****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: George Clooney
Written by: George Clooney/Grant Heslov/Beau Willimon
Based on play by: Beau Willimon

With those above words, unfortunately, a person could barely get elected School Marm these days.

Bugger.

What’s up for previews, these days?

YOUNG ADULT–With every preview, I want to see this movie even more. People hate Diablo Cody these days because she was nominated for an Oscar. That’s the only reason, no matter what they say. Eff ‘em. I still like Juno. (We’ll ignore Jennifer’s Body…if possible.) Charlize Theron looks to be perfect in the role of the girl everyone hates coming back to her hometown to destroy the marriage of her high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson). And Patton Oswalt, too? Yep. I’m there.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO–Once again…with every preview, I want to see this movie even more. David Fincher could have changed everything but the name and I would still go see it, knowing that I was going to see something super-entertaining and pretty goddamn good. I’m all in.

THE GREY–Why is Liam Neeson making all of these revenge flicks lately? (Ok, this isn’t EXACTLY a revenge flick, but it did tell me what’s going on with his decisions these days.) Here, he plays a man mourning the death of his wife. He goes out to Alaska and…lives with the wolves? Something like that. Joe Carnahan has missed before, but I still have faith. And, as long as Liam is mourning his own tragic loss, I’ll be there for him in the theatre…or at least on video. He is damn good at this stuff.

Ok. Back to it.

In the world of politics, nothing is sacred. The folks behind the scenes may tell us that integrity and loyalty rule the day, but they don’t believe it for a second. And they certainly don’t practice it.

Mike Morris (Clooney) is a presidential candidate with hope. Sorry…that’s HOPE. He sees no reason that religion should enter into the political realm, doesn’t understand why wealth is distributed to the rich and will never allow gay marriage to be anything other than a Civil Rights issue. He wants change and he’s going to be the arbiter. He just needs to win the Democratic primary in Ohio against Senator Pullman (Michael Mantell)

His crew is behind him 100%. Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an old hand at the whole campaigning thing and loyalty is Job One for him. He’s going to get Morris into office no matter what. He may play dirty occasionally (has to talk Morris into it most of the time), but he does it for the good of the candidate.

Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) is the newb. He’s young, idealistic and effing smart. He knows every move to make and when to make it. With Steve and Paul behind him, there’s no way that Morris can lose.

That is, until Pullman’s man, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), starts playing SUPER dirty. And until a young intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood…don’t know if she’s ever been better or sexier than she is right here) gets involved with Steve. Will Steve keep with his idealism? Will Paul manage to get dirty Senator Thompson (Jeffery Wright) to back Morris without giving him the world? Will loyalty bite Paul in the ass? And what of intrepid reporter Ida (Marisa Tomei)? What does she know that could blow the whole thing?

A lot of comparisons have been made to The Candidate. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen that movie, so I can’t make those comparisons. I’ll have to rely on my own observations. And those observations tell me that this is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. Clooney’s directing keeps getting better (although, I haven’t seen Leatherheads…not too sure about that one) and everyone is on the top of their game, standouts being, naturally, Hoffman and Giamatti. These guys are so good at playing these kinds of slimeballs that it’s hard not to like them while you’re trying to figure out if you hate them. Sure, Paul is loyal, but he’s also in politics. He’s not necessarily a good man. Tom, on the other hand, you pretty much hate from the get-go. He’ll do anything it takes to win, even if it means ruining another man’s life.

The only thing that I was a little unsure of was how bad Steve’s transgression really was. There’s one line that he could have fed the press that, I think, would have told the truth about Tom and made Steve out to be an ok guy. Instead, it had to escalate to something worse than it really was.

Oh well. The movie would have been pretty short if he had done that.

One thing that really struck me about this movie was how much of a gangster movie it was. No one, no matter how “good” they are, is untouched by greed and power. Everyone is in danger of being whacked/fired. There’s even an intense scene where a character is called into a suburban and we’re outside during the meeting. Is that person getting killed? What’s going on? Dammit! LET ME IN!!!

The moral of the story is that politics is dirty. Sure, it’s been said before, but rarely so gracefully or tragically. This is a great film from a man who, hopefully, has plenty more great films in him. Hell, between The Descendants, Drive and Crazy, Stupid Love, Clooney and Gosling have had an amazing year.

By the way, Clooney. If you ever ran for President, I would vote for you in a heartbeat. Just sayin’…

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Brian Jett
Written by: Brian Jett

Walter Dishman (David Denman who played Skip the demon on Angel) is a parole officer who is about to change his entire life. He just got three parolees who are going to help him, even if none of them know it yet.

Darla DeMint (Gillian Jacobs) is cold-hearted bitch who uses her hotness to get her way, then dumps the men who fell in love with her. The last one gave her a ring that she then tried to sell on e-Bay. Unfortunately for her, it was stolen.

Kris Styles (Kevin Hart) is a former doctor who committed a white-collar crime. Now he has to get a job to not break parole. The thing is, he doesn’t need a job. He’s got all the money he needs…if only his wife was still around.

Artie Satz (Ed Asner who, sadly, sounded like he was being read his lines a lot of the time) is a lifer. He just got out of prison after a long career robbing banks. Now what’s an old guy to do?

Of course, Darla starts to use her feminine wiles on Walter and he falls for it. He starts hanging out with her during his off time. Kris goes from job to humiliating job. Artie thinks about going back to the life.

Oh yeah. Walter is married…a fact that the filmmakers barely even register for us until it’s convenient to the story. Unfortunately, it starts to make Walter look like a terrible person because his wife is a perfectly nice lady. Nice to look at, too. As a matter of fact, I didn’t really like anyone in this movie but her. Artie was an asshole, Darla was a bitch (who started to change for no apparent reason) and Kris didn’t handle some of his jobs well. (Ok, some of them I totally understand. But the parking attendant job? Totally could’ve saved that.) And tell me again why I’m supposed to feel sorry for a guy who cheated Blue Cross or Medicare out of millions of dollars? Another insurance company I would totally be down for, but not those two. That’s like stealing from a charity.

This is one of those movies that tries to be everything and only really succeeds at a couple of them. It’s an ok character study, but that’s about it. It’s not particularly romantic. It’s not particularly funny. It’s not particularly dramatic. It’s not even very good at the social commentary about the prison system. I’ve seen it before and it was usually better.

Not particularly good, unfortunately.

THE DESCENDANTS (2011)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Alexander Payne
Written by: Alexander Payne/Nat Faxon/Jim Rash
Based on book by: Kaui Hart Hemmings

Alexander Payne has a very interesting formula. Take a likeable actor (Reese Witherspoon, Matthew Broderick, Jack Nicholson, Paul Giamatti) and saddle them with a pretty unlikeable character. Turn that character’s world on its head about 15 times. Then throw about a ton of narration over everything.

Throughout my time in film school, I was always told “No narration! It’s a crutch!” I would love for someone to tell Payne that. And then I would love for him to laugh in their faces. His movies fucking work. And they work perfectly.

Matt King (George Clooney) is a Hawaiian lawyer whose family has owned a giant plot of land for generations. It’s part of his heritage, but now it’s time to give it up. He and his cousins have seven years to sell the land or they have to break up the trust that owns it.

Meanwhile, Matt’s wife is dying of injuries sustained in a boating accident. She’s been in a coma for weeks and is not going to pull through. After dragging his oldest daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), out of reform school, she tells him that she caught her mom with another man (Matthew Lillard, looking for the first time like an adult).

Queue the journey. Matt, Alexandra, younger daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) and Alexandra’s dumbass boyfriend Sid (local boy, Nick Krause) head out to find this guy and confront him while trying to figure out how to tell the rest of the family about the impending death.

Everything about this movie is pretty amazing. Alexander Payne has yet to make a bad film and this keeps that record going. It’s funny, sad, thoughtful and perfectly acted by everyone. His movies are always peopled with folks that we wouldn’t want to hang out with, but MAN do we ever want to see movies about them. Matt King is no exception. He’s not exactly the best dad, hasn’t always been there for his daughters or his wife. Luckily, he’s an amazing subject for a film. It certainly doesn’t hurt that George Clooney is on the top of his game here. This very well could be his best performance yet. (You have no idea how heartbreaking it is to see that man cry.)

Of all of Payne’s films, this is probably the most beautifully shot. Not only does he show us the beauty of Hawaii (and there are some shots that make me want to go there tomorrow), but he shows us the mundane parts, too. The opening shots are of the cities that we never see: the traffic, the office buildings, the suburbs. It’s all there, too. We just don’t know about it because Hawaii is “Paradise.”

By the end of the movie, like all of Payne’s movies, we love the characters and Hawaii…even dumb ol’ Sid. Against all odds, we want this family to go on forever. And we wouldn’t mind if the movie was about three more hours long. We could watch them all learn to forgive each other all over again.

Watch for Beau Bridges basically playing his brother and Robert Forster playing himself.

The live action shorts program this year was much better than the animated program. There really wasn’t a loser in the bunch!

5 MINUTE DATING (2010)
Directed by: Peter Hatch
A really funny short about a young man who is just looking for love at speed dating. Unfortunately, he’s a bit of a monster

This one was great with a hilarious lead character and a pretty unexpected ending. Check it out.

DEUS IRAE (2010)
Directed by: Pedro Cristiani

Exorcism takes a special breed. These guys are that special breed. They’re the tough priests who will do anything to fend off the devil, even if it means beating the shit out of a little girl. Great special effects and some cool characters make me really hope that they’re trying to make this into a feature.

THE LEGEND OF BEAVER DAM (2010)
Directed by: Jerome Sable

A slasher short that Joss Whedon would love. A group of young campers are being told a slasher story by the douchebag camp master. One kid, in particular, is catching the brunt of his douchebaggery. But will Stumpy Sam help the kid get his revenge? And will there be singing?

Oh, yes. There will be singing…and gore. This is another one that I could almost see being a feature, but it might be best as a short. Seek it out. It’s funny AND catchy.

INTERVIEW (2010)
Directed by: Sebastian Marka

A reporter is trying to find out why a serial killer does what he does. He is interviewing him with an open mind. But is the killer trying to give him first hand experience?

This one was really intense. I never really knew what to think about what was going on and really couldn’t wait to find out. Maybe a bit too Seven, but whatever. Great short.

NINJAS (2010)
Directed by: Dennison Ramalho

This was actually my least favorite, but that was more for the absolute discomfort factor than anything else. It’s about cops in Brazil. A newbie accidentally shoots a kid thinking he’s a drug mule. When the other cops make him “go ninja,” he finds out just how corrupt and cruel his co-workers can be…and so do we. Jesus Christ (who makes a rather gory appearance), this one is painful to watch. Very good, maybe even one of the best. But I never need to see it again. Funny, because the director was a pretty jovial (and possibly drunk) guy.

OFF SEASON (2009)
Directed by: Jacob Jaffke

A cat burglar and his dog go from house to house in a resort town during the winter months, mainly to get alcohol. Things get freaky when he finds the wrong house…and a frozen body.

I don’t know what resort town has THIS much snow and frozen bodies of water, but whatever. It made for a really intense and creepy short that almost seemed to be inspired by the Genesis song “Home By The Sea.” Or maybe I’m a total geek.

LA PETIT MORT (2010)
Directed by: Jan Gallasch

A nurse pays a visit to a young man in her hospital. But she has deadly intentions…sexy, sexy deadly intentions.

Even with the title, I wasn’t sure where this one was going until it got there. When it finally did, it was pretty awesome. Maybe one of the lesser shorts but, in the group, that still means that it’s pretty damn good.

ROSENHILL (2010)
Directed by: Johan Lundborg/Johan Storm

Certainly one of the longest shorts of the festival, this one is about an old woman being admitted to an old folks’ home. She makes a friend, but then sees the craziest of the old men murdered in the night by two of the attendants. Who will believe her, though.

Really good, creepy stuff that makes me not want to get old. I guess it’s better than the alternative, but at some point it becomes less appealing.

TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER (2010)
Directed by: Can Evrenol

A young boy sees his dad and pregnant mom having sex. He gives them more than they bargained for.

