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400 Screens, 400 Blows - Based on a True Story
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
This week's column is based on a true story. Did I get your attention? Why is it that all the awards organizations love true stories so much? So many of this year's award contenders are based on true stories: Public Enemies, The Damned United, A Woman in Berlin, Julie and Julia (229 screens), Coco Before Chanel (145 screens), Amelia (1975 screens), Bright Star (25 screens) and even The Informant! (62 screens), as well as up-and-coming contenders like Invictus and The Young Victoria. And even if they're not specifically "true" stories, we have movies like The Last Station, about a real-life person, or movies like Brothers and The Messenger with torn-from-the-headlines plots.
It's getting so bad that, while watching it, I was even wondering whether Up in the Air was based on a true story. And certainly Precious seems based on a true story, even though it's very clearly "based on the novel PUSH by Sapphire." But why do we need this? Is it a cushion? What happens if we're exposed to pure imagination for a change? Would Star Trek have been better if it had been based a true story? What about Up? Could those balloons have really hauled that house halfway around the world? Probably not, but nobody questioned it for a second, and it doesn't matter.
New to Me: Purple Rain and Stunt Rock
Filed under: Action, Drama, Music & Musicals, Columns
As the perpetual young'en on the staff, it only seems fitting that I start chronicling my encounters with whatever classic or otherwise noteworthy titles that I'm just now dusting off and catching up with. For the first in this series, I find myself tackling a double feature of '70s/'80s rock kitsch - Stunt Rock and Purple Rain.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Doc Flock
Filed under: Documentary, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Lately I have been looking at some of my year-end awards screeners, mainly the documentaries. My critics' group votes for the year's best documentary; we each vote for our top five and then vote again from the top five finalists. It's not easy to figure out this year's front-runner as of yet, and most of the contenders have been huge yawners. For several years in a row, the big award-winners have always been about war in some form, either WWII or the more recent wars in the Middle East. But this year I have detected grumblings of ennui from the other critics, an ennui that i started developing years ago. This year the favorites appear to be a bit more lighthearted in tone, as well as more local in theme. Rowdy movies like Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Capitalism: A Love Story (52 screens) and Food, Inc. (5 screens) for example have captured the hearts of my colleagues.
The Academy threw a monkey wrench in the works when they announced their shortlist of 15 films that they would be considering for Oscar nominations. Following their bizarre rules, it was an odd list; it included many titles that no one has seen, and it eliminated many of the favorites, including Tyson (prompting an interesting response from director James Toback), Good Hair (38 screens), The September Issue (13 screens), It Might Get Loud (11 screens), Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg (10 screens) and More Than a Game (46 screens). The list also eliminated a couple of my favorites, both lively and spirited: Kirby Dick's Outrage and Not Quite Hollywood, about the history of Australian exploitation cinema.
Girls on Film: The Femmes Who Defy Convention
Filed under: Fandom, Columns, Girls on Film
A big revelation hit the wire yesterday. Belle de Jour -- a writer named after the film by Luis Buñuel -- came out of the literary closet. She's the British woman who anonymously blogged about her time as a London call girl, wrote books about her experiences, and saw them morphed into television form with the Billie Piper series Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
Her name is Dr. Brooke Magnanti, and as the Times describes: "Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants." Not quite what you were expecting, eh? Over the years, many have sworn that she couldn't be real. She must be a figment of some man's imagination, writing to make sex work look glamorous and ease the mind of lonely types who buy their sexual gratification. But here she is, 100% woman, 100% real, adept not only at the written word, but also medical pursuits.
On the one hand, I worry that this will inspire Hollywood towards a new torrent of prostitution-laced fare, adding to a business that's already over-saturated as if every Jane, Sue, and Mary have a side gig giving sex for cash. The biz already has more than enough of it, and they really don't need extra encouragement. On the other hand, I find myself enamored with her guts and how perfectly she challenges assumptions on sexuality, intelligence, and artistic flair. Naturally, this made me think about the women of film who defy convention.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - What's Up with Whip It?
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Drew Barrymore's Whip It (260 screens) opened seven weeks ago and still hasn't broken even on its initial cost. What's going on? When I walked out of the press screening, the critics were all buzzing about how much fun they'd had. The reviews were stellar: it has an 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. But somehow this critical enthusiasm just didn't translate for viewers. Something about tough chicks beating each other up during roller derby games just didn't appeal to the masses. Maybe it's because the movie is supposed to be set in Texas and was actually shot in Michigan. Maybe it's because our hero Bliss Cavendar (Ellen Page) was supposed to fall in love with a cute boy (Landon Pigg) who really wasn't very interesting, and you actually root for them to break up.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - 'Rum' Diary
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Director Claire Denis -- who was born in France but raised in colonial Africa -- enjoyed a measure of art-house buzz when she leapt onto the scene in 1989 with her film Chocolat (not to be confused with the awful 2000 Johnny Depp/Juliette Binoche movie of the same name). Siskel & Ebert praised it and Denis on their show at the time. In 2000, her film Beau Travail topped the Film Comment critics' poll of the best films of the year. But in-between, she couldn't catch a break. She has a tendency to make "mood pieces" rather than plot-driven films; these tend to cause people to think, thus making them very uncomfortable. Some of her movies couldn't get distribution and remain difficult to see. Others received only the tiniest distribution and even most critics didn't notice them. Such is the case with her wonderful new 35 Shots of Rum (2 screens), which is one of the year's best films.
