April 2009 - Posts

Tribeca 2009: "My Last Five Girlfriends."
Sun, Apr 26 2009 4:45 PM
Julian Kemp's "My Last Five Girlfriends" is less romance than ode to heartbreak -- the London-based comedy starts off with a suicide attempt by Duncan (Brendan Patricks), whose will to live has been shattered by the brutal end of his most recent relationship. The story then cycles back to the beginning of the trail of doomed romances, introducing us to Wendy (Kelly Adams) -- wasn't over her ex; Olive (Jane March) -- impenetrable; Rhona (Cécile Cassel) -- moody and just not the right fit; Natalie (Edith Bukovics) -- co-dependent; and Gemma (Naomie Harris), who he loved the most and who cheated on him with his best friend. Adapted from Swiss writer Alain de Botton's rather precious best-seller "On Love," "My Last Five Girlfriends" plays like a revved-up "High Fidelity" without the delayed coming of age. The film snaps, quick cut, from one clever visual bit to another -- a stuffed...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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Tribeca 2009: "The Exploding Girl."
Sat, Apr 25 2009 4:40 PM
Named after the B-side to The Cure's "In Between Days" -- the tune that provided the title to director Bradley Rust Gray's wife and filmmaking partner So Yong Kim's 2006 debut -- "The Exploding Girl" is a similarly moody slow-motion maybe love story between a young woman and the male best friend she's begun to reconsider in a romantic light. While Kim's film mixed its adolescent angst with the isolation of the newly immigrated, Gray's is set in more familiar territory, at least to anyone who's been to a festival in the last few years. It's mumblecoresque mainly in its milieu of inarticulate, educated 20-somethings -- formally, "The Exploding Girl" is more ambitious, a beautifully shot study of bottled up feelings that's also maddening in its lack of sharp edges. There's a medical motivation to its mildness. Ivy (played by up-and-comer Zoe Kazan), "The Exploding Girl"'s focus, has epilepsy, and...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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Tribeca 2009: "Here and There."
Fri, Apr 24 2009 4:35 PM
Men are from New York and women are from Serbia in "Here and There," the first narrative film from writer/director Darko Lungulov, a sweet-natured, by the book, fish-out-of-water comedy. Technically, some of the men are also from Serbia, but though it tries to tell the dual stories of an American man traveling to Belgrade to bestow a visa on a girl he hasn't met by marrying her, and the Serbian man in New York trying to raise enough money to pay him for that service, "Here and There" is weighted toward the former. Robert, played by eternal character actor David Thornton, is a failed 50-something musician with a nonspecific chip on his shoulder ("I can't play anymore -- I don't know why"). Evicted from his apartment, he makes a deal with his man-with-a-van mover Branko (Branislav Trifunovic) to assist in retrieving the younger man's girlfriend from Belgrade in exchange for...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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Cannes do.
Thu, Apr 23 2009 6:17 AM
The competition line-up for this year's Cannes Film Festival has been announced! A fair amount of Euro provocateurs -- Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke -- and France in general, and only two American films, the expected Tarantino and the unexpected Ang Lee comedy, which hopefully has more to it than its trailer would indicate. New films from Jane Campion and Pedro Almodóvar and Ken Loach, plus Park Chan-wook's vampire drama (left), whee! Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" will screen out of competition, as will Alejandro Amenabar's "Agora," with Sam Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell" as a Midnight Screening. In Competition         "Bright Star," Australia-U.K.-France, Jane Campion         "Spring Fever," China-France, Lou Ye         "Antichrist," Denmark-Sweden-France-Italy, Lars von Trier         "Enter the Void," France, Gaspar Noé         "Face," France-Taiwan-Netherlands-Belgium, Tsai Ming-liang  ...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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L'affiche.
Wed, Apr 22 2009 10:55 AM
This year's Cannes poster, created by Annick Durban and inspired, according to the festival, by "L'Avventura": "A mysterious female silhouette, caught in mid-movement, seems to be opening a window onto the magic of cinema and invites us into a dream..."
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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Wes Anderson, tumor.
Wed, Apr 15 2009 4:54 PM
In his interview with Noel Murray at the AV Club, Will Oldham expresses from pretty strong thoughts on movie music in general and Wes Anderson in particular: AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas? WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, "Wow, I'll bet they spent months or years writing this screenplay, and I'll bet they spent months shooting this, and I'll bet they spent months editing this, and now they're spending no time at all picking these completely inappropriate songs with lyrics to put under a scene that has dialogue." How does that even work? How can you have a song with someone singing lyrics under...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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"Penises: species specific."
Wed, Apr 8 2009 9:48 AM
Isabella Rossellini takes "Green Porno" beneath the waves in its second season -- the six new episodes explore the mating habits of whales, starfish, limpets, anglerfish and barnacles, with an added intro containing Rossellini's musings on phalluses. They're not as splendidly, surprisingly weird as the first set, but are still plenty charming, with Rossellini lustily proclaiming her place as the strongest male in a pod of whales. My favorite is the somewhat existential limpet one. + Green Porno (Sundance Channel)
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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Tha Lawsuit III.
Tue, Apr 7 2009 1:20 PM
"The Carter," Adam Bhala Lough's unexpectedly artful documentary about Lil Wayne that premiered at Sundance earlier this year, is now the source of a lawsuit from the wee multi-platinum rapper, who's suing the film's production company for "Breach of Contract, Fraud by Intentional Misrepresentation, Constructive Fraud and Invasion of Privacy," among others, according to AllHipHop.com: Wayne and his company signed an agreement which stipulated that Weezy would make himself available for the 90-minute documentary and make photos and videos from his personal archives available to the producers. In exchange he was to be allowed to review "various scenes of the Picture and have approval rights as to the final cut of the picture." The agreement went on to say, specifically, that Wayne would be given the "sole right of final approval" of any scenes that portrayed his actions or activities as criminal in nature.In early December 2008...copies were submitted to...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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The critic and the pirate.
Mon, Apr 6 2009 2:09 PM
Coming to an airport romance novel shelf near you? Roger Friedman, critic/columnist for Fox News online, caused as big a stir as a film critic seems able to these difficult days when he posted a review of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," having illegally downloaded the leaked, unfinished version of the film. The internet immediately went into paroxyms of self-righteousness, with Ain't It Cool News, among others, relishing in a chance to take the moral high ground by calling for Friedman's termination. Fox News, a separate entity from 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, the studio behind "Wolverine," took down the review, and on Saturday Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood reported that Friedman had indeed been fired. Sharon Waxman at The Wrap noted, with a bit more insight, that Friedman seems to think that the fact that his review was positive would excuse the means by which he saw the film. As a...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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Joe Swanberg doesn't stop.
Wed, Apr 1 2009 10:19 AM
I had a good half-hour talk with Joe Swanberg at SXSW, two days after the world premiere of his latest film "Alexander the Last" and a few days before my laptop hard drive failed, taking with it my audio files and transcripts. I'm slowly getting everything back, and while this interview isn't so timely anymore, I didn't want to let it go, either, since we covered a lot of interesting ground about how the way Joe shoots films is changing, and how he'd like to be, as impossible as it might seem, even more prolific. So here's a selection, with those points in mind: With "Alexander the Last," as far as I can remember, it's the first time you're working with people who are already established foremost as professional actors -- Jess Weixler, Jane Adams. Did that change how you went about making the film at all? Definitely. A year...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
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