A gore-filled back half and a disturbing sex scene made this one of the more viscerally disturbing of the program, but not the best. Still very good, though, and worth checking out if you don’t mind baby trauma. (There’s a LOT of that in this festival. Just about every one of the bumpers has a horrible abortion/baby killing scene. What’s up?)

THE UNITED MONSTER TALENT AGENCY (2010)
Directed by: Greg Nicotero

Nicotero is mainly known for his gore effects, but there’s no gore in this light-hearted short. It’s a newsreel telling us about the talent agency that handled all of the classic monsters of the 40s and 50s. (It even showed some of the monsters that were in development!)

Fun stuff from Nicotero. Definitely check it out.

THE HOUSEMAID (1960)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Ki-young Kim
Written by: Ki-young Kim

Apparently, music teachers were a hot commodity in 1960 Korea.

A middle aged music teacher (who also apparently works at a mill, although I never really saw him work there) is trying to build a bigger house as he builds up his family. He has two kids and a third on the way and his wife is weak from the pregnancy and working constantly at home as a seamstress. He has had one girl in his class fall in love with him and try to ruin his career. He takes on another one as a piano student and has her find a housemaid for his family. Both girls fall for him. Chaos ensues.

This is an incredibly complex and kind of disturbing look at infidelity. The “hero” is not a particularly nice guy, although he is a good father and, for the most part, a good husband. One little thing, though, can set him off and make him slip up. When the housemaid gets pregnant, things get worse. As he is building his new house, his family starts to fall apart.

I can understand why this is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films. It may be steeped in Korean culture, but the affairs of men and women are universal. (So, apparently, is the Mike Hammer theme (aka, “Harlem Nocturne”). It was used in a pivotal scene. Other than that, the original music by Sang-gi Han was very good.) There is really no reason that this movie couldn’t find a new audience in the US.

And then there’s the last 30 seconds. Um….what? I know this is a morality play, but seriously? I won’t give it away, but the very end just kind of comes out of nowhere.

I’m not sure how you will be able to see this film as it has not been released in the US on DVD. This annoys me, actually, but I have a feeling that Scorsese (who was involved in the restoration) will rectify that soon. It was released in Korea in 2008, so maybe we’ll get it here soon. And, with the remake out now, it shouldn’t be long.

Speaking of the remake….

THE HOUSEMAID (2010)

** (2/5)

Directed by: Sang-soo Im
Written by: Sang-soo Im
Based on characters by: Ki-young Kim

I have an idea. Let’s remake a classic film, but take out all sense and make it about the insanities of the rich instead of the roles of men and women.

A young poor woman gets a job as a nanny/housemaid for a super-rich family. They get whatever they want and have a head maid who rules the house. The young woman starts an affair with the man, loves their little girl and has almost no interaction with the woman, who is pregnant with twins. She gets pregnant, wants to keep the baby and ruins her life. For the last ten minutes, she decides that she wants revenge.

This was like a Korean episode of Dallas. Pretty pointless stuff. It starts off with a young woman jumping to her death in the market. She has nothing to do with the rest of the film. The last scene, which is all in broken English, I think was supposed to be a nod to the original’s strange ending, was completely nonsensical.

Skip this bullshit and see the original, if you can.

BUNRAKU (2010)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Guy Moshe
Written by: Guy Moshe

Absolutely the best art-deco impressionistic post-apocalyptic spaghetti western samurai comic book movie I’ve ever seen.

A young drifter (Josh Hartnett) floats into a gunless world ruled by a sadistic woodcutter named Nicola (Ron Perlman). He meets a bartender with a past (Woody Harrelson) and kid from Japan named Yoshi (Gackt, who is apparently a HUGE star in Japan). The three of them take it upon themselves to take down the regime, which is enforced by Killer #2 (Kevin McKidd) and seven other killers of varying skills.

Demi Moore also appears briefly as a prostitute with ties to Nicola and a certain ex co-star of hers.

The story is really nothing new. Drifter comes to town and, although he has no ties to anyone, he tries to take down the regime…often for selfish reasons at first. But maybe he grows a heart as time goes on. And the dialogue could be a little clunky at times.

That really didn’t matter to me, though. The visual style was so engaging and the performances so cool that I was fully involved the entire time. (It helps that I like all of these actors.)

The style is pretty hard to describe. Woody’s character makes pop-up books, so it’s a little bit like that, but there’s a lot of Dick Tracy-esque primary colors and crazy CGI stuff going on. The fight scenes are done in the same style. I’m not sure if Josh Hartnett is a great fighter, but this movie sure made him seem pretty awesome.

It doesn’t hurt that the world of the movie has abolished guns. Sure, gunfights can be cool. But sword and stick fights are a LOT more fun to watch.

It’s not a perfect film by any means, but I had a lot of fun with it. And, for this kind of movie, that’s all that matters. It wasn’t just another dumb-ass action flick.

SUMMER WARS (2009)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Mamoru Hosoda
Written by: Satoko Okudera

Kenji is one of those kids that you would never notice in school. He’s super smart and plays with computers all the time. He and his buddy work for a social networking website called OZ. They’re kind of junior tech support kids.

That’s why when popular girl Natsuki shows up at their office at the school asking one of them to come with her and do a job, they’re both pretty surprised. Kenji ends up going and finds out that the job involves telling her extended family that he is her future husband and that he’s a college boy with a really good background. (He’s actually a high school student with a normal, everyday, absentee family.)

Natsuki’s family is crazy and huge. Her great-grandmother rules the roost, but everyone else is even more bossy. When they find out that he’s NOT her fiancee and isn’t what she said he was, they immediately want to kick him out.

Which, of course, involves OZ. You see, OZ isn’t just a social networking site. It’s kind of a stand-in for the entire internet. Everything in the world is basically run on this network. When Kenji breaks a random code that sent to him on his cell phone, everything shuts down. Is it his fault? How can he fix it? CAN he fix it at all?!

This is one of those movies that starts out going exactly where you think it’s going to go and then takes a left turn at some point to become something much bigger and better than it ever should have been. In this case, it works nearly perfectly. The family is the thing here and, even with the bigger story of OZ and a possible nuclear accident, the family remains front and center of the story. Each member has their own personality and is integral to the outcome. It’s the kind of family that you actually want to spend more time with. And before you run off and say that they’re not realistic, bite your tongue. They reminded me a LOT of a family that I have been lucky enough to be enveloped into for the last 10 years or so. So many disparate people who have almost nothing in common but blood. But that’s enough to keep them together through good times and bad.

And that really is what the movie is all about: family. Keep them close no matter what happens. They may just help you prevent the end of the world.

Not bad for a movie directed by a guy who started out with Digimon.

I actually even skipped the first movie. I’ve seen Up at least twice, maybe more. It was absolutely one of my favorites of the year and, possibly, even the one that I think should win Best Picture. It won’t, but I think it should.

You can read my review here.

Let’s get right into the first one I saw today.

A SERIOUS MAN

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Joel Coen/Ethan Coen
Written by: Joel Coen/Ethan Coen

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) tries to be a serious man. He takes his marriage seriously. He takes his kids seriously. He takes his job as a physics professor seriously. And he takes his Jewish faith seriously.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that things won’t fall apart on him. In the same week that he’s up for tenure at his school a student tries to bribe him for a passing grade, his wife tells him that she’s leaving him and seeing Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), his brother (Richard Kind) is having some sort of crisis and his son is having his bar mitzvah. How could things possibly get any worse?

When the Coens are in charge of a retelling of the story of Job, you know that things will get worse. This is and isn’t a typical Coen Brothers film. First off, it’s a very personal film. It’s about Jews in suburbia in the late 60s…just as they were. It deals very closely with their religion and the way they grew up. It’s also the story of a man who loves his faith, but he’s about to lose it because so much is falling apart around him.

As always, the Coens manage to make someone else’s pain very funny. It’s not as laugh-out-loud as something like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski, but it’s still a comedy. Larry is a schmuck. He’s a loser. He’s a schlemiel. No doubt about that. But there’s something so pathetic about the guy that it’s hard not to really push for him and want things to work out. Stuhlbarg is amazing in this role and absolutely deserves all of the accolades that he’s gotten from this performance. Also better than expected was Richard Kind. He can be a pretty funny guy, but I’ve never seen him try anything else. He was very good here in what could have been a one-note role.

Also watch for Micheal Lerner and Adam Arkin in small roles.

I’m not a Jew, so it’s hard for me to really relate to a lot of this film, but I think I might understand my Jewish friends a little bit better after seeing it.

A lot of my friends who saw this movie with me hated it. Mainly it seemed to be because of the ultra-ambiguous ending. The thing is that they pretty much tell you that the story will have an ambiguous ending about mid-way through the film. And, really, there is no other way for the film to end. I loved it. It may actually rank up with some of the Coens’ best work. Just know that you’ll have to work some stuff out for yourselves.

THE HURT LOCKER

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal

“War is a drug.” This film starts with those words. Then it takes the next two and a half hours to prove it to us.

William James (Jeremy Renner) is the new guy on the EOD team. Unfortunately for the other two guys, he’s also the leader. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are actually scared when he takes over for their former leader (Guy Pearce). Is this guy going to get them killed?

In the RL, the answer to that question would be yes. Actually, no. It wouldn’t This guy would have been fired before he finished his first day on the job. He’s a complete dumbass. He puts on his suit and walks out to disarm a bomb, even after his team tells him that they have robots to do just that. Then he goes out, disarms the bomb and starts yanking on other cables that he finds with no real regard as to whether they might be attached to other bombs. Seriously? I would fire this guy and I wouldn’t know the first thing about disarming a bomb.

Barring that, though, this is a movie and, even though my friend who actually did this kind of work in Iraq called the movie pure fantasy, I’m here to grade it on its merits as a film, not its accuracy…of which there really isn’t much at all.

James is a down to earth guy for a guy who yanks on bombs all day for a living. He does his best to get to know his team and the people around them. He even befriends one of the kids who sells DVDs to the troops. (Right here, I thought, “Dammit. I’m seen MASH. I know what’s going to happen here.”)

The movie doesn’t necessarily have much of a through-line story. There’s no single villain except for the faceless Iraqis who are placing the bombs and shooting at our heroes. It starts 39 days before they’re done with their tour and ends basically at the end of those 39 days. It’s just a string of bomb disarmings put together to form a character study of the guys who do this incredibly important job. Luckily, the characters are interesting enough to hang this film on.

Is it a great film? Meh. I don’t really think so. I think it’s very good, but it’s not great. Maybe what ruined it for me is that even I am smarter about disarming bombs than these guys were. Or maybe it was the fact that I’ve seen a lot of war films, so I knew a lot of the tricks that Bigelow and Boal were pulling on us. (Although, they did kind of pull one new one with the kid. Kind of.) They do know how to build suspense, though. Those disarming scenes were pretty fucking tense. Definitely the best moments of the film.

Definitely worth seeing, possibly even buying. I wouldn’t say it’s Oscar worthy, though. I think everyone loves it so much because it gets into the heads of these guys…unfortunately, they don’t have anything new to say about their plights.

It’s still better than Bigelow’s ex-husband’s movie.

AN EDUCATION

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Lone Scherfig
Written by: Nick Hornby
Based on memoir by: Lynn Barber

England in the early 60s was a MUCH more permissive place than America in the early 10s, apparently. I spent this entire movie thinking about how strange it was that a couple were perfectly ok with their 16 year old daughter dating a nearly 40 year old man.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is just such a 16 year old. She meets David (Peter Sarsgaard) outside of her orchestra rehearsal when he offers her cello a ride when it’s raining. The two hit it off and, eventually, start dating. Meanwhile, her parents (Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina) don’t seem to have too many problems with this older man taking her all over town.

Times were different then, though. They were looking to get Jenny married partly because it would save them the money of sending her to college at Oxford. (They’re not quite that cold, but that is a big factor.)

David’s friends, Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), seem to have some secrets. Come to think of it, so does David. He’s really good at coming up with reasons for Jenny to come with him on weekend trips. And how does he make his money?

