| 23 October 2009
Michelle Monaghan and Jimmy Bennett in Trucker.
Now in its 24th year, the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival no longer talks about being the Guinness Book of World Records-sanctioned festival of longest duration.
Cuts in state government arts funding, the dwindling of corporate donations and the economy in general makes this such a bad year that FLIFF is forced to fall back on touting the quality of its films.
The festival, which kicks off today, runs a “mere” 20 days, and the number of films has been reduced 10 percent to only a 100 or so. But 50 or those are premieres of some sort -- either World, United States, Southeast, East Coast or Florida. And the Fort Lauderdale fest still has clout overseas, drawing entries from more than 30 countries.
The recession has done little to dampen FLIFF’s ability to draw celebrities with the lure of awards. Actor Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Best Man) and cinematographer Mario Tosi (Carrie, MacArthur) with each receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Producers) will pick up a Career Achievement Award and Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Gone Baby Gone) has been selected for the Star on the Horizon Award.
The latter two will also be appearing in support of their films in the festival. Monaghan stars in the independent drama Trucker, playing a tough-minded interstate big rig driver whose estranged 11-year-old son turns her life upside down when he appears on her doorstep. And Broderick headlines Wonderful World, about a deeply cynical proofreader and chess player whose pessimistic view of life seems confirmed when he loses his job.
Whether or not the films prove to be worthy, the Lauderdale festival knows that you can always compensate with parties. In fact, there is a reception or party almost every night of the festival. Often movies are matched with venues, like Black Dynamite at Bova Prime on Las Olas, An Englishman in New York at Pillars on New River Sound and a Queen to Play bash at Smith and Jones.
All screenings will be held at Cinema Paradiso, 503 SE 6th St., Fort Lauderdale, with the exception of opening night, when the film Timer will be shown at the Miniaci Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of Nova Southeastern University in Davie. Tickets are available at (954) 525-3456 or online at www.FLIFF.com.
Here are a few thumbnail reviews of films made available by the festival for advance screening.
Scott Storm in Official Rejection.
* Official Rejection (Noon, Sat., Oct. 24) -- Talk about the ultimate film festival film. Check out Scott Storm’s tongue-in-cheek documentary expose of the way film festivals really work and why he had such difficulty getting his 2004 crime flick, Ten ‘til Noon, accepted into any of the major fests. And if the film they made is half as entertaining as the chronicle of their rejection, you’ll wonder why it never received much love too.
The serious message is that the studios have co-opted the Sundances and their ilk, so do not look for the next Kevin Smith (Clerks) or Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs) to emerge from festivals anymore. Still, it is possible we will hear more from Storm, who makes being turned down very entertaining.
* Trucker (6 p.m., Sat., Oct. 24) -- Remember how you thought of Charlize Theron differently after she showed what acting skill she really had in Monster. Well, Michelle Monaghan is unlikely to cop an Oscar for her performance as interstate big rig truck driver Diane Ford, but she gives a who-woulda-thunk-it powerful performance that is light years above her work on the enjoyable Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or even the worthy, but little-seen, Gone Baby Gone.
She plays a tough, free-spirited loner whose only goal seems to be arriving at her destination promptly and picking up her “on-time” bonus. Naturally, then, her life is due for major upheaval when her former husband (Benjamin Bratt) contract cancer and her brat of an 11-year-old estranged son gets dropped off on her doorstep and he is re-introduced to his highly unmaternal mother. James Mottern’s script and direction are both lean and taut, but it is Monaghan who owns the film.
* When the Evening Comes (6 p.m., Thurs., Nov. 5) -- Walking a tightrope, director Craig Geraghty turns what could have been a formulaic comedy or even an overly sentimental tale into a very human slice-of-life drama. Charlie (Leo Marinello) is a 39-year-old “successful” New York lawyer, but he lives with his overbearing grandparents (Philip Bosco, Anne Meara) who cannot help but meddle in his life.
