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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 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 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 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 12, 2008 REVIEW | Book Smart: Joachim Trier's "Reprise"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Norwegian Joachim Trier directs his debut feature, "Reprise," with such assured kineticism that it's only a matter of time before Hollywood gets his hands on him and turns him into an anonymous hack. That's not merely cynicism or a judgment call on Trier's foregrounded visual flair, which, unlike most other flashy films pitched at the speed of youth, actually contains more true invention than gimmick; it's just a sad fact of a ravenous industry that subsumes European directors the same way it snatches up the new foreign, art-house ingenue and plunks her down as the latest Bond girl--it only sees the surface sheen. Trier's considerable talents will be easy to exploit: "Reprise" courses on the amiable full-tilt thrill of first-time filmmaking. And though the film perhaps tries a mite too hard to ingratiate itself to the viewer (rarely does it leave an emotion not underlined), its rhythms are well matched to its two main characters' restless pursuits for niche fame and artistic fulfillment. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] May 11, 2008 REVIEW | Father Figurines: Christopher Zalla's "Sangre de mi sangre"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] If writer-director Christopher Zalla's intent in "Sangre de mi sangre" was to sympathetically and realistically depict the plight of impoverished Mexican illegal immigrants trying desperately to eke out anonymous existences in urban U.S. areas, why does he litter his workmanlike debut film with characters directly out of Hispanic-cliche central casting? Though it's infinitely better than last year's execrable "Trade" (the worst movie...ever?), Zalla's film similarly traffics in south-of-the-border stereotypes, opening, of course, with the usual touristy-dangerous shots of Mexico, set to "indigenous" rhythms, which only prove to further distance the viewer from what should be a more intimate, humane experience. [ read more in Movies ] [ 6 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] May 7, 2008 REVIEW | Embedded: Nick Broomfield's "Battle for Haditha"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "What do you wanna know?" A young Marine casually utters this question at the outset of "Battle for Haditha," and it's a fitting epigraph to Nick Broomfield's blistering, ambitious film. The query prefaces the PFC's offhand account of his service and the conditions of his barracks in Haditha, Iraq, but it could easily be Broomfield's own inquiry to his audience: In a singularly brutal and cloudy episode of the war, a group of Marines is attacked by insurgents and retaliates by unleashing their notion of justice on a small residential enclave, killing some twenty-four people. What do you want to know about these events, and what means do you have to figure them out? [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] May 6, 2008 REVIEW | Imagine That: Tarsem Singh's "The Fall"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Playwright John Guare must have had Indian director Tarsem Singh (or as he's often simply known, Tarsem) in mind when he wrote about the increasing exteriorization of the term "imaginative": "Why has 'imagination' become a synonym for style?" Singh makes films that inspire a bevy of similarly misused adjectives: "sumptuous," "surreal," "eye-popping," "hallucinatory." He specializes in audacious compositions, shoots in exotic locales, fits his actors in unique costumes that appear simultaneously futuristic and old-fashioned, and in only two features, including the new and fifteen years in the making "The Fall," has shown a predilection for stories about, yes, "the power of the imagination." [ read more in Movies ] [ 3 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] April 30, 2008 REVIEW | Changes: Lucia Puenzo's "XXY"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Though it's as sullen and damp-grey as its morose 15-year-old protagonist, Argentinean filmmaker Lucia Puenzo's directorial debut "XXY" doesn't really get inside the mind of young Alex as much as watch her with an awkward combination of fascination and empathy. It's both a success and a failing on the new filmmaker's part; her intention in making "XXY," to humanely depict a character who might in other films or literature be relegated to oddball supporting status, is undoubtedly noble. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on Alex's differences (she was born with both female and male genitalia), rather than offering other facets of her life for consideration, the film slightly shortchanges what could have been a beautifully full portrait of a teenager going through radical inner and outer turmoil. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] April 29, 2008 REVIEW | Let's Go to the Videotape: Garth Jennings's "Son of Rambow"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] There's rarely a moment in "Son of Rambow" that isn't polished or primped for prime demographic impact; a whirlwind for those who get nostalgic for British school-chum pictures, Sylvester Stallone actioners, early Eighties camcorders, and breakdance-era outre outfits, Garth Jennings's ingratiating lark would seem to court snorts of recognition more than active engagement. Yet this backward-looking pint-sized "Ed Wood" often sails by on the charms of its formula - it's an appealingly rambunctious boy's adventure in the guise of a paean to the artistic process (not the other way around). Along with "Be Kind Rewind," Jennings's film may be on the crest of a wave of fondness for the days of videotape, although unlike Michel Gondry's film, which infantilized a community of urban dwellers by placing them in a cultural vacuum, "Rambow" uses the creation of taped home movies as a coming-of-age vessel. The children in "Rambow," set around 1983 or thereabouts, might as well be wielding digital cameras or pocket-sized cell-phone cams (and in fact, the film might have been less self-consciously precious had it been set in the present). [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] April 28, 2008 REVIEW | The Archaeologist's Dilemma: Jeremy Podeswa's "Fugitive Pieces"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Nostalgic, deeply felt, and refreshingly astute, "Fugitive Pieces" is something of a rare bird these days -- a big-budget, transnational historical drama that actually justifies its scope and subject matter with more than visual opulence. On the surface, it looks like the kind of mainstream art-house fare that marries historical romance with a superficial exoticism; with its meandering sense of space and time and its rich sensual engagement, Anne Michaels's novel has drawn comparisons to Ondaatje's "The English Patient," and similarly Podeswa's adaptation will draw comparisons to Minghella's film. But what might have been an overly sentimental romance for uptown crowds is saved by its clear intelligence and its readiness to tackle the history and representation of the Holocaust in ways that are not at all facile. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] April 23, 2008 REVIEW | Knock Off: Claude Lelouch's "Roman de gare"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Sixties art-house standby Claude Lelouch is, as it turns out, alive and well and living in Paris. He's even directed a new film; the title, "Roman de gare," incessantly punned with in the film, apparently refers to those cheap paperback thrillers available at train stations, tawdry stuff good for a vacation perusal. A glance at my unusually thick press kit shows an interviewed Lelouch defensive about his alleged status as a "popular" or "mass" director (everything is relative) -- hence his adoption of X material. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] April 20, 2008 REVIEW | Seeing Is Believing: Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Often when it comes to Errol Morris, the more you see, the less you know. Some documentarians aim to answer and resolve, but Morris is almost too content to leave us adrift in ambiguity, regardless of the political, moral, and epistemological repercussions. After a New York Film Festival screening of his last film, the Oscar-winning "The Fog of War," the woman seated next to me was angry -- violently, vocally angry -- at what she perceived to be the film's sympathetic treatment of Robert McNamara (or should I say, its failure to unequivocally indict him?). I wondered then: why the vitriol? Was it because she disagreed with the film, or because it challenged something she had previously thought she knew to be true? Uncertainty can be an upsetting thing. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] April 16, 2008 REVIEW | I'll Be Seeing You: Vadim Perelman's "The Life Before Her Eyes"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Diana and Maureen are in the girls' room, gossiping about boys and bio between classes, when shots ring out. It's the sound of an assault rifle wielded by Michael Patrick, the school nerd, on a violent, Columbine-like rampage. How do we know? "Yesterday in trig he told me he was going to bring a gun to school!" Diana explains, just as Michael Patrick bursts through the door. The two girls are cornered, and the lanky gunman, taking some time to reload a weapon that's bigger than he is, gives the girls a choice: Which one should he kill? [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] April 10, 2008 REVIEW | Growth Factor: Sue Williams's "Young & Restless in China"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot With the controversial Beijing Olympics just around the corner, the eyes of the world continue to attentively watch the rapid and profound changes taking place in the social, cultural, and environmental life of China, currently staking a claim as the global market's most powerful economy. "Young & Restless in China," a documentary in the vein of the ongoing "Up" series, examines how these radical transformations are affecting the latest Chinese citizens to enter the workforce, a dislocated and confused generation of young people awkwardly caught in the move from, as director Sue Williams puts forth, "idealism to materialism." It's a shift directly influenced by the political and economic reforms that have turned strict, repressive communism into destabilizing, still repressive quasi-capitalism, and Williams gets close to a wide range of subjects who illumine the challenges now facing this generation and the future of China. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] April 9, 2008 REVIEW | Strange Fascination: Ari Libsker's "Stalags"
