Indieville
January 2009 - Posts
Sundance 2009: "The Carter."
Mon, Jan 26 2009 12:13 AM
"The Carter" doesn't try to make the case that Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., is, as he himself has claimed, the "best rapper alive." "Best" and "alive" aren't always long-lasting qualities in the world of hip-hop anyway. Instead of making the case for Wayne the artist, Adam Bhala Lough's documentary focuses on capturing the incredibly, frighteningly of-the-moment ocean of celebrity through which he wades, a diminutive 25-year-old from New Orleans with a multi-platinum album and, for now, all the talent and swagger in the world, as well as one of its more distinctive drug habits. "The Carter" follows Lil Wayne unblinkingly on tour, as he bounces from Amsterdam to Atlanta and back again, apparently unmoored and eternally on the road, recording in hotel rooms and buses with the equipment that's always with him, high all the time on weed, on codeine cough syrup cut with soda. That's why...
Sundance 2009: "The September Issue."
Sun, Jan 25 2009 10:13 PM
There's a moment in "The September Issue" in which it seems, perhaps, that Miss Anna Wintour regrets. She's just explained that her siblings work in global labor organization, in arranging low-income housing and as the political editor of the Guardian. "My brothers and sister are very amused by what I do," she says, biting her lip, and for a second you believe that "Nuclear" Wintour, the famously glacial, controlling and all-powerful editor-in-chief of American Vogue, secretly wishes she'd gotten a medical degree and went off to Sudan with Doctors Without Borders. And then you don't, because throughout R.J. Cutler's documentary, which spans the assembling of the 2007 September issue of Vogue, the largest and most important of the year, Wintour keeps such a tight rein on how she's portrayed that even moments of vulnerability seem calculated. It's not much of a complaint -- I would have loved a bit more...
Sundance 2009: "Cold Souls."
Fri, Jan 23 2009 3:57 PM
The shadow of Charlie Kaufman looms unignorably large over Sophie Barthes' first feature "Cold Souls," which stars Paul Giamatti as a well-known and very serious actor named Paul Giamatti, who's finding that his role in a upcoming stage production of "Uncle Vanya" is weighing on him. An article in the New Yorker steers him to a service being pitched to wealthy New Yorkers looking to lighten their metaphysical load by having their souls removed and stored, and soon Giamatti is in the care of Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), who professes, not reassuringly, that his company has no idea how their process works. Extracted, Giamatti's soul takes the form of a chickpea. But while he no longer feels troubled -- in fact, he no longer feels much at all -- his soullessness isn't doing much for his acting. He falls down the rabbit hole of international soul trafficking, renting what he's...
Sundance 2009: "The Killing Room."
Thu, Jan 22 2009 7:28 PM
Like "Saw," but sort of topical, Jonathan Liebesman's midnight movie "The Killing Room" is about a room in which people are killed -- killed by the government! Or perhaps just one of those government-associated top secret groups that are always capable of levels of devious competence far beyond the capabilities yet demonstrated by any actual existing bureaucracy, I'm a little iffy on it all. Four people who think they're signing up for medical testing find themselves instead part of a deadly experiment to find...what? We're forced to guess as it all goes down alongside Chloë Sevigny, who plays a gifted psychologist with an icy disposition and some hot heels brought in to observe and to audition for a job under program head Dr. Phillips (Peter Stormare). Nick Cannon, Timothy Hutton and Clea DuVall are among the unfortunate subjects, and the quality that's being searched for by the sadistic process to...
Sundance 2009: "The Cove."
Wed, Jan 21 2009 8:33 AM
"The Cove" is a documentary about Taiji, Japan's capital for dolphin hunting, and how effective it is is directly proportional to how horrified you feel at the idea of dolphins being killed for meat. I've come to the conclusion that for me, the answer is: not very. I didn't relish the concluding footage of the world's most lovable cetacean flopping through its death throes in bloody water, but in the end I felt the same way I've felt when confronted with a look inside commercial slaughterhouses -- was anyone expecting it to be pretty? Dolphins, unlike whales, aren't endangered. They're just cute. A production of the Oceanic Preservation Society, funded by Netscape founder Jim Clark, "The Cove" is in part a very well supplied heist-style stunt that someone in the film compares to "Ocean's Eleven." While anyone can watch the dolphins be rounded up and offered to trainers as potential...
