Film Fatale

Sundance 2007: Magic Men, Weightless Women, Drawn in Black and White

This report appeared in the Observer (UK) in a slightly different form - read the original here.

HOUNDDOG
Director/screenwriter Deborah Kampmeier

USA. 2006. 98 min. 35mm.
Dakota Fanning, Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, Piper Laurie, Afemo Omilami.
No distributor information/release date as of Jan. 28

BLACK SNAKE MOAN
Dir/scr: Craig Brewer
USA. 2006. 118 min. 35mm. Paramount Vantage (In theaters Feb. 23, 2007: Official website)
Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake, S. Epatha Merkerson, John Cothran.

Another year, another programme of great films - little wonder Hollywood's big shots were stalking chilly Utah in search of the next big thing to fill cinemas (from me - Justine Elias -- the original report appears in the London Observer - Jan. 28, 2007. You can read the original, shorter version in print or online.

Independent cinema fans once came to snowy Park City, Utah, in search of obscure films and renegade directors such like Quentin Tarantino or Jim Jarmusch. But in recent years, indie films have gained profile and box-office stature. Now Hollywood suits flock to the festival looking for crowd-pleasers like Little Miss Sunshine, a Sundance hit last year that went on to earn $92m worldwide and four Oscar nominations. Coming into the festival, the movies that got the most attention weren't light -- but they were nearly weightless.

As in tossed around, carried off, like naughty white ladies of HOUNDDOG and BLACK SNAKE MOAN, two overcooked portraits of the American South (Weather forecast: Humid sultriness, lurid lightning. Conditions will deteriorate).

Continue reading "Sundance: Weightless Women, Magic Men in Black & White" »

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CHILDREN OF GOD: LOST AND FOUND(Slamdance)
A haunting, rigorous exploration of youth in exile -- for good reason -- from their families, from the communities that raised them, and saddest of all, from faith

Born in Brazil to members of the Children of God evangelical Christian cult, director/writer/interviewer) Noah Thompson -- one of eleven siblings - left at the age of 21. Several of his younger siblings have since followed. The story begins with begins with contrasting memories: disturbing, then horrifying news footage (c. 1990s) of the cult leader's exposure as a pedophile, and Thompson's own rigidly cheerful snapshots and home movies--despite the being raised in a regimented commune where fathers and mothers--young, attractive, fresh faced hippies-- went fishing, flirtily, for more followers, and nannies watched over the kids. When Thompson reminds his mother of the "flirty fishing," and that that he and other children had sex with some of those young-ish nannies, the voice on the other end of the line gets a little nervous. "I hope you're not going to make me look like a slut," she says.

Pity that mother for being drawn into an uncomfortable conversation with a camera and audiotape running. Maybe it was my imagination, but there seemed to be a great many people with her on the line, hoping to dissaude the filmmaker not from making the movie. Or maybe it was the audience's communal sorrow at Thompson's next remark: he was only trying to make some sense of his isolated/early-sexualized/accelerated childhood by speaking to other ex-Children of God who'd been raised as he was. What follows isn't a hit piece but a filmmaker's coming of age. As he locates his spiritual siblings - scattered now from Manhattan to Texas to Costa Rica to Brazil - he becomes a compelling figure before the camera, a compassionate listener with reluctant subjects who, paradoxically, seem to have been waiting all their lives to speak.

What they say is heartbreaking. "Look at how cute we were," remarks one young woman, who with her brother, suffered unspeakable treatment by the cult's leaders. "No wonder we got abused."

The cult once bended toward the rapey, criminal enterprise delusions of its leader--but the followers -- now calling themselves The Family International are now merely an isolationist religious cult.

HBO will be airing Children of God: Lost and Found "at a later date," according to the film's publicist.

Continue reading "Slamdance 1: Lost and Found and Kevin Bacon" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My festival wrapup, translated into British English, written for the Observer.

And Gaby Wood has done a cool profile in the Observer's Sunday magazine of Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was a delight in STRANGER THAN FICTION and superb in SHERRYBABY.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Congratulations to Mexican-born, Texas-educated, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Alejandro Monteverde, whose feature debut BELLA won the Toronto Film Festival's People's Choice Award. As part of the Contemporary World Cinema programme, Bella didn't arrive at the fest with huge advance buzz, but this modest, warmly observed two-hander about a washed up soccer star (Eduardo Verastegui) and a lonely, pregnant waitress (Tammy Blanchard) might just have stuff to be a breakout indie hit.

Continue reading "Toronto: 'Bella' is the People's Choice" »

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A friend had only to describe an early scene in EL CANTANTE, Marc Anthony and J. Lo's salsa biopic, for me to dash off to a public screening. A by-the-book musical up-and-downfall bio of salsa king Hector Lavoe (Anthony), the movie's got a hot soundtrack and all the Mad Lib, fill in the blanks woes of troubled musical genius. Family woes-check! Addiction-you got it! But before things go to hell, Lavoe and his lady love (Lopez) cruise Manhattan, snorting cocaine in a record company limo. Whoops! They hit a bump and the white powder goes flying. How they laugh, unaware of the tragedy to come. The movie's a mess, but Marc and J. Lo sure do look like a fun couple.

Not so the Rachel Weisz-Darren Arronovskys, whose Queen Isabella-conquistador fixated, time travellin' what-the-fuck THE FOUNTAIN plays like pillow talk. For some reason, Weisz is photographed in blinding white light, so that no matter which character or time period she's in, she has no pores or skin flaws whatever. Meanwhile Hugh Jackman gets the full dermatalogical treatment, even when he's in the same scene with her. Bottom line: you can tell who the director loves and who's the boy from Oz.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 07:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Death of a President
UK, USA. Dir. Gabriel Range

Shut Up and Sing
USA. Dir. Barbara Kopple, Cecelia Peck.