Basically, this is a really good (and more complex) version of Mona Lisa Smile. Jenny fights for her right to have a real education without having to be married off. I mean, why even bother if you have to give it all up when you get married, right? Even her headmaster (Emma Thompson) doesn’t seem to understand that Jenny wants to do something besides get married OR teach. (At the time you couldn’t really do both.) Although, she wants an English degree and, unfortunately, there’s not much else that you can do with that besides teach. Sad, but true.

An Education is a very good movie but, again, not so Oscar worthy. There just isn’t anything new here…except for the creep factor with the major age difference.

DISTRICT 9

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Written by: Neill Blomkamp/Terri Tatchell
Based on short film by: Neill Blomkamp

I’ve seen District 9 before, but I really wanted to see it again on a big screen. The main thing I wanted to make sure of was my original assessment of the special effects. Luckily, I was right. They are better than Avatar’s.

Wikus (Sharlto Copley who should have been nominated for an Oscar) is a weasel of a man. He works for the MNU, a munitions company in South Africa who pretty much rule the nation now that the aliens are here.

The aliens (“Prawns” to the racist humans) came 20 years ago and seem to be stuck on Earth. South Africa did what they always do: they put the folks who look different into a slum and made them separate and unequal. The aliens live in squalor that they aren’t allowed to get out of and now the MNU wants to move them to a concentration camp.

Wikus is sent in to serve the Prawns eviction notices. He has fun with it at first. He’s just as bad as the rest of the humans. He thinks the Prawns are slime, worse than animals.

Then something happens. Something horrible and amazing. He starts to turn into one of them. As he’s treated worse and worse by his own kind, one of the Prawns, Christopher Johnson as he’s called by the humans, starts to treat him better. Christopher is  a father and just wants to get his people home.

What’s so amazing about this movie is that the CGI creatures are actually more human than the humans. Christophe and his son are much more appealing than Wikus is. As Wikus turns more and more Prawn, he starts to become more human.

I love this movie. It’s not just a morality play about racism and human nature to hate what it doesn’t understand, but it’s a great gore-flick, too. The effects and gru are pretty amazing. The Prawns mix in with the human world far better than the giant blue smurfs of Avatar and the story makes more sense.

So, that’s all of ‘em. All TEN of the Oscar nominated films. What do I think of the choices?

Well, I absolutely think that it could have been whittled down to five. In fact, these ten could be whittled down to even less to let in some more worthy films. Of the ten here, I think that Up, A Serious Man, District 9 and Up In The Air are the best. I love Inglourious Basterds, but I’m not sure that it’s better than those four. In its place, I would put either The Fantastic Mr. Fox or Where The Wild Things Are. There. I said it. That was a great film.

What should win? Up. Hands down, Up was the best of these ten (or twelve) films. It won’t win, but it should. What will win? Most likely we’re down to either Avatar or The Hurt Locker, two of the films that I don’t think belong. It will probably be The Hurt Locker, because it’s more of an issue film. It’s also MUCH better, so I guess I won’t be TOO terribly upset if it wins over Avatar. I just wish that they would give the award to the movie that actually deserves it. Up will win Best Animated Feature and that will probably be it.

That’s too bad, but unsurprising. We’ll see tomorrow night, though!

**** (4/5)

Directed by: David Bruckner/Dan Bush/Jacob Gentry
Written by: David Bruckner/Dan Bush/Jacob Gentry

When you live in a town called Terminus, you know something is wrong.

But now something is REALLY wrong. A strange signal has infiltrated anything that sends or receives signals. It is turning people into killers. Not just random, unthinking killers, either. They are completely rational and everything they’re doing makes perfect sense to them.

When Mya (Anessa Ramsy, whose only other credit is a 48 Hour Film Project called “Darkest Adversary”) comes home from having an affair with Ben (Justin Welborn who looks a bit like he should be killing zombies to Queen songs), she notices that her husband, Lewis (AJ Bowen who looks like Vincent D’Onofrio and Ryan Reynolds’ evil love child), is even more hostile than normal. When the inevitable violence happens, for some reason it’s more shocking than it should be.

The film is told in three parts, each taken on by a different director/editor/writer. All three, Dan Bush, David Bruckner and Jacob Gentry, are pretty new to the game, only having done small features and shorts before this. And all three have a different vision, which is pretty cool.

The same trick that I decried in my Vantage Point review is done here…but this time it works. First off, all of the characters aren’t in the same fucking room when the shit goes down. We see three completely different stories that come to the same point, skipping over the parts where characters are in the same room that we’ve already seen. There are no big cliffhangers to keep us staring at the screen during imaginary commercial breaks. And all of these characters are pretty interesting. (I especially like the guy who devolves into a foil hat wearer before our eyes.)

There are some pretty horrible images here which are partly there to shock and partly to make us see what humans can do to each other when they are at their basest. This signal takes us back to our primordial instincts and it’s pretty horrifying. Even the good guys do some pretty awful things that we would hope that good guys wouldn’t do.

My only problem with this movie is that, if you were to read anything into it, you might take away a kind of anti-media message. Maybe saying that too much violence in the media could lead to more violence. But I think that might be reading too much into it. After all, it’s a strange signal that makes them violent, not video games or movies. (Although that first scene that is supposedly from a movie is pretty fucking violent. And that’s supposed to be when the signal started. Hmmmm….)

Maybe it’s technology that makes us violent. I know that when my computer does something stupid I want to break something.

By the way, as I was walking out of the theatre, there was a guy standing outside wanting me to say something about the film. Since I liked it so much I wasn’t really sure what to say that would sound interesting. It’s not that I had nothing to say…I just couldn’t think of anything amazing to say. As evidenced by this rather humdrum reviews. (“It was great!” BORING!!) In fact, the only thing that I could think to say if I had been accosted was, “Like The Cell, but good.” And I totally would have said that! If I had actually read The Cell. As it is, my honest critic’s heart couldn’t allow me to say it. Instead, I hid away.

Damn my heart.

Either way, this is a great festival. And, even if the movies aren’t as good as they used to be, it’s still a lot of fun. (And, to be honest, the movies are still great. It’s just that once you’ve seen one movie about Iranian women gaining new freedoms, it’s hard to think that you haven’t seen them all. And that seemed to be what ALL of the smaller movies were about this year.)

But the big news of the festival (besides the movies and celebrities running around) was The Palm. That’s the new theatre that took over for The Max this year. It’s still the biggest theatre in Telluride, but it’s a few seats shy of The Max. It’s also an actual theatre. The screen is flown in on a fly system instead of being built from the ground up inside of a gym. The seats are permanent (and some are at really weird angles) and there’s a balcony! No more lugging heavy quartets of seats through the school and placing them very carefully throughout the gym! This is a state of the art REAL theatre!

And, just to keep up with history, there are bits and pieces of the old theatres around. There is a sign from the lobby of The Max, a banner from The Strand (that was before my time AND before The Max’s time) and a giant sign for Vespucci Pictures. (That’s the name given to the production crew of the festival.)

And here’s the strange thing for a Texas boy to notice: The Palm theatre is named after a guy named Michael D. Palm. That, in itself, isn’t so weird. What’s weird is that Mr. Palm was a gay man. Even THAT isn’t all that weird. What’s REALLY weird is that this is a publicly funded school that named it’s facility after an openly gay man who worked for gay rights and died of AIDS. That just would not happen in Texas. Not even in a mostly progressive town like Austin. No, no. There would be so many people protesting it that they would finally just scrap the project all together, wait 10 years and then try to build the thing again under a different name. It’s amazing to me that a small town in a state that, just a few years ago, passed a law that was pretty discriminatory against gays (remember the whole Barbra Streisand thing?) would name a school facility (even a theatre) after a gay man. That’s pretty cool. If only the whole country could be as open minded.

And with that revelation comes the rather unofficial theme of this year’s festival: Gay.

For the first time ever that I know of, there was in fact a movie about gay cowboys at a film festival in a small mountain town. Since I didn’t actually get to see Brokeback Mountain, I can’t tell you if there was any pudding being eaten.

I actually only saw two movies with lead gay characters in them. Here’s the big one:

CAPOTE (2005)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: Dan Futterman
Based on book by: Gerald Clarke

Truman Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman in an amazing performance) is synonymous with witty writing. His books pretty much define the late 50s and early 60s. With Breakfast At Tiffany’s he created one of the most indelible characters of the mid-century with Holly Golightly.

But in 1966 he decided to write a book about the murder of a small Kansas farm family. He read an article about the murders and immediately told his publisher, William Shawn (Bob Balaban), that he wanted to write a novel about the crime. But first he had to talk to the people involved.

Truman and his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener in her best performance ever) go to Kansas and interview the friend of the teenage girl who was killed and Sheriff Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper) to get as much information as they can. But it’s not until the killers are caught that Truman gets really involved.

Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) were caught in 1960. Finally, in 1966, Capote completed and published In Cold Blood. Why did it take him so long? This movie (and the book it’s based on written by Gerald Clarke) fills in the gap left by Truman’s emotional turmoil at having met Perry Smith and, basically, formed a very strange almost father-like attraction to him. He saw in Perry the Truman that could have been if he had chosen a different life for himself. He cared about Perry, but at the same time had to use him in order to get his book written. And that tortured Truman. It tortured the hell out of him.

In fact, it tortured him so much that it ends up being very hard to figure out just how you feel about the character. He’s an asshole opportunist who wants to help his subject. This makes Truman Capote one of the most complex characters to come out of Hollywood in a long, long time. Is he finding them new lawyers just so that he can keep them alive long enough to get information out of them? Or does he really want to try to get them off?

The movie is very good, but it’s Hoffman who takes the prize here. His portrayal of Capote is sympathetic and beautiful. He’s a hard man who almost can’t handle being hard. He’s also incredibly fey and gay, but he keeps it at a level that is not annoying once you get used to it. (This is something that an actor in another movie at the festival could have learned from.) This is probably the best performance of the year. I can’t imagine anyone else doing anything better. Absolutely amazing.

And Catherine Keener, who has a bad habit of over playing things all the time, kept herself under control as the future writer of To Kill A Mockingbird. She was better than ever here.

I would also not be surprised if Collins got some accolades for his sensitive portrayal of a could be killer who is still surprised by what happened.

Capote is definitely one of the best films I saw at the festival this year. Check it out when it comes to a theatre near you.

BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005)

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Neil Jordan
Written by: Neil Jordan/Pat McCabe
Based on book by: Pat McCabe

This one, however, was NOT one of the best films. And it’s really a shame because it’s directed by Neil Jordan, who can be a great director, and stars Cillian Murphy, who is on his way to becoming a pretty good actor. It also stars Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson and Jordan regulars Stephen Rea and Ian Hart.

Patrick “Kitten” Brady (Murphy) grew up in a small Irish town. He always knew that he was different from the other kids, so as soon as he was able he ran to London and became the transvestite that everyone knew that he had in him.

Along the way he met up with a rock singer (Bono chum and collaborator Gavin Friday), a magician (Rea) and, of course, members of the IRA. He is constantly looking for his real mother even though there’s not much chance of ever finding her in a city the size of London. Besides, the priest back home (Neeson) doesn’t seem to want him to find her.

And this is the problem with this movie: this is ALL we know about Kitten. (Oh, and he laughs when he gets the shit kicked out of him. Which is aggravating not only to the people beating him up, but to the audience because it’s a pretty annoying laugh.) Kitten is a very “on the surface” character. There really isn’t a whole lot of depth to him/her. And I couldn’t really figure out if it was because of the screenplay by Jordan, the book by Pat McCabe or Murphy’s acting. Or maybe it was all three.

The last is actually a pretty big possibility because at first I thought that Cillian was doing really well with what little he was given. Then I started to realize just how annoying this character was and how, if he was only portrayed as being a little less fey, he would have been sympathetic. But, as it was, I was glad when he got beat up because it shut him up for a little while.

That’s not to say that the movie was all bad. For the first half hour it was actually a lot of fun. Kitten’s childhood was funny and the young actor playing him was pretty adept at balancing the nature of a future transvestite and the boyish mischief of knowing what you want and not really being able to get it.

