Steady Diet of Film

Sundance 2008: the Year the Docs Roared.

I'll go ahead and say what anyone who went to the Sundance film festival or followed the coverage is thinking: this year was fairly drab for narrative films. Going into the festival the most buzzed about films were documentaries (American Teen, An American Soldier/the Recruiter), the first sale was a documentary (Up the Yangtze), the most controversial films were documentaries (Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Art Star and the Sudanese Twins) and the most raucous Q&A was at a documentary screening (Stronger, Better, Faster).

Documentaries also covered a much wider breadth of subjects than the narratives' increasingly cliched parameters of "dysfunctional family forced out of their comfort zone and is forced to confront their differences which brings them closer together". There were portraits of artists that took creative license with the concert film form (CSNY: Deja Vu, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, U2 3D), the ecological (Flow: For Love of Water, Fields of Fuel), horrific moments in history coming to roost (the Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Traces of the Trade, Nerakhoon), cannibals (Stranded: I've Come From the Plane that Crashed in the Mountains) and the black helicopter contingency (I.O.U.S.A., Secrecy).

There were also two docs in particular that embodied what I love in scrappy, low-budget documentaries. Be Like the Others about transgender people in Iran (where it's illegal to be gay but not to have a sex change operation) and Slingshot Hip Hop about political Palestinian rap groups (bringing a total of four concepts and themes that make many Americans extremely uncomfortable) tell intimate, personal stories that never could have been on a large scale. Neither film has secured distribution deals yet but I hope to be writing soon about their forthcoming theatrical and dvd releases.

After the jump are the winners of the Sundance documentary awards.

Related: PopMatters, Documentaries Rule at Sundance.

This week on Show Me Your Titles: WTF?

This week on Show Me Your Titles film podcast, Cathy and I honor the movies that made us say, "WTF?!"

We review Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth, Danny Boyle's Sunshine and Lindsay Lohan's I Know Who Killed Me.

Enjoy! And share any feedback you have with us at Show Me Your Titles.

Noir City 6, vol. 1

The Hard Way
While the Hard Way is not technically considered a noir by the purists, the film's handling of suicide, poverty, familial obligation, greed and sexual manipulation has gained it "honorary film noir" status by noir-czar and Noir City head Eddie Muller.

Vaguely reminiscent of Susan Hayward's I'll Cry Tomorrow (just released on dvd in late 2007), the Hard Way is a deeply cynical melodrama centered around Katie Chernen a young actress (Joan Leslie, Yankee Doodle Dandy) with a hyper-controlling female family member. In I'll Cry Tomorrow the ingenue is pressured by her mother, in The Hard Way it's Katie's sister, Helen (Ida Lupino, joining Leslie for a second time since High Sierra) who plays svengali. Both starlets live in a world of total manipulation creating a false sense of being conflict-free and full of opportunity when really they are each being poured into the mold of someone else's dreams and slide into a steep downward spiral of drug and alcohol addiction.

Director Vincent Sherman (Old Acquaintance, Mr. Skeffington, the Young Philadelphians, the Damned Don't Cry) creates an airtight portrait of show business as a machine that runs on the youth and vigor of the stars that it drains and abuses. In one harrowing scene Helen feeds drinks to an aging, alcoholic singer (played by Gladys George of the Maltese Falcon, Madame X, Lullaby of Broadway) trying to get her too drunk to perform that night (after spending weeks making sure Katie sat behind the curtain and watched the performance enough times to know the lyrics and dance moves). Instead of playing the scene for laughs we see an immensely talented and charismatic but systematically abused woman who didn't have anyone working as a guardian to insulate her from the inevitable crash of her once meteoric fame. It's a scene that begs the complicated question, if Katie wants to be a performer isn't she better off with her vicious but loyal sister looking out for her?

We're also invited to see the hard-partying showgirls with their relatively low aspirations as hard-scabble pragmatists, using their time in the industry to find wealthy husbands instead of trying to enter into the fray. And each performer, now matter how absurd or frivolous their musical and comedy acts are in their private moments allowed to reveal a deep wells of pain and hard won wisdom.

