Posted on May 16th, 2008 at 5:09 pm By Craig Kennedy
Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve in
Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale)
Cannes seems to have begun rolling in earnest and reviews are pouring in. Time is short at the moment so here is a look at some of the biggies. Stay tuned for an addendum later tonight or tomorrow.
Screening in Un Certain Regard is Tyson, James Toback’s documentary about the controversial boxer. First, Variety’s Anne Thompson talks to the filmmaker who has been friends with Tyson since 1987. Then, Todd McCarthy reviews the film itself, calling it “revelatory.” Covering all the territory you’d expect (the early career, the highs, the lows, the rape and the ear biting), McCarthy says it never pretends to be objective, but “by getting Tyson to open up as he has, Toback has succeeded in illuminating one of the most polarizing, complex and — the film almost forces one to admit — misunderstood figures of our time.”
Posted on May 16th, 2008 at 11:09 am By Craig Kennedy
Check this out Scully, it’s called Living in Cinema. Best. Website. Ever.
Dig out your Lone Gunmen t-shirts and get the nerd stains cleaned off of them. Organizers of the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 19 - 29) have added a sneak peek at the upcoming X-Files: I Want to Believe.
Star David Duchovny, writer/director Chris Carter and screenwriter Frank Spotnitz will be presenting clips and chatting about their new film on June 22 at the historic and beautiful Crest Theatre in Westwood.
I do want to believe, but I remain highly skeptical.
Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 7:16 pm By Craig Kennedy
John Phillip Law, best remembered by me as Pygar the blind angel in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, died May 13 of cancer. He was 70 years old.
His first Hollywood role was as Alexei, a boyish Russian sailor in Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming! He also played the title character in the second of Ray Harryhausen’s three Sinbad films, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (the one with the one-eyed centaur and Kali, the six-armed statue come to life).
Last July, I caught a Q&A with Mr. Law at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica following a screening of Otto Preminger’s acid tinged cult favorite, Skidoo, organized by Skidoo expert and LiC familiar Christian Divine. Christian wrote a much better remembrance of the man than I can attempt here. Check it out.
Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 4:01 pm By Craig Kennedy
No cinematic pun intended…well maybe a little. This one tried to sneak past without my noticing it, but luckily Sartre brought it to my attention. It seems David Lynch and Werner Herzog are going to team up on a “horror-tinged murder drama” called My Son, My Son. It’s loosely based on the true story of a man with Sophocles on the brain who kills his mother with a sword.
What is described as a low-budget, “guerrilla-style digital video shoot” is set for next March.
Herzog is scheduled to begin filming his Bad Lieutenant remake in July and The Piano Tuner in the fall.
Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 3:16 pm By Craig Kennedy
Cannes 2008 in Competition: Waltz with Bashir
Screening in competition, Waltz with Bashir is the fourth feature from Israeli director Ari Folman. Because it’s animated and it centers on the Middle East, it is drawing comparisons to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, but it sounds like a very different animal. It tells the story of the massacre of Palestinian civilians during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut. Variety’s Leslie Felperin says it’s drawn in a “more minutely detailed, realistic graphic technique…that texturally looks more like the Rotoscoped animation seen in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.” She calls it “something special, strange and peculiarly potent.”
Cinematical’s Kim Voynar seconds that emotion, saying Folman’s film is “a beautiful, disturbing and deeply compelling film that documents the horrors to which he and his friends were witnesses, while offering hope that he and others might, some day, heal from the ravages of war.”
Folman’s next project will be an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 sci-fi story The Futurological Congress.
Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 12:02 pm By Craig Kennedy
The next stop for LiC’s continuing New Beverly Nights feature will hopefully be Friday or Saturday’s double-feature of Performance (1970) and O Lucky Man! (1973).
If there is anyone out there in the greater (or lesser) Los Angeles area who’d like to join me, drop me a line and we can coordinate. 7 bucks. Cheap!
Performance is Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s satire about a gangster on the lam in the home of a reclusive rock star starring Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger, James Fox and James Fox. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a mind-bending freak out of sex, drugs, rock, roll and crime. Also with Anita Pallenberg, the unofficial sixth Stone and the mother of Keith Richards’ children. Here’s a clip of Mick singing Memo from Turner:
O Lucky Man! is the second part of Lindsay Anderson’s satiric Mick Travis trilogy which began in 1968 with If… Malcolm McDowell returns as Mick, an ambitious coffee salesman whose enthusiasm leads him on a strange odyssey of sex, torture, scientific experiments and rock and roll, courtesy of Animals keyboardist Alan Price. Think Candide brought to 1970’s England and you might be on the right track. Also with Helen Mirren and Ralph Richardson.