Sundance 2009: "World's Greatest Dad."
Tue, Jan 20 2009 12:29 PM
Bobcat Goldthwait's not what you would call a natural filmmaker -- while "World's Greatest Dad" isn't half as clumsy looking as his 2006 Sundance bestiality-themed rom-com "Stay," it's still rough as all hell and reliant on handfuls of endless music montages. But as a screenwriter, he's among the best in what's its own subcategory these days: the sentimental center/outrageous set-up flick, the movie genre equivalent of the hooker with the heart of gold. And the premise of "World's Greatest Dad" is near-brilliant: A high school English teacher with unfulfilled dreams of being a successful author, Lance (Robin Williams) is the father of sullen teenager Kyle (Daryl Sabara) whose only interests seem to be demeaning his sad-sack single parent and his lone friend Andrew (Evan Martin) and masturbating. While spicing up the latter with some autoerotic asphyxiation, Kyle accidentally strangles to death, and rather than let that be the way the...
The 2009 Cinema Eye Nominations
Mon, Jan 19 2009 5:32 PM
The Cinema Eye Honors are now in their second year of honoring the best in documentary filmmaking, looking as much at craft as subject matter, unlike the lingering tendencies among, say, the Oscars. The 2009 nominees were announced here in Park City this afternoon, with filmmaker and award co-chair AJ Schnack joined by "My Country, My Country"'s Laura Poitras and Joe Berlinger, whose latest film, "Crude," premiered at the festival yesterday. There are some exciting tugs at the boundaries of what's considered nonfiction film in the list below -- most notably Guy Maddin's docu-fantasia "My Winnipeg," which isn't even in the same gene pool as your typical talking head doc. The awards will take place in New York on March 29. OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN NONFICTION FEATURE FILMMAKING MAN ON WIRE Directed by James Marsh Produced by Simon Chinn MY WINNIPEG Directed by Guy Maddin Produced by Jody Shapiro and Phyllis...
Sundance 2009: "Toe to Toe."
Sun, Jan 18 2009 10:03 AM
So much going on in D.C. prep school drama "Toe to Toe"! Troubled, promiscuous rich white girl befriends martyrdom-happy control-freak poor black girl, they fight over a boy who won't take either seriously in the end because "non-Muslim girls are just for practice," there's lacrosse, Princeton, go-go, class dynamics, a needy *** videographer, and some wild family troubles, including one of indie film's most unintentionally camp neglectful mothers, whose all-consuming job involves flying off to exotic locales to meet with government ministers, and who takes off in a cab while her daughter shrieks, wails and claws at herself while begging her to stay. Writer/director Emily Abt approaches her economically and racially diverse setting with a well-meaning anthropological thoroughness that seems to have included finding a way to work in every note she took when looking around, and it completely overwhelms her story -- the course of the friendship that's supposedly...
Sundance 2009: "Moon."
Sat, Jan 17 2009 5:13 PM
"Moon" has the serious/silly premise you'd expect from a '70s sci-fi movie, the type that's meant to make you gasp "Oh, the terrible inhumanity of it all. And yet... that could be us someday!" while not holding up to real examination. (In this case: how could it possibly not be more economical to just bring in workers from China?) But "Moon" also has Sam Rockwell, who gives such a funny, sad, tender performance that the film works as a drama about a man who, thanks to a mixture of high technology and corporate malfeasance, is forced to confront the wrathful person he used to be and the changed one into which he's grown -- to learn to embrace himself, sometimes literally. Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astronaut nearing the end of his three-year contract at a mining base on the far side of the moon. His only company is Gerty,...
Sundance 2009: "You Wont Miss Me."
