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 November 19, 2008 REVIEW | Dream On: Tom Gustafson's "Were the World Mine"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The least one could ask of a wish-fulfillment fantasy film is a little buoyancy and breeziness. Yet for all its good-natured intentions, Tom Gustafson's "Were the World Mine," in which a put-upon small-town gay teen converts his hopelessly straight town (including his corn-fed jock crush) to the pink team with the help of a magical, squirting purple pansy, is a mostly leaden affair, suffering as it does from a lack of realization and clarity. A film can't simply be "light as a feather" or contagiously sweet by virtue of its conception, but rather by the fine, clean lines of its craft. And this is no simple matter of budget: oodles of ingenuity have historically been wrung from more impoverished film productions than this one. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Queer Cinema, Reviews ] November 18, 2008 REVIEW | Dull Flame: Shamim Sarif's "I Can't Think Straight"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot. You would think that a cross-cultural, cross-religious lesbian romance should have enough built-in conflict to sustain an 80-minute feature, but Shamim Sarif's "I Can't Think Straight" slumps and stretches its way from its first uninspired set piece, an engagement party for Jordanian-Christian Tala (Lisa Ray), to its mildly embarrassing closing montage, cut to, natch, Jill Sobule's "I Kissed a Girl" (hello, 1995!). As with her other feature, "The World Unseen" (released to theaters earlier this month), Sarif adapts and directs her own novel here, with Ray and Sheetal Sheth playing the lead roles. For "I Can't Think Straight," she enlists the help of co-writer Kelly Moss, but to no avail: Sarif has crafted a movie with such paper-thin characterizations and so lacking in dramatic incident that it's frankly surprising that she was working from a novel at all -- much less one she wrote herself. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Queer Cinema, Reviews ] November 14, 2008 REVIEW | Close Encounters: Yair Hochner's "Antarctica"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] One can't accuse director Yair Hochner of not giving his target audiences what we want: in the opening fifteen minutes of the Israeli filmmaker's ensemble dramedy of hook-ups and hang-ups among a small group of gay men in Tel Aviv, he fills the screen with all manner of groping titillation. As one eye-catcher (Ofer Regirer) plows through a succession of one-night-stands, Hochner dissects the screen into boxes, temporally overlapping one another, allowing for a flurry of casual indulgence; there's no music to accompany this man's seemingly endless dalliances, just heavy breathing and the occasional clipped conversation. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Queer Cinema, Reviews ] November 13, 2008 REVIEW | Fan-dumb: Josh Koury's "We Are Wizards"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Full disclosure: I have never read any of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. I have never seen any of the blockbuster movies based on her series. That I plan to never do so is not entirely because of any perceived intellectual and emotional poverty of these books and movies--I know plenty of smart people who enjoy the Harry Potter stories, and there could be, at extremely generous moments, a certain side of me that would consider giving them a shot. But not as long as there are movies like "We Are Wizards," and not as long as there exist the Harry Potter-crazed subjects who comprise this painful documentary's meretricious survey of kitschy fandom. [ read more in Movies ] [ 2 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ] November 12, 2008 REVIEW | Yawn of the Dead: Vadim Glowna's "House of the Sleeping Beauties"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Intended as a meditation on mortality and morality, Vadim Glowna's adaptation of a Yasunari Kawabata novel simultaneously strives towards portentous poeticism and thriller intrigue, but falls more into tawdry B-movie territory instead. Written, directed, and produced by the German filmmaker, who also stars as protagonist Edmond, "House of the Sleeping Beauties" follows a man in the literal and figurative winter of his life. Edmond begins to visit the titular maison upon the advice of longtime friend Kogi (Maximilian Schell), who creepily persuades him by saying, "I only feel really alive when lying beside someone somnolent." [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] November 11, 2008 REVIEW | You Can Go Home Again: Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Though it often seems the nadir of schmaltz and sentimentality, the Hollywood Christmas movie has always been a bit bipolar. From "A Christmas Story" to "Gremlins," "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" to (undoubtedly) the forthcoming "Four Christmases," the subgenre requires a course of dysfunction and chaos before the dessert of earnest holiday cheer is served. Mom and Dad's best-laid plans go awry, Santa Claus gets trapped in the chimney and asphyxiates, and Arnold and Sinbad vie for the last available Turbo Man action figure -- but in the end, families are reconciled and the true, noncommercial meaning of Christmas is reified. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ]  REVIEW | Trivial Pursuit: Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A noisy, sub-Dickens update on the romantic tramp's tale, "Slumdog Millionaire" zips around a boy's hard-luck life with a strange verve. Ragtag children run through a labyrinthine Indian shantytown with a police officer in hot pursuit. Two boys ride atop a moving train, hanging upside down over the side to steal food from a wealthy family. The same boys arrive at the Taj Mahal and give bogus tours to German tourists. Later they guide an American couple around a scenic village by foot while locals strip their fancy car for parts. The kids are cute, shots are stylishly skewed, cuts are whip-quick, and rousing remixes of M.I.A.'s ubiquitous "Paper Planes" pop-pop and ching-ching throughout. Poverty can be so much fun. [ read more in Movies ] [ 4 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] November 5, 2008 REVIEW | Hack Attack: Darren Lynn Bousman's "Repo! The Genetic