Oh, and the music was, for the most part, great. I’m not so into disco, but the glam rock stuff was awesome. Of course, it’s hard to do a movie about transvestites in the late 60s and early 70s without using “Children Of The Revolution” by T. Rex. Love the song, but it’s starting to get a bit overused.

If you’re a fan of Jordan or Murphy, I guess you have to see this. Otherwise, it’s really kind of not worth it. Even then it may annoy you enough to where you don’t really like Cillian too much anymore.

But there is a pretty good Crying Game joke in there. Almost worth it. Wait. No it’s not. Nevermind.

A TRIBUTE TO MICKEY ROONEY

Ok. Let me say this first: Mickey Rooney is NOT gay. That’s not why I’m putting him near the top here. BUT he did make a lot of movies with Judy Garland. And I saw one of them, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

First off, let’s talk about Mickey himself.

After telling people that I saw Mickey Rooney at the festival I usually got one of two responses. First was, “I thought he was dead!” The other response I got was, “Oh! I loved him in Sin City!” How sad that no one thinks about this guy anymore. He’s 85 years old. He’s made 360 movies. He’s about the only person still alive who made silent films. He remembers EVERYTHING and EVERYBODY. And, amazingly enough, he still acts like he’s about 12 years old.

He’s also extremely funny. He and Peter Bogdonovich talked during his tribute about everything from his silent film days (he only made a few and he was VERY young) to the state of television today. (“I don’t know Martha Stewart, but I hear she has a new tv show coming soon called ‘Why?’”) He almost ended up turning the interview back on Boggy and asked him just about every question that was asked of him. The guy was amazing. And I’m ashamed to say that, up until this festival, the only movie I had ever seen with him was The Black Stallion. Oh, and there was The Fox And The Hound. Does that count? And I barely count Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Although it’s a great movie, his part was just embarrassing.

They showed clips of a lot of his films, but they didn’t even scratch the surface. Babes On Broadway, Bill, Boys Town (a movie that follows him to this day—he is still a representative of Boys and Girls Towns all over America), The Comedian. All movies that I need to see. (They showed The Comedian and I missed it. Dammit.)

He had stories about every movie, too. He remembered working with Don Siegel on Baby Face Nelson before Don went on to do Dirty Harry. He talked about how Lionel Barrymore played Judge Hardy in the very first Andy Hardy movie, A Family Affair in 1937.

And through it all I kept thinking of how dead-on Dana Carvey’s impression of Mickey was on SNL all those years ago. A bit over the top, but not too much.

BABES ON BROADWAY (1941)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Busby Berkeley
Written by: Fred F. Finklehoffe/Elaine Ryan

After the tribute we were told that one of the TBAs the next day was going to be Babes On Broadway, one of Mickey’s most famous collaborations with Judy Garland. Awesome! I’ll finally get to see a classic Mickey Rooney film!

But the real treat was that Mickey watched it with us. He introduced the film and talked about Judy and couple of the other actors in the film. Ray McDonald was apparently one of the greatest dancers ever and Richard Quine went on to be a director extraordinaire. He also went on about how music today is unintelligible and how the movie we were about to see had songs. That you could understand the lyrics to. And that you could sing along with. Dramatic pauses everywhere.

But I can’t begrudge Mickey for being so dramatic. He’s awesome and he’s had an amazing career. He’s earned a few Shatner-like pauses.

The movie itself is a fun little bit of fluff from 1941 that includes a lot of over the top Busby Berkeley song and dance numbers that, while not the master’s best, were still pretty memorable. The only really bad number was the one that Judy sang for the English exchange students, “Chin Up, Cheerio, Carry On”. And that was mainly bad because of the super-cheesy shots of the kids crying stoically. Even before that they were talking to their parents over a loud speaker back in London in really bad British accents and trying to use “new” American phrases. Sad.

But the movie and the actors had a LOT of life in them. I’m not a fan of Judy Garland, but I could almost see the appeal in this movie. And she and Mickey together were a lot of fun. The show that they do at the old theatre (they’re trying to raise money for the kids that Judy helps out with to go to “the country,” wherever that is, along with getting Mickey and his buddies an audition with a big producer) is hilarious. Especially the bit with Mickey in drag doing a Carmen Miranda dance.

Then came the discomfort. The end of the movie comes with a big minstrel show. Yes. Judy Garland in black face. Her eyes are huge already. With her face painted black they look like her entire face was eyes.

Watching something like this at home alone is one thing. I can watch it and see it from the perspective of time. This is something that, unfortunately, was done in the late 30s and early 40s. In fact, it was probably done all the way up to the early 50s. It was just another way of entertaining people. It was wrong and racist, but most of the folks doing it didn’t necessarily see it that way. Mickey Rooney is not a racist. Neither was Judy Garland. But they did a number in black face. Ok. I can handle that. Different times, different culture.

Watching with a group in a theatre, though, is a very uncomfortable prospect. Suddenly you’ve got a bunch of people who may not be able to see it from this perspective. Suddenly you start thinking, “What if Spike Lee is in this joint?” Everyone starts to squirm a bit. If there is laughter it’s VERY nervous laughter. It’s a little harder to deal with even with a festival audience that is a little more cultured than your typical Michael Bay audience.

But, as I’ve said before, I don’t think it’s a good idea to ban these kinds of movies. It’s certainly a terrible idea to destroy them. If we can’t learn from history, what can we learn from? This is a fun movie with an unfortunate end. It’s ok to watch this kind of thing with your kids. But just discuss the ending with them. Let them know that it’s wrong to do this sort of thing, but people didn’t realize it back then. Don’t let the indiscretion of a few people 60 years ago ruin your enjoyment of a good flick.

That’s about it from the gay side of things. (Again, MICKEY ROONEY IS NOT GAY! It’s the Judy Garland connection here.) As I said, I didn’t get to see Brokeback Mountain, but I heard that it was pretty good and definitely beautifully shot. I’ll have to wait to see it. I’ll bring my own pudding.

So, no more gay stuff that I saw, but there certainly was no shortage of the ever popular tortured artist effect. Along with Capote there were these next two flicks.

WALK THE LINE (2005)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: James Mangold
Written by: Gill Dennis/James Mangold
Based on books by: Johnny Cash/Patrick Carr (uncredited)

Johnny Cash (VERY well played by Joaquin Phoenix) was not always the legend that we know him as now. Once he was just a guy who wanted to be a country singer.

Check that. He was once a guy in love who wanted to be a country singer.

The object of his affection from the time he was about 10 years old was June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), the second youngest of The Carter Family, a country/bluegrass/folk singing family that took the country by storm throughout the 30s and 40s. (Their influence is still felt in all of those genres and more.)

Johnny and June grew up, married other people, and, amazingly, ended up touring with the rest of the Sun Records crew. (This movie has some of the best portrayals of Elvis, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and the rest I have ever seen.) And, after June’s two marriages, Johnny’s marriage and three or four kids…well, you know how Johnny and June ended up.

But it wasn’t an easy fight. Johnny became addicted to amphetamines and almost killed himself with them a few times. He got to be so annoying to June (walking all the way from his apartment with Waylon Jennings (played by Waylon’s son, Shooter) to her place across town, constantly proposing to her, etc) that she finally decided that she and her family had to help him kick his habit and get him to live his life and be the amazing star that she knew he could be.

Tough love has never been tougher.

The story has been told before, of course, but that’s ok. This is Johnny we’re talking about. And he approved every bit of this movie, including the casting. In fact, it’s been said that Johnny and June both chose Joaquin and Reese to play them. Joaquin is really showing that he’s one of the best actors of his generation. He looks and sounds just like Johnny at times. He sang all of his own songs and did such an amazing job that there were times that I thought that they had switched to a real recording of Johnny singing. (There’s at least one time, when he’s wearing sunglasses, that Joaquin looks just like River, too. I’ve never thought that they looked too much alike, but this kind of showed that they did.)

Reese, who also did her own singing, may not have looked too much like June, but she was pretty amazing, too. Anyone who thought that she could only do silly romantic comedies has forgotten that she started out in tender dramas like The Man In The Moon. She’s strong, vulnerable and funny sometimes all at the same time. (June was, after all, a comedian, too.)

Robert Patrick is also quite good as Johnny’s nearly indifferent father.

James Mangold and Gill Dennis’ script (based on Johnny’s autobiographies The Man In Black and Cash: An Autobiography) showed Johnny as an almost tragic hero who pulls himself out of hell with a LOT of help from June. And Mangold’s direction keeps the pace going without sacrificing character or story.

I loved this movie. I think it was probably my favorite of the festival, actually. And that’s not just because I’m a fan of Johnny. It’s actually a genuinely great film and it gives us a good perspective on the beginnings of the legend of Johnny Cash.

I have one quibble with the facts of the film: Didn’t Johnny see his brother, Jack’s, accident take place? That’s what I had always heard. Maybe it’s more dramatic to have him off fishing instead of where he could actually help him. I dunno.

NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (2005)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

Now, from one legend to a legend that was heavily inspired by the first.

Bob Dylan is one of the biggest names in rock music. Even in the late 70s and throughout the 80s when he was putting out pretty subpar albums, no one ever wrote him off for being done. As he’s come back throughout the 90s to today we’ve seen an American original grow older gracefully and have a renaissance of artistic resonance.

But how did the man who became Dylan get his start? Well, that’s what Martin Scorsese set out to tell us with this new documentary. In nearly four hours he shows us pretty much ever aspect of Bob’s early life up through the motorcycle accident in 1966 that sidetracked his career for about a year.

With interviews with Dylan and some of his closest cohorts of the time (including Joan Beaz, Al Kooper (who looks like a wasted Tim Robbins) and Allen Ginsberg) we get a better portrait of the man and the myth than any documentary has ever dared to give us before. Even D.A. Pennebaker’s amazing Don’t Look Back (which lent some footage to this film) didn’t give us such a well-rounded portrayal. It’s a great film that any fan of Dylan or music should make themselves sit down and watch. It’s being released on DVD soon. They will see Dylan deny that he is a spokesman of a generation, a folk singer or a poet. (He’s a song and dance man.) They will see him embrace his audience and then do everything he can to piss them off. (“Play it fuckin’ loud!”) And they will see what made him learn to love folk music in the first place.

One question I have: since Dylan is planning a trilogy of autobiographies and there’s so much more ground to cover than what this film covers, is Marty planning two more docs? That would be pretty awesome. I would love to see what he has to say about his Christian years and the dark years of Blood On The Tracks, Desire and divorce. And then end it all up with his big comeback with Oh Mercy in 1989 and the Oscar win for “Things Have Changed” in 2001.

This is definitely one that I’m buying as soon as I see it. And the soundtrack is out now as Bootleg Series #7. Can’t wait to pick that up. There’s a lot of unreleased stuff including different versions of songs like “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry,” live versions and demos.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (2005)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Liev Schreiber
Written by: Liev Schreiber
Based on book by: Jonathan Safran Foer

This one isn’t so much about a tortured artist as it is about a tortured young man. But the narrator does fancy himself a writer, so there ya go.

Jonathan (Elijah Wood) is a collector. He collects things that his family leaves behind. His wall is full of these things preserved in Ziploc baggies under a giant family tree. He wants to make sure that his family is remembered and this is the only way he knows how to do it. Yeah, it seems crazy, but that’s just him. He’s an extremely anal nerd who likes everything to be in order.

But now that his grandmother has died he is searching for the woman who saved his beloved grandfather’s life back before World War II. He travels to the Ukraine where his grandfather was hiding from the Nazis and meets up with a wannabe gangsta translator, Alex (Eugene Hutz, front man for punk band Gogol Bordello), who really only speaks very broken English, and his grandfather (Boris Leskin) who thinks that he’s blind, but he drives very well.

Along the way, of course, all three learn a little bit about themselves and their roots.

The movie starts off as a pretty brilliant almost surreal comedy and ends up being a very touching and thought-provoking drama about young men and their relationships with the past, especially their grandfathers. It’s not a perfect film (many had a problem with the tonal shift—I didn’t—and Jonathan’s fear of dogs kind of disappears pretty easily for being such a deep-seated fear), but it is a very good film and one of my favorites of the festival. The performances (especially Elijah’s, who looks like he could have been perfect as Clark Kent) were great and, even if the movie hadn’t been all that good, it would be worth checking out just for that alone.

