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Lynn Shelton Charms the Bagger

Posted Jan. 19 at 11:02 am by Brian Miller

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New York Times media reporter and blogger David Carr, aka The Carpetbagger, ran into Seattle director Lynn Shelton over the weekend at Sundance. And though he hadn't actually, you know, seen the her new movie Humpday, he was thoroughly smitten with Shelton and her scrappy band of indie stars and crew. Soon thereafter, the movie signed a distribution deal (reports Carr), which is a major coup for any Seattle filmmaker. Shelton's last feature, My Effortless Brilliance, played SIFF last year to less than steller notices. Let's hope Humpday plays SIFF this year, and goes on to full national arthouse distribution (i.e., the major cities, then Netflix).

Topics: Film

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Our First Report From Sundance

Posted Jan. 17 at 7:12 am by Brian Miller

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SW contributor and critic Scott Foundas is in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. He begins by reporting the following:

"Will everyone be wearing black?" a friend asked over dinner the other night when the subject arose of my imminent departure for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. "I'm so glad I'm not going to Sundance," confided one longtime film publicist at this week's Los Angeles Film Critics awards dinner, as if she had escaped sentencing to a leper colony. Indeed, this year, it feels like a funereal pall has descended on Park City, Utah before the curtain has even risen on January's annual powwow of independent filmmakers, distributors and deep-pocketed passholders hoping to catch a glimpse of Jennifer Aniston as she tries not to slip on the ice. When the festival does kick off tomorrow evening, with the world premiere of Oscar-winning animator Adam Elliot's debut feature, Mary and Max (featuring a clay-mated Philip Seymour Hoffman as an obese Jewish man with Asperger's syndrome), it will do so at the center of a perfect storm of indie-film bad voodoo.

Click here to continue reading.

Topics: Film

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Steven Soderbergh Interviewed

Posted Jan. 16 at 11:05 am by Brian Miller

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Soderbergh with Del Toro (Photo: Teresa Isasi/IFC Films)

Our colleague Scott Foundas sat down recently with the director of Che (review here), which opens Friday, Jan. 16 at the Varsity.

Steven Soderbergh tends to travel light — even when he has a movie camera tucked away inside his suitcase. That's how the filmmaker set off on a recent Japanese press tour where, in between interviews, he used a lightweight high-definition video camera known as the Red One to steal some Tokyo exteriors for his upcoming movie The Informant, a darkly comic thriller based on New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald's nonfiction best-seller.

Although The Informant stars Matt Damon and will be released later this year by Warner Bros., Soderbergh's moviemaking M.O. has changed little in the 20 years since his first dramatic feature, Sex, Lies and Videotape, won him the audience award at Sundance (then called the United States Film Festival), the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay—all before his 28th birthday.


Continue reading "Steven Soderbergh Interviewed"

Topics: Film

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Kevin Costner Saves Our Broken Democracy

Posted Jan. 10 at 4:02 pm by Brian Miller

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Just when we'd forgotten about Joe the Plumber, here comes Bud the Poultry Worker. Arriving Tues., Jan 13 on DVD, Kevin Costner's Swing Vote was timed—in its initial August release—to have some election-year topicality. Judging from the film's quick exit from theaters, with all of $16 million to its credit, actual voters were too concerned on the actual presidential race to pay attention to Costner's alternate America.

A producer on the film, who reportedly put his own millions into its ad campaign, Costner has been somewhat right-identified in the past, yet without outing himself as an actual Republican. A native of the SoCal suburbs who came of age in the sunny '70s, he seems like a moderate, no Rush Limbaugh ditto-head. Swing Vote (our review here) reflects his genial, middle-of-the-roadism. Which, in a year when more strident political films from the left (see W.) and right (see An American Carol) didn't do so well, still didn't save Swing Vote from box-office obscurity.

