Ran into Estella Warren at the Landmark tonight — still a total babe, at 31. We chose not to reminisce about Kangaroo Jack. And by the way Westside Pavilion folks — someone shat on/in the third level of your parking garage. Might want to look into that...

        

A beautifully stark, challenging drama about an aging mercenary, Anton Corbijn's The American, starring George Clooney and Violante Placido (above), is a work of pure cinema — a transfixing rumination on lone-wolf masculine loneliness, and a reminder that the inner lives of screen characters can be as gripping as any wildly manifested action. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Focus, R, 105 minutes)

        

I've been ruminating on The Town, Ben Affleck's directorial follow-up to Gone Baby Gone, and it seems a curious choice that the poster and billboard art for the Warner Bros. film features those rubber-faced nun robbers. They grab one's attention, to an extreme degree, and it just doesn't translate, on an elemental level; it muddies the water too much, and along with its nondescript title makes the film seem like more of a horror film — or at least opens it up to the interpretation of such, to a casual driver or passerby at a bus stop. It's a great "give" in the trailer, sure, those images, but not in the print art. I guess it's meant to be an evocation of the Point Break poster, but that was a more much rooted visual reference, whereas the masks here seem warped/melting, and more overtly creepy. I guarantee some middle-of-the-country impressionable boomers just bought a ticket for the Wall Street sequel instead.

        

One missed a.m. screening due to traffic, but two other screenings, a slew of interviews and an early-morning screener today, and the final experiential tally includes two adult film starlets, someone's car getting egged (not by me), Gemma Arterton in short-shorts, one surprising cow stampede (is there any other kind?), nicely lensed equine competition, and some greatly enjoyable work from John Malkovich.

        

So I have the sneaking suspicion that the stylized poster and advertising art (above) for George Clooney and Anton Corbijn's The American (Focus, September 1) is saying what the TV trailers cannot, which is namely that this isn't a commercial endeavor, and those seeking assassin-on-the-lam thrills would be wise and better served to look elsewhere. The orange background color is a purposefully jarring arthouse choice, and the female eye — at once lurking and alluring — is too esoteric a thing for Joe and Jane Popcorn. "Prepare for European styling," the above says. Only several more hours until confirmation on this.

        

Congratulations to Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston on their deserved Emmy wins. Good to see Al Pacino doesn't get the orchestral hook. And I guess I need to see Temple Grandin now.

        

A spare, intimately conceived demonic possession drama, The Last Exorcism wrings plenty of spooky and, early on, darkly amusing engagement out of a wry preacher's showdown with a troubled young girl, but is crucially undone by editorial choices which betray its mock-doc framework. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 88 minutes)

        

Holy corn nuts, Julie Delpy is making actually a sequel to her 2 Days in Paris, and Chris Rock is in the mix? This is much better and more interesting casting news than Jessica Alba in Spy Kids 4.

        

Twenty years since its bow, Twin Peaks again gets the loving glance-back treatment in a piece by Michael Glitz for the L.A. Times. It doesn't necessarily break much new ground, but again makes a compelling case for David Lynch and Mark Frost's series being the godfather of The X-Files, Lost and pretty much all of cable television.

        

Filmmaker David Lynch has been named the first-ever guest artistic director for AFI Fest 2010, it was announced today. "I said yes to being the guest artistic director of AFI Fest 2010 because I love the AFI," said Lynch in a press release. "AFI can do for others what it did for me. AFI gave me an opportunity and money to make a short film, The Grandmother, and my first feature film, Eraserhead. AFI put me on the map."

Lynch created artwork (above) that will serve as the official image of the 24th annual festival. As guest artistic director, Lynch will also program a special sidebar of films that have influenced and inspired him. His selections will be announced in October. AFI Fest 2010 will take place November 4-11 in Hollywood, at the historic Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the Mann Chinese 6 theatres, the Egyptian Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. For more information, click here.

        

Animal Kingdom, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Festival, is an involving, rangy and sneakily ambitious crime drama that pulses with a low hum of menace. Writer-director David Michôd's film smartly trades in organic rather than artificial thrills, making for a movie about the legacy of violence that doesn't often indulge in it. The result gets its hooks into an audience slowly. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Journalist, author and all-around talented guy Brad Schreiber has a new book coming out, Becoming Jimi Hendrix: From Southern Crossroads to Psychedelic London, the Untold Story of a Musical Genius, co-authored with Steven Roby. And you should buy it, for the music lover in your family.