Posted on May 15th, 2008 at 12:01 am By Craig Kennedy
Anders Danielsen Lie in Joachim Trier’s Reprise
LiC’s limited release Pick of the Week
There are plenty of decent limited releases from previous weekends still kicking around (The Visitor, Young@Heart, Son of Rambow, The Fall, OSS 117) and it might be a good time to try and find one because there is only one new wide release this time around:
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. The Pevensie children return to Narnia a year after their adventures beyond the wardrobe only to find that 1300 years have passed in Narnia time…and they weren’t a good 1300 years. I feel like I should have more to say about the weekend’s only new wide release. Alas, no. I’ve got nothing. If you’ve seen the first one or you’ve read the books, you know all about this. If you haven’t, you don’t care anyway. Me? I’ll catch up to it sooner or later, but I’m not in a hurry.
Expanding:
Son of Rambow. You might be tired of hearing me talk about this one by now, but tough crap. It’s a decent flick and it’s moving into a few more theaters this weekend.
Posted on May 14th, 2008 at 9:12 pm By Craig Kennedy
One irritating fact of limited release movies in this Internet age is that you never know when a movie will come to a certain place. Movies come to Los Angeles, I write about them and I forget about them. Often I never know who else will have a chance to see them or when.
I wrote about the terrific little film Young @ Heart back on April 11 and then I kind of lost track of it. Of course it didn’t go away. It’s been making its way around the country and other bloggers have been writing about it as well, including some folks familiar to LiC readers.
It would be sad to let this one sneak by under the radar so check out what the others have said about it. Miranda Wilding reviewed it here; Daniel Getahun throws in his two cents here; MovieZeal’s Phillip Johnston rings in here; Matthew Lucas was moved here; and finally, K. Bowen isn’t quite as enthusiastic, but he still liked it and you can read what he wrote here.
So, don’t take my word for it, listen to your fellow bloggers and then check your local listings to see if it’s come to your neighborhood. You’ll be glad you did.
Posted on May 14th, 2008 at 11:15 am By Craig Kennedy
Perhaps you’ve heard - there’s a little thing called the Cannes Film Festival happening on the Côte d’Azur right now and, now that the complaining about flights, accommodations, prices, and the color of the press passes has been dispensed with, reports from this morning’s press screening of Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness are streaming in.
Being the most buzzed about festival of the year, it’s reasonable to assume a movie blog would spend some time talking about it. The problem is, many of the movies that are playing I’m already going to see sooner or later and I’d prefer not to know too much about them. I narrowly managed to avoid significant No Country For Old Men spoilers last year and, while there’s not as much at stake this time around, it’s still like walking through a minefield.
It’s different with some of the other film festivals where you’re actively trying to discover things, whether you’re in attendance or not. Cannes for me is more about avoidance. I can’t ignore it however, so I’ll cautiously take it day by day.
To that end, I only skimmed some of the Blindness reviews to get a sense of where they were going. Jeff Wells starts his off “The problem with Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness…” which isn’t a good sign. The rest of the review is full of half-compliments and qualifiers and a general sense of disappointment. In other words: a fairly typical Jeff Wells review. He notes that only two or three people clapped at the end and he describes the press conference/reception afterwards as “muted.”
In Variety, Justin Chang calls it “an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on Jose Saramago’s shattering novel.”
Cinematical’s James Rocchi is more positive, though he’s also qualified in his praise. He concludes “while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort.”
Blindness stars Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore. It’s scheduled to open in the US on September 19.
Posted on May 13th, 2008 at 12:13 pm By Craig Kennedy
According to Variety’s Pamela McClintock and Anne Thompson, Michael Moore is going to make a sequel to Farenheit 9/11 which will be released next year.
Though the original was the highest grossing documentary ever in the United States with $119.1 million and an additional $100 million overseas, Moore’s most recent film Sicko only pulled in $24.5 million in the US.
Will audiences flock to see Moore’s take on Bush since the last film left off, or will the current conventional wisdom that no one wants to see movies about Iraq hold true?