Unavailable on dvd, the Hard Way opens the Noir City film festival as part of a double feature with Repeat Performance at the Castro theater on January 25th with actress Joan Leslie on-stage for a Q&A between films.



Jeopardy
Jeopardy is a surprisingly B-level film considering it was directed by John Sturges (Bad Day at Black Rock, the Magnificent Seven) and stars Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity, the Lady Eve) but plays like a Hays-code era Funny Games. The film depicts an American idyll (a war hero returning home and taking his smiling, blond family on vacation) being threatened and corrupted by deviant sexuality and impending doom.

A happy, middle-class family heads down the Baja peninsula for a two-week sojourn in their rustic, isolated fishing cabin. The father (Barry Wilson, the Bad and the Beautiful) quickly sends their apple-cheeked son off to play on a long-abandoned rickety pier so he and the wifey can take care of business (before lunch, of course!) She steadfastly rebuffs his advances as he attempts to seduce her with promises of impregnation while she stares furtively into the middle distance.  The pier, ominously marked "PELIGRO", collapses on her husband causing him no significant injury but trapping within drowning distance of a rising tide. She makes several failed attempts to lift, push and haul the wreckage away but all it results in is breaking the car's jack. She backtracks several miles to a service station to find the attendant murdered and the killer (Ralph Meeker, the Naked Spur and Kiss Me Deadly here channeling Jack Nicholson) looming. They hop in her car and head off. Similar to the hitch-hiking scenes in Edgar Ulmer's classic (and now available in the public domain) Detour, barbs are exchanged and secrets are revealed in rapid-fire conversation on a tense stretch of highway (in a convertible, natch).

In a positively electric scene between Meeker and Stanwyck, she disdainfully agrees to leave her family and become his crime wench if he will go back to the pier and save her husband. Stanwyck imbues the character with enough repression and ennui that one wonders, is she sacrificing herself to save her husband or is she looking for an escape hatch from her life of drudgery and perpetual pregnancy? The film backs way off before having to answer these questions, but it's a nice, noir twist on a family adventure story (and far less nihilistic than Funny Games).

Despite the film's down-market production value and 1943 moral codes, Jeopardy is surprisingly suspenseful and marginally subversive.

In an interesting footnote in film history, Barry Wilson and Barbara Stanwyck would be reunited seven years later in Samuel Fuller's western Forty Guns playing another couple in love but working at cross-purposes, a sheriff and oil baroness embattled over a land dispute in rural Arizona.

Still unavailable on dvd the film plays January 28th as a double featuer with Woman in Hiding at the Castro theater as part of the Noir City film festival.

 Hangover Square marks Laird Cregar's (Heaven Can Wait, This Gun For Hire, the Black Swan) final performance as George Harvey Bone, a composer desperately trying to complete his masterpiece concerto while under the duress of his harried agent (a dead ringer for Sigmund Freud) and the socialite patronizing his arts.  His chief obstacle to success though is the chronic rage blackouts triggered by discordant tones (or KILLING TONES as it were) that leave him frequently waking up distraught and covered in blood.

As with director John Brahm's previous film the Lodger, Hangover Square briefly toys with the mythology of Jack the Ripper. Bone goes to his doctor begging to know if he could be the killer but is assured that anyone he kills in a black out would be someone he knows intimately. Well that's a relief! Each morning Bone and his friends pore over the newspapers to confirm that the Ripper's victims were all strangers to him.

He meets and becomes infatuated with a saucy bar hall singer played by the magnificent Linda Darnell (My Darling Clementine, Unfaithfully Yours, A Letter to Three
Wives). His days quickly become consumed with composing songs for her act in the vain hope she will have sex with him if only he can make her famous enough. But when he finds out she has a boyfriend and has been stringing him along he flees, worried that he will hear a triggering KILLING TONE before he can put enough distance between them.  A cat is stalked by a madman, a corpse is disposed of in a method that could only happen in a noir film on Guy Fawkes Day and a handsome, smooth-talking detective puts the screws on a crook to make him crack. When Bone finally unveils his final masterpiece concerto (penned by the legendary Edward Herrmann) it's a beautiful piece of music rendering the final scene of this film utterly bizarre and unforgettable.