Making his writing and directing debut, Liev Schreiber isn’t necessarily flashy (except for the constant white-outs, which got a little annoying—but everything is illuminated!), but he’s certainly sensitive to the material and knows what he’s doing. It’s a very good debut film. And it makes me want to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel.

Although, it’s hard to hear about rings these days when Elijah is involved these days.

Now, let’s move on to the two Asian films I saw.

THE PRESIDENT’S LAST BANG (2005)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Sang-soo Im
Written by: Sang-soo Im

President Park Chun-hee (Jae-ho Song) was a tyrant. He killed people for no good reason, crushed opponents and, basically, made himself into a villain for future S. Korean filmmakers. But he also loved Japanese music and had a soft spot in his heart for women who sang those Japanese songs.

But that didn’t make him any less of a target of assassination plots. Not even from his own officials.

The President’s Last Bang is the story of the last days of his life. They were filled with the things he loved: violence and singing Japanese women. They were also filled with the ineptitude of his own bodyguards and army. (“We couldn’t find any bullets!”) It’s funny ‘cause it’s true!

This is the kind of story that Tarantino would make with Oliver Stone. In fact, Park’s assassination in 1979 shook the country like JFK’s assassination shook our country in 1963. And director Im Sang-soo was sued by Park’s son for defamation of character! They forced him to excise four minutes of documentary footage so that audiences wouldn’t be confused into thinking that this was not a fiction film.

It’s a really strange, funny, violent film with a lot of great political intrigue thrown in. The only problem I had with it was that it was kind of hard to follow at times. I’m sorry, but even other Asians have said it: all of these guys kind of look alike. It’s hard to keep up with who’s who and what’s going on. And I watch a lot of Asian films, so for me to be confused by something like that is really something special.

THREE TIMES

** (2/5)

Directed by: Hsiao-hsien Hou
Written by: T’ien-wen Chu/Hsiao-hsien Hou

Unfortunately, Three Times was not as good as The President’s Last Bang. In fact, it wasn’t even as good as Breakfast On Pluto.

It’s a nearly experimental film about three different love affairs in three different time periods. Each is acted by the same two actors (Chen Chang, and my main draw, Shu Qi) and none of them have a lot of dialogue. The second one, taking place in 1911, was actually shot as a silent film complete with title cards. Strangely, it has the most dialogue.

The first segment takes place in 1966 and involves a young man who is going off to the army and the girl at the hotel he is staying at who falls for him. When she goes to another hotel in another town, he goes to find her…so that he can play pool in front of her again for about 15 minutes.

The 1911 segment is about a couple who get to know each other better over the course of the film. Or something like that. I think at this point I was figuring out the rhythm of the film and realizing that I was in for a long, slow two hours. I missed a few title cards because I couldn’t keep my eyes open, not even to watch Shu.

The final segment (2005) was about artists and drugs. That’s about all I got out of it. It made no sense at all and was probably the worst of the bunch.

None of the stories really seem to go anywhere and the characters are about as interesting as watching a particularly slow bug crawling across a white floor.

Here’s the hell of this movie: I love Shu Qi. I could watch her reading the phone book. And she was actually very good in all three roles. In fact, it could be the best acting she’s ever done because it showed that she has a range. All three characters are very different. But watching this movie is like watching her reading the New York phone book to herself. And its entire plot has been stripped away. And the room she’s in is dark, so you can’t even watch the pretty paint dry around her.

The first segment, as I said, had 15 minute pool games. And these were shot in one take with only half of the table visible. The other half of the screen was a wall. So actors would disappear for minutes at a time and then you would hear the balls knock around. And Shu would giggle her cute little Asian girl giggle. AND THAT WAS IT!!! I’m all for movies with very little dialogue. Solaris was awesome. Kubrick was a master. But this is ridiculous.

And this is supposed to be Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou’s most accessible work. Wow. It makes me want to run out to the video store and look for his movies just so I can avoid them.

It also didn’t help that Shu was supposed to be at the festival and never showed up. DAMMIT!!!

CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN (2005)

not rated because I didn’t see all of it

Directed by: Hans Canosa
Written by: Gabrielle Zevin

Now for a slightly more successful experiment.

A man and a woman (Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter) meet at a wedding. They talk and decide to go back to her hotel room for a night of the old in-out, in-out. As they talk we learn more about their pasts and their current lives.

What makes this so interesting from a filmmaking standpoint is that it’s all shot what director Hans Canosa calls “dual frame.” It’s actually split screens that were shot simultaneously so that we always get the reaction of the other actor to whatever is being said to them at the moment it’s said. It must have really been like acting in a play on this set.

The screens don’t always show Aaron and Helena, though. Sometimes they show their memories of their younger selves (Nora Zehetner and Erik Eidem) or even other people at the reception. Sometimes it can be a little disorienting, especially when they look like they’re further apart than they actually are. But this sort of relationship is always a little disorienting, so it works in the film’s favor.

The performances were all very good, if nothing spectacular. The two younger actors look enough like their older counterparts (especially the beautiful Nora) that you could almost believe that they were actually younger Aaron and Helena. (Although I find it hard to believe that Aaron was ever as buff as Erik.)

Unfortunately, I was unable to see the final half hour of the movie because I had to work. (DAMMIT!!) But I do plan on finishing the movie when it comes out. It was enough fun to make me want to keep watching. I might wait until video, but I do plan on finishing it. I’ll try to let you know when I do.

And now, for the final festival film that I need to review. It wasn’t my last film, but it’s the last one for today.

EDMOND (2005)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Stuart Gordon
Written by: David Mamet
Based on play by: David Mamet

Imagine a world where David Mamet wrote Taxi Driver. Now, take Travis Bickle out of the film and put Jerry Lundegaard in there. Now you’re starting to get the idea behind Edmond.

Edmond (William H. Macy) is a loser. His wife (Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon) is a selfish bitch who wants nothing more than everything and his job is a dead-end. When he goes to a fortuneteller every card turns up bad. It’s time for him to change his life. So he leaves his wife and walks out into the mean streets of New York to find his way again. He runs into a man (Joe Mantegna) who has a pretty racist view of the world. But, to Edmond, it almost makes sense. Then he goes to hookers (Bai Ling, Mena Suvari and Denise Richards), but he’s too stingy to pay for their wares. In fact, his stinginess keeps him from a lot of pleasures of NYC.

Then he meets a young waitress, Glenna (Julia Stiles). She’s beautiful, young and attracted to him. Things only get worse for Edmond from there.

As Edmond becomes more fucked up and his worldview gets even more twisted, his world gets darker and darker. We just know that something is going to explode, and we think it’s probably going to be Edmond himself.

The craziest thing about this film is that it’s directed by Stuart Gordon, director of such awesome cult films as Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dagon. And this is, in fact, a David Mamet play. Not too high on the violence quotient, usually.

But Edmond does get violent. In fact, Gordon gets to spatter Macy with blood in one scene.

In a way, though, this kind of fits Gordon’s body of work. It’s certainly off-center. It’s also darkly comic, disturbing and shows a world that revels in it’s darkly comic disturbance. What more could Gordon want?! Besides, Gordon and Mamet have been friends for a long time. In fact, I think I remember him saying that he directed the first production of Sexual Perversity In Chicago, which made Mamet the playwriting behemoth that he is today.

It’s also a lot of fun to see Gordon and Mamet regulars co-mingle in one film. You’ve got Pidgeon, Macy and Mantegna on Mamet’s side and Jeffrey Combs, George Wendt, Mantegna and Debi Mazar on Gordon’s. And this still has Mamet’s rhythm to it. It really doesn’t matter who directs a film, if Mamet wrote it (especially as a play), you can tell.

The performances were all very good in that Mamet way, but Macy was pretty incredible. It’s hard for him to be bad, I know, but I thought he was really good here. He has a knack for playing losers.

Some people really didn’t like this movie at all. I know it’s not for all tastes, but I really liked it a lot. Not perfect by any means, but it’s a lot of fun in a really weird sort of way.

As we were walking away from the theatre I talked to Gordon and told him how much I’ve loved his films over the years. He says that he’s working on a fourth Re-Animator movie called House Of Re-Animator. It’s going to take place in the White House. That’s perfect. I can’t wait.

So that’s it for Telluride this year. I saw less movies than ever, but it was still a lot of fun. I left my little box canyon town on Tuesday afternoon and I already can’t wait for next year!

SXSW is run and attended by film geeks. We love film, but in a really fun way. Sure, it’s art, but we like the trashy stuff, too. You know, the Tromas, the Fulcis, sometimes even the Bays.

On the other hand, TFF is run and attended by film elitists. They look down their noses at Lloyd Kaufman because he just makes stuff to shock his audiences. They honor people like Arrabal and Angelopoulos. Personally, I had never heard of Arrabal and the only reason I had ever heard of Angelopoulos was because I worked at an Evil Empire Video when his film with Harvey Keitel came out. (Ulysses’ Gaze, in case you’re keeping score.) It’s definitely for the more high-brow filmgoer.

Both approaches work for me. I try to be somewhere in the middle, but I lean a little more towards geekdom. I actually love being a part of two such different festivals, but I’m kind of glad that the one in my hometown is closer to my heart. That way I can learn about the more obscure and artsy directors when I go to Telluride, but I can feel like I know what I’m talking about when I’m at home. Home field advantage, ya know?

Not only did I have that revelation, but I also experienced some of the strangest weather that the festival has ever seen. Usually it’s either cold or hot all weekend. This time, though, it was hot on Friday and turned butt-ass cold on Saturday. In fact, not only was it cold on Saturday, but it rained, it sleeted, it snowed, it groppelled and it snained. I’m not exactly sure what those last two are, either, but I’m told that they happened. It was so cold, in fact, that Ken Burns bought hot drinks for his fans waiting for his film, Unforgivable Blackness. The rain helped the dried up Bridal Veil Falls flow again.

Then, just as suddenly as it got cold, it got hot again. Sunday and Monday were beautiful with fairly cold nights. The snow-peaked mountains started melting. The people who thought that they would need to wear sweaters and jackets stripped. The theatres were cooled off again.

And, speaking of theatres, this was the last year for The Max, the Egyptian themed theatre built inside the high school gym. It’s the theatre that I have worked for the past four years, so it’s a little sad to see it go. But next year we won’t have to build a theatre out of nothing. The high school has a brand new fine arts center (partially donated by the festival so that they can use it) that will be set up with Dolby Digital Surround Sound and a big-ass screen. It’s a nice theatre space and I can’t wait to see if they come up with some kind of theme for us to play with.

The theme this year was (un)officially salaciousness and taboo. Old films such as the scandalous for 1933 Ecstasy (featuring a nude Hedy Lamarr, known at the time as Hedwig Kiesler) and new films like Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education about priests, kids and cross-dressers held up the theme, but, alas, I didn’t get to see either of those films.

Instead, I saw films that held a secondary theme: kids in trouble. (Bad Education follows that theme, too.) Whether it’s sexual trouble or life and death trouble (or sometimes both), there seemed to be kids in all kinds of peril at this festival. Let’s start with the best of these films.

NOBODY KNOWS (2004)

***** (5/5)

Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda
Written by: Hirokazu Koreeda

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda (After Life, Distance and Maborosi) brings the true life tale of four kids in modern Tokyo whose flighty, but loving mother (You…that’s her name, not a pronoun) leaves them alone for months at a time while she goes off to find the perfect husband. While she’s with them she treats them more as siblings than as her children. Perhaps that’s because each one is from a different father and she just can’t seem to latch onto any of them.

She leaves them some money, but it’s really not enough to keep them for as long as she leaves them. As rent and bills come due the kids start to have to survive by other means. The oldest, 12 year old Akira (Cannes Best Actor winner, Yuya Yagira) has to take over as the father figure for his brother and two sisters. He makes friends with some of the people at the local market and hides the fact that his mother has left them from most of the folks in the neighborhood.