        

Sure, we've all heard the stories, but when Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell says he does not fuck goats, I take him at his word. I don't think that's in dispute.

        

Over on his IndieWire blog, Todd McCarthy provides a glimpse behind the curtain in helping to program the New York Film Festival, and again stirs the pot regarding the up-in-the-air release date of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

        

A bit old but still very much worth a read, this amusing piece from Cracked.com about five ridiculous gun myths everyone believes because of movies — from the usefulness of silencers and infallibility of bulletproof vests to the dramatic effects of cocking a gun, and how a single bullet can/will ignite pretty much any piece of machinery. If any polling firm wants to donate their services, I'd truly be interested in partnering on some sort of empirical study of youngish NRA members, because surely there has to be some level of buyer's remorse with respect to most typical Hollywood actioners, right? I mean, when they go to the gun range or out hunting buck or whatever, and experience kickback that doesn't jibe with what's been peddled by Sylvester Stallone or whomever. Or is it that all those films are merely a testosteronized manifestation of how they'd like to really see themselves? That they present a world free of obstacles that can't be overcome with just a little (assisted) masculine acting out? Something to ponder.

        

Part of the reason that celebrities occupy a monarchical stratosphere, particularly in the United States, is that we seem, as a society, addicted not only to the traditional narrative cycles of debutante presentation, evolution, destruction and reinvention, but also the polarities that the rich and famous live out — lifestyles of wild excess which, by definition, cannot be sustained. Rock 'n' rollers probably most embody this behavior. But one of the few modern traditional artists who seemed, on an almost instinctive level, to grasp the peculiarities of this public appetite was Jean-Michael Basquiat, a painter who rocketed from graffiti-tagging anonymity and bohemian near-homelessness to avant-garde superstar status, and the subject of an absorbing but fawning new documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, opening this week at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles. More after the jump... << MORE >>

Some amusing T-shirt dissent on the fictitious campaign of Napoleon Dynamite's Pedro. Interesting, the pop cultural legs on this flick, and that so much of it is attached to a supporting character.

        

The conundrum facing many independent-minded would-be filmmakers is how much, if any, attention to pay to the marketplace. Ignorance to the commercial realities of eventual distribution (in whatever form) is dangerous, and yet pandering to patty-cake notions of superior "character-rooted narrative" has resulted in its own set of collective sins, I'd argue — a robust slate of risible low-fi product in which ethnically diverse families come of age in America, small town soldiers return home from Iraq, or various combinations of philandering hipsters grapple with heroin, dyslexia and coming out of the closet. Multi-hyphenate Todd Berger's The Scenesters intuitively understands this — what makes voracious but mainstream-leaning film audiences queasy or skeptical about "indie" film as a more broadly categorized movement — and has loads of fun twisting it in all sorts of pretzel shapes in service of a rangy, noir-tinged murder comedy.



A quirky and engaging film that honors many of the conventions of classic whodunit? cinema while also giving them both a modern spin and a deconstructive nudge to the ribs, The Scenesters centers on a smarmy, out-of-work film director named Wallace Cotton (Berger, above center) and his equally self-centered producer, Roger Graham (Jeff Grace), who land work as crime scene videographers, and set out to make some great art. They quickly stumble across crime scene cleaner Charlie Newton (Blaise Miller, resembling a cross between Casey Affleck and Dwight Yoakam), a schlubby, down-on-his-luck guy who's quietly honed a superb sense of deduction through his work.

As a couple of apathetic detectives (Kevin Brennan and Monika Jolly) investigate a series of killings in ultra-hip East Los Angeles, Charlie discovers clues that link together the killings, which convinces Wallace and Roger that Charlie is himself the perfect subject around which to center an investigative movie. As the body count mounts — and Charlie is encouraged to romantically reconnect with a beautiful reporter, Jewell Wright (Suzanne May), at the center of the story — Wallace and Roger angle to stay ahead of the killer, and craft a winning documentary, no matter the outside corporeal toll.