Charlie dotes on the two of them, but when grandma Marion cannot hide her contempt for his girlfriend, trying to correct the mistakes she make raising her own daughter, the relationship is strained to the breaking point. The dialogue seems honest and spontaneous, or maybe that is just Bosco and Meara demonstrating what old pros they are. Still, you will find yourself rooting for Charlie, even as you sense that happiness is not in the cards for him.
| 22 October 2009
Vincent Gallo in Tetro.
If Tetro is the 70-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s final film, it would be an elegant swan song to an accomplished career: an invigorating inhalation of arthouse air to remedy the commercial drudge work to which the director confined himself in the ‘90s.
Indeed, the Francis Coppola of the late half of the late ‘00s harkens more to his rebellious, rulebook-eschewing, film school upbringing than any period since his ‘70s zenith. But if Coppola has indeed found his muse again in the wake of such puzzling directorial decisions as Jack and The Rainmaker, he overplayed his hand with the self-marginalizing Youth Without Youth (2007), a pull-your-hair-out mystery that made sense only to him.
His first fully realized project in a decade’s time, it all but cemented the filmmaker’s reputation as a pretentious, out-of-touch megalomaniac who’s lost his place in modern moviedom. I would not be surprised to learn that more people under 30 know Coppola for his wine than for his films.
Yes, Coppola knows about displacement and disillusionment, two of the strongest themes in Tetro. Set in Argentina, it’s about brooding writer Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who abandoned his family, life and birth name in New York years earlier to go on an endless writing sabbatical in South America. When we meet him in Buenos Aires – grumpy and crippled, after being hit by a bus – it’s clear his creativity has been blocked for some time.
But he’d already written a kind of memoir-slash-manifesto attacking his father, a world-famous conductor, and reflecting on his late mother, an opera singer who died in a car accident with Tetro at the wheel. It’s a mammoth text, spilling out of suitcases stuffed in hard-to-reach cubbyholes, with no conclusion planned and no publication desired. He gets by on the occasional lighting job for a local Felliniesque theater company and on the income of his live-in girlfriend Miranda (Maribel Verdu of Pan’s Labyrinth), a mental health nurse who fell in love with Tetro when he was assigned to her clinic.
This is the world in which Tetro’s estranged brother Bennie (an unknown actor named Alden Ehrenreich), an 18-year-old cruise-ship busboy, enters when his ocean liner breaks down. He stays with his older brother for a week, reigniting old flames of familial discord left simmering on a long unattended burner of Tetro’s mind. Bennie wants to learn more about the complicated history in which he was raised – about the mother he never knew and father he barely knows -- and his surreptitious reading of his brother’s work leads both men to reevaluate relationships past and present, resulting in some surprising revelations.
Shot in black-and-white Cinemascope, Tetro captures Buenos Aires as a slice of towery German expressionism, all chiaroscuro lighting, canted angles and oblique shadows, photographed from the most compelling nooks and crannies in the city’s topography. Bursts of color (which Coppola experimented with in another otherwise monochrome film, Rumble Fish) and brilliant bursts of light illuminate Tetro’s visions, fantasies and flashbacks, the muddled muck of a mind that prohibits him from engaging in any kind of normal relationship. In its occasionally surreal visuals, the film recalls the hyper-stylized plasticity of previous Coppola works such as One From the Heart and Dracula, as well as such Italian dazzlers such as Nights of Cabiria and La Notte.
While there may be nothing quite like Tetro, it broadcasts such reference points – Coppola has also cited On the Waterfront as an inspiration for Tetro’s atmosphere, and Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman and The Red Shoes are shown in stock footage and homaged, respectively.
It all doesn’t quite add up, but unlike the convoluted clutter of Youth Without Youth, this time each enigma is worth deciphering, urging you to view the film a second time to crack its codes. Like a great work of art, it doesn’t play its entire hand on first look.
