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 July 2, 2008 REVIEW | Gathering Moss: Alex Gibney's "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Hunter S. Thompson's prose was nervy and pugnacious, his judgments bullying and hyperbolic, his life as volatile as any in postwar American letters. "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" couldn't be any more different in mien and spirit. A couple of passages aside, it is almost perversely straightforward in light of its unstable subject, a chronological march through the heavy '60s, the downer '70s and the post-Reagan blur with a dutiful assemblage of talking heads and archival footage. The historical and cultural insights are all textbook, the music choices "Gump"-esque (if I hear Jefferson Airplane playing over images of Summer of Love San Francisco one more time...). What saves the movie is the man himself. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ]  REVIEW | House of Cards: Terry Kinney's "Diminished Capacity"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] One could surmise the mediocrity of "Diminished Capacity" from reading the synopsis alone: Cooper (Matthew Broderick), a small-town-boy-made-good in the big city but lately suffering from the lasting effects of a serious concussion, heads back home to visit his fading Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda). As Cooper's mother explains of the latter's condition in a letter, "Dr. Hoyt calls it 'diminished capacity'; that's the legal term for a man who thinks that fish are typing poetry out on the end of his pier." Got that last bit? To clarify: Rollie connects fishing lines to each letter on his typewriter, the nibbling of which results in a jumble of words (Rollie edits). [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] July 1, 2008 REVIEW | High Times in the 90's: Jonathan Levine's "The Wackness"
Park City coverage sponsored by BE KIND REWIND. [ read more in Movies ] [ 4 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Park City, Reviews ]  REVIEW | Best Kept Secret: Guillaume Canet's "Tell No One"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Guillaume Canet's "Tell No One" begins with a certain nonchalance that one wouldn't ordinarily expect from a suspense thriller, least of all one that adapts Harlan Coben's multi-twist mystery plotting with the brio of a distinctly "Bourne"-again action film. In its first minutes, the film draws us into a group of French yuppies summering enviably in woody Rambouillet. Kristin Scott-Thomas rolls a joint, someone passes a baby around, and all seems serene enough for Dr. Alex Beck to take his wife Margot for a languorous, moonlit skinny-dip at a nearby lake where they used to swim as children. How cruel it seems of Canet to ruin this moment, allowing Dr. Beck to be beaten unconscious and left naked on the dock, while Margot falls prey to a knife-wielding, cat-murdering serial killer. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews, World Cinema ] June 28, 2008 LAFF '08 NOTEBOOK | Top Docs: "Trinidad," "No Name," "Pressure Cooker," "Loot" and "Boogie Man"
Los Angeles Film Festival coverage sponsored by Stella Artois. [ read more in Movies ] [ 2 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Festival Dispatch, Lead Story, Los Angeles Film Festival ] June 26, 2008 REVIEW | Woman on Top: Catherine Breillat's "The Last Mistress"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The first time Asia Argento appears in Catherine Breillat's "The Last Mistress," she fills the frame, reclining on a couch with devilish confidence as her character, Vellini, discusses the upcoming marriage of Ryno (Fu'ad Ait Aattou), her lover of ten years, to another woman. It's an appropriate entrance for a woman who could fittingly be described as a force of nature -- a "goddess of capriciousness," as one character calls her -- someone who trembles with erotic delight as she climaxes on a tiger-skin rug, moans with unfathomable grief clutching the corpse of a loved one, and drinks blood from a man's bullet wound with carnal glee. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] June 25, 2008 REVIEW | Found and Lost: Peter Tolan's "Finding Amanda"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Over the years, it's been both disconcerting and somehow satisfying to watch Matthew Broderick gradually morph from a lithe, cocky teen heartthrob to a pudgy, middle-aged sad sack. The puppy-dog eyes have sunken deeper into down-turned crevices of disappointment, and he seems lost in his burly torso, often vacuum-packed into tucked shirts and constricting ties. Broderick's onscreen persona has come to embody early forties despair, when fading youth has given way to ambivalence about the future; this seems to have been a long, slow journey, which began somewhere around Alexander Payne's superlative "Election." [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] June 24, 2008 REVIEW | Staged Craft: Peter Askin's "Trumbo"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "Trumbo" tells