Releasing on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the riots that shook Los Angeles in the wake of the not guilty verdicts in the police-beating case of Rodney King, documentary Clash of Colors: L.A. Riots of 1992 analyzes the complex political, economic and social factors before, during and after the racially infused catastrophe which claimed 55 deaths, thousands of injuries and more than $1 billion in property damage. Filtered specifically through the lens of the riots’ impact on the Korean-American community, the movie — the significance of its subject matter winning out over staid presentation — tells a story often relegated to the sidelines of most mass media accounts of the event.
Neophyte director David D. Kim, a lawyer and businessman who was Vice President of the Korean Chamber of Commerce at the time of the riots, assembles an engaging and thought-provoking collection of interview subjects, including author Lou Cannon, ex-Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Boyarsky and former pastor Cecil Murray, among many others. Production value is fairly meager throughout, with interviewees shot in a straightforward manner and archival footage sometimes less than smoothly integrated. The crucial context Clash of Colors provides, however, outweighs its lack of slickness. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DDK Productions, unrated, 81 minutes)
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Happy Birthday, Michelle Pfeiffer
It’s a happy 54th birthday to Michelle Pfeiffer today, who deserves nothing but sunshine and happiness in life. Well worth checking out for both Pfeiffer fans and others who probably missed it when it was dumped like a homeless murder victim’s body by its distributor is Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman; it’s a charming, funny romantic comedy with great performances by Paul Rudd and a young(er) Saoirse Ronan.
Brit Marling Talks Sound of My Voice
In her first two films — Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, both Sundance Film Festival sensations last year, with the latter just now seeing release, to give it some modicum of distance from the vaguely thematically similar Martha Marcy May Marlene — actress Brit Marling exhibits a unique skill set, coming across as at once ethereal and commanding. But she’s no mere ordinary big screen find; she also co-wrote each of the films, giving the Georgetown University graduate and class valedictorian a leg up other actresses of her generation out to establish a career foothold.
Penned along with friend and director Zal Batmanglij, the Los Angeles-set Sound of My Voice centers on Peter and Lorna (Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicius), a pair of would-be documentarians who infiltrate the quasi-religious sect of a mysterious woman, Maggie (Marling), who claims to be from the year 2054. Weird things ensue. Recently, I had a chance to speak to the 29-year-old multi-hyphenate one-on-one, about her film, her writing and acting processes, a Cranberries song, and a past, present and future spent trying to avoid drinking the “cultural milk.” The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full, engaging read.
Camel Spiders
There’s something simply unnerving about the very title Camel Spiders, and the movie’s creepy DVD cover box only drives home that point.
A Roger Corman production, Camel Spiders unfolds in the Middle East, where an American military patrol headed up by Captain Sturges (Brian Krause) is ambushed by insurgents. Outgunned and seemingly doomed, the unit is given an unexpected reprieve when their attackers are suddenly hauled off by what a native liaison calls “the devils of the sand.” When Sturges returns Stateside with the body of one of his fallen comrades, he’s unaware that a few of the paralyzing-sting-happy creatures have stowed away with his cargo, and are now loose in a suburban Southwest environment totally unprepared for the type of threat they represent.
Directed by genre veteran Jim Wynorski, Camel Spiders is an ultra-modestly budgeted serving of gooey, pure-genre bread pudding. Nothing about the movie is particularly subtle or even interestingly shaded, from the characterizations and dialogue to the action and gore. Ergo, while the movie doesn’t really live up to the squirm-inducing prospects of its premise (think something along the line of Tremors), neither does it totally embarrass itself. Fans of schlocky low-budget fare will find momentary diversion here, which is Camel Spiders‘ only real aim.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Camel Spiders comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. Are there a plethora of engaging bonus features? No, no there are not. Are there any bonus features? Same answer, kid. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; if Half is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C (Movie) D (Disc)
The Five-Year Engagement
Writer-director Nicholas Stoller and co-writer/star Jason Segel located plenty of comedy in masculine doubt and the difficulty in climbing back up on the romantic saddle in their winning 2008 collaboration, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. A through line of thematic follow-up can be traced to their new work, The Five-Year Engagement, a comedy that attempts to chart the turbulent, churned-up period of personal development and possibly divergent professional paths between a young bethrothed couple’s pledge for marriage and eventual trip down the aisle. Alas, plenty of recognizable and game supporting players can’t save this bloated, hit-and-miss affair, which possesses the same basic nougaty center of ribaldry and sentimentality in which producer Judd Apatow specializes, but falls victim to a sagging hour-plus in its middle, as well as an ending which feels more the product of test-marketing approval than genuine romantic rallying. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, please click here. (Universal, R, 124 minutes)
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Talks Headhunters, New Tom Cruise Film
He has a rugged physicality that’s served him well in movies like Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down and even Wimbledon, but Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (the “j” is pronounced as an “i”) is an actor still probably best known by face, and not name. That could be changing, though, as the Danish-born actor has a plum role on HBO’s zeitgeist smash Game of Thrones and a meaty part in Tom Cruise’s next film. His latest movie is the deliciously twisted dark crime comedy Headhunters, a Norwegian import that centers on a corporate recruiter (Aksel Hennie) who also moonlights as an art thief in order to pay for his lavish lifestyle, and finds his double life compromised when he crosses paths with Coster-Waldau’s character, a disgraced CEO who’s more than he seems. I recently had a chance to talk to Coster-Waldau one-on-one, about his movie, cinema’s greatest shit-centric scene since Trainspotting, acting in different languages, and what he can’t say about Oblivion, that Cruise film. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full, fun read.