Posted on May 13th, 2008 at 12:01 am By Craig Kennedy
Jody Hill, Will Ferrell, Ben Best, Danny McBride and Adam McKay
Throw a press conference in L.A. to promote a $70,000 indie martial arts comedy called The Foot Fist Way written, produced and directed by three friends from the North Carolina School of the Arts and you might be hard pressed to find many takers. Promise free booze, hors d’oeuvres, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell however, and Internet types start crawling out of the woodwork.
LiC recently crawled out of said woodwork for said press conference, but just between you, me and the monkeys, we would’ve gone even without the vodka tonics or Will Ferrell. It turns out we liked the film in question, and the rest is just gravy. We’re huge fans of gravy too, but that’s another story.
More about what Ferrell and McKay were doing there in a minute. Back to the film in question.
Posted on May 12th, 2008 at 4:23 pm By Craig Kennedy
Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity
According to Sun Media, Tina Sinatra would have the world believe they’re going to make a biography of her father Frank Sinatra and that fellow Italian-American Martin Scorsese might direct it. Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see the one-sheet and it says “A Martin Scorsese Picture” across the top. Alas, I can’t resist a double Scorsese/Sinatra rumor so hear I am spreading it.
If you look at my CD shelf (yes I still have CDs and what’s more, I still refer to them as “albums” - you can call me Abe Simpson if you want), next to The Rolling Stones, the 2nd biggest chunk is Frank Sinatra. Scorsese already did The Stones (I still wish he’d do a proper biography…not sure there’s anything left to be told there, but still) so his take on Sinatra would be a welcome treat.
If it happens, I hope the movie covers the pre-Rat Pack Sinatra from his late ’40s decline to his ’50s resurgence with Capitol Records, including his turn as Maggio in From Here to Eternity, but that’s just me.
Posted on May 12th, 2008 at 11:17 am By Craig Kennedy
Lee Pace and Catinca Untaru in The Fall
Though I was mildly disappointed by my first viewing of Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, I wonder if expectations didn’t get the better of me. Even if it’s not perfect, I think it’s still something to see and an article by David Kehr in yesterday’s NY Times casts a new light on it.
It didn’t occur to me until I read Kehr’s piece that there was no CGI used in the crafting of the beautiful and sometimes miraculous imagery. It’s getting to a point now where I assume at least a partial assist by computer in almost every movie I see, but according to Singh, “I had enough of that in my first film, as much as I enjoyed it. I decided in this one that the art direction was going to be in the landscape and in the costume design and nothing else.”
I also didn’t realize that Singh financed it himself. According to friend David Fincher (who has a presenting credit along with Spike Jonze), when financing for the project fell through, the director decided “I won’t have the passion and belligerence that I think this is going to take 10 years from now” so he just did it, traveling from continent to continent, agreeing to film commercials in places he knew he wanted to film the fantasy sequences for his movie.
These are the things I miss out on when I go out of my way to see a movie without knowing anything about it. Sometimes a little background is useful.
Posted on May 12th, 2008 at 12:01 am By Craig Kennedy
Welcome back to another Monday Watercooler. I hope the moms out there had a lovely Mother’s Day and I hope everyone managed to catch something good and discussion-worthy either at the cinema or on DVD.
I didn’t catch quite as many movies as I’d originally planned, I missed Redbelt and Mister Lonely and a midnight screening of Smokey and The Bandit at The New Beverly, but I did manage to catch the French spy spoof OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, Tarsem Singh’s visually splendid fantasy/drama The Fall and a repeat viewing of the much maligned Speed Racer.
Posted on May 11th, 2008 at 12:10 pm By Craig Kennedy
Standards torch-bearer trips on shoelaces, starts forest fire
I was going to make fun of a column in yesterday’s NY Times, but then I realized David Poland already did it. After a cup of coffee, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway. I can’t afford to be choosey, but neither apparently can the NY Times.
If someone would care to read Michael Cieply’s NY Times column about negative anonymous Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull reviews that leaked Thursday morning and then come back and tell me what business something like this has in the supposed Paper of Record, I’d love to hear it.
Frankly, it’s the kind of piece you’d expect to find in a blog not unlike LiC. There is little in the way of actual reporting. Cieply called Spielberg’s publicist Marvin Levy and got a couple of one line quotes that don’t illuminate or offer any new information and then he talked to Tim Ryan, the senior editor at Rotten Tomatoes about when legitimate reviews of the film are likely to first appear. That’s it. The rest I could’ve done myself if I’d cared to think thing about such a thing for longer than two seconds.
Posted on May 10th, 2008 at 11:50 pm By Craig Kennedy
I’ll stick with the original, thanks.