An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Many Americans have never heard about the Stalag fiction phenomenon; Ari Libsker's short but valuable documentary, simply titled "Stalags," makes for a troubling, though thoughtful, introduction. Stalags constituted a genre of cheap exploitation novels that briefly thrived in Israel in the early Sixties during the period of the Adolf Eichmann trial, when the atrocities of the Holocaust were initially and tentatively broached in the public sphere. Stalags usually stuck to the same tried and true formula, pawning themselves off as translations of memoirs by American or British soldiers who had been imprisoned during World War II by the Nazis and subjected to sexual humiliation and violence by SS she-devils. In the end the soldier gets to turn the tables by raping and killing his inhuman torturers. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ]  REVIEW | Weird Science: Shi-Zheng Chen's "Dark Matter"
An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "Dark Matter" begins with a shot of Meryl Streep practicing tai chi, and therein lies a precise encapsulation of the film's attitude toward the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures. In its 90-minute duration, the film grapples with a number of weighty themes: the origins of the universe, the importing of Chinese scholarly talent by American universities, even the deep causes of incidents of campus violence, like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. But ultimately, the film's approach to these issues is as suspect as an American movie star going through the motions, however gracefully, of the thirteen postures. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] April 8, 2008 REVIEW | Compassion Play: Tom McCarthy's "The Visitor"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Tom McCarthy's surprise indie hit "The Station Agent" was something of a minor miracle. A touching, big-hearted character study propelled by three vibrant performances, "The Station Agent" distinguished itself with its sensitivity and grace, qualities sorely lacking in an independent film culture that too often prizes the clever, the glib, the cute, and the smug. With his sophomore effort as a writer-director, "The Visitor," McCarthy once again proves himself to be refreshingly out-of-step with the indie mainstream, taking an improbable set-up and patiently observing as his damaged but likeable characters work their way through it. Despite its contrivances, the film is a work of quiet, restrained empathy. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] April 6, 2008 REVIEW | Old Joy: Stephen Walker's "Young @ Heart"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Can rock music and colostomy bags mix? (Insert your own hilarious "Shine a Light" joke here.) The subject of Stephen Walker's new documentary is Farmingham, Massachusetts' "Young @ Heart" chorus, a 24-member group with several international tours under its belt. The singers' median age, we're informed, is 80. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Lead Story, Reviews ] March 29, 2008 REVIEW | Such Great Heights: Hou Hsiao-hsien's "The Flight of the Red Balloon"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Like his 2004 film "Cafe Lumiere," Hou Hsiao-hsien's sublime new movie "The Flight of the Red Balloon" finds the director in a foreign country paying homage to another filmmaker. With "Lumiere," Yasujiro Ozu was Hou's reference point and Tokyo his canvas; here, Hou reimagines Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short "The Red Balloon" as a Parisian family melodrama. Hou's film, much like Lamorisse's, opens with the magnificent titular object hovering barely out of the reach of seven-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu); as he gets on the Metro, it floats just above the station, drifting up into the trees. The balloon, and by proxy Lamorisse's film, serves as our point of departure -- our way into Simon's world and our guide through the streets of Paris -- but the delicate, charming, quietly heartbreaking portrait of childhood and family that follows is distinctively and unforgettably Hou. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews, World Cinema ] March 27, 2008 REVIEW | Tuckered Out: David Schwimmer's "Run Fatboy Run"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Since the "chick flick" moniker continues to stick, it's only fair that male-targeted incarnations of the romantic comedy receive an equally derogatory nickname now that they're all the rage. I nominate "dick flicks" over David Denby's more diplomatic "slacker striver romance" designation -- certainly the subgenre's preoccupation with penis jokes earns the label. As outlined by the New Yorker critic in an article last year heralding the crop's crystallization with "Knocked Up," the flicks typically focus on an unmotivated and immature man as he kicks and screams his way towards reformation for the love of a good (and hot) woman. "Run Fatboy Run" fits so uncomplicatedly into this mold, you can imagine how paint-by-numbers it plays. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] March 24, 2008 REVIEW | Wistful Thinking: Morgan Neville's "The Cool School"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "The Cool School" is one of a subset of documentary biographies that might best be called "Scenes of Yesteryear." Like the recent "Weather Underground," "Commune," and "American Hardcore"--whose respective subjects include radical terrorists, hippie collectives, and indigenous, anticommercial punk rock--"The Cool School" weaves testimony from participants of a faded fringe movement with footage from its heyday to take stock of the legacy of the marginal subculture in question. These are nostalgic, sometimes commemorative films employing a similar functional style to deliver content as practically as possible, and they're so close to each other in quality that a misfire ("American Hardcore"'s harried mess) usually isn't all that far from a triumph ("Weather Underground"'s precise portrait of revolutionary fanaticism). [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] March 21, 2008 REVIEW | Family Feud: Jeff Nichols's 'Shotgun Stories"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The presence of David Gordon Green's name in "Shotgun Stories"' billing block is probably both a blessing and a curse for the reception of Jeff Nichols's feature film debut. On the one hand, it broadcasts what sort of film this is -- an earnest character study with a touch of that neo-Southern Gothic quirkiness that Green has made his own. But on the other hand, it will probably authorize some unforgiving comparisons to a style of filmmaking that -- judging by the maddeningly uneven "Snow Angels" -- even Green himself seems to have exhausted. With a trailer for Green's Seth Rogen-James Franco stoner comedy "Pineapple Express" and head-scratching rumors of a "Suspiria" remake circling the internet, it's becoming clear that even Green is anxious to move on from the type of filmmaking he patented, even as a cottage industry of similar films flourishes. [ read more in Movies ] [ 1 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] March 20, 2008 REVIEW | Gross National Product: Olivier Assayas's "Boarding Gate"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Olivier Assayas's "Boarding Gate" arrives on these shores like a battered shipment of cheap goods. True, it's only sat moldering for ten months in its film canister since its Cannes premiere -- a relatively short period in these hazy days of distribution -- but it shows a distinct lack of freshness all the same. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing: there's a tantalizing whiff of mediocrity to "Boarding Gate," and it's consistently set off by high levels of self-awareness and undeniable craft. Assayas's later career has been a heady stew of class and crass, yet not even in his terrific, audience-baiting pseudo-technothriller "demonlover," with its corporate-girls-gone-wild for the smart set, did he flirt as heavily with exploitation as he does here. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] March 18, 2008 REVIEW | Over the Borderline: Patricia Riggen's "Under the Same Moon"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The main question "Under the Same Moon" poses is whether its story, which follows the basic outline of a separated mother and son fairy tale, befits its subject, the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants. The immigration issue has in the last few years become a hot one in part due to economic angst and homeland security paranoia, but Mexican director Patricia Riggen and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos don't use their film to explore the larger political picture of fence-hopping workers and the varied American responses to their increasing numbers. Instead "Under the Same Moon" remains at ground level, showing audiences the unique backgrounds of individuals forced by circumstances to leave their homes and risk their lives north of the border. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] March 16, 2008 REVIEW | Sweet Nothings: Christophe Honore's "Love Songs"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] As in last year's "Dans Paris," 37-year-old filmmaker Christophe Honore ventures back to that lost Eden known as the French New Wave, this time to punch up a featherweight tale of young love and loss with high-concept tomfoolery. And though "Love Songs" (or, if we could please use its original, more melodic title, "Les Chansons d'amour") better evokes that era's carefree cinematic spirit, it's similarly bound by dictates and referents, twice-removed and over-rehearsed. Hence "Love Songs" is not merely a musical -- in which passionate, lost twentysomethings wend their way through difficult times by breaking into pop tunes with puppy-love ingenuousness -- but also a riff on musicals, performance, play-acting, etc. Part of this is just by postmodern design, yet often the result is simultaneously ingratiating and distancing. Those looking for the exhilarating crescendos of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (the film's declared inspiration: Honore borrows Jacques Demy's structure, separating his narrative into the same three distinct chapters -- Departure, Absence, and Return) might be put off by the film's less dramatic swooniness; "Love Songs" is the brief dalliance to "Cherbourg"'s intense affair, perhaps too shy to fully take the plunge, but nimble enough to give off a flirtatious buzz. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] March 11, 2008 REVIEW | Dead Again: Michael Haneke's "Funny Games"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Michael Haneke's 1997 "Funny Games" always seemed more like an instruction manual than a thriller, with the famously dyspeptic Austrian auteur hesitantly going through the genre motions only to teach us something he feels we really ought to learn. Now, as if to put all doubts of his intentional didacticism to rest, Haneke has returned to the scene of his crime (against art?) for his first English-language film, a stringent remake that, in theory at least, takes the guise of the sort of Hollywood product he always intended to deconstruct. The implication is that those who most needed this movie medicine (namely us mindless drones known as Americans) didn't swallow the first time, so perhaps now, unencumbered by nattering subtitles and unfamiliar European faces, we will unwittingly flock to the multiplex for a punishing lesson in audience humility and media critique posing as a home-invasion suspenser. [ read more in Movies ] [ 4 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] March 10, 2008 REVIEW | The Road Well Traveled: William Maher's "Sleepwalking"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] When a film opens with shots of a straight and anonymous American highway -- that most overdetermined of American film locations -- as "Sleepwalking" does, one must be braced for a story about emotional journeys. A ribbon of asphalt stretching to the horizon is immediate shorthand for personal growth along the road of life (for, to paraphrase Tom Cochrane, life is a highway); this is as true for Captain America and Billy as it is for Steve Martin and the late John Candy. Though "Sleepwalking" offers little variation on the modern automotive odyssey to maturity (as its protagonists carpool their way to catharsis and fulfillment, sensitive pop songs play in the background and the camera's lens flares with orange sunsets), its earnestness and acting at least provide the momentum necessary to avoid stalling, whether or not the viewer is content to ride along. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] March 9, 2008 REVIEW | A Winning Argument: Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp's "War Made Easy"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Though the early to mid-aughts documentary boom has recently died down, it's still difficult to believe there hasn't been a serious nonfiction indictment of the collusion between the government and the media in selling the invasion of Iraq to the American public. This accounts for a somewhat shameful omission in the ever-growing Iraq War doc catalogue--the sheer amount of lies, distortions, and fear-mongering titillations on display in a typical CNN or Fox News broadcast circa 2002 (and today) would offer enough evidence on the sorry state of our national media for a book-length study, let alone a feature film. Columnist, critic, and antiwar notable Norman Solomon has now, remarkably, provided both: his 2005 volume "War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" has been adapted into an explosive, compact 73-minute documentary by filmmakers Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. If a few years ago Solomon was a lonely voice in the wilderness, with this film he has a major stage from which to educate a potentially greater audience. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ] March 6, 2008 REVIEW | Quiet Anger: David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels"
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Steve Ramos reviewed David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels" following its world premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.] The moment in "Snow Angels" that qualifies stand-alone filmmaker David Gordon Green as the most artful of film masters occurs when Glenn (Sam Rockwell), a broken man, dances with two drunken patrons at a rundown tavern in the small Pennsylvania town he calls home. A birthday cake sits on a nearby pinball table without explanation. The room is dark, so dark that it's hard to say if one of the shuffling patrons holding Glenn is a man or woman. But everything is placed with the same attention to perfect detail as his previous three feature films, "Undertow," "All the Real Girls" and his best film, "George Washington." [ read more in Movies ] [ 4 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] March 5, 2008 REVIEW | Like, Actually: Bharat Nalluri's "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A middle-aged, getting-your-groove-back Cinderella story: Miss Pettigrew, an unsuccessful domestic used to taking her meals in breadlines, maneuvers a job with a flighty American "actress" abroad, Delysia Lafosse. Just like that, prim Pettigrew is off the streets and hovering around the nexus of the London smart set, where her self-possession and propriety are suddenly rare and valuable commodities. It doesn't take long for a reasonably handsome suitor to notice. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] March 4, 2008 REVIEW | Aural Examination: Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Gus Van Sant's so-called "Death Trilogy" may have culminated two years ago with crowning achievement "Last Days," but to judge by his latest film, "Paranoid Park," the entropic weight of mortality is still very much at the center of the filmmaker's concerns. Moving beyond the Death Trilogy's Bela Tarr-grafted stories of self- and other-inflicted violence, Van Sant now tinkers with his trademark stylistic oddities, nonlinear narrative devices, and thematic ideas to fashion a heterogeneous, experimental grab-bag that even for him and his death obsession becomes seemingly familiar and evocatively strange. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] March 3, 2008 REVIEW | "Burbs of a Feather . . . " : Ira Sachs' "Married Life"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] "Married Life," the third feature from Ira Sachs, marks a major departure for the Memphis-born filmmaker. The first of his movies to take place away from his native South, and his only period picture, "Married Life" stakes out new thematic ground for a director whose previous efforts, "The Delta" and "Forty Shades of Blue," focused resolutely on outsiders, people on the margins trying to navigate their way through an unfamiliar, unfriendly, and even hostile social environment. By contrast, "Married Life," tackles a far more commonplace -- and rather banal -- subject: suburban heterosexual partnership and the mysterious, often unspoken undercurrents that both threaten and sustain ostensibly happy marriages. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Reviews ] February 28, 2008 REVIEW | Son of God: Paulo Morelli's "City of Men"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] 2000's art-house megahit "City of God" has officially attained franchise status -- after spawning a made-for-television series, "City of Men," it's now passing a licensed spin-off of the same title along to theaters. Director Paulo Morelli, who had a hand in the TV show, looks at the favelas of Rio de Janeiro through a scrim of hissing high-contrast grain, the camera swaying with heatstroke wooziness over swaggering neighborhood kingpins. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] February 27, 2008 REVIEW | Malignant Growth: Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Due to the onslaught of environmental documentaries that prioritize urgency over intelligence, Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen," an inquisitive, elegant rendering of the battle between land development and dwindling natural resources in Austin, might get lost in the shuffle. And what a shame that would be, for Dunn's refreshingly thorough look at the encroachment of capital on untouched land is smart enough not to treat its subject as a horror show. The film is more sobered than alarming, yet it's hardly defeatist. An impressionist's portrait of contemporary American economic life, "The Unforeseen" is for nature both a paean and an elegy, and for contemporary American nonfiction a challenge, in both scope and aesthetic. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Documentary, Reviews ] February 25, 2008 REVIEW | Street Poetry: Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Scraping for a living in the shadow of that holy of professional baseball holies, Shea Stadium, twelve year-old Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco) does everything an impoverished, parentless, out-of-school 12-year-old can do to survive in the lowest depths of one of New York City's strangest and direst areas, Willets Point, Queens. He calls his boss Rob's (Rob Sowulski) auto body shop both his workplace and home, hustles pornographic DVDs, robs U.S. Open patrons, steals hub caps from Shea's parking lot for extra cash, and saves up precious money to buy a used mobile-food van along with his 16-year-old prostitute sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), in order to, as they dream, start their own business. [ read more in Movies ] [ 0 comments ] [ filed under Lead Story, Reviews ] February 21, 2008 REVIEW | Holding Court: Jacques Rivette's "The Duchess of Langeais"
[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A chamber piece for two tragic almost-lovers, a coquettish Duchess and a noble French General. A chance flirtation at a Fauborg St-Germain party initiates an arduous campaign of rom |