Sat, Jan 17 2009 12:30 AM
"You Wont Miss Me" is all about Shelly Brown, a girl with the kind of problems plenty of 20-somethings dream of moving to New York for the express purpose of having: substance abuse, reckless hookups in her bedraggled Williamsburg apartment with shaggy boys who mistreat her, sudden fights with friends and strangers, an unseen actress mother who doesn't pay her enough attention, and no job beyond auditioning for roles herself. But the film, the second from Ry Russo-Young, isn't your average chronicle of dabblings in urban self-destruction, because Shelly, as she's begun to realize herself, can't turn down the volume. She's not crazy -- the film is structured around fractions of her exit interview with the psychiatrist tossing from a mental hospital because she doesn't belong there -- but she's the kind of person who gets called that behind her back, her emotions and moods always slipping out of her...
Sundance 2009: "Nollywood Babylon."
Fri, Jan 16 2009 10:33 PM
Nollywood, the subject of the solid Canadian documentary "Nollywood Babylon," is Nigeria's homegrown movie industry. The world's third largest after the -woods Holly and Bolly, it's the source of hundreds of movies annually, all shot quickly, cheaply and digitally, all released directly to DVD or VCD (outbursts of public violence made theaters less than appealing). Nollywood cinema is, by definition, popular cinema -- funded by investors or the filmmakers themselves, the features are calculated to give the people what they want, crowdpleasers, melodramas, crime stories, tales of religious redemption, broad comedies, all designed to recoup cash. "Africans telling African stories," as one girl puts it. Basically, for the type of person who predicts the death of film due to new technology or to commercial pressures, "Nollywood Babylon" could be seen as an ominous vision of the future. "The great Nigerian film has not yet been made," explains one interviewee, a...
Sundance 2009: "Mary and Max."
Fri, Jan 16 2009 8:01 AM
The opening night slot at Sundance is customarily considered one of doom, and in that tradition "Mary and Max" is a disappointment, though just a mild one. The film, animator Adam Elliot's first feature, has many of the elements and motifs of his splendid, award-winning shorts -- a distinctive portraiture-inspired look, heavy voiceover, characters with mental or physical disabilities, misspellings, insulting newspaper headlines, accident-prone pets -- while demonstrating why, as it is, Elliot's style is better kept to a briefer form. "Mary and Max" flips between the lives of its title characters, a lonely seven-year-old Australia girl with a birthmark on her forehead and neglectful parents and an equally lonely 44-year-old obese New York man with Asperger's. Mary picks Max's name by chance out of the phonebook and writes to ask him questions about America, and despite the fact that she unknowingly pushes him into several anxiety attacks, the two...
Ready, set, go.
Wed, Jan 14 2009 6:01 PM
Clockwise from lower right: Painkillers, actual cold meds (knock on wood!), faith-based preventative cold meds, now aged Flip, shiny new digital voice recorder, Sundance 2009 program, trusty notebook, press pass, bourbon (strictly for Saint Bernard-type mountain rescue scenarios), stimulant beverage #1, stimulant beverage #2, Blackberry, tissue, useless glove-like things. Bounced from this year's Sundance survival kit -- Zicam, which for me only induces disturbing nose bleeds. A colleague swears by it after being proffered some by Winona Ryder at some earlier iteration of the festival, but the inside of Ryder's nose is clearly tougher than mine....
Selections from David Fincher.
Tue, Jan 6 2009 12:10 AM
A few highlights from "Behind Button: A Conversation with David Fincher," hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Kent Jones to close out their Fincher retrospective pairing the director's work with films he likes, a set-up that yielded the whiplash double feature of "Se7en" and "Mary Poppins." He was drawn to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" because it seemed to offer "a more complete telling of a love story... because it involved one being there to help the other pass on," and found that "there were a lot of moments in the script that were semi-clichés" that he believed were overturned by the backward-aging structure. His original conception of the visual style of the film was based on Andrew Wyeth, sparse, fields of grain and lots of shots over characters' shoulders, something that went out the window upon seeing New Orleans. On the aforementioned double feature: "'Mary Poppins'...
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