the eventful story of the best-known name in the Hollywood Ten, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, with an unsurprising emphasis on the leftist's misadventures with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Famous and well-paid before HUAC sentenced him and nine other fellow Communist sympathizers and members to jail, Trumbo toiled for years afterward to win back his career, returning to the movies under pseudonyms and "fronts" designed to keep a blacklisted name unconnected to the scripts he was working on ("Roman Holiday" and "The Brave One," for which his front, Robert Rich, won the 1957 Academy Award) and then being the first to break the blacklist by taking unconcealed credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus." [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] June 19, 2008 REVIEW | Winning Losers: Cecilia Miniucchi's "Expired"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] It's an incontrovertible truth that Samantha Morton is among the best actresses in the world, a fact somehow aided and not obscured by her insistence on playing, from "Sweet and Lowdown" to "Mister Lonely," the same character: the innocent, all-forgiving punching bag of a self-obsessed, self-hating asshole. And in Cecilia Miniucchi's "Expired," Morton once again owns this self-abnegation, here in its most socially and municipally abject form: that of the meter maid. Reluctantly writing up parking tickets to the ever irate and incredulous population of Santa Monica, Morton's Claire, in voice over, identifies herself as "one of the most hated people in the world." A brutally funny and relentlessly squirm-inducing film about neuroses, loneliness, and love, "Expired" posits the traffic cop as the nadir of self-esteem and the constant recipient of abuse and disgust. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] June 14, 2008 REVIEW | Buy the Book: Sarah Gavron's "Brick Lane"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Sarah Gavron's "Brick Lane" is the kind of movie a critic would just as soon let pass without comment. Unchallenging and inoffensive, it gives little to work with, its soft-focus take on a rich novel less outrageous than enervating. The potential for a banalized transposition was always there. Monica Ali's bestseller approached issues of cultural dislocation and female empowerment with sensitivity and nuance, but faint whiffs of Lifetime wafted through at certain moments. In Gavron's hands, those shortcomings find their full flowering. If you had never read Ali's novel, no one would blame you if after Gavron's movie you thought it was a high-toned, paperback romance for housewives. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] June 12, 2008 REVIEW | Life and Limb: Carlos Brooks's "Quid Pro Quo"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Castrated twice in "Sin City," stabbed and beaten to death in "Bully," shot in the face in "In the Bedroom", and most recently a mentally abused emotional adolescent in this year's "Sleepwalkers," Nick Stahl is steadily carving out a niche for himself as the whipping boy of contemporary American independent cinema. For good or ill, Carlos Brooks's debut feature "Quid Pro Quo" allows Stahl to graduate from this bit of typecasting, making him less the passive recipient of violence, and more one who endures in its aftermath. A paraplegic Ira Glass-like public radio commentator, Stahl's coyly named Isaac Knott is the survivor of a childhood automotive disaster that claimed the lives of his parents and the use of his legs. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] June 11, 2008 REVIEW | Life of the Mind: Jan Schutte's "Love Comes Lately"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Viewers of "Love Comes Lately" may find themselves wishing they had curled up with a Phillip Roth book instead. Not that Jan Schutte's film, awkwardly grafted together with three short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, doesn't have its share of charms, most of which are to be found in its glowing supporting cast of veteran female performers. Yet this tale of an 80-year-old Jewish writer making the literary circuit rounds and dealing with a variety of romantic entanglements, is a mostly creaky affair, evocative of not the life at its center so much as the many similarly themed (and less clumsily executed) films that have come before. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ]  REVIEW | Cold Comforts: Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "Encounters at the End of the World" is the latest missive from world cinema's Marco Polo / Jack London / Great White Image Hunter, Herr Werner Herzog, out for a deserved large-screen airing before entering its inevitable Discovery Channel rotation. The spoils of Herzog's latest expedition are an enjoyably idiosyncratic series of home movies. Lured by ethereal underwater scenes shot beneath Antarctica's ice, and funded by the National Science Foundation, Herzog disembarks to the tamed final frontier, on the trail of Ernest Shackleton, whose expedition haunts the film in gray archival footage, and whose preserved base of operations is visited before film's end. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] June 9, 2008 REVIEW | Real Men: Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's "Chris & Don: A Love Story"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] If only someone would make a fictional gay romance that had as much feeling and depth as Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's "Chris & Don: A Love Story." A wistful, at times unbearably intimate study of the life-long love affair that Los Angeles portrait artist Don Bachardy has had with now-deceased British writer Christopher Isherwood, this documentary is wholly suffused with genuine romantic longing, even as it purposefully investigates the complex bonds between the two men -- as lovers, as artists, as mentor/protege, as father/son surrogates -- with psychological clarity. While in description, a documentary focusing on the experiences of one pair of lovers might sound hermetic, "Chris & Don" comes across as remarkably expansive; rarely is love depicted onscreen with this much soul-rattling care. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Queer Cinema, Reviews ] June 8, 2008 REVIEW | Paternity Case: Anand Tucker's "When Did You Last See Your Father?"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Based on British writer Blake Morrison's 1993 memoir, "When Did You Last See Your Father?", directed by Anand Tucker ("Hilary and Jackie," "Shopgirl"), is a slightly awkward revisiting of the classic melodramatic story wherein a son or daughter must deal with the death of an adversarial parent. At once over-reliant on the visual cliches of its genre (oversaturated light for outdoor scenes, metaphor-reflecting mirrors for indoor ones, slow-motion everywhere) and thoroughly unabashed in juxtaposing the gravity of mortality with the uncouth avenues of expression people take to get through it, the film oscillates wildly between middlebrow preciousness and a genuinely messy understanding of what could very well have been in other hands by-the-numbers Oedipal angst. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] June 5, 2008 REVIEW | Troublemaker: Erik Nelson's "Dreams with Sharp Teeth"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] In a 1978 essay, Harlan Ellison enumerated what he deemed "The 3 Most Important Things in Life": Sex, Violence, and Labor Relations. Such a succinct list doesn't encompass all of the writer's many facets -- Ellison the political activist, Ellison the anti-anti-intellectual, Ellison the (self-described) angry Jew -- but it's a start. At very least, it's an indication to those uninitiated into the man's verbose, ornery omniverse that Ellison is a good deal more than what he is most known to be: a writer of what he calls "imaginative literature" (but what most everyone else knows as "sci-fi"). [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] June 4, 2008 indieWIRE PRODUCTION REPORT | "Hanging Out," "Chess," "Four Seasons," "Killing Holly," and "Pontypool"
[EDITOR'S NOTE: indieWIRE's monthly production report looks at independent films in various stages of production. If you'd like to tell us about a film in production for future columns, please contact us.] In June's edition of indieWIRE's production column, Jason Guerrasio profiles five new films in various stages of production. This month's group includes Jerry Zaks' "Chess," Andrew Jacobs' "Four Seasons Lodge," Barra Grant's "HangingOutHookingUpFallingInLove," Anthony Akiniz and Christopher Compton's "Killing Holly," and Bruce McDonald's "Pontypool." [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under In Production, Lead Story ]  REVIEW | Back from the Dead: Dario Argento's "Mother of Tears"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] When Dario Argento's now enshrined horror classics "Suspiria" and "Inferno" are fondly recalled, it's never in terms of their narratives, characters, or even forward momentum. Rather, it's the isolated images and set pieces: dark rooms drenched in red or blue gels, horrific deaths choreographed with the obsessive-compulsive precision of a ruthless artisan, gorgeous framing and pummeling soundtracks that heighten all the senses at once. Of course, then there are the idiotic plots: for while Argento illuminates the occult as a tactile, living thing, he has never shown the slightest interest in making that terror seem like something that could exist outside of the frame. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] June 3, 2008 REVIEW | Fascist Faux Pas: Sergei Bodrov's "Mongol"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "Mongol" marks a personal first for this reviewer: a bloated epic so boring and unengaging that by its numbing conclusion (the word anticlimactic can only be used for stories that actually build) he was zapped even of the conviction to hate it. An international co-production that probably broke the bank of several film companies from Russia, Germany, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, and 2008's official Academy Awards foreign film entry for the latter country, "Mongol" is one of those violent, historical blockbusters that have been multiplying like swamp rats ("Gladiator," "Apocalypto," "300") ever since the head-slapping enshrinement of "Braveheart" by the Academy back in 1995. [ read more in Movies ] [ 2 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] June 1, 2008 REVIEW | Everything Is Deracinated: Nina Davenport's "Operation Filmmaker"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Thanks to a steaming pile of liberal-minded good will, Muthana Mohmed, a 25-year-old aspiring filmmaker was brought from Baghdad to the Czech Republic to intern on the set of an American movie production. Muthana received the invitation after having been spotted in an MTV-produced documentary about youth in Iraq following the U.S. bombings and invasion; the makings for an inspiring true tale of determination, hope, and cross-cultural healing were all in place. Yet as charted in Nina Davenport's provocative, utterly compelling documentary "Operation Filmmaker," Muthana's journey after leaving his homeland for the first time in his life was undone by factors reflective of an unbridgeable cultural divide. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] May 31, 2008 REVIEW | Trouble in Paradiso: Giuseppe Tornatore's "The Unknown Woman"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A deliberately titillating scene opens Giuseppe Tornatore's "The Unknown Woman": three women wearing masks, asses to audience, stand naked in a strangely gilded room to be examined through peepholes. After they're dismissed, a second round comes out, and a blonde is asked to step forward and strip; "She'll do fine," an offscreen male voice intones. As usual, the "Cinema Paradiso" director has an eye for the voluptuous female form, but the lascivious voyeurism of his camera -- contained (Tornatore thinks) in his preceding movie, "Malena," by embedding its obsessive gaze within the point of view of a horny adolescent boy -- is made explicit here by its alignment with a prurient perspective. This objectifying introduction to his film's protagonist (played by Xenia Rappoport) is curiously at odds with the rest of the film, which is filtered through her subjectivity. This slippage explains the unintentional unease which colors the movie from the start, and undermines its attempt to create a credible portrait of a woman. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] May 29, 2008 REVIEW | Muscle-Bound: Chris Bell's "Bigger Stronger Faster*"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Though it comes across as hale and hearty, Chris Bell's "Bigger Stronger Faster*," a litany of American body worship touchstones since the early Eighties, is nothing if not ambivalent towards its subject. Falling somewhere between a specific personal essay and a more vaguely targeted social commentary, Bell's documentary, a freeform expose of steroid use in the U.S., is, somewhat inevitably, a product of narcissism and insecurity, not unlike the psychological forces that compel bodybuilding and athletic determination in the first place. Fledgling feature filmmaker Bell, a self-described "fat, pale kid from Poughkeepsie" turns his camera on himself, his equally brawny brothers, and the culture at large that both tacitly supports and vocally abhors performance-enhancing drugs. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] May 28, 2008 REVIEW | Beyond the Pale: Tom Kalin's "Savage Grace"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Tom Kalin's 1992 film "Swoon" was a noteworthy entry in the New Queer Cinema canon not because of its subject matter but how Kalin navigated such precarious terrain. A recouping of the Leopold and Loeb murder as an emotionally ambivalent expression of homosexual historicity via a not necessarily unsympathetic character-study timepiece, "Swoon" purposely created a discomfiting space for viewers used to more conventional true-crime narratives. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] May 23, 2008 CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Divided Reactions: "Headless Woman," "Sonata," "Liverpool," "Robbed" Find Detractors and Fans
Cannes' perennial post-screening boos are not to be trusted. Neither, for that matter, are the standing ovations. To each his own cinema, to be sure: one viewer's masterpiece is another's misstep, depending upon your taste and even where you sit. It's been alleged that the Salles Bazin screening room is far less kind to a film than the bigger venues. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Cannes, Lead Story, Reviews ] May 22, 2008 CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | The Revolution By Night: Steven Soderbergh's "Che"