What went wrong with the picture? It's not the grandiose, ego-tripping, career-sinking epic that Waterworld represents in the Costner canon. In a year when "change" was the winning slogan, Swing Vote may've been doomed by its centrism. Though, unlike most political flicks, it was willing to name sides and parties, calling the Dems and the Republicans for what they are, the movie was unwilling to choose sides. You don't want to alienate moviegoers of either political stripe, of course, but I think Swing Vote underestimated the electorate...

Continue reading "Kevin Costner Saves Our Broken Democracy"

Topics: DVD and Film

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Humpday Benefit Party Redux

Posted Jan. 9 at 6:13 pm by Brian Miller

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As previously reported, local director Lynn Shelton got her new feature Humpday into Sundance, which begins January 15 in Utah. That's great news, but movies always cost more to make than originally envisioned. So, naturally, there's to be a fundraiser/send-off party tomorrow night (the last one, originally scheduled for Dec. 20, was snowed out).

There will be music, refreshments, and a rough-cut screening of the film. Also, potential investors take note: For a very modest financial contribution, you could be an associate producer on the flick. Details as follows:


Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, www.nwfilmforum.org. $5. 11 p.m. Sat. Jan. 10.

Topics: Film

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Local Link to Che

Posted Jan. 15 at 10:34 am by Brian Miller

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(IFC Films)

Steven Soderbergh's four-hour epic treatment of Che Guevara (played by Benicio Del Toro) opens Friday at the Varsity. (Our review here.) Among the credited screenwriters is Peter Buchman, once a playwright here in town associated with the old Annex Theatre during the '90s. After a script collaboration with part-time local screenwriter Chris McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), Buchman left town and began getting work in Hollywood, including Jurassic Park III. (Also Eragon, ugh.)

His stage productions here included Airsick (1995) and Zero G (1997). Neither of which, unfortunately, featured dinosaurs or Catalina Sandino Moreno (pictured above with Del Toro).

Topics: Film and Stage

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Golden Globes Preview and Predictions

Posted Jan. 9 at 9:20 am by Paul Jensen

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Remember last year's Golden Globe ceremony? Don't strain too hard - it didn't exist. The Writers Guild strike, and the Actors Guild's reluctance to cross the picket line, forced the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to reduce their usual glamor-fest to a press conference announcing the winners.  Not a backless gown or drunken George Clooney in sight.

 

As a film awards season junkie, I heart the Golden Globes for one simple reason: booze. That isn't sparkling cider in those flutes. Encouraging natural born narcissists to souse up before stumbling onto a stage to slur into a microphone while holding an awkward, top-heavy trophy is entertainment at its finest.  No wonder they forget who to thank - some of them forget where they are. In 1998, Christine Lahti was in the bathroom when she was announced the winner for Chicago Hope.  OK, so it's not Hedonism III, but it's bacchanal compared to the super-serious Academy Awards.

 

Some Oscar aficionados see the Globes as an Oscar indicator of sorts. Truth be told, the HFPA fancies themselves free-thinkers, so a Globe win isn't a straight shot to Oscar glory. Their Best Picture winners haven't matched the Oscar winner since 2003.  Every year there seems to be at least one or two oddball nominees; last year's Best Picture nod for the tepid Denzel Washington vehicle The Great Debaters springs to mind. There doesn't seem to be a lot of method to their madness. Still, a win can't hurt your Oscar chances. And they do pour a mean Manhattan.

 

Who's going to win on Sunday? My best guesses...

Continue reading "Golden Globes Preview and Predictions"

Topics: Film

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Mickey Rourke, Bruised and Interviewed

Posted Jan. 7 at 11:16 am by Brian Miller

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You can read J. Hoberman's new review of The Wrestler here. Meanwhile, our colleague Scott Foundas recently sat down to talk with Mickey Rourke, who's won plaudits for his comeback role, along with plenty of Oscar talk. Here's their conversation:

"I hated the '90s. The '90s fuckin' sucked," says professional wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson early on in The Wrestler—and he should know. Over the hill and past his prime—his steroidal body a palimpsest of battle scars, his graying hair dyed a Nordic blond—Robinson hasn't seen the inside of a major arena in the better part of 20 years. Nowadays, he gets top billing by scraping bottom, trading blows with other used-to-bes and might-have-beens in school gymnasiums and banquet halls, earning a cut of the door that's barely enough to cover his trailer-park rent.