Reminiscent in some slight ways of Russell Brown's The Blue Tooth Virgin, another inside-Hollywood tale that wasn't afraid to showcase under-the-radar ambition in ways that didn't always flatter its characters, The Scenesters unfolds against the backdrop of a (n appropriate) hipster soundtrack that includes the Airborne Toxic Event, the Cribs, Wallpaper, Le Switch and more. Scream is obviously something of a touchstone inspiration here (and Chinatown, too, for the film within the film), but the shoegazing, mumblecore cinema of the Duplass brothers also rates mentioning, both because of this movie's DIY ethos and the fact that it's simultaneously self-aware about the dangers of arthouse pretension. Berger's film spins off all sorts of jokey asides (Charlie's crime scene training video, a music video from a side project rock band one of the cops fronts), as well as a trial session framing device that features Sherilyn Fenn as a prosecutor and John Landis as the judge, and sometimes these bits don't connect. Or, rather, they play OK as scenes, but muddy the editorial collection as a whole — a sense of how much what an audience is watching is formed after the fact, and by whom, after the conclusion of the murder spree mystery at its core.

Smartly, though, Berger seeds his film with all sorts of mini-conflicts and personality clashes, which makes for much fun and amusement. His dialogue has some salty bite ("Would it kill people to find bodies during magic hour — I feel like I'm on the face of the sun" Wallace bitches at one crime scene), and doesn't always dwell on its punchlines, in a hamfisted effort to drill them home, and let you know how "smart" it is. A few of the performances aren't quite up to the par with the material, and the movie could have benefited from a bit more rakish snap to its telling, particularly in the finale. But The Scenesters has in abundance what every independent film yearns for — intrigue and a cocksure rhythm that doesn't ever feel false. If its plotting doesn't in the end leave much room for a big surprise, that's no reason not to surrender to the pleasures it provides along the way. Sometimes a nice slice of archness can be a good thing. For a trailer and more information, click here. (Vactioneer/Midwinter Studios, unrated, 101 minutes)

        

While it's being sold as another comedy of anarchic male ribaldry, the title of The Switch actually plays two ways since its atypicality is its biggest blessing. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Over on LAExaminer.com, Marvin Miranda has an excellent interview with Tamra Davis, the director of Basquiat: The Radiant Child, which bows at the Nuart this weekend in Los Angeles. More on the film to follow shortly.

        

Kyle Gallner, Allison Scagliotti and Tania Raymonde have been cast in Losers Takes All, a film set in the world of mid-1980s American independent rock music, that follows a fictional punk/pop band as they stumble and stagger in what everyone thinks is the opposite direction of success — commercial or otherwise. More after the jump... << MORE >>

No one can ever accuse Harvey Weinstein of pulling a punch when it comes to awards campaigning. Ergo, Piranha 3D gets a jump on its Oscar competition, over at Funny or Die.

        

Two interesting voices of intra-conservative dissent have bubbled to the surface in the form of pieces by Bruce Bartlett, over at Capital Gains and Games, and Paul B. Farrell, over at MarketWatch. The former figure, a supply-side champion who was a domestic policy adviser to President Reagan and a Treasury official under the first President Bush, characterizes the modern Republican Party as a greedy, sociopathic group, saying it "is not the party of Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan that I was once a member of; it stands for nothing except the pursuit of power as an end in itself, with no concern whatsoever for what is right for the country." The latter author, quoting David Stockman, President Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, damningly assays the hype and empty sloganeering of Republican fiscal ideology. Engrossing reads, both.

        

Three screenings today, and the final experiential tally includes three bared buttocks, approximately 13 deaths, one ripped-off mustache, one scene of Malin Akerman preparing to do some blow, one vampire squirrel, one gay smooch, two mentions of the Kardashians, one joke at the expense of Lindsay Lohan, one drunken toast by Elijah Wood, one FOX News reference and one decapitation by baseball bat.

        

I've now twice watched the new minute-long teaser trailer for I'm Still Here (Magnolia, September 10), Casey Affleck's documentary about a performance art stunt by strange year in the life of brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix, and the phrase that most comes to mind is "metaphysical wankery." That doesn't mean that's all it is or has to offer, of course, but that's what it feels like right now, from this proffering. Regardless of whether it's "real" or a bone-deep mockumentary, what's the film's through line, that's the question. And if it's the rap career thing, that's a problem. For more information, click here.