Hangover Square has been cited by Stephen Sondheim as his chief inspiration for writing the murder musical Sweeney Todd. Laird Cregar plays Bone as a  sympathetically beleagured but inherently unsettling character and his deteriorating mental state is heightened by Joseph LaShelle's (a regular Billy Wilder collaborator) claustrophobic cinematography.

Side note: Is the Hangover Square screenwriter Barre Lyndon in anyway related to the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon?

Hangover Square plays as a double feature with Dangerous Crossing January 29th at the Castro theater as part of the Noir City film festival.

2008 Oscar nominations announced. Excuse me, what the fuck?

This morning the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced their nominees for a little  award you might have heard of called THE OSCARS.

And since the Oscars are the only top-tier awards show likely to get a waiver from the WGA, February 24th will probably be the last time for a good long while that fashion and film lovers get to enjoy communal prognostication.

Some thoughts on the nominations below and full list after the jump:

+Even though it feels a tad excessive, I'm thrilled Enchanted was nominated for three different Best Original Songs. It really was a fairly perfunctory film made memorable by Amy Adams and those spectacular music and dance sequences. Adams having already established some Oscar cred (nominated for Junebug in 2005) will hopefully perform at least one of the songs at the event.

+There Will Be Blood's much-ballyhoo'd score was not nominated. Jim Emerson at Scanners explains why.

+Juno was nominated for four awards: Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Actress (Ellen Page). Seriously.

+My deeply beloved the Savages nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress.

+Philip Seymour Hoffman nominated for Charlie Wilson's War. Read Stephanie Zacharek's review for Salon to further understand why.

+Hal Holbrook recognized for his small, but incredible role in Into the Wild.

+Cathy has been wondering why Javier Bardem keeps getting put in the "Supporting Actor" category when he is like, the best thing since sliced bread in No Country for Old Men. Were the producers just concerned he would get steamrolled by the Daniel Day-Lewis Milkshake Express?

+Persepolis nominated for Best Animation feature, here here!

+Foreign Language category nominations are, as expected, pretty lame.

+Big congratulations to producer Audrey Marrs and director Charles Ferguson for their Best Feature-Length Documentary nomination for No End in Sight. The film is a first-time film effort for both of them. 

+Documentary short category has some fantastic and varied films including Cynthia Wade's and Vanessa Roth's deeply moving Freeheld and James Longley's (Iraq in Fragments) Sari's Mother. Big congratulations to the nominees!

Show Me Your Titles #17: At Home She Feels Like a Tourist.

This week Cathy and I review films about people who left their homeland only to learn you can never really go back.  We review Persepolis, the Namesake and 2 Days in Paris.

Thanks for listening, and share any feedback at Show Me Your Titles.

Big Sky Doc Film Festival announces 2008 line-up!

In the shadow of Sundance's opening night (check out Sarah Jo Marks' overview here), the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival announced their 2008 line-up this today. Over the course of 6 days in February the fest will screen 54 features and 37 shorts from 40 different countries.

In the fest's short five year they've screened docs that went on to have successful theatrical and television runs (Favela Rising, the Cats of Mirikitani, Horns and Halos, Hardwood, Alice Sees the Light) as well as odd-duck audience favorites such as Stealing Altitude  and this year's Getting Eve Off described as such:

Getting Eve Off is a look at the Missoula resident prostitute as she attempts to legitimize her "pay-for-play" Maternal Order of St. Eve church.

Missoula!

Full line-up after the jump.