Restless City
Strikingly photographed but dramatically inert, Restless City chronicles the story of a young African immigrant trying to make it on the mean streets of New York City. In a bit of a case of the emperor’s new clothes, praise for this art-minded cinematic import recalls Andrew Sarris’ “Russian Tea Room Syndrome,” which posits that sophisticated cineastes will willingly accept in a foreign (or foreign-contextualized) film the sorts of lapses in character and story that in an American film they would utterly reject, basically just for the sake of appearing cultured.
Less explicitly a crime tale than many of the other fringes-of-society/underclass pictures which it glancingly recalls (Tsotsi, Shottas or, say, Viva Riva!), Restless City is kind of like a grimy lost verse of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” — a movie concerned with locating the maybe quiet nobility in hand-to-mouth existence, and celebrating the struggle for self-betterment and, of course, dollar bills. This is perhaps an admirable pursuit in theory, but it makes for a grinding and ponderous experience as rendered here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (AFFRM, unrated, 80 minutes)
People v. The State of Illusion
The new film from the same creative team behind the New Age-y, $16 million-grossing 2004 box office surprise What the Bleep Do We Know?, documentary People v. The State of Illusion is a deadly dull treatise on stress and other modern psychological hindrances to health and happiness. Mildly and fitfully informative and stimulating, but also more than a little creepy, director Scott Cervine’s film — narrated in artificial tones by executive producer and motivational speaker Austin Vickers, to whom the phrase “uncanny valley” could be applied — comes across as a Scientology recruitment video awkwardly cross-pollinated with a late-night infomercial.
So what is People v. The State of Illusion selling? Well, the movie peddles the notion that stress is a consequence of perception, and that it’s physically impossible to have an objective view of reality; we fill in gaps with our memory, one interviewee explains, and “the only reality is what we’ve chosen to participate in.” Interview subjects include authors like Debbie Ford, Dr. Joe Pispenza, Dr. Robert Jahn, Dr. Candance Pert, Dr. Michael Vandermark, Peter Senge and Dr. Thomas Moore, who get meta on the aforementioned and related topics, while Vickers intermittently pops up to dole out complementary factoids like the detail that more people die from suicide each year than in all of the world’s armed conflicts combined.
A recurring string of narrative re-enactments, though, is woefully misguided, and just puts the brakes on any philosophical insights or awakening the movie might be aiming to trigger. Cervine and Vickers’ other ideas are just as hamfisted. They opt for easy metaphor, hammering home the notion of emotional programs being prison walls via visual overlays of jail cells and what not. The movie itself then just becomes lost in the weeds. When folks start talking about how emotions “literally guide our eyeballs where to look — our superior colliculus moves our eyes, and where our eyes gaze is subconsciously an indicator of the emotional state that we’re in,” well… what does it say about my emotional state that I found myself aggressively wanting to gaze away, and get instead just get lost in a daydream about Marisa Tomei or Diora Baird, or maybe Marisa Tomei and Diora Baird?
There’s an intriguing and potentially beneficial message here — about the idea of making life changes in states of joy rather than waiting until pain or loss — but People v. The State of Illusion is a yawning patchwork of brain science and psychology, and even more of a mess as a self-help film. For more information, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, unrated, 86 minutes)
Penumbra
An Argentinean import that scared up a big positive reaction at last year’s Fantastic Fest, Penumbra is a slick, teasing, well constructed genre offering that rather skillfully exploits audience antipathy toward its bitch-on-wheels protagonist in slowly unspooling the story of a potential cult looking to find a secluded apartment in advance of an extremely rare solar eclipse. A thriller long on suspense if short on eventual explication, the movie is anchored by a fierce performance from Cristina Brondo.
Co-written and directed by brothers Adrian and Ramiro Garcia Bogliano, Penumbra is a film smartly rooted in character, and possessing of the slight tinge of a morality play, like so many of those old Tales From the Crypt episodes (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). There’s plenty of filler here — the first 50 minutes is all set-up, basically — but it’s well handled, and it’s so invigorating to see a genre piece with a spitfire female lead of this sort that one doesn’t terribly mind. A darkly playful score and engaging musical selections by Martin Jurado also give the proceedings some pop. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 90 minutes)
Sound of My Voice
A gripping, low-fi, arthouse mystery/thriller that steadily swells the pulse of viewers, like an incrementally inclined treadmill, Sound of My Voice is a joint exercise in disquiet and intellectual provocation, and far and away one of the best cinematic offerings of the year so far. Slim but still never less than spellbinding, the low-budget feature serves as a lesson in the power of storycraft, and further confirms the talents of burgeoning multi-hyphenate Brit Marling.
