Indieville : Cannes 2009

Getting closer to the world's first $0 movie.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:05:00 GMT

There's a history of movies whose low budgets and origin stories are more famous than the films themselves. From his 1992 $7,000 debut "El Mariachi" onward, Robert Rodriguez has practically built a career out of this kind of thing. A decade later, Shane Carruth would make a much better movie -- "Primer" -- for the same number (unadjusted for inflation!), but people didn't talk about his budget as much. That's because all there was (and is, honestly) to Rodriguez is...(read more)

Quentin Tarantino makes war fun again.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:15:00 GMT

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" comes out next Friday, but the deluge of negative advance press seems to indicate we should be bored already. Quentin! Always with the talking and the self-indulgence and the references. He doesn't make it easy on himself; unlike Wes Anderson, who went from bad-haircut-geek to styled-out, blazer-wearing fashion template in under a decade, Tarantino hasn't learned anything about dealing with the press over his career. He's still...(read more)

"Drag Me To Hell."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:18:38 GMT

By the B-movie ethics of Sam Raimi's "Drag Me To Hell," the torments inflicted on poor Christine Brown are grossly (and grossly) unfair and yet, there's no denying it, also at least a little bit deserved. Christine (Alison Lohman) is the bank loan officer who makes the fateful final call to kick a zestfully unlovable old lady out of her house for failing to keep up on mortgage payments, but she's really just the last dinky cog in the machine, the one put in the disagreeable...(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Inglourious Basterds."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:08:07 GMT

Quentin Tarantino's a great writer of dialogue, and no one's more convinced of the fact than Quentin Tarantino. The ratio of talk to action -- not gun fights or explosions, but just people doing stuff -- in "Inglourious Basterds" is, generously, nine to one. Again and again, characters sit down over drinks (whiskey, champagne, milk), and the stakes may be high, but the conversations are meandering and lengthy, and no matter how clever they may get, they end up defeated by their...(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Vincere."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:19:35 GMT

If Giovanna Mezzogiorno wants to be Italy's answer to Angelina Jolie, "Vincere" is her "Changeling," and how unfortunate. "Vincere," directed by Marco Bellocchio, is the story of Ida Dalser, the first wife of Benito Mussolini and mother to his first son, Benito Albino Mussolini. By World War I, Mussolini had finished with her and married Rachele Guidi, resorting to a dictator-style divorce of Dalser by taking her child, dumping her in an insane asylum and having...(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Kinatay."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:47:39 GMT

There are two easy types of film provocation. You can prod an audience with boundary-pushing images -- say, Chloe Sevigny painting Vincent Gallo's tree -- or by testing their tolerance for style or narrative experimentation -- say, Vincent Gallo driving, driving, driving, driving. "Kinatay" (which translates to "Butchered") tries out both, culminating in an act of gruesome violence after a patience-trying buildup of dread and boredom over a long, unlit nighttime car ride....(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Vengeance."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Sun, 17 May 2009 12:55:07 GMT

We're far enough away from the golden age of Hong Kong John Woo action excess that a little nostalgia is warranted, and Johnnie To's "Vengeance" is meant to fondly recall every operatic slow-mo shoot-em-up of the era, though until that sinks in, it just looks ungainly. Singer Johnny Hallyday, who's often shorthand summed-up as France's Elvis equivalent, plays Francois Costello, a Parisian restaurant owner with a dark past and real talent for wearing a Burberry trench coat...(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Thirst."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Sat, 16 May 2009 19:32:31 GMT

"Thirst," Park Chan-wook's plague-vampire-priest-black-comedy-gothic-family-drama-noir, has enough going on for at least an entire other movie, if not two. Its developments are impossible to predict, but that's because half are unnecessary -- by the time clergyman-turned-secular-bloodsucker Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) and his lover Tae-joo (Kim Ok-bin) are hiding a body in the closet before hosting their weekly mahjong game, I could barely remember how everything started (Sang-hyun...(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Taking Woodstock."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:43:22 GMT

Some many questions for such a straightforward comedy! Why would the apparently grown-up Elliot spend himself broke supporting his parents' run-down Catskills resort in the first place? Why is his mother so crazy? What's up with the money hoarding? Where did the mafia end up? Did the town actually manage to do anything to fight the concert's arrival? "Taking Woodstock," which was directed by Ang Lee from a screenplay written by James Schamus, is based on the autobiography of...(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Spring Fever."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:29:19 GMT

Lou Ye was banned from making films for five years by the Chinese government after "Summer Palace" screened at Cannes in 2006 without their approval. Which means it's some sort of act of defiance and bravery, sure, for him to have since then made "Spring Fever," which this year premieres in competition. But the film is pure soap opera under the scarcest sheen of something higher, a love pentagon set in neon-and-concrete Nanjing. Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao) is its central tragic...(read more)

Cannes 2009: "Up."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:00:01 GMT

Pixar's proven, again and again, a miraculous ability to spin cinematic gold out of almost perversely unlikely scenarios, but the beginning of "Up," the opening night film at this year's Cannes, is something else entirely. A boy, Carl, watches a newsreel in a '30s theater about larger-than-life adventurer Charles Muntz, and when making his way home, enraptured with his hero's exploits, he encounters Ellie, a gap-toothed girl who's taken over an abandoned house to play...(read more)

Cannes do.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:17:02 GMT

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...(read more)

L'affiche.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:55:19 GMT

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..."...(read more)

Opening nights.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:25:28 GMT

Yesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival announced that its opening night film will be "Passchendaele," a $20 million World War I epic from actor/director Paul Gross, whose other helming credit is 2002's "Men With Brooms," as far as I know, the only curling rom-com in existence. Guy Dixon at the Globe and Mail talks with Gross, who based the film on the life of (and stars as) his grandfather Sergeant Michael Dunne: "About two-thirds of the film is set on the...(read more)