The one overwhelming message coming from the competition films at the 61st Cannes Film Festival is: shit's messed up. "Waltz With Bashir" digs into the never-fully-healed wounds of war. In Matteo Garrone's "Gomorra," organized crime isn't an aberration; it's just the shadow army of an irredeemably venal free-market system. The Dardenne Brothers' "The Silence of Lorna" expresses a horror at a not-too-underground economy in the trade of human lives. Lucia Martel's "Un Mujer Sin Cabeza" takes a still, near-surreal look at class (un)consciousness, and doesn't like what it sees. Even the period melodrama here, Clint Eastwood's fact-based "The Changeling," fairly bristles with anger at corrupt authoritarianism. And even the not-overtly socially conscious family saga here, Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" (Un Conte de Noel) emphasizes fissure and disruption over harmony and affinity. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Cannes, Festival Dispatch, Lead Story ] May 21, 2008 REVIEW | Irreconcilable Differences: Parvez Sharma's "A Jihad for Love"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Homosexuality isn't a choice, but often, many forget, neither is religion. And this is certainly the case for the world's dense population of devout Muslims, now comprising the second largest religion in the world. Since the dictates of various orthodoxies seem almost by design to painfully rub up against basic biological desires, the demonization of sexuality has been widely reported upon and dramatized, whether directly or indirectly, for as long as there has been sophisticated thought. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Queer Cinema, Reviews ] May 20, 2008 CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Auteur Fatigue, "Gomorra" Pops and Wayward Youths
Good, but not great. Accomplished, but not amazing. A consistent thread is emerging within this year's Cannes selection: Name directors are showing up with solid work that displays their talents, but doesn't transcend them or spin them into new, novel directions. A familiar refrain has been heard over the last few days: "I liked it, but it wasn't as good as their last film." Are auteurs spinning their wheels? With several new movies to go, from Steven Soderbergh's "Che" epic to Laurent Cantet's high-school study "The Class" to Atom Egoyan's latest "Adoration" (which has been rumored to be a come-back film, of sorts), it's too early to make a judgment call about Cannes' 61st, but no film is blowing audiences out of the water. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Cannes, Lead Story, Reviews ] May 18, 2008 CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | In Competition, Desplechin Out in Front; Ceylan and Jia Don't Disappoint Fans
Rainy days here in Cannes may have dampened morale, but the films, and a much-needed burst of sunshine on Sunday morning, have boosted critics' spirits. Aside from "Blindness," Fernando Meirelles' apocalyptic opener, which received a mixed response, this year's competition slate has yielded a satisfying crop of art-cinema--though no masterpieces have yet emerged. Critical consensus has Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" as the competition's front-runner so far, though the animated Israeli drama "Waltz with Bashir," which screened on day two, also played extremely well. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Cannes, Lead Story, Reviews ]  REVIEW | Scattered People: Fatih Akin's "The Edge of Heaven"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A German filmmaker of Turkish descent, Fatih Akin has made hybrid cultures and hyphenated identities his great subject. "Head-On," his acclaimed breakthrough film from 2004, told a love story between two German Turks that wended its way back to the homeland. In "The Edge of Heaven," his latest, the fixation on blurred borders and social dislocation continues on a larger canvas. Several characters shuttle back and forth between Turkey and Germany, even as the quest for home and rest seems increasingly quixotic. But let the overstuffed "The Edge of Heaven" be a lesson: Just multiplying and magnifying your obsessions does not make them any more powerful. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] May 14, 2008 indieWIRE PRODUCTION REPORT | "Gigantic," "Peter and Vandy," "Phantomschmerz," "The Seminar with Robert McKee," and "You Won't Miss Me."
[EDITOR'S NOTE: indieWIRE's monthly production report looks at independent films in various stages of production. If you'd like to tell us about a film in production for future columns, please contact us.] In March's edition of indieWIRE's production column, Jason Guerrasio profiles five new films in various stages of production. This month's group includes Matt Aselton's "Gigantic," Jay DiPietro's "Peter and Vandy," Matthias Emcke's "Phantomschmerz," Bradley Glenn's "The Seminar with Robert McKee" and Ry Russo-Young's "You Won't Miss Me" [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under In Production, Lead Story ]
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