Skipping past any of their recruitment or plotting, the Los Angeles-set Sound of My Voice delves into the story of a pair of would-be indie documentarians — Peter (Christopher Denham, above left), a substitute teacher, and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius), a reformed party girl — and their infiltration of a cult. Their plan is to expose as a sham and con artist its leader, Maggie (Marling, above right), a frail and softly spoken twentysomething woman who sports a tattoo on her ankle that she says marks her from the future, and the year 2054. Supposedly allergic to the toxicity of the modern outdoors, Maggie lives in guarded seclusion in a basement in the San Fernando Valley, where she relies on organic, homegrown vegetables and occasional blood transfusions from her adherents for survival.
Peter and Lorna come and go several times, showering and donning white robes with each visit. Maggie doesn’t so much preach doom-and-gloom as just subject her impressionable charges to a number of group mental exercises. After witnessing Maggie seemingly break Peter down, though, Lorna begins to question the sincerity of his adamancy that he still believes Maggie to be a fraud; the energy behind their documentary project seems to wane. Things finally come to a head, and turn possibly dangerous, when Maggie asks Peter to bring a specific young girl, Abigail (Avery Pohl), from his class to her house.
Like Marling’s other big break-out movie from last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Another Earth, Sound of My Voice is born of a unique screenwriting collaboration between Marling and its director, in this case Zal Batmanglij. The project originally had its roots as a planned web series — hence the 10 untitled chapters in which the movie unfolds, most of which are capped with nice little revelations or moments of emotional suspense. Far from giving Sound of My Voice a choppy, episodic feel, however, this tack helps feed a well-groomed atmospheric tension, and immediately deflate any misguided notion that the film is going to go off the rails into muscle-bound or derivative thriller territory.
Yes, like last year’s stirring Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sound of My Voice also focuses on a cult. But there are other (positive) similarities to that film too, like an emphasis on psychologically telling long-form scenes, and in the manner in which they each indulge in slow revelation. Marling’s performance is a beguiling mix of Earth Mother playfulness and emotional remove that never tips over into the reservoir of menace one might expect. Instead, via a sly and masterful juxtaposition of Maggie’s physically stricken vulnerability, quiet manipulation and pinprick hectoring, Marling and Batmanglij craft a character who, perhaps somewhat improbably, is even more interesting, reveling as she is in playing a role. Denham, too, gives a masterful turn, and stands on the cusp of breakthrough recognition; after having toplined the underappreciated Cinequest offering Forgetting the Girl, he’s already completed production on Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort, Argo.
Years from now, Sound of My Voice will still effect the same emotional hold and connection, but have some additional value as one of the little, curious filmography entries in a couple notable careers. In the present day, however, it’s no less special — a delicate, mesmeric thing that dances darkly along the edges of psychology, religion and science-fiction, raising questions about faith, identity, self-betterment, epistemic closure and romantic connection. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox Searchlight, R, 84 mintutes)
96 Minutes
If Crash were re-cast and re-imagined as an Atlanta-set teen drama about a carjacking gone awry, it might resemble something like 96 Minutes, a wan thriller, co-starring Brittany Snow, whose reach for socio-economic/ethnic insight and relevance far exceeds its meager grasp. Despite a few good moments and performances, overly familiar plotting and a dearth of insight doom this padded, grandiloquent melodrama, no matter its claim that it’s based on true events. For more information on the movie, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Arc Entertainment/First Point Entertainment, R, 96 minutes)
Darling Companion
Lawrence Kasdan’s 11th film as a director but his first since 2003’s Dreamcatcher, Darling Companion falls victim to an ambling, free-range focus (or lack thereof), which mistakes authenticity for dramatic engagement. A story about emotional fissure and reconnection built around the search for a missing dog, the pleasantly inoffensive ensemble dramedy suffers from a dearth of insight or elevating banter.
Co-written by Kasdan and his wife Meg, and based on an actual experience the pair had, Darling Companion has a lived-in vibe — its visual presentation feels in some respects like a L.L. Bean catalogue come to life, marked by nice outdoor footage and warm autumnal hues in general — but never quite fully takes shape. The basic likeability of much of the cast — particularly Richard Jenkins, who exudes a rumpled charm as a guileless retiree comfortable in his own skin — helps mitigate some but not all of the movie’s slack. Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline deliver somewhat shopworn performances, and reductive cutaways in particular undercut the convincingness of Kline’s character. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 103 minutes)
Greta Gerwig Talks Damsels in Distress, More
It’s no great knock on most actors and actresses to say that conversations with them, even when exceedingly pleasant, are often of the same genus, broadly speaking. After all, unless it’s a grand cover story for a print publication (a dwindling breed, it seems) such interviews are typically prescribed and tightly scheduled affairs, with the promotion of a specific project chiefly in mind. And if you don’t have much time, it can certainly be difficult to leave feeling that you’ve glimpsed a bit of who the interview subject really is.