Show Me Your Titles #16: Dysfunctional Families

This week on the podcast Cathy and I discuss the problematic racial issues in Juno, celebrate the return of director Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills) with the Savages and then have a heated debate about whether Garry Marshall is empowering or exploiting Lindsay Lohan's sexuality in Georgia Rule.

Thanks for listening, and share any feedback at Show Me Your Titles.

Inexplicable sex scenes

In a recent article in the NYTimes author-professor Linda Williams stated, “We’re stuck in this dichotomy of pornography’s un-nuanced pleasure and simulated sex, which does not allow certain kinds of representations”. Hollywood is usually eager to improve the formula until this year when most of the top prestige films (Assassination of Jesse James, There Will Be Blood, 3:10 to Yuma, Into the Wild) barely even had women in them.

Plenty of bloggers are happy to discuss what constitutes a good sex scene, I'm here today to discuss the inexplicable sex scenes.

Inexplicable Sex Scenes:
Under the Sand (Francois Ozon) - Charlotte Rampling has a threesome with the ghost of her missing husband and new lover.  Oh, Francois Ozon! You've done it again!

Shadowboxer (Lee Daniels) - Cuba Gooding Jr and Helen Mirren play a team of hitmen related by marriage who hooked up after his Dad dies.   I have no words. 

Blue Velvet (David Lynch) - Really technically a rape scene and therefore doesn't belong on this list.   However I can never pass up an opportunity to discuss and asthmatic Dennis Hopper's "baby likes to fuck" monologue.

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven) - Okay, an easy shot to take in a gravely misunderstood film that introduced us all to the concept of water epilepsy.

11:14 (Greg Marcks) - A teenage hellion (Rachel Leigh Cook) bones a guy to death... in a cemetery!

Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan) - The entire films revolves around a foggily-remembered night when a bisexual comedian (Kevin Bacon) spurns his long-time lover (Colin Firth) to have overly voice-overed sex with a journalist (Alison Lohman).  Just odd.   

Body Double (Brian DePalma) - Cheating girlfriends, naked neighbors, Melanie Griffith as a porno star! And this was DePalma's headier days?

Inexplicably Bad Sex Scenes:
Gigli (Martin Brest) - Okay nothing about Ben Affleck is even approaching sexy but Jennifer Lopez not being able to salvage something about this scene is just tragic.  Gobble, gobble.   

Taking Lives (D.J. Caruso) - I suppose it's just a matter of playing the odds, Jolie's had many great sex scenes (Gia, Original Sin, Cyborg 2) but Ethan Hawke . 

Black Dahlia (Brian DePalma) - Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett are young and hot (and a real life couple) but their improbable seizure sex in this clunker could be bottled as the cure for sin. 

9 Songs (Michael Winterbottom) - It's real! Unsimulated! Really! And it still doesn't work at all. 

Monster's Ball (Marc Forster) - Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton are just uncomfortable, unbelievable, forever marred by Ocar's terrible choice that year.

Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Steven Shainberg) - Robert Downey Jr. and Nicole Kidman, so attractive and credible... so awkward and unsexy!

Fear (James Foley) - Essentially the abstinence-preaching equivalent of Showgirls (with an alternately laughable and unsettling interplay of possessive ownership of Reese Witherspoon's virtue between bad-boy boyfriend Mark Wahlberg and her father played by William Petersen). Witherspoon and Wahlberg going to second base on the roller coaster = LOLLERSKATES.

Under-rated sex scenes: 
History of Violence (David Cronenberg) - Marital bliss and angst are depicted here with memorable economy.

the King (James Marsh) - Gael García Bernal came on the sex scene with Y Tu Mama Tambien in a very different turn here as a delusional, manipulative (and still manically sexy) man rejected by his long-lost father the scenes between Bernal and Pell James provide a sweet reprieve between the shocking and saddening moments in this little-seen film.

Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne) - In an under-rated film, with an under-rated actress by an under-rated director. Unfaithful's visceral sex scenes of infidelity provide a springboard into a third act marital discord spinning into a feverish, frenzied nightmare.