Coppola called Tetro a very “personal” project in an interview with Empire magazine, and it’s telling that this is his first original screenplay credit in 34 years. Boundless in its sweeping Shakespearean drama and boldly experimental in its form, Tetro is the sign of a filmmaker reconnecting with the young movie brat of The Conversation and The Godfather.
It is the real youth without youth.
TETRO. Director: Francis Ford Coppola; Cast: Vincent Gallo, Alden Ehrenreich, Maribel Verdu, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Carmen Maura; Opens: Friday; Venue: Lake Worth Playhouse
| 14 October 2009
Max (Max Records) sits atop Carol (voice of James Gandolfini) in Where the Wild Things Are.
For a story set largely inside a young boy’s imagination, Where the Wild Things Are does a remarkable job of planting the viewer in the boy’s head.
Using unhinged, handheld camerawork and an inordinate number of point-of-view shots, director Spike Jonze presents a compelling prologue of a boy with a loving home who nonetheless seeks solace in isolation, donning a wolf costume and preferring the company of the family dog to his harried single mother and teenage sister.
The movie’s opening stanzas are a series of minor calamities that come off as major catastrophes when shot through young Max’s (Max Records) viewpoint: His sister’s ruffian friends destroy his newly built igloo, he destroys a family memento in return and he causes a ruckus on the dining room table when his mom (Catherine Keener) pays more attention to her boyfriend (a blink-and-you-miss-him Mark Ruffalo) than to him.
These events, coupled with the unappealing prospect of having to eat – ick! – frozen corn for dinner, lead to the frustrated Max’s imaginary voyage across storm-laden seas, up treacherous, jagged mountains and into a shadowy forest, where he lords over a commune of impressionable gremlins with authority, anger and relationship issues.
While it would be unfair to suggest that this is when the story falls apart, suffice it to say that by this point Where the Wild Things Are has already reached its creative peak, found in the lovely moment at home when Max’s mom transcribes her son’s story about a vampire ostracized from his clan when he loses his fangs. The scene works as an understanding of the way Max sees himself and as an insightful peek into his fear of abandonment, as well as a look at the way his mom fosters his creativity.
The rest of the movie – the hour-plus plunge into the woods of Max’s mind – plants only the seedlings of this kind of depth. There are moments in Jonze’s mostly lugubrious vision that could have trumped the simplicity of the 1963 Maurice Sendak picture book on which it’s based, but they only come off as unrealized additions, rickety ships of ideas without anchors. Intolerance, fear of the Other, the worship of false idols, the emotional and physical disguises we all don – these themes are all fleetingly introduced, then discarded just as quickly in the Jonze- and Dave Eggers-written screenplay.
If only its scattershot thematic landscape could match its skillfully designed visual one. Sendak hand-picked Jonze to direct the film because of his love for Being John Malkovich, and the director paints his fantastical setting with that film’s same muted color palette of dark blues and blacks. While the film is, unfortunately, not totally devoid of CGI, most of the movie magic is pleasingly retro, utilizing a combination of animatronics and suitmation, a rubber-suit technique originally used in Japan’s Godzilla movies.
The soundtrack, by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, drifts in and out with melodious, buy-it-at-Wal-Mart restraint, and the voice actors (James Gandolfini, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara and Lauren Ambrose among them) raise a few eyebrows without calling too much attention to themselves and their real-life personae.
Of course, these are just the bells and whistles of studio filmmaking, thoroughly accomplished. But in the age of Pixar, just being a well-made children’s movie isn’t enough. Perhaps Where the Wild Things Are is a fine adaptation of Sendak’s story; the author himself has heaped glowing praise upon it. But after watching a 10-sentence book adapt into a feature-length script, it’s clear Jonze’s film could have been a lot more.
John Thomason is a freelance writer based in South Florida.