But chatting with Greta Gerwig is an expansive experience, full of rich anecdotes, asides and pockets of intrigue. It helps, certainly, that she’s formally educated, having graduated from New York City’s Barnard College, where she studied English and philosophy. But it’s also in large part because of her easygoing nature, her lack of emotional or social guise. Her voice has a lilting quality that exudes thoughtfulness; Gerwig is not of the canned-answer clan, mindlessly reciting soundbite-friendly talking points. That her name is an anagram of great is no small surprise; it’s a fact that just seems right.
Gerwig’s latest film is writer-director Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress, in which she plays Violet, the quirky yet focused leader of a dynamic group of girls who set out to rescue fellow college students from depression through an on-campus suicide prevention center that peddles a combination of dance, donuts and hygiene improvement. Over breadsticks and iced tea, amidst sidebar discussions about college life and Andrew Jackson biographies, I recently had the chance to speak to Gerwig one-on-one, about Damsels, Stillman’s unique authorial voice, the Internet, personal reinvention, her thoughts on future life as a multi-hyphenate and why she’s still a certified aerobics instructor. The conversation is excerpted below, with an even longer excerpt over at ShockYa:
Brent Simon: So what was your first contact with Whit’s script?
Greta Gerwig: Well, I loved, loved, loved Whit’s movies. My friends and I from college used to do what we called the Chloe Sevigny from Last Days of Disco dance, where she just moved her shoulders. It’s not really a dance, I guess, but just a way she moved that looked really cool that we tried to emulate. So he was on that list of filmmakers that I would do anything to work with and for, and I was just so excited that there was a script and that he was going to make something. I thought that maybe he just had made three perfect films and was done. Along with everyone else, I had no idea what he was doing. It was like that feeling you get at the end of a movie that you just adore, where you just wish there was more of it — you want to keep living in that world, and you wish someone would say, “There’s another one right here.” Or [it’s the same] way I feel about writers I really love, where I’ll read a book and say, “Thank God, they have seven other books, I’m occupied.” It was that feeling of (excitement) over him having more characters and ideas, so I was enthralled and taken in by that at the outset. I don’t even really remember reading it with a particular character in mind. I just read it like a book or a play that I was studying.
BS: Whit’s films are so urbane and particular that feel like they should come with footnotes, so I was surprised to learn that he doesn’t really like to have rhapsodic discussions about historical or philosophical or social commentary in his films.
GG: Whit doesn’t really encourage any sort of intellectualizing or mythologizing of his own work, especially on set. He’s very dismissive about all of that, he’s very quick to say, “Oh, I’m stupid,” which is obviously not true. I mean, I think… well, we didn’t specifically talk about them with Whit, but the ideas that he puts forth, as you learn the script and say the lines, you come to think that they make a lot of sense and are really rational. In the process of getting inside a character and why they say these things, you inevitably believe all of the things that they’re espousing on some level. At least I do, I don’t know if everyone does. (laughs) When I first read the script I thought, “Oh, what a funny and ridiculous idea,” but by the end of shooting I thought, “No, that’s totally reasonable, people actually are happier when they’re dancing.” Even though he didn’t specifically sit down and talk about the decline of decadence and all of that, it all works its way in there if you just say it enough.
BS: He also has a very specific pitch and meter to his dialogue. Did he talk about that a lot?
GG: Not per se. He wouldn’t give us specific direction regarding sound, but I would say the big thing for me, because I had such an idea of other people doing his dialogue, was getting those voices out of my head — like getting Chris Eigeman out of my head, or Kate Beckinsale out of my head. I didn’t want to be doing an imitation of the way they sounded when they did his dialogue, which is what I think what happens a lot with writer-directors with a very strong voice. In their later films, when people know what they’re doing, it’s what happens in Woody Allen films where they do an imitation of him. But when he was making films in the 1970s people weren’t doing imitations of what they thought it was. I think sometimes when things become iconic, the rhythms get set in a way that’s hard to break out of. The big thing for me was that I tried to come at it internally. It’s so tempting when you get a big monologue to score it almost like a musical score, and say, “Here’s the first thought, here’s the next,” to block it off and underline operative words and really prepare it because it’s a large chunk of text. But I tried to almost memorize it without meaning beforehand, and then find the meaning as I’m making my point to another person, so that I didn’t do this intellectual rhythmic process before, which would have been based on what his other actors had done. I tried to find the words spontaneously based on the thought pattern, if that makes sense. (laughs) Other people may do other things.