As it happens, the '90s weren't much kinder to the actor playing Robinson: Mickey Rourke. By the end of that misbegotten decade, the onetime Hollywood A-lister was living in a $500-a-month studio apartment and subsisting on a meager income generated by the sale of his motorcycle collection, plus whatever acting jobs he could scrounge up from the few producers in town who weren't afraid to hire him. His flirtation with a boxing career had come to an end. His tabloid-catnip marriage to model Carré Otis had hit the skids. There were reports of arrests, of plastic surgeries gone awry, and of the actor walking off the set after a producer refused to allow his pet Chihuahua to appear with him in a scene.

"The thing is that I am the one to blame for all that," Rourke says as he lights a cigarette in what I'm pretty sure is a nonsmoking suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, the day after The Wrestler's North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. His Chihuahua, Loki, barks from a nearby cushion. "I used to blame other people, but I've got nobody else to blame except for Mickey Rourke."

Continue reading "Mickey Rourke, Bruised and Interviewed"

Topics: Film

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Why Don't They Hand Out Awards for DVD Extras?

Posted Jan. 6 at 2:31 pm by Mike Seely



Keith Fenimore, a pal of mine who now works for Howard Stern, has long had what I think is a brilliant idea to stage an awards show devoted to character actors (i.e., non-movie stars who are in just about every flick you've ever seen but whose names you don't know). The Character Actor Awards is what Fenimore has titled his idea, and he's still trying to get the requisite backing to pull it off.

Anyhow, I thought of Keith and his idea last night as I was watching the actors' commentary on Tropic Thunder, which has garnered Golden Globe supporting actor noms for Tom Cruise (undeserved and overhyped, in my opinion) and Robert Downey Jr. (who should win, in my opinion). Downey plays an Australian actor who has a pigmentation operation in order to authentically portray a black Vietnam soldier in the movie with the movie, and employs a Dolemite-era dialect throughout.

The performance is risky and brilliant by itself, but on the DVD commentary, Downey does the unexpected: he doesn't drop character, thus staying true to his character, a method maniac who says he never drops character until after the DVD commentary is in the can. Downey's improvised riffs are funnier on the commentary than they are in the movie — and they're very funny in the movie. For this he should receive some sort of award — only there aren't any awards acknowledging the genius of special features on DVD. Keith: Maybe if you combined this concept with the Character Actor Awards, you'd have a truly irresistible package.

Topics: DVD and Film

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Still More Top 10 Lists

Posted Jan. 1 at 2:52 pm by Brian Miller

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You can read our critics' alphabetical list of the 12 best films of 2008 here. Me, I'm a traditionalist, a 10 best man who prefers numbers and rankings. Happily, several of our top-line writers have complied (after the jump). First, however, is the Village Voice Media critics' poll (with my votes and 10 best list contained herein), with an introduction by the esteemed J. Hoberman. But I'll give you the list that matters first:

1. Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, U.S.) Determined little whatsit saves Earth and rocks the vote. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

2. The Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France) Great Chinese filmmaker remakes a 50-year-old French kiddie classic. Paris has never seemed more gloriously strange—nor has puppeteer Juliette Binoche.

3. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK) Insanely cheerful little earful teaches kindergarten kids (and the rest of us) how to work and play with others in normally dour British filmmaker's greatest crowd-pleaser.

4. Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China) Part archaeological dig, part science fiction, this is a documentary with actors—and Jia's latest report on China burying its past and entering the future.

5. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France) Dysfunctional French family clusters around matriarch Catherine Deneuve. She's gravely ill and in need of a compatible transplant— the real infusion is the film's superabundance of cinematic brio.

6. Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel) War is treated (and "treated") twice removed in Folman's animated documentary of the nightmares, memories, and fantasies suffered by Israeli soldiers a quarter century after invading Lebanon.

7. Milk (Gus Van Sant, U.S.) Van Sant goes straight . . . for the heartstrings, that is, in this wildly affirmative biopic of the San Francisco activist Harvey Milk, played with a controlled enthusiasm by Sean Penn.

8. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, U.S.) Boxcars, hobos, no money for gas—the Great Depression happening today: Stranded somewhere in Oregon, Michelle Williams is so lonesome she cannot cry.

9. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden) Bullied 12-year-old boy falls in puppy love with the androgynous 200-year-old child vampire next door, in this gritty, wintry, bloody adaptation of Sweden's equivalent of the Twilight novels.

10. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, U.S.) First-time director wrestles with the convoluted script he wrote for himself—it's self-reflexive to the max and beyond, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Kaufman's alter ego.

Continue reading "Still More Top 10 Lists"

Topics: Film

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Harvey Milk's Ain True Love

Posted Dec. 29, 2008 at 8:37 am by Mike Seely

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Its Golden Globe snubs aside, Gus Van Sant's Milk is a critical darling, and rightfully so. I saw it over the weekend at the Rose Theatre in Port Townsend (those who feel like the classic American movie experience is dead need only visit this little gem to be convinced otherwise). The performances were universally sensational — Emile Hirsch finally convinced me he's more than a poor man's DiCaprio — and Van Sant's sense of time and place is masterfully acute. Having previously seen the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary on the San Francisco pol's life, it is no hollow compliment to say I didn't feel shorted on historical details either.

But what really caught me by surprise was the strength of the love story between Sean Penn's Milk and James Franco's Scott Smith. The film opens with the former picking up the latter in a New York subway station, after which they move to San Francisco together, cohabitating for years together, through Milk's many early electoral defeats. Smith leaves him when it becomes evident that Milk will never put their love before the combination of his career and the gay rights movement. This departure occurs maybe midway through the film, if my memory serves me.

A lesser filmmaker might have let the romance die there. But not Van Sant, who brings Smith back in a handful of very poignant later scenes. Here, Smith is depicted as not bitter but sympathetic to the choice Milk has made — the choice to leave their love behind in pursuit of a greater good that would stand to benefit them both. Near the film's end, their post-intimate friendship blooms to the point where rediscovered romance is only a pair of opera tickets away. This possibility makes the film's conclusion tragic on a far more personal level than I ever could have imagined, and drives a cinematic stake through the cold hearts of all those Californians who voted to deny homosexuals the right to carry monogamy to its highest peak.

Topics: Film

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Tom Cruise Defends Self Against Nazi Charges

Posted Dec. 28, 2008 at 5:56 pm by Brian Miller

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Currently starring in the WWII thriller Valkyrie (review), in which he plays a German officer trying to assassinate Hitler, Tom Cruise recently sat down with our colleague Scott Foundas. Director Bryan Singer was also part of the sit-down; here's Scott's account:

It's July 20, 1944, and Adolf Hitler has been assassinated—the victim of a bomb blast organized and executed by a cabal of high-ranking German army officers seeking to wrest control of the country away from the Third Reich and, with luck, bring an end to World War II. Duped into thinking that the coup is actually the work of rogue members of Hitler's inner circle, the reserve army has taken to the streets of Berlin, arresting SS officers and other Nazi apparatchiks, while the rest of Axis Europe, taking its cue from Berlin, follows suit. By nightfall, Hitler's manifest destiny will be a thing of the past.