Opera"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A helpful shortcut for negotiating the heaps of texts in this modern world: all attempts to give something familiar or antique a self-consciously edgy, gritty makeover can be, de facto, written off as terrible. Reassuring American songbook standards ("Over the Rainbow," "What a Wonderful World," etc.) performed in breakneck pop-punk style? Terrible. Movies set in centuries past where actual rules of comport are ignored and everyone acts like frisky undergraduates with ruffled collars? Terrible. Steampunk? Terrible, terrible, terrible. [ read more in Movies ] [ 3 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] November 4, 2008 REVIEW | The Other Side of the Fence: Mark Herman's "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] For a little, promising while, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" seems to be a welcome, if belated, response to "Life Is Beautiful." Whereas Roberto Benigni's self-deifying exercise in Holocaust schmaltz--one of the most repugnant and false movies ever made--sincerely believes obliviousness (not imagination, as its defenders claim) can shield the innocent from horror, Mark Herman's film understands this is not only impossible, but that any attempt to do so is unconscionably insulating and opposed to developing human awareness. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] October 29, 2008 REVIEW | Out of the Past: Amos Gitai's "One Day You'll Understand"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai doesn't seem to have a career so much these days as a mission. It would be difficult for this ambassador of his nation's cinema to break away from Capital-t Topics at this point, but his lugubriousness as a filmmaker indicates that he believes in his own cause as much as his admirers do. Long, slow single takes and tracking shots that call attention to themselves and humorless, self-consciously "penetrating" close-ups are normally the order of the day for Gitai. And this one-man film warrior has finally, with his latest, "One Day You'll Understand," made his first explicit fictional work of Holocaust remembrance. While its intimacy occasionally brings out some memorable pocket-sized moments, the film is still burdened with Gitai's dry art-cinema tactics and narrative didacticism. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] October 24, 2008 REVIEW | Running Wild: Christina Clausen's "The Universe of Keith Haring"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The best compliment that can be paid "The Universe of Keith Haring," a straightforward, fast-moving documentary about the Pennsylvania phenom who made his way from New York City bohemia to the art world and transcended all to become one of the most recognizable names in popular graphics in the late 20th century, is that it is as inspiring at the level of a cinematic portrait as its subject was at the level of pure creation. As directed by newcomer Christina Clausen, the film looks to Haring as an artistic role model for his preternatural talent, of course, but also for his infectious lust for life that had him as committed to social activism and teaching children as to his latest painting. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ] October 23, 2008 REVIEW | A Matter of Taste: Philippe Claudel's "I've Loved You So Long"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Juliette, a middle-aged woman, waits alone, gray and taciturn -- two words that pretty well describe "I've Loved You So Long." She stands to haltingly greet her rendez-vous, her sister, Lea. We gather they've been apart a long time. Juliette's been "away," her past a talked-around negative space that's filled out as the film nurses us for two hours on a drip-feed of withheld backstory. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews, World Cinema ]  REVIEW | Winter Kills: Tomas Alfredson's "Let the Right One In"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] With its calm, wintry rural setting, Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist's Swedish best-seller "Let the Right One In" depicts slaughter, death, and dismemberment as though sprung from the stanzas of Robert Frost. This is hardly the first film to drench teen angst and burgeoning sexuality in supernatural bloodletting (De Palma's "Carrie," Romero's "Martin," and, more recently, John Fawcett's "Ginger Snaps" equate, respectively, telekinesis, vampirism, and lupine transformation with pubescent turmoil), but Alfredson sets his film apart with a memorably stringent (dare I say, Scandinavian) visual design. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] October 22, 2008 REVIEW | A Self-Made Man: Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Staring into the abyss through a kaleidoscope, Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" sees ecstatic, innumerable facets in the depths. Another of Kaufman's Alice in Wonderland narratives, his first directorial effort is more gnarled and coiled than his scripts for Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation") and Michel Gondry ("Human Nature," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), yet also more emotionally direct. Impossible to fully grasp on first pass, the film nevertheless has a rigorous -- and perversely funny -- through-line of extreme anxiety and sorrow. "I won't accept anything but the brutal truth," says his protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman). "Brutal, brutal," he repeats, hammering home the cliched, self-conscious overstatement, but he means it every time. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ]  REVIEW | Army of Shadows: Fear(s) of the Dark