BS: You mentioned Woody Allen, [and you’re in his] next film. Other films have proxy Woody Allens; is that phenomenon part of your segment in To Rome With Love at all?
GG: Not in my role. I don’t think the female characters are usually written as a proxy for him, so there’s less of a trap to fall into. I’m with Jesse Eisenberg, Alec Baldwin and Ellen Page. It was great, and a lot of fun. It’s really funny, and definitely one of his comedies — less along the lines of Match Point or Vicky Christina and more like Midnight in Paris.
BS: One of the things that struck me about Damsels was its idea of radical conceptual reinvention, and that we accept that in artists, like Madonna or Lady Gaga or whomever, but less so in everyday life, from our friends and peers. Did you ever experience that feeling as you moved out of adolescence, a desire to shed a skin, if you will?
GG: I’ve always had the desire to get to the most authentic version of myself, whatever that means, and in the past&n
bsp;I’ve harbored some misplaced belief that there is an authentic version and I’m not there. I think it’s now more popularly accepted in psychology that we have many selves that are true selves, and depending on the occasion you’re one way at work and another way at home. You are adaptable and they’re all you. But I find the time that I have felt most pulled toward reinvention has been more with the stuff that happens outside of acting — dressing up for the premieres or doing that kind of stuff. That all feels like I need to transform Greta into something else, and I don’t feel that I’ve been successful at doing that, nor does it make me very comfortable.
BS: Does that feel like a need?
GG: No. I used to (even) be worried about things like drinking too much coffee because I thought it altered my personality, so the Madonna transformation or something like that makes me nervous. I don’t have that architect’s view of myself. I think some filmmakers have that, actually — they design themselves and their lives, and look a certain way. They want to change or invent a persona as a way of protection.
BS: I think Hollywood is like that in a lot of respects. A big part of it is the entertainment industry, yes, but it’s also a destination city with so many people constantly moving in and out.
GG: Not to get too heady about it, but it feels like everyone is famous now, in the sense that everyone is documenting themselves really heavily. When I was in college, which was from 2002 to 2006, Facebook happened and I was at Columbia and we all joined because it was exclusive. Like, that montage in The Social Network? That totally happened to me! It was really funny to watch it, because it was my life being dramatized in a (David) Fincher movie, and I didn’t even have to go through a serial killer experience. But for me I think the most extreme version of reinvention I’ve gone through is just a honing of tastes. In college it was (about discovering) good movies, music, books and theater, and feeling a little bit ashamed about your high school CD collection and hiding it, but then in your mid-20s owning it again. That’s a whole process. Now I think that people are so aware of their persona and what they’re putting out there, and have a need to micromanage their own image. Even if you’re not a so-called public person it’s so part of life now, I think everyone is their own Madonna.
BS: I do sometimes think that social networking and the ubiquitousness of connection is re-wiring the human brain a bit, because it’s depriving it [of needed] downtime.
GG: I read this article about Facebook where Zadie Smith had written a piece in the New York Review, and it was her musings on stuff technological, and she said that all these things that we take for granted have a mind and a creator behind them, and the key thing to know about Facebook is that it was basically made by an adolescent boy — these are [the things] that he thought was important. So then you filter your entire identity into the categories that an adolescent boy thought were important at one time — like, a smart adolescent boy, but one nonetheless. …But I think the whole idea of invention depends on a viewer, and someone looking at you and setting up a situation where people are looking at you. I mean, I love it — I think it’s so strange and extreme and great — and I think Whit loves artifice too. I mean, I know he does; I don’t feel uncomfortable saying that. I think he would appreciate the well-told lie, I don’t think it’s something that he finds upsetting. It’s almost like this enjoyment of the surface, but that doesn’t have to be shallow or trite. It just is this sincere enjoyment of the surface.
BS: Are you big on social media, then?
GG: No, I’m not on Facebook or any of that stuff. But I do think about it a lot. I’m very interested in it. I don’t think anyone has really written anything great about it yet, in an academic way that’s also accessible to a lot of people. Like, I re-read On Photography, this (Susan) Sontag book recently, and I don’t think there’s an equivalent for the Internet and what’s happening now. She’s so smart about photographs and the way they’re utilized. She points out such smart things, about how you can’t imagine a modern family without photographs, and how photography is a part of the family, part of what that glue is. It’s part of the government, and it’s hard to imagine being on vacation anymore without photography. I just feel like someone needs to take a really intellectual look at the Internet. I feel like some people have written really smart things about it, but almost from a scientific point-of-view — like what is this in relationship to your brain? [There hasn’t been] a look at the paradigm shift that’s happening. I think there are things that have been touched upon — I read that (Nicholas Carr) book The Shallows, which was pretty good but didn’t go far enough, I thought — and someone needs to do it. You could really make some statements about some stuff. It’s odd — I participate so little in that world, and yet I’m so interested in what somebody will say about it because I think it’s huge.