Hype hurts the morning after, and journalists who queued up to see DEATH OF A PRESIDENT in the too-small cinema are feeling a bit snookered. Festival programmer Noah Cowan called this "what if?" docu-drama directed by Gabriel Range the "most dangerous and breathtakingly original film" he'd encountered this year; advance press served to fan the flames of controversy and a quick sale to Newmarket Films. For about 30 minutes, D.O.A.P. carries real tension: Set in 2007 Chicago, the site of a presidential visit and angry war protests that get out of control, the movie uses news footage, plus visual effects, plus CCTV footage, plus TV-documentary-like talking heads, to tell the story of the night the president (Bush) was assassinated. But once the deadly event occurs, and the inevitable frameup of a Syrian-born IT engineer begins to unfold, D.O.A.P. never follows through on its premise of showing how the assassination effects the country at large. All windup, no pitch. (As unsettling as the idea is, how would anything change if Cheney were president? Hasn't it been made clear, in the latest round of 9/11 and Iraq documentary/remembrances, much he already runs the show?

Continue reading "Toronto: Politics, Truth & Consequences" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One other comment about BLACK SHEEP: It's godawful gross and gorey, and I have issues with gore. But this comedy horror movie is so silly that I was laughing rather than cringing during scenes of innards being pulled by fanged sheeps. The silliness of the sheep-teeth distracted me from the realistic, smelly, horrid looking innards and offal, and no human being or animal came close to realistic or well-acted agony.

Continue reading "Toronto: Frankenfish Gone Wild! 'THE HOST'" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a certain kind of comedy acting that I find pure genius, and it's not the craft that they teach in the Strasberg Institute. When an actor holds a puppet or doll up to their neck, screams "It's got me! It's biting me!" and throws himself to the ground as if the thing has deadly jaws clamped to him--I fall to pieces with laughter. Matt Dillon did this in SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, and someday they'll show that clip when he gets he's lifetime achievement Academy Award.

Early on in BLACK SHEEP, a rather convincing looking mutant sheep fetus from goes on a neck-biting rampage, and I completely lost it. I'm not alone. The New Zealand made horror-comedy had a great reception at last night's Midnight Madness premiere, and today's press and industry screening was packed with buyers. The movie's now the subject of a bidding war and will surely be sold by festival's end. The movie couldn't be much sillier, but it's got enough shock and gore to please genre fans. The story has two feuding brothers--an evil scientist who's been tinkering with ovine DNA and younger one who's become farm-phobic after a long ago tragedy.

The creature effects do become excessive, but they're well done (from the WETA Workshop), and no joke about men left alone with livestock goes unexplored.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ALL THE KING'S MEN (Dir. Steven Zallian. 2006. PG-13. 128 mins. Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Anthony Hopkins.

The book you didn't want to read in high school becomes the movie you won't want to see this fall.

Despite certain relevance (an anti-hero populist politician brought down by big money career pols), evocative location shooting, and an all-star cast rounded up from the far corners of the Academy Award winning world, All The King's Men plays like a high-minded theme paper written as a chore. Yet the film, directed and adapted by Zallian from Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a Huey Long-like governor, isn't nearly the wreck that its bombastic trailers—now playing for an ominous twelve months—would have it seem.

Continue reading "Toronto: All The King's Men, Put Together Again" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blame the enemies of Kazahkstan!

Sacha Baron Cohen's highly anticipated Toronto Film Festival movie premiere was a bust, despite the actor/writer's triumphant midnight carriage ride through downtown Toronto. Only twenty minutes into his riotiously well-received comedy/satire, BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHKSTAN, the cinema's sole film projector broke down.

Continue reading "'Borat' Premiere Unplugged; Kazakh Enemies Suspected" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:25 AM | Permalink

Darren Aronofsky is a filmmaker with big ideas. The critics at the Venice Film Festival seem to think he's overreached himself with THE FOUNTAIN, a movie that's got something to do with the fountain of youth and a love story that stretches over (as Gary Oldman put it so eloquently in Bram Stoker's Dracula) "oceans of time." Whatever the the movie's about, Hugh Jackman looks postively Hestonian in this film still:

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The Toronto International Film Festival has announced the lineup for its popular Midnight Madness screenings, the programme that can launch horror, action and comedy movies. A couple of years ago, Midnight Madness' breakout star was director Eli Roth, who went on to make HOSTEL - a reprehensible movie, but the sold-out of CABIN FEVER must have been the highlight of his life -- every first-time filmmaker's dream come true. Last year, the belle of the festival was Sarah Silverman, who rocked the house with JESUS IS MAGIC.

Sacha Baron-Cohen, who wore a startling red thong in Cannes, stars in the first midnight movie is BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKSTAN. Expect him to completely dominate all the early red carpet and party photos: Especially if he brings his own camera crew.

I have great hopes for SEVERANCE, the second thriller from Britain's Christopher Smith. His debut CREEP was a nightmare ride on London's Underground -- and probably the last to be filmed on location there due to the 2005 terrorist attacks. In the new movie, a corporate team-building retreat in the wilderness goes terribly awry -- someone (or maybe something) takes a cutthroat attitude to the competition.

With horror movies from Russia, Spain, Korea and France and the USA, this is one of the most diverse lineups in many years (I don't know what to make of the New Zealand entry BLACK SHEEP, in which the national animal goes bloodthirsty...sheep are so damn cute.)

The 2006 Toronto International Film Festival runs Sept 7-16

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)