In the Cut (Jane Campion) - Meg Ryan and Marc Ruffalo in a post-feminist fairy tale.  Also just Marc Ruffalo handcuffed to a radiator in general.. 

40 Year old Virgin (Judd Apatow) - Elizabeth Banks' bathtub masturbation scene was playful and sexy. Viva!

Directors Just Don't Understand

This week AMC's industry gabfest Sunday Morning Shootout was live (in front of a very lucky studio audience) at the Palm Springs Film Festival.  With the Golden Globes not being televised big name actors and directors have to show up to hustle for festival awards to keep their films in the hearts and minds of the Academy voters.

The first half of today's show was a roundtable discussion (of sorts) with four directors with films in competition: Joe Wright (Atonement), Adam Shankman (Hairspray), Jason Reitman (Juno) and John Sayles (Honeydripper).

Maybe it's because I've been watching campaign coverage in my every waking hour that I now see scheming and jabs in every public address.  But there was clearly no love lost between these guys.

:01 Sayles gives dignified response to self-distributing his film but wait... I'VE BEEN MAKING FILMS SINCE THESE JACKANAPES WERE IN DIAPERS AND NOW I HAVE TO DRIVE AROUND AMERICA WITH MY FILM IN THE TRUNK OF MY CAR. Fuck!

Shankman: I at least made a fun movie, unlike you sad sacks and OHHAI I've suffered the most! My film came out all the way in summer!

03: Reitman hates going to awards shows because he has to stop dressing like he's homeless.

Shankman: I love to dress up.. BECAUSE I AM GAY! This strike is lame and hitting Diablo Cody the hardest, and she will burn down the building if she wins the Golden Globe.

Reitman *death stare* 

Sayles: In addition to making more films than all of you assholes combined, I'm a member of WGA and you're all a bunch of corporate whores.

:06 Sayles: Just because your movie is a vanity project and your actors worked for scale doesn't make it INDIE... COUGH JUNO COUGH.

Reitman: At least I can follow a budget, old-timer.

Wright: I am artiste and know nothing of your 'budgets', I leave that to the ugly people.  Oh and BTW, I'm British and you Americans are all fat, lazy and dumb.

[ed note: It's going to take double the budget of Atonement to make a "Jamie Foxx homeless musician" movie?]

Peter Guber: Everyone has suffered more than Joe Wright... you lazy British prick.

:10 I think Jason Reitman made a joke but no one knows for sure.

Peter Bart: "Jason's a little smug because his film just passed $50M" (huge audience applause)

Reitman *death stare* (ed note: Why is this guy so angry?!)

Wright: Why are you fat, lazy Americans applauding money? You're all TRASH!

Reitman: Your wife likes my trash!

Sayles: What have I done to deserve this? (He says this more with his face than his words)

Cut to commercial, then a taped interview with Emile Hirsch. Sad! At this rate there would've been "yo mama" and hair pulling by the second commercial break.

Rest of the show:
Emile Hirsch: I lost so much weight! GIVE ME MY OSCAR!!

Top box office movies this weekend: the Bucket List and First Sunday. God help us all.

Peter Bart: Things were so much less depressing during WWII.

Peter Guber: Clearly indie films should be more like Spiderman 3.

And then came the locusts.

Scaredy Cat, the POV online shorts film festival choice this quarter

 
Starting December 10th until March 10th PBS's Online Short Film Festival (hosted by P.O.V.) will be streaming free online Andy Blubaugh's film Scaredycat. The 15-minute experimental documentary, examining the role fear plays in our daily lives, starts out as somewhat precious picture of the film-maker's OCD. But when Blubaugh delves into his recent mugging and assault as a point of departure (illustrated with animation and his 911 phone call) to look at PTSD, mandatory sentencing laws and emotional closure the film reaches surprising depth.

I caught the film when P.O.V. bumpered it with Frieda Lee Mock's wonderful Tony Kushner documentary Wrestling with Angels and highly recommend them both.