BS: Because your route to acting was a little bit different than a lot of other younger actors, which is something I think comes through regardless of which movies someone might have seen you in —
GG: (laughs, interrupting) OK! That’s great. (laughs) It’s funny, because I just wanted people to see me as an actor at one time, I was so sad that I (thought it) would never (happen). I love writing and doing those things, I’m totally happy. But it was that moment of identity (crisis) where I was like, “I wish I could just be an actor and have everyone see that.”
BS: What age was that?
GG: Twenty-five. (laughs)
BS: See, that’s what I’m saying — that’s relatively late. Regardless of skill or attributes, I think there’s a particular thing — and I’m not knocking it, because it’s understandable for actors raised on pilot season auditions or television shows — that often comes through in performers who have a few more years of life experience, or who aren’t thrust into a bunch of films at a very young age.
GG: I wouldn’t trade college for anything, it changed my life. And I also think it’s an opportunity to exist — well, it’s not outside of the economy, because it is very expensive — but the work you do there is outside of the economic world. Most of your life is spent doing things that are directly engaged with a consumer economy. You’re either making something for consumption or buying shit, or your life is formed around that. It’s idealized, and it costs money to be there, so it doesn’t totally work (as an example), but spending 18 to 21 or 22 not doing anything that’s actually useful — or making, buying and selling at that moment — is I think spiritually rich and important. Even though it’s not religious, I think the time spent reading books because they’re great and talking about them because they’re great is valuable, because there’s more to life than utility. And that’s probably a reason why I love Whit’s movies so, because he’s so a part of that mindset and the way that he views the world. And even though he makes fun of pseudo-intellectual characters, they still are so smart and funny — like in Metropolitan, with the reading of the book reviews and what not. (pause) If I could be only an actress and that be that work then I would do it, but it doesn’t really work for me. (laughs) I hate saying “just an actor,” I don’t like that implication, but… it’s just not the whole thing for me.
BS: Do you think you’ll end up back behind the camera? [Note: Gerwig c
o-directed 2008’s Nights and Weekends]
GG: Yeah, I think that’s totally where I’ll end up. And I’m satisfied knowing that it may not ever be one thing. It may be a combination of things. I might be happiest doing lots of stuff.
BS: I remember on a certain level having a profound jealousy of the founding fathers, because of this idea of [their very] scattered intellectual interests.
GG: Yes! It’s the best. I always think of them, and the issues of people who did everything. Not to sound like a communist, but because everything is so monetized today and everyone is so trained for what they do that I feel like it’s hard to elegantly take something up. Because there’s always a school for it, or whatever — a specialty. The ability to be a dabbler and an amateur takes a lot more [courage]. But I love people who dabble. I read a lot, and spend a lot of time trying to learn foreign languages, which I’m not good at. I’m not a natural, but I really love them and also I got this idea in my head since Kristin Scott Thomas acts in French films and speaks French really well. I thought, “Oh, how brilliant!” and because I really like Arnaud Desplechin, (I thought) maybe if I become really good at French I can be in one of his films. But I also like a lot of Korean films right now, and Korean is so hard! (laughs) So I have tons of those audio programs. Oh, and I’m also certified in a lot of weird jobs, because in high school I had an idea that I wanted to be an actor or writer, and that I might not get paid, so I thought I’d become good at all these lower-level jobs that I wouldn’t have to take all that seriously. So I’m a certified aerobics instructor, and [also] a certified paralegal.
For the full, original interview, from ShockYa, click here.
Jesus Henry Christ
A canted coming-of-age tale about a 10-year-old prodigy who sets out to find his biological father, writer-director Dennis Lee‘s Jesus Henry Christ, executive-produced by Julia Roberts, uses the loose thematic conceit of burgeoning self-identity as a jumping off point for a colorful and at times funny but mostly emotionally hollow exploration of adolescent isolation and yearning for acceptance. It’s not that Jesus Henry Christ is at all bad, per se. It’s just that its casually whimsical tone and esoteric asides come across less as emblematic of a genuinely original voice and carefully constructed tone, and more like an amalgamation of Little Man Tate, Rocket Science, Running With Scissors and, of course, Rushmore, which will certainly get name-checked in plenty of reviews. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Entertainment One/Red Om Productions/Reliance Entertainment, PG-13, 100 minutes)
Fightville
Fans both of last autumn’s Warrior as well as underground, edge-of-society docs like Paul Hough’s The Backyard will likely spark to Fightville, a knuckle-dusting portrait of aspirant mixed martial artists from co-directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (How to Fold a Flag). Shrewdly observed and possessing of two top-notch subjects, Fightville features plenty of neck chops, grappling and other fighting action, but connects chiefly on a basic human level, charting the fundamental craving for acknowledgment, betterment and emotional connection of two young souls.