And, just to add to the difficulties, the landlord doesn’t know that there is more than one kid in the apartment. Yuki, Kyoko and Shigeru all have to hide the fact that they even exist.

At two and a half hours, this was the longest film that I saw at this year’s festival, but there was not a wasted moment in all of that running time. The story could have been told in half the time, but it would not have been as rich. We would not have cared as much about these kids. When tragedy comes (as it always must in these stories) it hits us hard and fast because of the time we have spent growing up with the kids.

All of the performances were very good, but 14 year old Yuya deserved his award at Cannes. His portrayal of Akira was sad, but hopeful, just like the film that he’s in. He showed subtlety that most kids wouldn’t know what to do with.

And the final frame reminded me of the final freeze of The 400 Blows. The film is sad and depressing, but there’s an edge of hope that let’s us know that those of us who make it through this kind of life will eventually be alright.

I have only heard of Koreeda’s other films, but I can’t wait to check them out now. This was his dream project and the one that he is the most proud of. He read the story of the kids about 15 years ago and immediately wrote the screenplay loosely based on it. Finally, after financial backers leaving him and studios deciding not to do it, he has been able to bring his vision to the screen. And he does it in a way that is universal. Tokyo is not that different from any city in America. Kids are kids and tragedy is tragedy. When the two meet, we can all relate. I’ve seen a lot of films about kids left alone by their parents (Soderberg’s King Of The Hill, The Cement Garden, etc.), but this is probably the best of the lot. In fact, I think this is the best film I saw at this year’s festival.

WASP (2003)

Directed by: Andrea Arnold
Written by: Andrea Arnold

On a similar note, this short is about a young mother of three little girls and baby boy on the poor side of London. She loves her kids, but she also resents them for taking away her youth. She wants to go out and date, but that’s hard for a single mom. When she meets up with an old crush from school she takes desperate measures to hang out with him at a bar. While she’s inside with the guy (whom she told that the kids were a friend’s) her kids are outside the bar eating their dinner of potato chips and a soda.

Then the title is literalized maybe a bit too much.

(I don’t care if it’s not a word. I like it. Shut up.)

A good short, but it beats its point home with a sledgehammer. The ending is open ended and hopeful…perhaps too hopeful. If this were a true story, it would be pretty bleak. Director Andrea Arnold knows how to make us sympathize with everyone involved, though. Zoe may be a bad mother, but you can almost understand her actions. How hard must it be to be so young and have so many kids? Yes, you have a responsibility to raise these kids and keep them from danger, but there are so many other issues and feelings tugging you in so many different ways at that age.

Now, on to a completely different kind of peril for kids.

PALINDROMES (2004)

*** (3/5)

Directed by: Todd Solondz
Written by: Todd Solondz

In the world of Todd Solondz, kids are never safe. Whether they’re being threatened with rape and ridiculed (Welcome To The Dollhouse), or actually molested (Happiness), they are always victims.

Aviva is one of the biggest victims of Solondz oeuvre. She is a 13 year old girl whose cousin has just died. She doesn’t want to end up like her cousin, but some of her family members see her as just another statistic. Why we’re not really sure, but they see some of the dead girl in this younger girl. Her mother (Ellen Barkin) is a loving woman who doesn’t always know the right things to say. (“Maybe if she had cleaned her face a little more then she would have been happier and more loved.”)

This is when Aviva decides that she wants a child of her own. She has sex with the neighbor boy and gets her wish. Unfortunately her parents have other ideas. They take her straight to the abortion doctor who accidentally takes away her ability to ever have children.

Aviva doesn’t know this, though. She runs away and starts to have sex with who ever will have such a young girl. She sees nothing wrong with her new found love for a trucker who gave her a ride and a quickie. When he leaves her she is devastated.

This is when she meets Mama Sunshine and her crew of young misfits who have found God. They are all perfectly happy with their particular disfiguring disabilities because of their personal relationship with their God. Unfortunately, Mama’s husband and Dr. Dan (Richard Riehle) take their religion a bit too seriously.

Just in case you missed the fact that this could happen to any girl in the world, Solondz pulls a Bunuel and has Aviva played by many different little girls and grown women. That makes the proceedings even creepier.

Aviva is a typical child hero of Solondz’ work. She is quiet, shy and painfully introverted. She almost can’t speak to anyone. Of course, all of the actresses play her slightly differently (the first girl plays her as the opposite of everyone else, actually), but most of them have the same horribly shy demeanor.

For you Dollhouse fans out there, Mark Wiener (Matthew Faber) shows up as Aviva’s neighbor who has been accused of being a child molester.

I kind of liked this movie just because it was so weird and I’m a Solondz fan. Does that make it good? Well, not really. It was very exploitative (all of the kids at the Christian Camp had something physically or mentally wrong with them (like his version of Freaks) and the big, black girl who plays Aviva throughout this sequence is constantly shown in tiny clothes just to show how fat she is) and it didn’t really seem to know what its point was. Was it anti-abortion or anti-zealot? Maybe it was trying to show both sides, but they were both kind of shown as being completely ridiculous. The post-9/11 statement was interesting, but seemed a little forced.

And what was up with Jennifer Jason Leigh showing up for one scene? Did she show up saying, “Todd! I want to be in your movie! What can I play?!”

This is certainly Solondz’ weakest film, but for his fans it’s probably worth it. It’s an interesting experiment that didn’t really work the way it should have.

Now let’s move on to the biggest film of the festival and one that almost had a common theme. At least, some characters thought that it did.

FINDING NEVERLAND (2004)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Marc Forster
Written by: David Magee
Based on play by: Allan Knee

JM Barrie (Johnny Depp) is a playwright who is in trouble. He can’t seem to write another hit. His latest is a resounding flop and his producer, Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman), is wondering where his money is going. He has faith in James, but things are starting to look dim.

His home life is no better. Barrie’s wife, Mary (Radha Mitchell), is losing interest in her husband. She sees him less and less and is just unhappy in general, especially since he doesn’t seem to have any interest in becoming part of “society.” He is a childlike man who has no time for trivial things like dinner parties and manners.

That’s when he meets his new muses. Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her four boys run into James while he is playing with his dog at the park. He instantly falls in love with the family and starts to spend a lot of time with them teaching them and learning from them. The second youngest, Peter (future Charlie Bucket to Johnny’s Willy Wonka, Freddie Highmore), is that saddest of creatures, a child who has lost his imagination. Ever since his father died, he hasn’t been able to be a kid. When James is dancing with his pet bear, all Peter sees is the big sheepdog.

But a strange thing starts to happen. As James spends more and more time with Sylvia and her family (and more time away from his wife), Peter and James both start to learn how to use their imaginations. Peter learns that he might be able to be a kid after all and James starts to write his greatest creation, Peter Pan. Charles thinks he is insane, but history tells us differently.

Of course, tragedy must strike every uplifting story like this, and it does in the form of tuberculosis. But Kate looks great even if she’s sick.

As manipulative and Hollywood as this movie was, it was actually probably the second best film that I saw at the festival. It was involving right from the start. The acting was great (people are talking about an Oscar for Johnny). It was sad, charming, heartbreaking, funny, magical and full of the hope that sometimes only children can see. The scene where James sees that the oldest boy has grown up right before his eyes is so touching that it makes you forget that growing up is supposed to be a good thing in our world.

Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) switches from James’ Neverland and his real world in a way that is disorienting in a really cool way. At one point the kids and James are playing Cowboys And Indians. Every shot changes between the two worlds. It’s a great scene that keeps you wondering exactly where you are.

If you like Johnny Depp or the story of Peter Pan, you need to check this movie out. Even if you just like movies about plays, this is a very good one.

VIVA LA MUERTE (1971)

*** (3/5)

Directed by: Fernando Arrabal
Written by: Fernando Arrabal/Claudine Lagrive
Based on book by: Fernando Arrabal

Viva La Muerte puts its young protagonist in a completely different kind of peril. Young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) is without a father (he was killed by the national army), has a pretty strange mother that he has an even stranger relationship with and his country is being ruled over by Fascists. Every once in a while he dreams of what he would rather be doing, whether it be figuring out how his father died or rubbing mud all over his mother and licking it off.

Obviously, this is a surrealist’s look at Fascism. Many of the images in the film are meant to be a child’s view of what was going on in Franco’s Spain. It’s all an homage to Bunuel and Fellini, but director Fernando Arrabal forgot one thing: those guys knew how to keep it interesting. Arrabal let his vision get a bit out of hand and it went on and on and on……and on.

His point is obvious. Religion is sometimes used for evil and Fascism is bad. Fando’s mother is very much against fighting the system. She just wants to go along with whatever is going on and sometimes gets a little too into it, like when she cuts off the balls of a cow towards the end. (No fake cows here. Those are real yarbles. Pretty twisted.) She is the non-fighter of the country. Go with the flow and let them do what they want. She’s just as bad as the Fascists.

Speaking of balls, check out the scene where the priests balls are cut off and fed to him. Funniest line of the whole movie: “Oh, mi cajones. Thanks you, O Lord, for this wonderful treat.”

Um. Yeah. I’ll take your word for that one.

That is one lesson that Arrabal didn’t forget when he was learning from the Surrealist Masters: comedy. Early surrealism was meant to make people laugh and think. Un Chien Andalou was meant to be a sensationalist piece of film, but it was also made to make us laugh occasionally. The surrealists had senses of humor and it always showed in their films.

And this is something that was lost on Peter Sellars, the man who introduced the film. He gave us probably the most pretentious intro. of the festival. It was full of pregnant pauses and deifying of Arrabal (who was in the audience). To him, even the early surrealist filmmakers and artists were trying to convey deep meanings. “Surrealism was never surreal. It was real.” Yeah. That’s why Bunuel and Dali always said that there was no meaning for Un Chien Andalou. They purposefully rejected anything that made any kind of sense. Later surrealists may have had more meaning, but the early guys were just going for dreams. If meaning came out of it, great. That’s your interpretation and they can laugh at it if they want to. (And they often did.)

If you’re a fan of Bunuel or Jodorosky (El Topo, Santa Sangre), check this one out. It drags, but it’s definitely an interesting cinematic experience.

Let’s move on to a younger kid in trouble.

UP AND DOWN (2004)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Jan Hrebejk
Written by: Jan Hrebejk/Petr Jarchovský

(I can’t find any information about this movie online and it was a sneak preview, so there’s nothing in the festival program. Sorry if my details are a little slim.)

This Czech Republic film starts off with two truck drivers having a typical truck driver conversation. Well, typical for modern movies, anyway.

After they make it through the customs agents at the border, they pull over and let the contraband people out of their trailer. Unfortunately, one of them gets left behind. A little baby boy is still in the trailer and the drivers decide to sell him to a black market adoption agency.

This is where a young couple that can’t have kids picks him up. And this starts a chain of events that involves thieves, an upper class family and their children and racism in the newly Democratic Czech Republic.

I had no clue what to expect from the film since no one knew anything about it, but it ended up being completely different even from what I wasn’t expecting. The first scene made it seem like it would be some kind of heist film involving two guys stuck with a baby. Then it ended up being a dark comedy. Then it was a social drama. And all of the films worked really well. The pace was slow, but it needed to be so that we could pick up all of the intricacies of the plot and message.

The characters were well drawn and didn’t always end up where you wanted them to end up. And the theme even changed mid-way. Racism didn’t show it’s ugly head until a little after the mid-point, but it ended up being the central theme of the film.

If you get a chance, check this one out. It may be hard to find, though, until it comes out on DVD.

Now for a child who is working through her peril through film.

PROSHANIE

Directed by: Mariya Saakyan
Written by: Mariya Saakyan

This short film was considered by some to be the best film of the festival. It’s a 27-minute homage to Andrei Tarkovsky that is about the death of filmmaker Maria Saakyan’s father and the life that came before it. There is almost no dialogue (and no subtitles for the little dialogue that there is) and a collection of images that is sometimes beautiful and other times ponderous.

I like Tarkovsky. His imagery is always interesting, even when the camera sits on it for 5 or 10 minutes. He constructed stories with pictures more than with words and evoked a feeling with these images and stories that was above anything that could actually be put on the screen.

