indieWIRE’s Long, Hot Indie Summer
You can approach summer with its seemingly endless string of big budget sequels and movies aimed at the id of 13-year-olds in a few different ways. You can close your eyes and bite the pillow praying for it to just end, you can ignore it, you can complain about it, or you can do what we do here at LiC: you can mock it.
Meanwhile, Peter Knegt over at indieWIRE has his own positive twist on #2: he’s ignoring the riff raff and shining a bright spotlight on the abundant indie and foreign offerings that should wilt in the summer heat but actually thrive as an oasis of cinematic goodness for those of you who need more than just a bunch of robots kicking the crap out of each other for sustenance.
Here’s the complete list for May
And here are my own thoughts about a handful of Knegt’s selections:
- Adoration. The latest from Atom Egoyan.
- Little Ashes. Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Federico Garcia Lorca in 1922.
- Summer Hours. Olivier Assayas’ latest is an early candidate for my favorite movie of 2009. To keep me from repeating myself, you can see what I have to say about it so far here.
- The Girlfriend Experience. Soderbergh. Say no more.
- Departures. This Foreign Language Oscar winner is about an out of work cellist who ends up taking a job in the highly ritualized world of encoffineers, professionals who prepare the bodies of deceased loved ones for the next world. In the process he addresses his daddy issues and finds closure for the emptiness in his own life. It’s odd, but promising raw material that unfortunately never delivers. Marred by melodrama, earnest but clunky voiceover, unfunny jags of humor and a stubborn predictability, Departures is still a worthwhile film but a highly overrated one.
Here’s June
plus my picks…
- Away We Go. The trailer for this one looks like Sam Mendes read a book called “How to Make an Indie Film in 30 Days or Less” and Away We Go was the result.
- Tetro. Francis Ford Coppola’s latest.
- Food, Inc. Scary looking documentary about where our food really comes from.
- Moon. The Sundance sci-fi number with Sam Rockwell I’ve been looking forward to.
- Whatever Works. Woody Allen.
- The Hurt Locker. Kathryn Bigelow’s gripping psychological action movie about an elite bomb disposal squad in Iraq.
Here’s July
well you know the drill by now…
- (500) Days of Summer. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s year-and-a-half-long love affair with Zooey Deshchanel got good notices at Sundance.
- In the Loop. This big-screen spin on the caustic British comedy In the Thick of it is a satiric look at the US/UK relationship in the run up to the Iraq war featuring Peter Capaldi, James Gandolfini, David Rasche and Steve Coogan.
- Lorna’s Silence. Belgium’s Dardenne brothers are always worth a look.
And here’s August
- Cold Souls. Here’s another one out of Sundance. Paul Giamatti stars in a comedy where human souls can be extracted, bought and sold.
- It Might Get Loud. Davis Guggenheim’s documentary look at electric guitar players from three different generations: Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White.
- Taking Woodstock. Ang Lee.
- Inglourious Basterds. Quentin Tarantino’s latest is the movie I’m most looking forward to this summer.
Filed under: Upcoming
Little Ashes, Adoration, Summer Hours, Lorna’s Silence, The Girlfriend Experience, 500 Years of Summer and of course Inglorious Bastards are the ones I am most looking forward to.
Yes to Inglorious Basterds! I’ll give any Woody Allen a try. In the Loop also sounds interesting. I did hear good things about 500 Days of Summer so I may check that out too.
Of course I’m way behind on movie-going once again and there are still tons of old movies I haven’t seen. There are a ton of books I haven’t read that I want to catch up on too (they’re piled up in stacks on my apartment floor). I need extra hours in the day.
I want to see Inglorious Basterds as much as anything too, but on what planet is a 70 million Weinstein backed, Brad Pitt headlining war-movie indie?
I’d say “indie” is about more than a budget. IB is an artist driven film released by a non-major studio. Sure, it’s in a different class than say…Moon or Summer Hours, but it sure as Shinola isn’t Transformers 2 or GI Joe.
I’d like to see every one of these. I’m very heartened that Egoyan’s new movie has been getting solid reviews, since he’s had such a string of misfires or at least misunderstoodfires since The Sweet Hereafter (love that film).
I’m least interested in Away We Go and Taking Woodstock, but the directors make them worth a look.
Yeah, what she said. It would be redundant to repeat JB, but I’m in the tank for almost all of these at the moment. Ang Lee and Sam Mendes are doing nothing for me with the early trailers on their films, but maybe the actual movies will be better? I don’t know.
Regardless, the three movies I’m most curious about: Summer Hours, Moon, Basterds.
Sam Mendes and Departures are the odd men out for me. Ang Lee is Ang Lee so even the somewhat tired milieu is ok by me. Hopefully he can offer a fresh take on it. I did like the trailer some.
I’m up for WHATEVER WORKS, (500) DAYS OF SUMMER, TAKING WOODSTOCK, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS AND anything else that’s special and unexpected that comes down the pike….
Let’s hope it’s a long, hot summer that’s cinematically rich.
Those are the best kind. In the summer theatres are the best places to be.
All that lovely air conditioning…
I followed the link from the SOOD: July post and now I realize that most of what arrives in June here will arrive for me in July, so maybe July isn’t so bad after all. And it’s already looking like Summer Hours and Girlfriend Experience will arrive in June here, so June has something (SOMETHING) to offer.
Thank god.
Summer Hours = Fucking awesome. Not to hype it too much, I’m just saying.