It’s a fairly gritty thing, of course, but Fightville also bears a pinch in common with nonfiction movies like One Lucky Elephant and No Room For Rockstars, which at least partially document marginalized subcultures (a traveling circus and the Vans Warped Tour, respectively). Viewers might come for the fisticuffs, but be pleasantly surprised at gaining a real window into its protagonists’ souls. It’s the equivalent of an unexpectedly delightful conversation with a potluck-seated dinner companion with whom you thought you might have nothing in common. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (MPI Media Group, 85 minutes, unrated)
Ayelet Zurer Talks Darling Companion, Man of Steel
With her statuesque beauty, Israeli-born actress Ayelet Zurer has made a strong impression in genre fare like Angels & Demons and Vantage Point and especially heavy, hard-hitting dramas like Fugitive Pieces, Adam Resurrected and Steven Spielberg’s Munich, in which she played Eric Bana’s sympathetic wife and served as his emotional mooring. Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion, then, represents a nice, unexpected change-up for Zurer, who plays Carmen, an exotic seasonal housesitter who ends up helping her employers (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline) search for their missing dog, and in the process develops an unexpected connection with a member of their extended family, Bryan (Mark Duplass). I recently had a chance to sit down with Zurer one-on-one, and talk about the movie, Kasdan, psychic inclinations, and her role as Lara Lor-Van in Zack Snyder’s hotly anticipated Man of Steel. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.
Monsieur Lazhar
A Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee from (French) Canada, Monsieur Lazhar is a psychologically perceptive, humanistic tale of adolescent grief, wayward adult yearning, and how emotional healing can often arrive from the most unexpected sources. Anchored by an award-winning lead performance, the understated movie develops slowly, like a Polaroid, into something greater than the sum of seemingly simple parts.
Starring Mohamed Fellag, Monsieur Lazhar is so effective at connecting, no matter its nominal foreign status, because it unfolds in a world that recognizes and embraces complexity and duality, and isn’t dishonest about the piecemeal way in which emotional centeredness is often achieved. There are not writ-large catharses here, but rather honesty and setbacks followed by smaller moments of betterment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Music Box Films, PG-13, 94 minutes)
Dennis Lee Talks Jesus Henry Christ
Precocious doesn’t even begin to describe Henry James Herman, the central figure of Jesus Henry Christ, and a 10-year-old boy genius who rabble-rousing manifestos on the nature of truth and upsets the carefully ordered world of his doting single mother (Toni Collette) when he sets out to find his biological father (Michael Sheen). I had the chance recently to speak one-on-one to writer-director Dennis Lee, about his reaction to the rocky commercial reception of his debut film, Fireflies in the Garden, and the challenge in crafting his nine-years-in-the-making follow-up, based on an award-winning short he made in film school. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.
Keyhole
Canadian auteur Guy Maddin — he of the black-and-white art film — attempts to give genre a bit of a nominal spin in much the same way that Lars von Trier did last year with Melancholia. His stab at the cops-and-robbers template arrives in the form of Keyhole, a kind of quarter-hearted siege/stand-off film cross-pollinated with psychological melodrama, and a heavy side of metaphorical import. The result, while characteristically full of some beautiful and evocative images, seems doggedly intent on achieving art status through obfuscation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Monterey Media, R, 93 minutes)
Chimpanzee
With Earth, Oceans, African Cats and now Chimpanzee, Disney, via specialty distribution arm DisneyNature, has carved out a nice nature documentary niche theatrically pegged to annual Earth Day celebrations. Its latest effort is a genuinely heartwarming and astonishingly intimate feature that engagingly locates the parallel drama, sadness, curiosity and uplift of the animal kingdom.
Chimpanzee takes as its subject a wild group of the animals living in the Ivory Coast, and focuses in particular on a newborn chimp named Oscar, showing him playing with his fellow primates and also trying to learn the ins and outs of jungle life. Shot over the course of four years, a 10-hour car ride and two more hours of hiking into the woods from the nearest airport, the film is full of amazing footage. Scenes of the chimpanzees plotting out an attack on tree-dwelling monkeys (they aren’t exclusively herbivores, after all) is fascinating, but the most arresting sequences come by way of the group’s creation and use of tools to extract ants from an underground colony or smash open nuts. These behaviors, of course, mirror humankind traits so closely that they — and especially the wordless observance, replication and refinement by young Oscar — unlock something deep and profound within a viewer’s heart. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DisneyNature, G, 78 minutes)
Detention
Undoubtedly the idea was to bring out the long-delayed horror-comedy Detention, starring Josh Hutcherson, after the profile-raising release of The Hunger Games last month, but there almost certainly was also a significant amount of email back-and-forth from Hutcherson’s management team with other studio folk about how to downplay its theatrical unspooling, and kind of dump the body from a slowly moving van, without hoping too many people notice. A film of boundless energy and if not empty voice then at least wholly scattershot imagination, the over-the-top Detention debuted last year at SXSW, which seems a perfect home for its robust, scrupulously manufactured eccentricities.
