If every war is a thousand rolling tragedies, then the flip side of such conflict is also the opportunities it provides for humanity to showcase the better angels of its nature. Poker is the unlikely binding agent at the heart of Rescue in the Philippines: Refuge from the Holocaust, a briskly paced documentary in which a disparate but closely knit cabal — including the president of the Philippines and a future president of the United States — work together to concoct an intricate plan of rescue and re-settlement, saving over 1,300 Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Rescue in the Philippines opens exclusively in Los Angeles this week at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills. (Three Roads Productions, unrated, 60 minutes)
Daily Archives: March 28, 2013
Director Pablo Berger Talks Blancanieves
In 2004, writer-director Pablo Berger delivered an unlikely yet charming little Spanish-Danish comedic hybrid, Torremolinos 73, about an exasperated encyclopedia salesman who, along with his wife, accidentally trips into a career directing pornographic movies for import to Northern European countries. It took more than eight years to realize the dream of his totally different but equally unique follow-up, Blancanieves, the winner of 10 Goya Awards, the Spanish equivalent of the Academy Awards. In a case of good news/bad news, though, Berger’s movie — a black-and-white silent film that re-imagines the tale of Snow White through the prism of bullfighting, while also serving as a homage to European silent movies of yore — comes on the heels of the Oscar-winning The Artist. Ergo, two of its most distinctive qualities risk looking, bizarrely, derivative. I recently had a chance to speak to Berger one-on-one, about the joint pain and opportunity that presents, as well as his decades-old inspirations for the movie. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Wrong Redux
Writer-director Quentin Dupieux‘s follow-up to the delightful Rubber, the somewhat similarly absurdist Wrong, also hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Austin tomorrow (it’s also already available on VOD), so why not reset that review as well?
Blancanieves Redux
Psst… writer-director Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, the Spanish entry for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award category, saw a brief awards-qualifying run earlier in the year, but opens wider tomorrow in theaters, so now seems as good a time as any to reset my previous review.
Eva Mendes Kills It, Disses Steven Seagal on The Daily Show
Props to Eva Mendes, who kinda killed on The Daily Show tonight, all while not talking very much about her new movie, Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond the Pines. She asked host Jon Stewart about how/why he got cut out of The First Wives Club, which in turn led to Mendes then recounting a rather hilarious story about finding out at a premiere that her voice had been over-dubbed… because she didn’t “sound intelligent enough,” she said a producer told her. The bigger indignity, she said? It was a Steven Seagal movie. (That would be 2001’s Exit Wounds, to save you a cross-search.) Again, the whole episode is here, if you need it, or I’m sure they’ll have guest-specific splits up soon.