Indieville
September 2008 - Posts
The week on IFC.com: Flaming martians, Aki Kaurismäki and Fantasic Fest.
Fri, Sep 26 2008 5:47 PM
A round-up of what's been happening on the rest of IFC.com: + Interview: Wayne Coyne on "Christmas on Mars" - The Flaming Lips frontman on his first feature, the Large Hadron Collider, "90210" and space ovens. + Interview: Chuck Palahniuk on "Choke" - The "Fight Club" author on the latest adaptation of his work, making people faint and coded security announcements. + On DVD: Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy, "Shadow" - Michael Atkinson on Criterion's new set of three films from the Finnish master of deadpan and a "mysterious and rarely discussed work" from the Polish New Wave. + IFC News Podcast #95: From Fantastic Fest - Matt Singer and I report, a little worse for the wear, from the country's largest genre festival in Austin, TX. + Opening This Week: Ladyboys, sex addicts, Spike Lee - Neil Pedley rounds up what's new in theaters. Want these updates to be sent...
Fantastic Fest 2008: "Ex Drummer."
Thu, Sep 25 2008 5:30 PM
Interesting that at a festival that celebrates visceral cinematic shocks -- the over-the-top splatter of "Tokyo Gore Police" and the "we dare you to walk out" boundary pushing of "Martyrs" and "Deadgirl" -- the two most disturbing films I saw weren't horror at all. The first is "I Think We're Alone Now," and the second Koen Mortier's feature debut "Ex Drummer," which wins the prize for moral decay. It's been compared to "Trainspotting," and, like that film "Ex Drummer" has visual style to burn and threads of seedy surrealism, but in terms of content it makes Danny Boyle's work look like something from the Disney vaults. "Ex Drummer" would kick you in the teeth if it had a pair of steel toe boots and feet to wear them on, a whirlwind of nihilism in which every character is either an impulsive animal, a destructive misanthrope or a willing and deserving...
Fantastic Fest 2008: "I Think We're Alone Now."
Wed, Sep 24 2008 3:42 PM
Like "American Movie" and "Billy the Kid," Sean Donnelly's "I Think We're Alone Now" makes you squirm at its relationships with its subjects and its audience. I wouldn't say that, as a documentary, it's unethical, but it does focus on two people who suffer from unknown degrees of mental illness and, watching it, you have to wonder why they ever agreed to be filmed in the first place. Jeffery Deane Turner and Kelly McCormick are obsessed with, and in the case of the former, have also stalked former '80s star Tiffany. Tiffany is the faded pop center of their troubled lives -- Turner, who suffers from Asperger syndrome, claims to be in a loving relationship with her and able to communicate with her via radionics, while McCormick, who's intersex and transitioning to female, believes she's fated to be with the singer after having a vision of her while in a...
Fantastic Fest 2008: "JCVD."
Wed, Sep 24 2008 12:42 PM
Centering your film on the tragedy of being famous is a iffy proposition -- it's not a topic to which the majority of the world will relate, and from any normal and honest perspective, the benefits of celebrity far outweigh any downsides. But director Mabrouk El Mechri has as his star the Muscles From Brussels himself, Belgian action icon Jean-Claude Van Damme, a man whose legitimate claims to fame were staked decades back, and who's now a figure of ridicule with a history of cocaine problems, four divorces, a tendency to spout ludicrous things in televised interviews and a recent track record confined to direct-to-DVD foreign productions. He's also a pretty good sport, since all of these things factor it into "JCVD," a film in which Van Damme plays a somewhat more pathetic variation on himself, headed back to Brussels after losing both custody of his child and a role...
Fantastic Fest 2008: "The Substitute."