Saakyan tries SO hard to do this, but she is not Tarkovsky. She’s just a fan who wants to emulate her hero. Like Gus Van Sant before her, she wants to be the man (but she doesn’t remake one of his films into oblivion). Also like Van Sant, she ultimately fails to achieve what Tarkovsky could do. In fact, her short felt longer than any of his 4 hour epics.

Some kids may be in trouble, but they may not actually exist.

KEANE (2004)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Lodge Kerrigan
Written by: Lodge Kerrigan

William Keane (Damian Lewis from Band Of Brothers and Dreamcatcher) starts off as a jittery, possibly insane man. He talks to himself as he roams the streets looking for clues about the location of his daughter and her kidnappers. She was abducted from the train station as he turned his back on her and now his life is shattered. This is all he does all day. He has no job. He has no family. He self-medicates with booze and cocaine. He just walks the Earth looking for his daughter.

Keane is so crazy, in fact, that we start to doubt the fact that his daughter ever actually existed. He’s a heartbreaking figure, but what if his broken mind just made the whole thing up?

Director/writer Lodge Kerrigan (Clean, Shaven and Claire Dolan) has, along with Lewis, created a character that actually gets creepier as he starts acting more normal. After meeting a beautiful little girl (Abigail Breslin from Signs) and her mother (Amy Ryan from “The Wire” and You Can Count On Me), Keane starts to calm down a bit. But then things might be going off the deep end for him. Lewis is amazing in a role that keeps him on screen the entire length of the film. He keeps you on the edge of your seat waiting for tragedy to befall someone and always looks like he’s ready to lash out at the smallest little thing.

I’ve never seen either of Kerrigan’s other films, but I’m seeking them out.

Here’s a movie about something that even kids should know about.

KINSEY (2004)

****½ (4.5/5)

Directed by: Bill Condon
Written by: Bill Condon

Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) may have been repressed by an overly religious father (John Lithgow), but as he grew up he started to realize that sex was something that everyone did and everyone should know something about. That’s why, in 1948, he published Sexual Behavior In The Human Male. It caused a huge controversy, but it was also a best-seller and was the first real scientific book treating sex like the everyday act that it is.

But first, Al was an introvert. He wasn’t exactly sure how to act around people, so he kept to himself. He was great with his students, but didn’t know any of them too well. That all changed with Clara (Laura Linney—recipient of a Silver Medallion at the festival this year). She changed his life and, eventually, decided to marry him.

That’s when his sex life started. The two of them were very open about their sex life and they felt that everyone should follow suit. Why not? We all do it.

As Alfred and Clara get deeper into the research (both with each other and with just talking to other people) they gather a close group of confidants that start as assistants and end up, sometimes, as lovers. Peter Sarsgaard is the most trusted of the group and becomes a lover of both Alfred and Clara. Chris O’Donnell and Timothy Hutton are his other two assistants.

Kinsey, directed by Bill Condon (Gods And Monsters), is a pretty typical Hollywood biopic, but it’s a very good one. It was compelling from frame one and never stopped being interesting. And, because of it’s subject matter, it’s a very important film.

In fact, it’s so important that it was surrounded by security. Why, you might ask? So did we. Someone in line at my theatre said that she had heard that it was because it was being released after the elections. Why, again? Because it’s too politically explosive. Why is sex political? Because our current administration is afraid of it. If it’s not missionary with the lights off, then it’s deviant. And for a film to show someone back in the conservative 40’s who realized that perverse acts weren’t as perverse as we all thought at the time would make their entire sexual infrastructure crumble. They would suddenly realize that about 75% of all people are at least partially homosexual. They would start to see that just about everybody has performed some form of oral sex. And they would find out that everyone masturbates.

This information actually kind of pisses me off. How could a studio force a producer/director to hold their film’s release until after an election? How dare they? This is a very important film that could open the eyes of a lot of people. And now, instead of allowing the people who see it to be informed, they hold it back to where it can’t do any “damage.” And, besides, this film is not a political statement! It’s not like Fahrenheit 9/11. It’s something that states facts about a man’s life. It’s about a man who finally figured out that our culture is based around hiding sex instead of embracing it and he was sick of it. He believed that sex was good, fun and necessary. It’s something that married and unmarried couples do. He also found out that marriage DOES matter. So does love. Once you’re married, that’s it. Your spouse is your partner. How is this a political statement!?

Kinsey said something that stuck with me: “In a more enlightened country, every 12 year old would know what I now have to teach you.” This is a sad comment. Sex should be talked about in an open manner. Yes, you can keep your privacy. You don’t have to tell all of your gory details to everyone. But don’t be ashamed of them, either. And certainly don’t berate someone else for having different details. Or even similar ones.

How about some films about people acting like children?

BEING JULIA (2004)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: István Szabó
Written by: Ronald Harwood
Based on book by: W Somerset Maugham

Julia (Annette Bening) is one of the biggest stage actresses of her time (30s London). And, boy does she ever act like it. She’s kind of a bitch, actually. Her agent/husband (Jeremy Irons) loves her, but they don’t have a true marriage. They love who they love and they don’t really care otherwise. In fact, Julia cares so little that her feelings have pretty much died. She’s just a sarcastic bitch who seems to not have much love for anyone.

Until, of course, she meets Tom (Shaun Evans), a younger man from America who seems to not have anything except for great admiration for Julia and her talents. She soon begins an affair with the kid that causes her to feel love for the first time in years.

But is Tom everything he’s cracked up to be? Or is he just fishing for money to pay off his debts? And who is this new actress (Lucy Punch) that everyone is pushing to the fore-front?

Based on the book by W. Somerset Maugham called Theatre, this is a great story of rising fame and fading fire. Like All About Eve it shows how the theatre world can be backstabbing while it’s smiling in your face. The end is hilarious.

But the movie itself almost collapses on its own wit. It’s almost hard to tell that it’s a comedy because it’s so dry. The acting is amazing all around and very subtle, but I don’t think the movie is going to play too well to a general audience. Definitely worth seeing for Annette and Jeremy fans. Especially for that ending.

AALTRA (2004)

*½ (1.5/5)

Directed by: Gustave de Kervern/Benoît Delépine
Written by: Gustave de Kervern/Benoît Delépine

And speaking of endings, that was about the only good thing about this movie. When one of the actor/director/writers said, “The first 6/4s of the movie are incredibly boring, but that last two minutes are amazing.” I thought he was kidding. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.

The movie from Belgium is about two men (stand up comics Benoit Delepine and Gustave de Kervern) who hate each other. When they cause an accident that makes them both paralyzed from the waist down, they are for some reason forced to hang out together all the time. Why? I have no idea. I would think that they would want to get away from each other. But there they are, wheeling themselves around together.

That’s the whole fucking plot! It’s a movie that really tried to be offensive in the Farrelly sense, but ended up being offensive in a cinematic sense. Boring with a capital BOR.

The one bright spot was a hilarious karaoke scene with a guy singing the old Bobby Hebb song, “Sunny.” But he’s not just singing it. He’s mangling it in ways that only a non-English speaker could do. Oh, he’s singing in English, but he’s singing English words that ALMOST sound like the real lyrics. (“Sunny, once and two. I luff you.”) It’s awesome.

And, just like that, it’s over. Then we go back to five or ten more minutes of these two assholes having what I have a hard time calling adventures. They’re just too boring.

Skip this one unless you can fast forward to that one scene.

And, of course, don’t pay for it at all. I don’t want to encourage these guys to make another “film.”

KONTROLL (2003)

***½ (3.5/5)

Directed by: Nimród Antal
Written by: Nimród Antal/Jim Adler

Kontroll is about a different kind of asshole. In Eastern Europe they don’t run the subway system like we do. It’s mostly on the honor system. But if you get caught by the ticket inspectors, be prepared to possibly be physically thrown off of the train.

Everyone hates these guys. Even children spit on them. Basically, they are the losers of society who have no other place to go for a job. So they go to the lowest place in the country to find employment in what is basically a night world all the time.

Bulcsu (Sandar Csanyi) is the leader of one group of these inspectors. He doesn’t have a life above ground. In fact, he sleeps in the underground tunnels. But when a mysterious man starts running around and pushing people in front of the trains, things really heat up for Bulcsu and his crew. Is one of them doing it? Or is it their rival group who is responsible?

The Budapest Underground is a really cool world to set a film in. It’s cavernous in an almost beautiful way. These guys live down here where there is no sun and basically no happiness. The only joy they get is when they get to kick someone off of a train. And then they feel like kings.

And now, ever since Trainspotting, young directors have been trying to create a kinetic world for their characters to live in. No better world for these characters to be kinetic (and yet still completely stationary) than the Underground tunnels.

This is Nimrod Antal’s first film and it’s pretty impressive for that fact. It’s not a great film, by any means, but it’s certainly interesting and worth seeking out. The murder mystery almost bogs the whole thing down, though. I would rather just spend time getting to know these guys than have some weird-ass outside force take over all the time. And it kind of drags at times. Bulscu runs a lot. And he gets beat up. A whole lot. He’s bloody for most of the movie. Wouldn’t he wash up at some point?

The end, though, is completely up for interpretation. I must have heard at least three different versions of it. I don’t want to give away too much, but the fate of Bulscu is up in the air.

Check it out if it comes to a theatre anywhere near you. And then tell me what you think of the ending. And if you can find the soundtrack, let me know, too. It’s pretty awesome.

BAOBER IN LOVE

**½ (2.5/5)

Directed by: Shaohong Li
Written by: Yao Wang/Zhong Zheng

This was the last Asian film I saw and it’s the weirdest movie that I saw at the festival. (Even weirder than Viva La Muerte.)

Baober (Zhou Xun) is a young girl who has no real ties to the real world. She lives the way she wants to and takes nothing for granted except for sanity. When she finds a videotape of Liu Zhi (Huang Juc) she realizes that she has to save this guy from his loveless marriage. In the video he complains about his sex life and the things that his wife takes for granted about him and Beijing in general. She takes the tape to the wife and, in effect, ends their marriage. And, of course, Liu falls in love with Baober.

At least, that’s what I got out of the movie. Like Kontroll, it has a very kinetic pace that makes it a little bit difficult to keep up with. (Of course, my lack of sleep didn’t help that at all, either. That’s the problem with festivals—too much time NOT sleeping.) And, once the two fall in love, there’s not really very much going on anymore. That leaves about an hour of film, though. So I just sat back and enjoyed the surrealism (pretty over the top for a Mainland film) and pretty images while I drifted off for lack of storyline.

Zhou Xun was pretty interesting, too. At times she acted like she was in a horror movie. It was a very cool performance. Too bad the movie wasn’t interesting enough to really keep up with her.

The movie was controversial in China for its frank sexuality. Are they even more repressed than we are? I saw more frankness in The Road To El Dorado. Sure, he talks about masturbation and he and Baober have sex, but it’s not very graphic.

The soundtrack is cool and the images are cool. That’s really about it. And what was up with that ultra-dark ending?

Supposedly there was a message about new and old Beijing hidden in the film somewhere. I’m not sure that I got it. There certainly was a lot of construction going on, so I saw it there. But was she supposed to be New Beijing shaking up the world of Old Beijing (him and his wife)? I dunno. I’ll let the scholars talk about that one.

In the meantime, let’s move on to the last Asian film and the one that was the most fun.

THE HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (2004)

**** (4/5)

Directed by: Yimou Zhang
Written by: Yimou Zhang/Feng Li/Bin Wang

From Zhang Yimou, director of Hero and Raise The Red Lantern, comes another period action film that shows that the Asian dramatic directors should cross over as much as possible.

This time out he tells the story of two policemen and the girl who comes between them. Mei (Zhang Ziyi, who was in attendance at later screenings…DAMMIT!!! I missed her!!) is a blind prostitute, but she’s also the daughter of the slain leader of the titular revolutionary group. Leo (Andy Lau) goes under cover to get her to take him to their lair. Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) keeps popping up to almost blow Leo’s cover, but he may have ulterior motives.