        

What sort of opportunities do being a Bond babe present? Well, movies like The Assassin Next Door, you might think, headlined by Quantum of Solace's Olga Kurylenko. In actuality, though, this Israeli import isn't a straight-ahead shoot-'em-up, but instead an action-tinged drama whose downmarket title and baser revenge instincts actually belie a somewhat interesting tale of interpersonal connection by two wounded women. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Samuel Maoz's claustrophobic war drama, which picked up the Golden Lion prize at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, is decidedly a case of the emperor's new clothes — a forcedly subjective movie that takes the complexities and moral grayness of war and reduces it to empty melodrama cloaked in air-quote artfulness. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Ridiculously, The Tillman Story has lost its appeal over a "R" rating with the Motion Picture Association of America, The Wrap's Steve Pond is reporting. I don't get it — it's the exact same type of case and argument as the Iraq-set documentary Gunner Palace six years ago. What, since we're supposedly now "leaving" Iraq — always the hotter of the fronts in the two wars we're simultaneously waging — the argument that young people who might be being recruited to serve in the military very much deserve a chance to see this sort of material no longer holds sway?

        

So it looks like VH-1's Scream Queens is back for another go-round, with a supporting (and presumably bloody) gig in the forthcoming Saw 3-D dangled as bait for the winner, just as a role in Saw VI was on the line in the original program. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

The trailer for The Romantics (Paramount Famous, September 10) plays as a chatty, lit-leaning, femme-sympathetic younger version of a cross between The Big Chill and Rachel Getting Married (no surprise, given the fact that it's adapted by Galt Niederhoffer from her own novel), but reintroduces the Katie Holmes Problem™, namely that she's never found a way to translate her eye-batting small screen experience at emoting to something approaching convincing, subdued film acting, where there's a bit more nuance. Again, for the trailer, click here.

        

Online in advance of its publishing in the September issue of Esquire, John H. Richardson's profile on Newt Gingrich is a fascinating read of the conservative philosopher who would be king. A ferociously intelligent, fireball-lobbing, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do power junkie who gets brittle when one tries to pin him down, Gingrich comes across, not unlike many political high rollers, as a study in contradictions. Among the revelations? He's sensitive about comments regarding his weight, and he asked both his second and third wives to marry him while he was still married (to his first and second wives, respectively).

        

Photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn has a nice blog detailing his experiences making and fine-tuning The American (Focus, September 1), with plenty of on-set pictures of George Clooney, for those interested in keeping score at home. Click here if interested.

        

Human history is littered with all manner of mass killing — from serial murders and genocides to crusades and wars of territorial incursion — and yet such evil is consistently rendered as beyond the pale in public accountings, as somehow aberrant and now a default state of the human condition that we are almost all capable of if pushed to the limit, and faced with the same terrible circumstances. Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath's stirring, stomach-churning new documentary, Enemies of the People, reveals just how banal evil really is. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Over at Eco Stiletto, Sophia Bush talks in admirable detail about her dedication to environmental causes, but why she can't completely give up meat. And no, that wasn't a double entendre, sickos.

        

Forgot to mention this earlier, but the 2010 Magill's Cinema Annual, a book of reviews to which I contributed, is now out. Steep cover price given its academic/reference source leanings, but check it out on Amazon if you so desire.

        

Laurence Fishburne's daughter is making the leap into porn, it seems, releasing a sex tape through Vivid Entertainment. For an AVN interview with the 19-year-old Montana Fishburne in which she cites Kim Kardashian as a role model, click here. She wants to "jump-start" her career, and eventually start a business, she says. What kind of business? She's not sure about that yet.

        

Starring Luke Wilson, Giovanni Ribisi, Gabriel Macht and Laura Ramsey, co-writer-director George Gallo's Middle Men is a rangy immorality tale and crime drama inspired by the true story of a mid-1990s company that revolutionized the peddling of pornography online. The film has energy and some sleazy fun around the edges, but critically fails to ever locate a sincere and deeply lasting feeling, be it titillation or trepidation. It's also dinged mightily by Wilson's performance, sad to say. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 112 minutes)

        

Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev follows up the fascinating My Kid Could Paint That with this unsettling, emotionally affecting look behind the curtain of American mythmaking — a film that examines the truth behind NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman's April 2004 death in Afghanistan from friendly fire, and exposes the high-level Army cover-up (and, yes, grinning, flag-waving media complicity) in knowingly packaging a phony version of this event as a heroic adjunct in a two-for-one narrative about noble wars of necessity. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Based on Guillermo Martinez's award-winning novel, The Oxford Murders is an unlikely thriller, given its narrative investment in number theory and logical series. And the result, adapted by director Álex de la Iglesia and pitched at a breakneck, didactic clip, absent any sensible, modulated emotional investment in the characters or material, falls flat, accordingly. It does feature Elijah Wood eating spaghetti off of Leonor Watling's apron-clad chest, however. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

On a certain level, I admit I'm completely fascinated by this sort of online film community slap fighting, and yet I'm also always exasperated beyond belief when I read something like this. What, exactly, is the win, for those throwing stones?