Mon, Sep 22 2008 9:44 AM
Paprika Steen, the Danish actress best known for her roles in Dogme films like "Festen," "The Idiots" and "Mifune," is to die for in Ole Bornedal's horror-comedy "The Substitute." Like, she eats someone whole. She plays the forbiddingly named Ulla Harms, a substitute teacher who takes over sixth grade class 6B and whose hair-raisingly cruel instruction technique is augmented by what seem to be the abilities to read minds, balance pencils on their sharpened tips and force people to say nice things about her. In short, Ulla is an alien, a fact 6B, led by moody protagonist Carl (Jonas Wandschneider), gets wise to early on but the verity of which they can't convince their well-meaning, oblivious parents, even as it becomes clear she means to abduct the kids and abscond to her brutal home planet in order to use them as specimens in an attempt to understand the human capacities...
Fantastic Fest 2008: "Seventh Moon."
Sun, Sep 21 2008 2:03 PM
There was an episode of "The Maury Povich Show" in which people confessed to serious but laughable phobias -- birds, pickles, balloons -- after which, for scientific purposes, you understand, a PA would come out and confront them with their object of terror. As I watched a housewife be chased around a sound stage, shrieking, by an intern wielding a balloon, it occurred to me that the segment was one of the most awesome things I'd ever seen on TV, and also that, in a far-off way, I could relate to the woman. I can't stand the low-grade torture of seeing a balloon in the hands of someone with the intent to ultimately pop it -- the pop itself is nothing, but the anticipation of it, the not knowing when it's coming, is agony. "Seventh Moon" is a horror flick based almost completely on that squirmy frisson, which is really...
Fantastic Fest 2008: Opening Night, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."
Sat, Sep 20 2008 9:34 PM
There's incredible (and welcome) cultural whiplash in sneaking away from the middle of the determinedly highbrow New York Film Festival to head to Austin for Fantastic Fest, an event that's most certainly not. Dedicated to horror, sci-fi, fantasy, cult and general genre fare, Fantastic Fest is the brainchild of Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League with support from Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles, with a line-up of international fanboy sprawl that this year includes everything from Icelandic LARPing comedy "Astropia" to Korean Leone homage "The Good, The Bad and The Weird" to a documentary about William Castle and sidebars focused on Ozsploitation and pinku films. Fantastic Fest has become famous for TBD secret screenings that have turned out to be some kickass gets for such a young event -- an unfinished version of "Apocalypto" with Mel Gibson in tow as well as the world premieres of "There Will Be Blood"...
Everybody's gone online.
Mon, Sep 15 2008 5:39 PM
Fantastic Fest kicks off on Thursday, which is also when I'm headed over to Austin (hot damn!), but with beaming internet generosity the festival has already unveiled five features and five shorts from this year's line-up that can be seen, in their entirety and for free, online here. The features include Sean Donnelly's doc about Tiffany stalkers, "I Think We're Alone Now"; J.L. Vara's surreal noir "South of Heaven," starring filmmaking brothers Adam and Aaron Nee; and Reynald Bertand's comedy about an average man who discovers a face cream that temporarily turns him into a major celebrity, "La Creme." Those films will be online until September 20th. October 17th, Magnolia will be releasing Wayne Wang's "The Princess of Nebraska," the companion film to his "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," which opens in theaters this week, online for free on YouTube. Dennis Lim talked at Wang at the New York...
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008.
Mon, Sep 15 2008 4:34 PM
I read "Infinite Jest" in college. A friend passed it along, told me it was something she knew I'd like. Hefting the 1000-plus pages, I thought that I was duty bound, therefore, to hate it, and started reading right away to prove so -- such is the unfortunate person I was. And still am. I ended up finishing the book in three days, at the expense of class, sleep and any social interaction, devouring it in great gulps of prose, propping it open on the kitchen counter as I poked at some occasional ramen on the stove and unsteadily suspending it, wrist trembling, in front of my face in one hand while I brushed my teeth with the other in the morning or at night. I didn't like it -- I grudgingly but thoroughly adored it, that brash, annoying, unbelievably smart and hubristically ambitious doorstop of a novel, and worked...
The week on IFC.com: Diane English defends "The Women," remaking your own film.