Like Hero, the visuals are stunning in this film. Director of photography Xiaoding Zhao has an amazing career ahead of him.

The plot isn’t the most intricate, but it’s one that has been ingrained into the Chinese consciousness for so long that it is almost sacred. It’s like Romeo And Juliet. We play with that plot all the time and call it new every time we do it.

I know a lot of people still don’t understand how these people are supposed to be flying through the trees and walking on water. Those people need to understand, martial arts is not really a fighting technique or even a way to protect people. It’s really a sacred discipline. A spiritual endeavor. A way to be closer to your own personal “supreme being.” These kinds of films express that idea better than any other film. They show how these people are so nimble, balanced and disciplined that they can stand on top of a bamboo tree. Sure, it’s not realistic, but it makes sense. I love Jackie and Jet, but these films are for the die-hard martial arts film fans. And what’s so awesome is that they are becoming mainstream. Hero was number one for two weeks. It took this kind of serious martial arts film to put Jet Li in the top spot.

I really liked this movie a lot. It’s not as good as Hero, but it’s still very good and very, very beautiful. I’m sure all of the colors meant something (green is betrayal and orange is love? Maybe?). And when the whole world turns to winter at the end, you can feel the coldness that these two men feel for each other.

Originally there was a part for Anita Mui. When she died, Yimou rewrote the film out of respect for her.

Go see this one after you see Hero. It’s opening at the end of the year.

Thus endeth another year at the Telluride Film Festival. Not a standout year, but not a horrible year, either. Until next time, make more black movies.

This page is dedicated to the memory of TFF Staff Member Tim Gillespie. He was a great musician, teacher and an all around great guy. We missed you, Tim.

But before I get into the movie, let’s take a look at some trailers.

DEATH AT A FUNERAL–Of all of the previews before this movie, this is the one that I want to see the most. It’s the new Frank Oz movie and it looks really funny. It doesn’t hurt that it has ‘Firefly’ alum Alan Tudyk in it…with a British accent, no less! (Ewen Bremner and Peter Dinklage are also in it.)

It’s about a family in the wake of their patriarch dying and the trials and tribulations of just getting him buried. The preview starts off a little slow, but it picks up and becomes very funny by the end. I was totally surprised to see Oz’s name attached since it’s such a British type of movie. But it’s got his dark humor all over it, too.

GRACIE–A girl’s brother dies and she takes his spot on the college soccer team. Based on a true blah, blah, blah. No interest here. (Although, doesn’t Dermot Mulroney look old?

YOU KILL ME–Speaking of old, isn’t Ben Kingsley a bit old for Tea Leoni? But I digress. Ben plays an alcoholic hitman whose boss (Philip Baker Hall) sends him to San Francisco to dry out. There, he meets his sponsor (Luke Wilson) and and new love (Leoni). Looks pretty stupid, but we’ll see. Director John Dahl has done good work in the past. Hopefully he can do it again.

INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS–A shy kid meets a pretty girl and falls in love. But his family leaves a little to be desired, so he hides them from her for as long as he can. Of course, she has to meet them once he decides that she’s The One. Brenda Blethyn is his comedienne mom who is about to become a star again.

This one, which used to be called Clubland (sounds too much like either a movie about clubgoers or an Elvis Costello biopic), looks pretty good. I’ll see it. Maybe not an Oscar winner, but it looks fun in that ‘indie/dysfunctional British family’ sort of way.

Now, how ’bout some pie.

When I first heard about this movie…well, actually I thought it was going to be a bad horror movie where Keri Russell served her customers up on a platter. Just look at her smile. It’s a little bit vicious, right?

Then I found out what it really was and I had no interest in seeing it.

Eventually, though, I started to hear more about it. First off, the fact that Nathan Fillion was in it made me a tiny bit interested. That guy’s just awesome. Then I found out that it was directed by Adrienne Shelly. Now, I don’t know a whole lot about her and I’ve only seen a couple of Hal Hartley movies, but I kind of wanted to support it just because she was a female director, a decent actress and the way she died was so tragic and horrible. She was still working on this when she was murdered in her own apartment. Nathan was on Fangoria Radio yesterday talking about it and the hostess, Debbie Rochan, talked it up as being an amazing film.

Ok. I’ll give it a shot.

Jenna (Russell) is a waitress at a pie shop in a small town…probably in Mississippi. I don’t think they ever say. She’s not only a waitress, though. She also makes a lot of the pies and actually created a lot of them. When she’s stressed out, that’s what she does: she invents a new pie in her head and names it after whatever’s going on in her life. (‘I Hate My Husband Pie’ is my personal favorite.)

Jenna is trapped in a completely loveless marriage to Earl (Jeremy Sisto). When she finds out that she’s pregnant, she’s at a loss for what to do. She’s going to keep the baby, but she doesn’t really give a damn about the baby because she hates the man who helped create it.

Enter Dr. Pomatter (Fillion). He’s just taken over for Jenna’s usual OB/GYN. He’s a nervous guy and pretty new at doctoring, so Jenna takes an immediate near-dislike to him.

Oh, infidelity has never been so cute.

Dr. Pomatter is married, too, but the two eventually spark a romance that brings a happiness to Jenna that she never knew was possible.

What to do?

There’s really nothing new here. It’s basically Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore for a new generation. Even the characters at the diner come from that movie and the series it spawned, ‘Alice.’ There’s a Flo (Cheryl Hines), a Vera (director, Shelly) and a Mel (Lew Temple). There’s a welcome new character here (new to the story, but not to film history), the owner of Joe’s Pie Shop, Old Joe. Andy Griffith plays him as a salty old man who seems to want nothing more than to bring a little bit of rain into the lives of the people who work at his pie shop. Of course, there’s a soft edge to Joe.

This all sounds like I didn’t like the movie, though. And, for about 20 minutes, I thought that I wasn’t going to like it. That first part is really choppy and nothing interesting is said. But, since nothing interesting happens in these peoples’ lives, I can understand where Adrienne was going with it. And as soon as it picked up, I started to really like Jenna, Joe and Dr. Pomatter. Becky, Dawn and Cal (the Flo, Vera and Mel characters) remain kind of uninteresting throughout, but they serve their purposes. (There’s one really awkward scene with Cal that really didn’t seem to fit the character at all. It’s one of those epiphany moments that just wouldn’t come from this guy.)

What makes this movie, though, are the performances of the two leads. Keri and Nathan really make you care about the happiness of these two people. I was a little surprised that I liked Keri as much as I did. Sure, she’s cute, but I’ve never really thought that she was all that great of an actress. Decent, but not great. Here she’s pretty great. And Nathan is, of course, cool as hell.

And then there’s Andy Griffith. Say what you will about his old show. Personally, I’m not a fan of the show as comedy, but as a set of characters it’s pretty amazing. He and his writers created some of the best characters in tv history. And Andy is a great actor. I haven’t seen him in very much besides ‘The Andy Griffith Show’ and (ahem) ‘Matlock.’ But I have seen his first movie, A Face In The Crowd…and it’s fucking amazing. He’s such a hateful asshole by the end of the movie that you can’t believe that Andy Taylor ever existed.

Here, Andy has some of that old edge back. Sure, it’s softened over the years, but it’s still there and he’s every bit as good as he ever was.

Even though this movie is highly derivative, I really liked it a lot. The relationships seemed pretty believable (although, what woman falls in love with her OB/GYN? I mean, honestly?) and the performances were spot on. It’s funny, heartbreaking and happily poignant, often all at the same time. And just thinking about the talent lost in such a horrible way will make you wish that the movie would never end.

And godDAMN, those pies all looked amazing!

But first, a few previews.

ALPHA DOG–Justin Timberlake in ANOTHER freakin’ movie about white trash degenerates. (More about the other one later.) This time it’s about a group of teenagers who kill another one after accidentally taking him hostage. Or something like that. All I know is that the families of the real participants are pissed that it got made and tried to stop its release. Even though all of the names and locations are changed, they figure people will know exactly who it’s about. And, apparently, the trial isn’t over yet. Maybe. I don’t know. The article I read was kind of confusing and it was a while ago.

I’ll stop typing now.

NOTES ON A SCANDAL–Judi Dench “befriends” a new teacher (Cate Blanchett) after the younger woman becomes involved with a student. Judi blackmails Cate into this friendship and then all Single White Female hell breaks loose.

This actually looks really cool. And it’s interesting that involves an older woman instead of two hot young ones. Judi looks pretty menacing, too, so that helps a lot. I’ll see it.

SMOKIN’ ACES–This one is awesome! I actually kind of can’t wait to see it again.

BLACK SNAKE MOAN–And, again: This one is awesome! And it’s the other Justin Timberlake preview. Personally, I think he needs to stop trying to act. But I’ll see how he is in Alpha Dog before I really draw any conclusions. Check this one out, though. Very good flick.

Now, how ’bout these kids, then?

It’s an interesting phenomenon when a film can argue for something and against it at the same time. Very few films have tried it and fewer still have succeeded. The only one that really comes to mind is (sort of) Trainspotting with its constant talk of how amazing heroine is and then showing how awful it can be.

Todd Field’s Little Children seems to take that same approach towards infidelity. For one couple it seems like the only solution while for the other it seems a bit extreme.

Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is stuck in a loveless marriage. Her husband, Richard (Gregg Edelman), has become addicted to a porn website and, even before that, never seemed to have much interest in his wife. Sarah is kind of ambivalent towards their daughter, Lucy (Sadie Goldstein), but she is the main care-giver and stay-at-home mom. Richard never has any real interaction with his daughter. They’re terrible parents who almost realize it.

Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson) is almost the exact opposite of Sarah. He loves his son, Aaron (Ty Simpkins) and hangs out with him gladly every day while his wife, Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) works as a documentarian. She’s a perfectly loving wife, but there’s something missing. Brad is envious of Kathy because she is able to take care of the family financially and she seems to have more of their son’s love. (Aaron wears a jester hat while he’s hanging out with Daddy, but when Mommy comes home from work he’s more serious and takes the hat off.)

When Sarah and Brad meet at the park, sparks fly and they start an affair that is more like a marriage than either of them feel that they are getting at home. They hang out at the pool together with the kids, laugh, joke and genuinely love being around each other. Then they go home for a bit and fuck like bunnies while the kids sleep.

Meanwhile, Ronald McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley from the original Bad News Bears and the new All The King’s Men) is shut up in his home. He’s a convicted sex-offender (he exposed himself to a kid) and is now living with his mom (Phyllis Somerville). That’s got the whole suburb running around and checking up on him all the time. When he shows up at the neighborhood pool all hell starts to break loose.

Ronnie especially has Larry (Noah Emmerich) riled up. He’s an ex-cop who can’t help himself from going over to Ronnie’s house and blasting a bullhorn at 2am.

All of these people come together in a suburban nightmare reminiscent of Todd Solendz’ Happiness. And, just as he was able to keep things sort of light, so is this Todd. Working from a book and screenplay by Tom Perotta (Election), he manages to make us laugh while we’re cringing from the tension brought by an illicit affair or a psycho-sexual deviant who is also a fragile human being.

He also uses the voice of NOVA, Will Lyman, as a narrator so that we feel like we’re watching a documentary about the Suburbanbound human.

Out of many great performances, Haley is a big standout. He hasn’t acted in over ten years, but it’s almost as if he had never given up. Haley’s story is a sad one that is hopefully getting better. He was a child actor with a huge future. But when adolescence hit, so did a bad case of the uglies. His hairline started receding and the freckles turned into pock marks. He wasn’t a cute kid anymore. He was a pretty unattractive young man.

But now he may just have a great future again. Field specifically wanted him to play the part and he’s fucking amazing. He makes Ronnie somehow sympathetic. We know that he’s not a good man, but we feel sorry for him mostly because of the bad things he’s done and the fact that he knows that he’ll do them again.

There has been a lot of talk about Oscars for the cast of this little film. I can see why. Everyone is very good. But I would say that the screenplay would probably get my vote.

Either way, it’s a great film and should be on more peoples’ list of Things To See.

Plus, it has two of my favorite women in it. How could I go wrong?!