        

The Jackass films are so nakedly designed to provoke that many critics reflexively pooh-pooh them, when at their core these ribald stunt flicks say something about the inherently human (or is it just masculine?) appreciation of prankish absurdity. And the creative stagings on display in the new trailer for Jackass 3D certainly deliver: fish slaps, porta-potty launches, and a human "duck shoot." Sign me up.

        

The star-free Step Up franchise has proven a lucrative moneymaking machine for corporate parent Disney, with the first two films racking up just under $265 million combined, and the peppy second installment — helmed by Jon Chu, who returns for a third go-round — in particular dramatically increasing its percentile foreign returns. This brings us to Step Up 3D, a movie that tries to serve as a reminder that, for all the advances in digital technology, the human body is and remains one of if not the most engaging big screen special effects there is. Unfortunately, loud and insurmountable narrative gear-grinding completely derails the energetically pitched third installment of the popular dance series, which never convincingly locates any sort of emotional pulse amidst its occasionally dazzling choreography. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Touchstone/Summit, PG-13, 97 minutes)

        

Atypical genre plotting and some absolutely delicious twists feed British kidnapping thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed, the solid and engaging feature directorial debut of J Blakeson. Plenty of movies have covered this narrative terrain before, but few in recent memory with as streamlined a sense of tension-soaked purpose. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Over at Funny or Die, Eva Mendes peddles her sex tape, don'tcha know. Nice joke, though it needs a better acronym, and a bit tighter execution.

        

Over at Geekweek, Luke Y. Thompson makes an amusing case for why he should get punched in the face by Nicolas Cage in the sequel to Ghost Rider. He even has an online petition, in case you want to abet his cause.

        

Capitalism has taken a pounding as of late, from Michael Moore's documentary takedown to just the general feeling floating out there in the air that America's economic system no longer has at its heart the lasting interests of the common person. But against this backdrop of equal parts skepticism and populist anger arrives The New Recruits, a nonfiction film about a battalion of jet-setting business students armed with a radical plan to end global poverty: charge poor people for goods and services. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

Austin's legendary Alamo Drafthouse comes to Los Angeles this year, and as part of their touring "Rolling Roadshow" extravaganza, the L.A. leg features an outdoor screening of Jackie Brown at its original shooting location of the Del Amo Fashion Mall in Torrance. More after the jump... << MORE >>

Adapted from a novel by Ben Sherwood, and starring Zac Efron and Amanda Crew, Charlie St. Cloud is a passably effective melodrama that should play like catnip to its star's core female audience but hardly anyone else. An inoffensive, worshipfully photographed, yet at times dramatically stolid interpretation of swelling adolescent feeling, the movie wrings maximum consequence out of Efron's dewy-eyed, cherry-lipped pin-up sensitivity. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 99 minutes)

        

The feature film debut of writer-director Ryan Piers Williams, The Dry Land centers on James (Ryan O'Nan), an Iraqi War veteran who struggles to reconnect with family and friends, including wife Sara (America Ferrera), upon returning home to small town Texas. Riddled with post-traumatic stress disorder and unable to reconcile his experiences overseas with the staid life he left at home, James sets off on a road trip to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., hoping a wounded pal can shed light on the combat accident he can't remember. Narratively, the film just goads when it's convenient and shrinks when it suits its purposes, never feeling like an honest exploration of its characters' problems. More after the jump...<< MORE >>

I've had many a conversation over a beer, or glass of wine, about how humankind's knowledge of its own mortality is pretty much the root cause of all of our anxieties, aggressions and troubles. The lurking recognition of a finite period of time in which to luxuriate, however much we try to cram that deeper into the recesses of our minds, warps our thinking, and leads to fitful acting out or otherwise perverted rationalizations. After all, who doesn't want more of life, just on their own terms? Well, some folks, of course. Life is hard, and After.Life centers on someone for whom it might just not be worth it anymore. More after the jump...<< MORE >>