Fri, Sep 12 2008 5:17 PM
A round-up of what's been happening on the rest of IFC.com: + Interview: Diane English on "The Women" - The director defends softening up George Cukor's 1939 "bitchfest" into a celebration of female friendship. + Review: "Burn After Reading" - Matt Singer calls the Coens' comedy "one of their zaniest, most immature films in the best possible way." + List: Remaking Your Own Foreign Language Film - Five international directors who rehashed their own work in good ol' American English. + Interview: Jamie Kennedy on "Heckler" - The actor/comedian leaps (sort of) into the "does criticism matter" fray and comes up with an interesting toaster metaphor. + On DVD: "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis," "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" - Michael Atkinson on Mary Jordan's documentary that's a :smashing introduction into the world of mid-century, iconic D.I.Y. rooftop moviemaking," as well as a one of the great...
Watch your mouth.
Thu, Sep 11 2008 4:12 PM
"My apologies." --Viggo Mortensen, after going off about the things "that have been happening in the last eight years in this country," and being reminded that he's actually in Toronto, from the New York Times. "Contrary to what I was quoted as saying, I feel very proud of my country and through my work I have always tried to contribute to its culture within and outside Spain and to honour my people." --Javier Bardem backpedals after calling the Spanish "a bunch of stupid people" in an earlier interview, from the Indepedent. "My wife Tonya told me I may have hurt my chances with the Clint Eastwood stuff... They (Oscar voters and Academy bosses) take everything into account with me. They take into account that I like the Knicks or that I'm in New York." --Spike Lee regrets (?) his Eastwood tiff, while not himself taking into account the possibility that...
Trailering: Three "Nights."
Thu, Sep 11 2008 3:34 PM
There are three different teaser trailers, or maybe they'd be better described as anti-trailers, for Joe Swanberg's "Nights and Weekends" up on the official site here -- like the film, they're without music, based instead around single conversations ("You kiss harder... than I recall") cut through with other footage. Here's my review from the SXSW premiere; it opens October 10th. For a trailer that's very much A Trailer, see this one for "The Soloist," director Joe Wright's first excursion into the present day after "Pride & Prejudice" and "Atonement," and extremely Oscar-baitey in a totally different way. Robert Downey Jr. plays a flaky L.A. Times columnist who finds a befriends a schizophrenic homeless man (Jamie Foxx) who's happens to be a musical prodigy who once attended Juilliard. It's not even "based on a true story," it's simple "a true story," and its got a November 21 release date. And here's...
September.
Thu, Sep 11 2008 3:19 PM
"Man on Wire": Philippe Petit in 1974, © 2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images...
"Che" goes to IFC Films.
Wed, Sep 10 2008 10:55 AM
It looks like those rumors that Steven Soderbergh's "Che" was going to be released by Magnolia Pictures were just that -- this is from the freshest press release: IFC Films has acquired all North American rights to Steven Soderbergh's epic "Che" starring Benicio Del Toro, produced by Laura Bickford and Benicio Del Toro and written by Peter Buchman. The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival where Benicio Del Toro won the Best Actor Prize. It is currently screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be screening next at the New York Film Festival. "Che" will be released for one week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December. The company will then re-open the film in January through IFC In Theaters, its day-and-date distribution platform which makes independent films available to a national audience in theaters and on-demand, simultaneously. It will...
"I would simply go to the Internet and watch real people having real sex."
Tue, Sep 9 2008 1:52 PM
"I was on a roll, so I kept going with it. I said, 'Look, if I were a 13-year-old boy, and I saw ['Zack and Miri'] on cable back in 1983? Yes, it would send me to the bathroom to jerk off. Now, as a 13-year-old boy, if I saw this movie? It would not titillate me. I would simply go to the Internet and watch real people having real sex. How can you possibly say this is too erotically charged when it's so obviously a comedy with people having over-the-top fake sex, when we can see examples of real sex at a keystroke?' " --Kevin Smith on appealing "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"'s NC-17, at Salon. "[I]t's weird, because everywhere I go, people yell, 'Grasshopper!' or 'Bill!' but down there in Mexico or Colombia or anywhere in South America or most of Europe, people will yell, 'Serpent's Egg!'...
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