Well, that was the idea, anyway. If only Hitler hadn't moved that morning's strategy meeting at the Wolfsschanze from his airtight bunker to a breezy conference hut, and if only the briefcase planted by one Col. Claus von Stauffenberg—a maimed hero of the war's North African theater—hadn't bumped against the foot of Col. Heinz Brandt, who proceeded to move it behind a large wooden table leg, shielding the Führer from the worst of a blast that killed four others. Even then, the ingenious plot might have come off had Stauffenberg's co-conspirator, Gen. Friedrich Olbricht, not had second thoughts about mobilizing the reserve troops, or if only someone had thought to cut off phone service to the office of Joseph Goebbels, so that, on the verge of being arrested himself, the propaganda minister wouldn't have been able to verify the voice of his still-living-and-breathing master at the other end of the line. If only.

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Topics: Film

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Clint Eastwood Interviewed

Posted Dec. 27, 2008 at 1:51 pm by Brian Miller

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With his new Gran Torino (review) earning nice notices and scheduled to expand into more Seattle theaters next month, our colleague Scott Foundas recently sat down with the iconic, Oscar-winning actor and director. Here's what he had to say:

"You've made the first movie of the Obama generation!" exclaimed an audience member ,as he rushed up to Clint Eastwood after a recent screening of Gran Torino. "Well," the 78-year-old actor-director replied, without missing a beat, "I was actually born under Hoover." It was an ironic juxtaposition, given that Eastwood's Torino character, widowed Korean War vet and former Detroit autoworker Walt Kowalski, has earned comparisons to TV's Archie Bunker, both for his politically incorrect racial epithets and general hostility toward a modern world that seems to have left him—and his old-fashioned American values—out in the cold. "We could use a man like Herbert Hoover again," Bunker sang at the start of each All in the Family episode. But it's change, not nostalgia, that sets the tone in Gran Torino, as the belligerent Walt ventures first across the property line and then deeper into the lives of the Hmong immigrant family living next door.

The movie, Eastwood tells me the day after the Torino screening, appealed to his own personal philosophy of "never stop learning. If you never stop learning, then you never stop growing as a person, you never stop taking in new information and changing. People ask me, 'Have you changed?' And I say, 'I hope so,' because over 10, 20, 30, 40 years, you're supposed to change all the time. You're supposed to expand."

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Topics: Film

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New Oscar Connections for SIFF

Posted Dec. 22, 2008 at 4:39 pm by Brian Miller

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SIFF 2009 runs May 21 through June 14. One notable change for the festival, announced earlier this month, concerns short films. (The image above is from Giving Thanks, seen at SIFF '08.) SIFF will henceforth be deemed an Academy Awards ® qualifying festival, meaning that, according to press release:

"As a qualifying festival of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, short films that receive Best Narrative short film and Best Animation short film awards at SIFF may qualify to enter the Short Films category of the Academy Awards ® for the concurrent season without the standard theatrical run, provided the film otherwise complies with the Academy rules."
In plain English, filmmakers can henceforth save the expense of four-walling their short flicks in New York and L.A. (i.e., paying a theater to run them for a week) by instead seeking entry at SIFF (and other film fests). Provided, of course, the film is good enough to include in the fest, as determined by SIFF programmers. All of which should help the quality of short films at SIFF this summer.

Topics: Film

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Real Headline: Romantic Comedies May Be Ruining Your Love Life

Posted Dec. 17, 2008 at 10:42 am by Chris Kornelis

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Via our friends at Yahoo! I'm not going to read this article. But, I must point out one thing. The picture used here is from the atrocious Serendipity, the low point of John Cusack's career until Must Love Dogs, is in no way representative of the romantic comedy genre, of which I am a fan. Look, rag on the comforting, cheesy romantic comedies all you like. It's easy. But, don't prop up something from the bottom of the barrel as its poster child. If you want to try and make the case that The Sure Thing or Sleepless are ruining relationships, be my guest. But, Serendipity's destroyed far more.


Topics: Film

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