Indieville : Reviews

SXSW 2009: "Sorry, Thanks."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:56:32 GMT

Apologies for whipping out the m-word, but mumblecore always seemed to me to be defined by its choreography of conflict avoidance. Its characters are so vague about they want and what they think because what they definitely don't want is to lay those things out and risk disagreement, rejection or open hostility. They lack any obvious sharp edges, and so seem to be infected with terminal niceness, but to say that is to ignore all the passive aggression lurking underneath the surface of those meandering...(read more)

"Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:19:56 GMT

The common refrain when describing Kurt Kuenne's documentary "Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father" is that you shouldn't -- that the shocking events that occur over the course of the film should blindside audiences as much as they blindside the filmmaker and his subjects. But you wouldn't be watching "Dear Zachary" if it were merely the film Kuenne first set out to make: a celluloid memorial to his childhood friend Andrew Bagby, a cheery 28-year-old with...(read more)

"W."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:21:30 GMT

When the "South Park" boys looked at George W. Bush not long after he'd been sworn in in 2001, they saw in the malapropism-prone Texan we'd sort of elected the perfect sitcom character, a genial doofus whose hijinks could always be resolved in the space of half an hour, even though those problems hung on the unresolvable ones over which our country regularly tears itself apart. And with all that's happened in the intervening years, with "W." we find that when Oliver...(read more)

NYFF 2008: The rest.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:55:57 GMT

"I'm Gonna Explode" An unhappy girl and a troubled boy meet in detention in their high school in a suburb of Mexico City, and before you can shout "Holy Nouvelle Vague, Batman!" they're running away on a dreamy days-long adventure together, having found their perfect co-conspirator. Their parents don't take this well, but their on-the-lam offspring haven't actually gone further than the roof of the boy's house, where they sunbathe with the radio on, divest...(read more)

NYFF 2008: "Happy-Go-Lucky."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:10:43 GMT

You're not supposed to take to Poppy right off the bat. She rides through London in her wildly colored outfit over the opening credits grinning so cheerily that at any moment a chorus of animated forest creatures threatens to leap out and provide backup as she burst into song. She pops into a bookstore and tries to chat up the utterly resistant cashier as she browses. She is, to put it lightly, irritating as all hell. When she rounds the corner to leave, her bike is gone, and she just sighs "We...(read more)

NYFF 2008: "Ashes of Time Redux."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:05:34 GMT

When Wong Kar-wai's lone attempt at a martial arts film, "Ashes of Time," first came out in 1994, it was considered by most to be awfully pretty and mystifyingly elliptical. "Redux" finds it restored, re-edited, seven minutes shorter, with feverishly heightened colors and dramatic new music from Yo-Yo Ma. Having never seen the original version, I can't speak to whether it's also been clarified, but here's what I got: The Blind Swordsman (who's more in the process...(read more)

NYFF 2008: "The Wrestler."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:23:37 GMT

Mickey Rourke is one magnificent wreck. "The Wrestler" holds off from giving you the full-frontal of his face for a while, as if he were the monster in a low-budget horror flick. When it does finally creep around, you see misplaced tautness, semi-mobile features, starlet lips, an overall impression of carved putty. One of the film's visual jokes is that Rourke's character, faded pro wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson, is a shambling but still formidable hunk of meat, but...(read more)

NYFF 2008: "The Class."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:44:51 GMT

"The Class," Laurent Cantet's very fine film about an academic year in a life of a teacher and his students at an inner city Parisian middle school, gets its structure and its strength from limitations. The camera doesn't wander outside of the walls of the school; it seldom leaves the classroom, the only meaningful place of intersection between the worlds of François Marin, imperfect instructor, and his boisterously mixed bag of multicultural pupils. When a student departs for the...(read more)

NYFF 2008: "Bullet in the Head."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:05:10 GMT

I hope someone out there is proclaiming Jaime Rosales' "Bullet in the Head" a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking that forces you to reconsider narrative's place and importance in film and such and such. There is something likable about its daring, and it's exactly the kind of film that needs a vocal contrarian champion to stubbornly insist it's the best thing ever. But that person is not me. "Bullet in the Head" is an 85-minute film shot in stalker-cam via...(read more)

Fantastic Fest 2008: "Ex Drummer."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:30:31 GMT

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...(read more)

Fantastic Fest 2008: "I Think We're Alone Now."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:42:33 GMT

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...(read more)

Fantastic Fest 2008: "JCVD."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:42:59 GMT

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...(read more)

Fantastic Fest 2008: "The Substitute."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:44:56 GMT

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...(read more)

Fantastic Fest 2008: "Seventh Moon."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:03:35 GMT

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...(read more)

Fantastic Fest 2008: Opening Night, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:34:37 GMT

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...(read more)