair discusses voice casting and David S. Cohen looks into how the Academy is struggling to define animation in the face of the growth of motion-capture, and how “this fall’s big mo-cap release, ‘Beowulf,’ may stump the rules — or at least have the Acad asking the filmmakers to answer a few questions.”

    On that latter film, Dalya Alberge at the London Times has a breathy piece on its 3-D incarnation:

    The technology has become so flawless that it is set to transform the way films are both made and watched, film-makers say. There is an unsurpassed clarity, making audiences feel that they are in the picture. Two reels of film go through the projector and fool the brain into merging them and seeing them in 3-D.

    Personally, we’d love to see “Ratatouille” get a best picture nod, and it probably does have the best chances of any animated film in quite a while. And it made A.O. Scott get all gushy. Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” which with its black and white cel animation looks in no way related to either the semi-lifelike insanity that is “Beowulf” or the more figurative “Ratatouille,” could also be in line for awards — if not animation, then foreign language film, as it is France’s submission to the category this year.

    + John Lasseter (LA Times)

    + Is animation stuck in Oscar ghetto? (Variety)

    + Animation voice experts debate tricks (Variety)

    + Academy struggles to define animation (Variety)

    + Beowulf becomes even more epic in 3-D (London Times)


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