Paul W.S Anderson’s Death Race, the remake of Paul Bartel’s satiric 1975 drive-in favorite Death Race 2000 has been moved up from September 26 to August 22. I guess this means they’re not counting on any Oscar nominations.
Bartel’s Roger Corman produced original starred David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone, Mary Woronov and others in a futuristic cross-country race where the goal was not to finish first, but to run over as many pedestrians as possible along the way.
Anderson’s remake appears to eliminate the pedestrian killing angle and instead mixes in elements of The Running Man with convicts racing for their lives. It stars Jason Statham, Joan Allen and Ian McShane.
Posted on May 10th, 2008 at 10:53 pm By Craig Kennedy
According to the L.A. Times’ Sheigh Crabtree, Steven Spielberg told German magazine Focus that Chicago Seven is on the back burner and that he hopes to begin filming the oft rumored Abraham Lincoln biography in 2009 to coincide with the 16th president’s 200th anniversary.
OK, I’ve already lost interest in this story, but I’ve gone and typed it so I suppose I’ll post it.
Posted on May 10th, 2008 at 12:17 am By Craig Kennedy
In the interest of supporting and promoting a Los Angeles institution and in encouraging others to do the same for their local revival movie theaters, here’s the first of what I hope becomes a semi-regular LiC feature: New Beverly Nights, wherein I will sample some of the cinematic double-feature bounty The New Beverly Cinema serves up to LA audiences on a nightly basis.
As I reported at the end of April, The New Beverly is celebrating its 30th anniversary as a revival theater with a month long recreation of its first calendar from May 1978. The entire program is lovingly dedicated to New Beverly founder Sherman Torgan by his son Michael who has kept the place going since Sherman died unexpectedly last July.
Posted on May 9th, 2008 at 4:52 pm By Craig Kennedy
GreenCine Daily reminds us that Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo premiered in San Francisco on this day in 1958. Perhaps Speed Racer can learn a thing or two from a film ahead of its time that opened to less than stellar reviews and box office, only to be reappraised more favorably (thanks to the French) in later years.
Posted on May 9th, 2008 at 3:49 pm By Craig Kennedy
The folks at Hulu would like you to know they have 13 episodes from the American version of the original Speed Racer cartoon available for viewing. Here’s Episode 9: The Most Dangerous Race - Part 1 featuring Snake Oiler and the Car Acrobatic Team. Originally broadcast in 1967.
Posted on May 9th, 2008 at 2:10 pm By Craig Kennedy
For those of you who grow weary of the Speed Racer conversation, here’s a little nugget of news from this morning about Natalie Portman bailing on the new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s oft filmed Wuthering Heights “due to a scheduling conflict with another as-yet unannounced project” according to Variety.
The Hollywood Reporter adds that the announcement comes just days before the Cannes Film Festival where financiers hope to sell the movie. The scramble to find a replacement begins.
I’m happy with the William Wyler version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, but it would be kind of pointless to be against another version. While I like Natalie Portman, I’m still kind of iffy on American women playing period English roles, though the opposite happens all the time.
I wonder what the “as-yet unannounced project” is.
Posted on May 9th, 2008 at 3:53 am By Craig Kennedy
This is not a full review and it’s guaranteed 100% spoiler free.
So often, movies wither under the expectations you set for them. Either they simply don’t stack up or they take a different path than what you were hoping for. Every once in a while however, a movie comes along that turns out to be exactly what you want. The Wachowski’s Speed Racer was just such a movie. Halle-friggin-lujah for a bit of summer fun that showed me something I hadn’t seen before and didn’t piss me off.
Noisy? Yeah.
Busy? Sure.
Goofy? Guilty as charged.
Fun? Like nobody’s business.
This was live action with the plasticity and freedom of movement of animation. It was anime come to glorious candy-colored life.
One of my biggest fears going in was that Spritle and Chim-Chim would be as annoying as they were in the cartoon. I needn’t have worried. They were silly, but like the cartoon they were mainly used for comic relief and it worked.
My second fear was that the movie would be too long. I’ll admit it sagged for a little while after about an hour and they might’ve been able to tighten it up a little bit, but I was never really bored.
What I wasn’t expecting was much depth. I would’ve been happy with mostly eye candy, but Speed delivered a surprising and welcome emotional resonance by the end; not a lot, but enough for a summer movie.