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. Studio: Warner Brothers; Director: Spike Jonze; Cast: Max Records, Catherine Keener, voices of James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara and Paul Dano; Rated: PG; Opens: Friday; Venue: Most commercial houses
| 10 October 2009
Hilary Swank. (Illustration by Pat Crowley)
It used to be that superheroes and special effects went on vacation in the fall, but the studios seem more intent this season on making money than making art. It is hard not to notice, for instance, the barrage of vampire and assorted undead movies (Zombieland, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, The Twilight Saga: New Moon) coming our way.
True, the Oscars have expanded the Best Picture category to 10 nominees this year in an attempt to get some more mainstream, commercial flicks in the race, but surely none of these bloodsuckers will --pardon the expression -- make the cut.
So let’s look beyond them to more promising fare likely to arrive in the region in the next few months. Per usual, take these release dates as firm at your own peril.
Capitalism: A Love Story: You can almost hear the irony in documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s voice with the title of his latest activist non-fiction tale, designed (like Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko) to educate, entertain and irritate. This time around, his focus is the global financial crisis and the greed-meisters who caused it. (Opened Oct. 2)
A Serious Man: A new movie by Joel and Ethan Coen is always welcome, whether they are in a whimsical mood (Fargo) or deadly serious (No Country for Old Men). Their latest sounds like a little of each, the saga of a Midwestern professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) whose life takes a downward turn when his wife asks him for a divorce, his children rebel against him and a student of his attempts to bribe him for a better grade. (Opened Oct. 2)
New York, I Love You: This is the second shoe to drop, following its precursor, Paris, Je T’aime, another series of short films from such A-list directors as Alexander Payne, Wes Craven and Mira Nair, exploring the nature of love, New York-style. The cast is similarly attention-getting, with such name performers as Natalie Portman, Kevin Bacon, Robin Wright Penn and Ethan Hawke. (Oct. 16)
Amelia: The search for aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while trying to fly around the world, has led to this much-touted biopic, starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank and directed by Mira Nair (The Namesake), with Richard Gere as the feminist pilot’s manager and husband. (Oct. 23)
Men Who Stare at Goats: A dark comedy based on the non-fiction best-seller about an Army unit seeking to apply the tenets of telepathy and other paranormal phenomena to combat. Wait, don’t turn the page! The high-powered cast includes George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, and it is directed by Grant Heslov, co-writer of Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck. (Nov. 6)
Lily Morgan and John Cusack in 2012.
2012: Here’s another summer picture that has migrated to the fall, an action picture about the end of the world -- oh, that again -- with John Cusack as a science fiction writer who feels the burden of having to prevent doomsday. Since director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) is at the helm, you have to expect a few major global landmarks to be exploded along the way. (Nov. 13)
The Twilight Saga: New Moon: If you are going to sink your teeth into one vampire movie this fall, you might as well make it this second installment in the Stephenie Meyer series. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are back as the teen bloodsucker and the comely gal he is smitten with. Get in line behind every teenager with nine dollars. (Nov. 20)
Nine: Not to be confused with 9, the sci-fi animated movie of a couple months back, this is the film version of Maury Yeston’s acclaimed Broadway musical based on Federico Fellini’s loosely autobiographical classic, 8½. Rob Marshall (Chicago) puts a prestige cast of Academy Award winners, including Daniel Day-Lewis as philandering Italian filmmaker Guido Contini and his bevy of beautiful women, including Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz and the great Sophia Loren. (Nov. 25)
The frog (Bruno Campos) puckers up for Tiana (Anika Noni Rose).