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Like any omnibus film, the Christophe Jankovic and Valerie Schermann-produced French collection of creepy, crawly cartoon shorts, "Fear(s) of the Dark," succeeds on the strength of its best components. Though it seems that in animation it's easier to convey an "idea" of fear to an audience than impart in the viewer fear itself, the film nevertheless pleasantly lodges in the brain. A persuasive showcase for a handful of contemporary animators, "Fear(s)" is comprised of mostly beautifully designed segments which get exponentially better as the film continues, going deeper and deeper into an ever darkening rabbit hole. Like the famed sixties compilation "Spirits of the Dead," which wisely saved Fellini's astonishing "Toby Dammit" for its just-desserts course, "Fear(s) of the Dark" sends us out on a high, low note. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] October 19, 2008 REVIEW | Crash Landing: Gonzalo Arijon's "Stranded: I Have Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] In his 1993 review of "Alive," a film based on the infamous 1972 true story of the survivors of a Uruguay rugby team that crashed in the Andes on their plane ride to a tournament, Roger Ebert wrote, "We care about the characters while we watch the movie. But at the end it all seems elusive. The movie characters complete their dreadful ordeal, but somehow, walking out, we feel the real Andes survivors would not quite recognize themselves." Ebert suggested that "Alive"'s problem was one of evocation: despite the attempt to impart what the survivors went through, their incredible physical endurance (72 days in freezing cold temperatures) and mental fortitude (being forced to eat the flesh of their dead comrades to continue living) couldn't even be approached, let alone translated to the screen. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ] October 15, 2008 REVIEW | Like a Virgin Redux: Madonna's "Filth and Wisdom"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The filmmaker of "Filth and Wisdom" has a lot to say. She's got big ideas and some clever ones too, and she's letting it fly. She's repulsed and fascinated by hypocrisy in the world, and wants people to just get over themselves, to abandon fear, pride, and learn to fly their freak flag high. She found this cool new band and its awesome-looking Ukrainian lead singer, and made a film all about him and his friends making it in the big city. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] October 14, 2008 REVIEW | Electoral High School: Caroline Suh's "Frontrunners"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] This year's race comes down to a clear choice between vitality and experience. On the one hand, you have a young outsider running on a ticket of change; on the other, an older, more experienced candidate who nonetheless wants to "raise the bar." The former is accused of being all style and no substance, but balances this with an experienced running mate. The latter occasionally seems too intense, but has cleverly joined forces with a likable female vice-presidential candidate who might help soften his image. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ] October 9, 2008 REVIEW | Junior League: Luke Eberl's "Choose Connor"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Often notable for the ways in which its naive, teenage protagonist's slowly eroding positive outlook seems to be duplicated by the director himself, "Choose Connor" is a movie about politics and disillusionment made by a first-time filmmaker barely out of his teens. This film, in which a middle school-age wannabe politician finds out about how dirty and disappointing the world is, originated as a script written when actor-turned-debuting-director Luke Eberl was just 17, and went into production when he was 20. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ]  REVIEW | The Naked Truth: Joe Swanberg & Greta Gerwig's "Nights and Weekends"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig, the costars, cowriters, and codirectors of "Nights and Weekends," spend a good part of their film naked. At the film's outset, while in a long-distance relationship, James and Mattie enter the former's Chicago apartment and promptly make love on the floor; toward the end of the film, after a year and an off-screen break-up, they fleetingly try something similar in a hotel in New York. In between, the film often pauses to ponder the many levels of these characters' self-exposure: showering, sitting on the can, dressing and undressing themselves and each other, critically scrutinizing themselves in mirrors and photographs. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] October 8, 2008 REVIEW | Taking No Prisoners: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Happy-go-lucky is a term that smacks of anachronism in both diction and meaning. Conjunctively evocative of will-o-the-wisp and devil-may-care, merry-go-rounds and tilt-o-whirls, any present use of the term usually implies irony or condescension. The word, and whomever it might describe, can't possibly survive in today's jaded world. Coming from a filmmaker who has put his share of characters through reality's ringer ("Naked," "Career Girls," "Vera Drake"), and has at times (though not as often as some would assert) slipped into theatrical caricature, the title of Mike Leigh's latest film, "Happy-Go-Lucky," would seem like an invitation to watch the other shoe drop. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] October 7, 2008 REVIEW | The Perfect Storm: Wong Kar-wai's "Ashes of Time Redux"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Eradicating bad memories of the moldy "My Blueberry Nights" in one fell swoop, Wong Kar-wai's gussied-up reissue of his 1994 "martial-arts action epic" (in quotes because it never actually feels like any of those things) is a reminder of why we fell in love with the Hong Kong auteur in the first place. Just as "Fallen Angels" is hardly a crime caper, "In the Mood for Love" is never quite able to blossom into the romance we expect and hope for, and "2046" only elegantly limns the edges of the science-fiction it intimates, "Ashes of Time" promises a wuxia saga that never quite arrives. ("Chungking Express," meanwhile, barely fits a genre template at all, but more than satisfies Wong's delight in sending us down blind alleyways). [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] October 2, 2008 REVIEW | Easy Bake: Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs's "Humboldt County"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] From its simple title font evocative of another era to its opening and closing shots reminiscent of "The Graduate" to its casting of filmmaking icon Peter Bogdanovich, "Humboldt County" acknowledges its immodest aims early on. Taking as their subject matter a happy, hippie hideaway in the marijuana-rich forests of Northern California, writing and directing team Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky seem to believe that representation of the unconventional marks their debut effort as such, but the film fails to break any new aesthetic or narrative ground. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] October 1, 2008 REVIEW | Jesus Fish in a Barrel: Larry Charles's "Religulous"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Bill Maher has had quite a run. Fourteen years have passed since "Politically Incorrect" saved him from Shannon Tweed vehicles and endless stand-up. A Washington meets Hollywood twist on the McLaughlin Group, "PI" proved surprisingly durable for Comedy Central before losing steam (and some bite) on ABC. After ill-timed (if courageous) comments led to the show's cancellation, Maher moved right along to "Real Time" on HBO (tweaking the format by losing the left-right debate and giving more time to Maher's emboldened commentary), where his notoriety, and wonky-smug shtick, hasn't waned. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ]  REVIEW | We Regretfully Decline: Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] What if Jonathan Demme threw a party and asked you to come? You'd probably initially be flattered by the invitation; after all, the Oscar-winning director and longtime music scenester has certainly racked up an impressive roster of friends over the years. But while it sure would be swell to hang out with a random cross-section of multiculti hepcats for a couple of hours, eventually you'd probably feel that you don't quite belong. This is the feeling I got not long into Demme's new self-consciously "back-to-basics" independent film, "Rachel Getting Married," in which he shoots a script written by Sidney Lumet's daughter as an excuse to throw a backyard soiree celebrating his handpicked community of actors, musicians, and artist friends. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] September 30, 2008 REVIEW | Just Don't Look: Fernando Meirelles's "Blindness"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Perhaps a decent film couldn't have been made from Jose Saramago's "Blindness." Like any great work of art, Saramago's novel resists transference. A gathering of words beaded into narrative, paced by rhythmic commas that both push forward and trip the eye, organized into paragraphs like economically shaped capsules of character and consciousness, and chapter breaks that arrive suddenly, stranding the reader in portentous white space, "Blindness" exists fully, necessarily, on the page. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] September 29, 2008 REVIEW | Looking for Stability in a Soggy Mississippi: Lance Hammer's "Ballast"
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Anthony Kaufman reviewed "Ballast" at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the film opens in limited release this week.] The cool, wet misty plains of the Mississippi Delta offer little comfort to the three protagonists of art-director Lance Hammer's bracing feature debut "Ballast." In fact, the desolate surroundings--yards with broken cars, fields with no harvest, decrepit gas stations--only further reflect their downtrodden condition. But by the time this remarkably sure-footed first film is finished, a slight glimmer of hopefulness arises among the psychological and physical turmoil. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Park City, Reviews ] September 26, 2008 REVIEW | Back to School: Laurent Cantet's "The Class"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Realism is the mode du jour of international art cinema, so it's fitting that the New York Film Festival opens with Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or winner, "The Class," an exercise in naturalist mise-en-scene, improvisatory nonprofessional acting, and immediate handheld cinematography. These tropes should by now be familiar to audiences attending a festival that will also feature works by likeminded filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke and Kelly Reichardt (and hosted Hou Hsaio-hsien's and Lee Chang-dong's similar films last year). But Cantet's film impresses if even for the feat of credibly portraying the atmosphere of a classroom full of fourteen-year-old urban Parisians -- with all of the adolescent storm and stress that such a petri dish would necessarily create. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] September 25, 2008 REVIEW | The Surge: Neil Burger's "The Lucky Ones"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Maybe sometime in the next decade, the Iraq War will get its "Platoon" or its "Full Metal Jacket," but for now, we'll have to keep waiting for a memorably incisive, dramatically successful cinematic treatment -- at least, from a fiction film (documentaries are, happily, another story). Neil Burger's "The Lucky Ones" makes no effort to fill that void. Instead, it seems calculated to correct another, related problem: the anemic box-office of Iraq-themed films. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] September 23, 2008 REVIEW | Sports Wear: Ryan Little's "Forever Strong"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Ryan Little's "Forever Strong" is a friendly, heaping helping of rugby porn -- in senses both erotic and non. Seemingly cast top to bottom with holdovers from "Flaunt" photo-spreads and David DeCoteau flicks (in fact, fans of DeCoteau's boxer-brief brand of cheapo-homo horror will recognize the film's lead, Sean Faris, from his debut in DeCoteau's Blockbuster Video fave "The Brotherhood 2: Young Warlocks"), "Forever Strong" is a charming enough paean to muscle shirts, athletic shorts, and Faris's beauty mark. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] September 21, 2008 REVIEW | Shock Defect: Clark Gregg's "Choke"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Let's say the least you expect of art is that it shows signs of a coherent designing intelligence, and the least you expect of entertainment is that it doesn't make you wish you were looking at something else. Now let's move on to "Choke," which is neither, adapted from a Chuck Palahniuk novel by actor Clark Gregg. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] September 18, 2008 REVIEW | The New World: Wayne Wang's "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Since virtually inventing Asian-American cinema in 1982 with his film "Chan Is Missing," Wayne Wang has built a curiously Frankensteinian body of work, mixing indie and commercial productions and spanning subjects as diverse as a lazy Brooklyn afternoon and the last days of pre-handover Hong Kong. Though films like "Eat a Bowl of Tea" and "The Joy Luck Club" defined his early career, Wang has, like Taiwanese contemporary Ang Lee, consciously evaded being pigeonholed as an Asian-American filmmaker, pursuing diverse projects. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] September 17, 2008 REVIEW | Unanswerable Questions: Koji Masutani's "Virtual JFK"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] An inevitable byproduct of the study of history is the "What if?" game, the second-guessing of key events and decisions in light of the disasters that followed. One of the great American "What if?"s of the twentieth century is of course born from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the cutting short of the promise of Camelot and all the youthful hope it embodied. Of course, Kennedy came to embody much of that youthful hope once he was immortalized by untimely death, and the romanticization of his presidency by the public in the last four decades has often had less to do with what he actually did in office than what he symbolizes as a lasting pop culture icon. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] September 16, 2008 REVIEW | Don't Worry, Be Angry: Stuart Townsend's "Battle in Seattle"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A mere couple of weeks after a polarizing Republican National Convention, it will be difficult for some of us to criticize a film like "Battle in Seattle." For many, Stuart Townsend's ensemble fictionalization of the 1999 protests against the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle may strike a welcome note, harkening back to a triumphant, nonviolent-turned-violent demonstration which caused -- directly or indirectly -- a collapse in trade negotiations that even some participants characterized as imbalanced. Townsend's film portrays this moment as a victory for the antiglobalization movement (and the Left, broadly defined), an example of how public opinion, voiced loudly and peaceably, can effect great change in a world that too often seems governed by cronyism and corporate interest. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] September 11, 2008 TORONTO '08 CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK | "Paris," "Agnes," Rock Stars and "Religulous"; TIFF Docs Go Personal and (Non) Spiritual
If a single lesson emerges from this year's crop of documentaries at the Toronto International Film Festival, it might be this: Who needs Paris Hilton when you have Agnes Varda? Both the overexposed starlet and the French New Wave legend showed up in Canada this week to watch themselves on the big screen, although at least Varda had the audacity to direct herself. Like most of her famous cinephilic colleagues, the playfully existential octogenarian continually churns out unique, startlingly creative movies. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews, Toronto ] September 10, 2008 REVIEW | Everything Is Privates: Alan Ball's "Towelhead"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Not far into his feature directorial debut, "Towelhead," Alan Ball offers us the sight of a thirteen-year-old girl having her first period in a bathroom stall; this is shot from a low angle, with the camera positioned near the floor, peering up through the girl's blood-stained panties as she stares down in perturbation. To acknowledge the sheer inappropriateness of Ball's framing is not to take a moral stance (Summer Bishil, who plays the character, was close to twenty when she acted in the film), but rather to call into question the neophyte filmmaker and longtime overpraised screenwriter's level of taste, imagination, and sophistication. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] September 9, 2008 REVIEW | Troubling the Water: Irena Salina's "Flow"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] To the long and ever growing list of pressing environmental concerns we can add the global water crisis. Despite its indispensability for human survival, water hasn't gained traction as a political issue (at least not in America), and so filmmaker Irena Salina interjects "Flow" into the conversation as a corrective; she wants her film to do for the world water crisis what "An Inconvenient Truth" did for climate change. While the facts revealed in the documentary, as conveyed in interviews with numerous activists and scientists, are not exactly stunning revelations -- or maybe at this point I'm just unsurprised by tales of apathetic governments or corporate greed trumping concerns for public welfare -- it manages to bring to light an issue which merits more attention but often gets lost amidst headline-grabbers like global warming and oil shortages. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] September 4, 2008 REVIEW | Adult Swim: Chris Smith's "The Pool"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The value of a film like Chris Smith's "The Pool" becomes more tangible when you begin to imagine what a lesser filmmaker might have wrought from the same material. Extending his sympathy for, and fascination with, the American working class beyond the boundaries of his home country, Smith, the director of "American Job," "Home Movie," and "American Movie," traveled to the small Indian state of Goa, its west coast the shores of the Arabian Sea, to make his latest film. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] September 3, 2008 REVIEW | I Wish I Was a Baller: Jessica Yu's "Ping Pong Playa"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] After a string of documentaries, including "In the Realms of the Unreal," and an Academy Award win for Best Documentary Short, Jessica Yu makes an unlikely, deceptively slight narrative feature debut with "Ping Pong Playa." What's perhaps most surprising about the film, however, is that Yu (who has also directed a fair amount of television drama) is actually quite adept as a comedy director. Adhering to well-worn underdog sports humor, her film follows the slow, amiable rise of Christopher "C-dub" Wang, a slacking Asian American with more of a penchant for the urban culture of hip-hop and basketball than for his family's business and passion: ping-pong. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] September 2, 2008 REVIEW | Setting the Record Straight: Robert Cary's "Save Me"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Robert Cary's "Save Me" is hardly the incendiary, ripped-from-the-headlines passion play that a short description of it might imply. And indeed its poster, depicting its star, Chad Allen, skull-capped and mouth slightly agape, pointing an inverted cross to his temple, revolver-style, likewise promises a scorching take-down of bullying American fundamentalism. Yet "Save Me" isn't a teeth-bared addition to the culture wars; surprisingly docile and rigorously even-handed in its portrait of a New Mexico Christian sexual "re-education" house for men, Cary and screenwriter Robert Desiderio are not courting controversy as much as curiously surveying a state of mind. Though the film is too hung up on tidy explanations and often seems desperate to create clear and quantifiable motivations for its characters' actions (there's a certain Screenwriting 101 going on here), "Save Me" is appealing in its refusal to demonize any of it characters. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Queer Cinema, Reviews ] August 27, 2008 REVIEW | Once Upon a Time in the East: Takashi Miike's "Sukiyaki Western Django"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Django, Tarantino, Miike: These names alone are enough to tell anyone whether or not "Sukiyaki Western Django" is for them. If you only know the middle guy, don't bother (and for shame!); if you know and like all three, you've probably already seen and blogged about the movie anyway. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] August 26, 2008 REVIEW | Dite-moi: Jiri Menzel's "I Served the King of England"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] For the last decade American movie audiences have been bludgeoned so mercilessly with poorly and vacuously executed whimsy ("We're drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn famously wrote in the September 2007 issue of Atlantic Monthly, and I wholeheartedly agree) that an even partially successful excursion into magical realism like Czech New Waver Jiri Menzel's "I Served the King of England" comes as nearly a relief, a rare contemporary example of how fanciful, wide-eyed filmmaking can be employed not simply for the sake of ironic condescension or set design window-dressing but for genuine emotional and political exploration. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] August 21, 2008 REVIEW | The Rising: Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's "Trouble the Water"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "I'm showing the world that we had a world before the storm," says Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a.k.a. Black Kold Madina, on August 28, 2005, the day preceding Hurricane Katrina's devastating touch down in New Orleans. Kimberly is poor, black, and, unlike the majority of the city's wealthier white citizens, unable to "afford the luxury" of transportation that could take her out of what will prove to be a very vulnerable Dodge. Armed with a newly purchased camcorder, she records and narrates her preparations for the storm as well as the ongoing life of her Ninth Ward community, including neighbors' defying boasts in the face of reports warning residents to evacuate their homes due to the impending category-five hurricane. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] August 18, 2008 REVIEW | Tomb of the Mommy: Azazel Jacobs's "Momma's Man"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Considering that Azazel Jacobs, the director of "Momma's Man," is the offspring of American avant-garde filmmaker extraordinaire Ken Jacobs, one would be forgiven for expecting his film to be more experimental and abstract than the seemingly conventional narrative that plays out. Yet buried beneath the poignant clutter of this occasionally familiar stunted-youth-in-life-transition tale is a surprisingly complex, elegantly detailed meditation on creativity and artistic growth. While Ken Jacobs may work with found footage, purposefully elongating time and reassembling it into tapestries of pointed Americana, his son has constructed a personal fiction film using the detritus of his own life: the downtown Manhattan loft where he grew up, the gadgets and tchotchkes strewn about it like cherished memories, and his parents themselves. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] August 12, 2008 REVIEW | Split Ends: Claude Chabrol's "A Girl Cut in Two"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] At first glance, Claude Chabrol's latest seems yet another in his long line of slow-boiling thrillers, set mostly amongst the upper classes, in which the sinister bobs up above a seemingly placid surface -- compulsively watchable and strangely unsettling, sure, but par for the course for the erstwhile New Waver. Yet while "A Girl Cut in Two" treads in waters made murky with mysterious allusions to disreputable pasts and intimations of impending murder, the filmmaker intriguingly muddies the generic proceedings by probing his characters' ingrained sexism; it's an approach that deepens what could have been just another true crime story. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] August 10, 2008 REVIEW | Pale Fire: Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Each review of a new, annual Woody Allen film needn't require an overarching, state-of-his-art introduction, but it's hard to fight the urge to do so. The fact that, even at this late stage in his career, America's most prolific just-off-mainstream filmmaker instigates such charged responses from so many viewers -- whether a bemused, wistful smile or a fly-swatting "feh" -- goes a long way in proving that there's still vitality here, even if it often exists in the debates around his work more than in the worlds of the films themselves. Antiquated though Allen's brand of verbose, narcissistic city-dwellers may now be (even at wishfully young ages in such films as "Anything Else," "Melinda and Melinda," and now "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"), there will always be a core of truth to their self-aware bourgeois bitterness. [ read more in Movies ] [ 4 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] August 6, 2008 REVIEW | Age of Consent: Isabel Coixet's "Elegy"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] In what may be a perfect sophisto storm, none other than Sir Ben Kingsley plays Philip Roth's academic antihero David Kepesh, a solemn piano underscoring his negotiations with sex, art, and mortality in the Continental Manhattan of Isabel Coixet's new film, "Elegy." Kepesh teaches literature at Columbia and, as a low-key celebrity cultural critic -- is there any other kind of intellectual celebrity -- works the NPR/Charlie Rose circuit. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] August 4, 2008 REVIEW | Circle Jerk: Rodger Grossman's "What We Do Is Secret"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The world certainly isn't wanting for hagiographies of Seventies punk-rock trailblazers, but rarely has one felt as inauthentic as Rodger Grossman's feature debut, "What We Do Is Secret." Grossman short-changes his subject by framing the tragic, brief musical career and suicide of the Germs' front man Darby Crash (ne Paul Beahm) as a by-the-book rise-and-fall narrative. Even if the film pretends to problematize his image (as hesitant political proselytizer; as scum poet) by inserting half-focused, black-and-white talking-head interview footage of Crash (as embodied by Shane West) making provocations about the need for a fascist state, Grossman is far more interested in him as rock god, capitulating to the standard biopic romanticization of truly unhappy people. (Gus Van Sant smartly abstracted such deification in "Last Days.") Grossman may purposely portray Crash as self-mythologizing, but the film is all too happy to follow that lead. [ read more in Movies ] [ 3 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] August 3, 2008 REVIEW | Corked: Randall Miller's "Bottle Shock"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] In "Bottle Shock," director and co-scripter Randall Miller -- of such disparate (and dismal) output as the Sinbad-starring "Houseguest" and painfully twee indie "Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School" -- seemingly extrapolates Virginia Madsen's centerpiece soliloquy on wine from "Sideways" and stretches it out to feature length, but with none of Alexander Payne's eloquence or wit. [ read more in Movies ] [ 4 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] August 1, 2008 PARK CITY '08 REVIEW | Women of the Year: Courtney Hunt's "Frozen River"
EDITORS NOTE: This review of Sundance Film Festival grand jury prize winner "Frozen River" was originally published during festival. As Ray Eddy, the heroine of filmmaker Courtney Hunt's riveting melodrama "Frozen River;" a working-class mom in Upstate New York trying to care for two sons after her husband skips out with the family savings, actress Melissa Leo sports a nose turned red from the winter cold. She has creased cheekbones weathered by hard living and tattoos on her thin body. Leo is the female embodiment of harsh New York winters and the impoverished rural communities along the St. Lawrence River. But don't think for a second that Leo's unforgettable lead performance in "Frozen River" is purely a physical one. As Ray, the type of workingwoman seldom seen in movies, Leo shows a fiery passion to do right by her sons and emotional power bright enough for ten movie dramas. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Park City, Reviews ] July 31, 2008 REVIEW | Sweatin' to the Oldies: Darryl Roberts's "America the Beautiful"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Opening with "vintage" black-and-white footage of women from the Fifties huffing and puffing through antiquated exercise routines, set to Bruce Channel's "Hey, Baby," the ostensible investigative documentary "America the Beautiful" establishes its de-facto glibness within seconds. Throughout the course of the film, further video montages will be set to such ferociously on-topic chestnuts as Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People," and Letters to Cleo's "I Wanna Be a Supermodel," ironically backing images of primped, preening girls or magazine model cut-outs. Director Darryl Roberts's mode of address is so hackneyed and juvenile, and the editing strategies and muddy non-aesthetic so predictable, that one has to try and look beyond the surface of things to find any value here; after all, that's what Roberts himself has attempted to do in making it. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] July 29, 2008 REVIEW | Soft Shoe: Alex Holdridge's "In Search of a Midnight Kiss"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] From "Sunset Boulevard" to "Mulholland Drive" and beyond, most movies revolving around Hollywood hopefuls portray the greater Los Angeles area as a soulless cesspool into which the hordes can't help but sink. But in his Tinseltown-set feature "In Search of a Midnight Kiss," Alex Holdridge reimagines L.A. as a place of renewal and unsung beauty: Skyline shots inclusive of freeway traffic, graphic compositions incorporating the city's variegated architecture, and even the Hollywood sign shrouded by smoggy haze are lovingly lensed in stark black-and-white in obvious homage to Woody Allen's "Manhattan" (though this hipster kid on the block scores his images to the indie rock of Shearwater rather than Gershwin). [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] July 28, 2008 REVIEW | Dropped Ball: Paul Weiland's "Sixty-Six"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] There is a certain class of British film -- for which John Boorman's "Hope and Glory" is perhaps the prototype -- which follows an adolescent boy's coming of age during a notable or sentimentality-laced period of twentieth-century English history. Invariably in such films, there is a female object of incipient pubescent desire; a belligerent older brother who usurps most of the family's attention; and a redemptive father figure through whom the protagonist learns to stiffen his upper lip and be an Englishman. More often than not, the garden shed is a focal point of action. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] July 24, 2008 REVIEW | Carnival of Old Souls: Margaret Brown's "The Order of Myths"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] It may come as something of a shock to most that in Mobile, Alabama, a culturally sanctified segregation still exists. And documentary filmmaker Margaret Brown must be relying on that shock from viewers of her exacting new film "The Order of Myths," even if it resolutely avoids sensationalism or polemics from the top down. On the face of it, Brown's document of Mobile's annual Mardi Gras celebration, a centuries-old tradition that predates even the establishment of New Orleans and which still maintains separate events for black and white residents, is an energetic, if unsettling, tribute to the strange persistence of tradition; yet like gently lifting a decaying flagstone with a twig, Brown has managed, in a fleet 75 minutes, to uncover quite a lot about (obviously) America's entrenched racism and (perhaps not so obviously) why our presumably modern sensibilities allow for its continuity. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] July 22, 2008 REVIEW | Walking in the Air: James Marsh's "Man on Wire"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A blow-by-blow account of how, in 1974, the impish French performance artist, and ludicrously appropriately named Philippe Petit achieved (and survived) the seemingly otherworldly when he walked on a tightrope situated 1350 feet in the air, anchored between the World Trade Center's twin towers, James Marsh's documentary "Man on Wire" is a fleet, engagingly narrated, and [insert "taut" here] suspense narrative. Like the events it's based on, "Man on Wire" is the kind of film that's more inspiring to witness than it is to later think (or write) about, but let it be said that Marsh's adeptness at mounting his tale is undeniable, and what the film lacks in any sort of subtextual richness it more than makes up in narrative functionality and the clarity with which it reconstructs Petit's mission impossible. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] July 19, 2008 REVIEW | Disconnect Four: Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass's "Baghead"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A refreshingly high-concept low-budget outing, the Duplass Brothers' "Baghead" is an immensely likeable and surprisingly well-executed genre hybrid. The difficulty one finds in trying to categorize it is part of its charm, and this is not just whether one sees it as horror, comedy, or relationship roundelay but also how one defines and compartmentalizes its aesthetic: "Baghead"'s makers and at least one of its stars may have crawled out from under the "mumble"-corps, but its adherence to a somewhat conventional narrative framework successfully contorts and expands the boundaries of what that short-lived almost-collective of filmmakers were after. And furthermore, and of greater significance, it smartly proves that it only takes the slightest, smartest tweaks to temporarily revitalize an entire genre. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] July 17, 2008 REVIEW | Post Traumatic Stress: Aditya Assarat's "Wonderful Town"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] In many ways, the debut feature from Bangkok-born, American-educated Aditya Assarat, "Wonderful Town," has all the hallmarks of a workshopped Sundance indie: an eminently tasteful romance between two ingratiatingly sweet people burgeoning against a backdrop of recent tragedy, buoyed by delicate guitar score, bracketed by self-consciously lovely landscape shots. A detailing of the emotionally and physically ravaged coastal area of Takua Pa following the December 2004 tsunami that cost it more than 8,000 local lives, "Wonderful Town" means to use the event's aftereffects to evoke its characters' personal displacement. There's no doubt that Assarat has talent for situating people within gracefully framed environments, but in an overly studied manner that leaves no room for the sort of spontaneity in performance and composition that the film's subject matter warrants. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] July 15, 2008 REVIEW | Sympathy Strike: Charles Oliver's "Take"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Like Lee Chang-dong's 2007 "Secret Sunshine," Charles Oliver's debut feature "Take" deals with the awkward moral quandaries of infanticide and the subsequent, touchy relations between a killer and his victim's mother. That Lee's film remains unreleased in this country is no doubt due in part to the fact that his film, unlike Oliver's, did not star Minnie Driver (although it did win an award at Cannes for its actress, Jeon Do-yeon). But in spite of this star pedigree, Oliver's film manages to grapple with some knotty questions about justice, even if it is not quite as bold or ironic as Lee's. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] July 11, 2008 REVIEW | Dear Johns: Jacques Nolot's "Before I Forget"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The catchwords for "Before I Forget" would seem to be direct, intimate, unsparing; yet, conversely, it also feels cavernous and, in its seeming brutal frankness, slippery and elusive. Either drenched in unyielding shadow or flooded with harsh light, "Before I Forget" follows the sixty-something Pierre (played by writer-director Jacques Nolot), a former hustler, HIV-positive for 24 years, living alone in a spacious Parisian apartment, who's unmoored after the death of his elder benefactor. The premise is simple, intensely character-driven, and the structure linear and compartmentalized -- we see Pierre's daily activities, which involve, in no discernible order, meeting with fellow gay former gigolo friends of the same age, having comparatively impersonal trysts with hustlers of a much younger age, visiting his psychiatrist, and generally putting around his flat -- but the result is enormously complex, a surveying of an entire life just past its midpoint via its practicalities and lost promises. [ read more in Movies ] [ 4 comments ] [ filed under Queer Cinema, Reviews ] July 9, 2008-thumbnail.jpg) REVIEW | The Material World: Silvio Soldini's "Days and Clouds"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] In its detailing of a couple's financial freefall after the loss of a job, Silvio Soldini's "Days and Clouds" -- recently featured in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual roundup of new Italian cinema -- couldn't ask for a more fittingly precipitous point in time for its American theatrical release than this disquieting summer of soaring gas prices, staycations, anxious awaiting of stimulus checks, and shuttering Starbucks. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews, World Cinema ] July 8, 2008 |