Aside from the stellar visuals and crazy action, the best part was that the movie was a complete throwback to when I was 6 or 7 and there were few better things in the world than Lucky Charms and Saturday morning cartoons in your pajamas. There was no irony, no smirking self-awareness and no attempt to be hip with a bunch of clever pop cultural references. Speed Racer was a couple of hours of pure, wide-eyed innocence and one hell of a lot of fun.
Attention haters: the line to suck it forms on the left.
“The plot is officially under wraps but is said to center on the title character, a boy named after his favorite dessert. He runs away from home during the holidays after he and his parents are caught shoplifting meat, then meets up with a runaway girl raised by two gay men and searching for her birth mother.”
Posted on May 8th, 2008 at 8:12 pm By Craig Kennedy
I’m about as interested in the business end of Hollywood as I am the ass end of a gassy camel with a chili craving, but the other big story that had everyone feeling gloomy today besides the Glenn Kenny downsizing was Warners Bros’ surprise announcement they were shutting down their specialty divisions, Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures.
What does it mean for us, the movie-goers? Will stuff like Snow Angels and La Vie En Rose still come out of Warner Bros.? If not, will the slack be picked up by the many other specialty houses? I don’t know.
Posted on May 8th, 2008 at 9:29 am By Craig Kennedy
Chuck just brought this to my attention: Premiere critic Glenn Kenny announced on his blog this morning that he is, as they say, no longer with the firm. I’ve never been a huge Premiere fan, but I’d grown to like Glenn’s blog over the last several months. He’s smart, occasionally combative and often entertaining. I hope that he lands on his feet somewhere.
These are dark days indeed for people who make a living talking about movies and a little bewildering for those of us who don’t do it for money. Time and again I keep telling myself that all these firings aren’t a symptom of the death of criticism, they’re a sign of the death of printed media. But I wonder: is there no room in the world for professional critics anymore?
Whether or not I agree with this or that critic, I believe there need to be strong voices raising the creative bar higher to counteract the forces of commerce that always seem to want to lower it.
Posted on May 8th, 2008 at 12:01 am By Craig Kennedy
Go, Speed Racer! Go!
If week #2 of Summer’s wide releases don’t thrill you, there are a handful of interesting looking limited releases to choose from. First up, here’s what’s most likely opening at a theater near you:
Speed Racer. Box office watchers are smelling a bomb, but I really hope this movie is a splashy, kinetic thrill ride largely aimed at kids, devoid of pop cultural references and ironic distance and jam packed with eye-popping computer-generated action. Take that and tie it to even the slimmest of narratives and it could be in the running for my favorite movie of summer. My biggest worry is the 2+ hour running time. It’s not an automatic deal breaker, but a live-action film based on a cartoon from my childhood feels like it should be leaner and meaner. Emile Hirsch is Speed, Christina Ricci is Trixie, John Goodman is Pops, Susan Sarandon is Mom and Matthew Fox is Racer X.
What Happens in Vegas. Whatever it is, I wish it had stayed in Vegas.
Redbelt (expanding wide). David Mamet’s latest opened in NY and LA last weekend and now it jumps onto 1000 screens give or take.
Posted on May 7th, 2008 at 4:25 pm By Craig Kennedy
Joel passed along some great news for all you early-adopting AV nerds who actually like movies (no, I’m not talking about the ones who bought the Superbit version of Bad Boys II back in the day). According to their newsletter, The Criterion Collection (every movie lover’s friend) has finally announced they’re going to start rolling out their catalogue in Blu-ray in October. Prices will match the standard-def versions.
Posted on May 7th, 2008 at 3:10 pm By Craig Kennedy
Because it is our policy to leave no un-spoilery Coen stone unturned, LiC is pleased to announce that Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading has been given an R rating by the MPAA for pervasive language, some sexual content and violence…you know, for adults.
So why didn’t we post the Burn After Reading shots that made the rounds last week? Paragraph 5, subsection D of the Official LiC Coen Blackout Guidelines states: “Dissemination of any audio or visual materials related to pending Coen projects prior to their official release in theaters constitutes spoiler activity and is grounds for a punch in the balls.”
Yes, I know this is a largely pointless post, but the monkeys voted and decided that we’re just that excited about the prospect of a new Coen movie and we couldn’t help ourselves.
It starts fresh every Monday using the weekend's movies as a springboard. Where it goes from there is up to you. Read what everyone is talking about and add your two cents.
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John Phillip Law, best remembered by me as Pygar the blind angel in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, died May 13 of cancer. He was 70 years old.
Perhaps you’ve heard - there’s a little thing called the 