The Princess and the Frog: Flying in the face of computer-generated animation, Disney returns to the traditions of hand-drawn, two-dimensional feature-length cartoons with this New Orleans-based retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ The Frog Prince, with a definite twist. After African-American Princess Tiana (Anika Noni Rose of Dreamgirls) kisses her frog, she turns amphibious, too. (Nov. 25)
Invictus: Here comes Clint Eastwood with another below-the-radar, end-of-year drama, which is likely to become popular, despite the Latin title. Of course, it helps that it stars Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. The former plays South Africa’s political force of nature Nelson Mandela, in the early days of his presidency, in the run up to his nation’s upset win at the 1995 rugby World Cup. Damon, presumably having shed his Informant weight, plays the team captain. (Dec. 11)
Avatar: It has taken Titanic director James (“King of the world”) Cameron a dozen years to make another feature film, but expect it to be a blockbuster. It is a 3-D science fiction yarn about a soldier out of his element on the planet Pandora. Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver star, but from early glimpses, the real star looks to be the state-of-the-art special effects. (Dec. 18)
Sherlock Holmes: The enduring Arthur Conan Doyle character is probably the most filmed literary icon ever, but we have never seen him quite like this. The rational sleuth (Robert Downey Jr.) and his medical sidekick (Jude Law) have been re-conceived by action-violence director Guy Ritchie. Baker Street may never be the same. (Dec. 25)
Jude Law, Robert Downey Jr. and Rachel McAdams in Sherlock Holmes.
| 09 October 2009
Gertrude Berg in The Goldbergs.
Long before there was e-mail there were tenement windows, an almost-as-effective communications vehicle for ethnic housewives to yell “Yoo-hoo” to each other.
That was the catchphrase that kicked off each episode of a pioneering radio and, later, TV show called The Goldbergs. Written by and starring Gertrude Berg as an upbeat, wisdom-dispensing Bronx matriarch, Molly Goldberg, the show and its creative force are affectionately recalled in Aviva Kempner’s new documentary, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg.
Kempner, whose The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg celebrated the first Jewish baseball player in the major leagues, has carved out a cinematic niche which she describes as “films about under-known Jewish heroes.” Berg certainly qualifies, having all but invented the domestic sitcom long before Lucille Ball, won the first Best Actress Emmy ever awarded, conceived and written every script of The Goldbergs and fought her network when it tried -- successfully -- to squeeze actor Philip Loeb, who played Berg’s husband Jake, out of the series during the Communist witch hunt of the 1950s.
Herself a housewife as well as a one-woman radio and television production mill, Berg, who died in 1966, was the most popular female entertainer of her day. Still, as the film recounts, when a writer pitched a script about Berg to the head of CBS in recent years, he had no idea who she was.
Kempner’s narrative style is fairly straightforward and chronological, leavened by extensive clips of kinescopes of Goldbergs episodes. Berg was big on imparting life lessons in each show, not unlike such WASPy latter-day series as Father Knows Best. But she also sneaked in social commentary from Molly’s Bronx living room and, surely more significantly, she paved the way for product placements and in-character commercials.
Kempner includes talking-head interviews with those connected with producing The Goldbergs, but all but the youngest cast members have long since died. More eye-opening are the selected figures who recall growing up watching the show, notably Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg.
Missing, unfortunately, is much footage of Berg herself talking about her creative process, success and the effects of the blacklist. The only glimpse of Berg as herself, as opposed to her accented fictional matriarch, is on a Person to Person program with Edward R. Murrow, where she comes across as a witty, cultured woman, quite in contrast to Molly.
Born Tillie Edelstein, the daughter of a Catskills hotel owner, she simply announced her intention to become an actress, reinvented herself as Gertrude Berg and forged ahead, seemingly unaware of the odds against her goal. Following the demise of The Goldbergs, canceled after an ill-advised move by the family to the suburbs, Berg moved on to Broadway, winning a Tony Award in 1959 for playing a widow who finds unexpected romance in A Majority of One.
But in terms of leaving behind a legacy, the only other medium more ephemeral than those early TV kinescopes is the theater.
YOO-HOO, MRS. GOLDBERG. Director: Aviva Kempner; With Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Susan Stamberg, Norman Lear, Ed Asner; Not rated. Opens today at Regal Cinemas Delray 18, Regal Cinemas Shadowood 16 (Boca Raton), Sunrise Cinemas at Mizner Park, and Cobb Theatres Jupiter 18. Opens Oct. 16 at Emerging Cinemas, Lake Worth.