Detention‘s story centers around someone re-enacting the slasher killings of a popular horror movie villain against a couple unsuspecting high schoolers. Lest one think this is another twist or update on The Faculty or Cherry Falls, however, the film also nips liberally from canted high school dark comedies like Pretty Persuasion, Brick and Assassination of a High School President. It’s basically sort of like what would happen if Scream and Donnie Darko spawned a love child in a threeway with Inception, and then that baby married the loquacious Juno, dosed up on some ecstasy, fired up The Breakfast Club‘s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” on their iPod, and went ironically to a Napoleon Dynamite fan convention. But in the way that sounds more like a car crash than awesome and intriguing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 93 minutes)
The Woman Who Wasn’t There
For most sane and normal folks, the events of September 11 sparked not only shock and grief, but also an instinct of outreach — a desire to help, somehow, not only tangibly or materially, but also emotionally. The stories told by some of the survivors in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers were so heartrending that an impulse to share or ease their burden was a fairly natural reaction. Tania Head, however, took that feeling to an extrapolated extreme that’s still rather hard to grasp.
Head (above right) told a devastating story of narrowly escaping death from the 78th floor of the South Tower, blown back against a marble wall by the impact of the airplane, badly burned and suffering from a deep gash that almost took off her entire right arm. She was saved by Welles Crowther, a young man wearing a red bandanna whose heroic actions on that day were widely reported. Her common-law husband, Dave, however, was not so lucky — he perished in the North Tower. She spent two months in the hospital, and later co-founded the influential World Trade Center Survivors Network advocacy group. The only problem? Her entire story was a fabrication. On September 11, Head, actually born Alicia Esteve, was in post-graduate classes in Barcelona.
The documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There, from executive producer Meredith Vieira, chronicles this bizarre, stranger-than-fiction story, interviewing around a half dozen of the chief subject’s former friends and peers in the aforementioned group. It’s even more peculiar when one considers that the director, Angelo Guglielmo, Jr., was actually pressed into making a nonfiction movie about 9/11 survivors by Head herself, before the truth about her deceit came out in a series of investigative articles published in the New York Times in the fall of 2007. That means Head is very much featured in the unintended resultant product that is The Woman Who Wasn’t There, narrating her (false) story while others recount their deep connection to her, creeping suspicion about her story, and eventual betrayal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (ID Films, unrated, 65 minutes)
Director Marc Simon Talks Unraveled, Financial Collapse
The financial collapse of 2008 was brought about by many factors — including governmental deregulation and lack of proper oversight — but make no mistake, there were plenty of flat-out crooks involved. And were it not for the staggering scale of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff‘s deception, Marc Dreier and his $750 million fraud would likely be the name most lastingly associated with American white collar crime. Filmed over the last two months of Dreier’s house arrest, leading up to his prison sentencing, the documentary Unraveled unfolds in unique fashion, offering up a rare first person reflection on scamming of this scale and sort. Even more unique, however, is the fact that the film’s director, Marc Simon, himself had a personal connection with his subject. I recently had a chance to speak one-on-one to Simon (no relation), about his movie, chasing a “Rosebud” moment in relation to Dreier, and his own thoughts on the criminal sentencing of his one-time boss. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.
No Room For Rockstars
A meandering but still punkish documentary overview of the Vans Warped Tour, director Parris Patton’s No Room For Rockstars, shot over the 2010 iteration of the event, offers up a slice-of-life look at the punk rock juggernaut, a rain-or-shine misfit circus that crisscrosses North America every summer as a rollicking outdoor minstrel show aimed at kids hungry for live music mainly outside of the glossy pop mainstream. If it’s mostly an amorphous fan’s document that doesn’t locate much in the way of a dramatic throughline, the backstage and behind-the-scenes access will at least still prove engaging enough to its core demographic even if few others. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Vans Off the Wall/Agi Orsi Productions, unrated, 97 minutes)
L!fe Happens
The enormous critical and commercial success of the $288-million-grossing Bridesmaids will likely serve as a line of demarcation of sorts in Hollywood, but the witty, engaging female-oriented comedic ensemble L!fe Happens should come with an asterix, for no mere knock-off is it. Penned before Bridesmaids but only now seeing release, the Los Angeles-set movie, born of collaboration between director Kat Coiro and star Krysten Ritter, winningly marries a female buddy comedy with single mother drama, a pinch of bawdiness, sharp characterizations and some slyly observed situational humor.
There’s a Dorothy Parker-esque snap to some the dialogue, delivered with aplomb by in particular Ritter and Kate Bosworth, who exhibit a great rapport. But the thing that is most noteworthy and heartening about L!fe Happens is its emotional and psychological underpinning, which is consistent, and not constructed for sitcom whimsy or scene-to-scene contrivance. Conflicts and resolutions in various relationships are informed by characters’ maturations or, as often as not, their chafing at change. Co-writers Coiro and Ritter also deserve credit for addressing the manner in which new friendships often impede or complicate existing ones, particularly in communal living situations. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (PMK*BNC, R, 100 minutes)