Indie Spotlight: New Releases for Oct. 23
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Foreign Language, Horror, Independent, New Releases, Columns, Indie Spotlight
Here's a quick look at what's opening in limited release this weekend. If they're not playing where you live, keep an eye out as they make the rounds. And if all else fails, there's always DVD....Ong Bak 2: The Beginning (pictured) is something of a prequel to Ong Bak, the Thai sensation from a few years ago. Tony Jaa, whose multi-discipline fighting skills are beyond impressive, plays a guy who fights a lot. Cinematical's Todd Gilchrist sums up the way many of us felt when we first caught the film at South By Southwest: The fight scenes are spectacular; unfortunately, the plot that holds them together is incomprehensible and takes itself too seriously. At Rotten Tomatoes, the critics are almost evenly split between yea and nay, with the only question being whether the awesomeness of the fights is enough to compensate for the dullness of the rest of it. Playing on 10 screens in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C.
Antichrist is an art-house horror film from Lars Von Trier, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a grieving couple to whom some supernatural and terrible things happen. It's been appalling audiences since it premiered at Cannes this spring. The critics all seem to agree that it's repellent, grisly, unsettling, and hard to watch. Where they part company -- about evenly down the middle, so far -- is whether that's good or bad. Playing on one screen each in L.A., New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. It will also be available through some Video On Demand systems starting Oct. 28.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Fear of the Unknown
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Just take a look at that weekend box office. Sure, the critically panned Couples Retreat came in at #1, earning over $32 million on 3000 screens. But scan down the list and look at #4, which was Paranormal Activity. It earned $7.9 million on 160 screens. That's not a typo. One hundred and sixty screens. If we take the average, Paranormal Activity earned $49,375 per screen, and Couples Retreat took in a paltry $10,666 per screen. That's five times as many butts in the seats for the horror film than for the unfunny comedy (which means that there must have been a lot of empty seats at the latter). There's a simple reason for this: Paranormal Activity is a genuinely scary movie.
The same goes for any of the "body genres," i.e. comedies, steamy films, weepies, etc. If they genuinely work, and genuinely elicit the response that they promise, they will be a hit every time. Horror buffs -- myself included -- probably see more than a dozen new "scary" movies in the theater each year, but it's only once every few years that we actually get scared at one of them. Paranormal Activity achieves this by doing something very simple and not at all new: it doesn't show anything (or, rather, it shows very little). It knows that nothing that can be shown onscreen can equal the fears and nightmares of the people in the audience, and that the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Docs on the Rocks
Filed under: Documentary, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
I just saw Gerald Peary's new documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism -- which incidentally features Cinematical's fearless managing editor Scott Weinberg as well as Cinematical alum Karina Longworth -- and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite some lumps here and there. I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not non-critics will like it, but it celebrates many of my heroes (James Agee, Manny Farber, etc.) and even included one or two historical tidbits I did not know. One thing it talked about was the immense power wielded by Bosley Crowther at the New York Times from 1940 to 1967 -- he alone could make or break a movie -- until a new generation led by Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael began to directly challenge him. Crowther was mainly interested in social responsibility in films, films that managed to "say a little something," rather than sheer artistic exercises or works of personality. The new documentary treats Crowther kindly, but dismisses him as a relic.
Indie Spotlight: New Releases for Oct. 9
Filed under: Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Independent, New Releases, Columns, Indie Spotlight
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Here's a quick look at what's opening in limited release this weekend. If they're not playing where you live, keep an eye out as they make the rounds. And if all else fails, there's always DVD....First, be aware that Paranormal Activity has expanded into 160 theaters nationwide, with screenings all day (not just at midnight). The Coen brothers' A Serious Man (which might stretch the definition of "indie," but still) is also expanding a bit, though still in only about a dozen major cities.
Good Hair (pictured) is a highly enjoyable documentary by Chris Rock examining African American women's obsession with hair. I saw it at Sundance and, speaking as a white dude, I had no idea it was this big a deal. The black members of the audience, meanwhile, were nodding and smiling knowingly. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg had much the same reaction I did when he reviewed it at Sundance, and all but two of the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are positive, calling it funny, informative, and enlightening. Playing on about 180 screens in the greater L.A., New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. areas.
An Education was a huge hit at Sundance this year, with raves all around for its star (Carey Mulligan) and its director (Lone Scherfig). It's a coming-of-age story about a girl in 1960s London, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby. Cinematical's James Rocchi adored it; so does almost everyone else who has reviewed it. (And one of the pans is from noted contrarian Armond White, who doesn't count anyway.) It's just in New York and L.A. right now, but don't worry: Sony will be pushing it for awards consideration, so you'll get a chance to see it.
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