I'm going to be completely honest, my first film at SFIFF was underwhelming. It's a little film (with an even smaller budget) called The Selling. The festival catalog calls it witty and original, and claims it deftly handles a blend of humor and horror. I found none of these qualities in Selling.
I have just arrived in the bay area for the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival. While the relationship is still young, I don't mind saying that San Francisco is my favorite city America. Whether SFIFF will become my favorite American film festival has yet to be seen as this is my first year attending. The weather is considerably more favorable than Park City in January.
The giant monsters movie genre, at least in the most nostalgic terms, is nearly extinct. Sure, Peter Jackson’s King Kong was pretty good. And Cloverfield saw a good bit of success financially and critically. But it seems as if the movie-going public’s imagination is uncaptureable, by any good measure, by the idea of enormous, loud, dangerous creatures (Rush Limbaugh doesn’t count). But rumors swirling through the festival mills about an indie gem called, unceremoniously, Monsters held great promise for the movie niche. And, it seems, these rumors are well founded. Gareth Edward’s feature film is charmingly ethereal and, at times, staggeringly beautiful.
Take Shelter, the sophomore effort from writer/director Jeff Nichols, represents a major step forward from Nichols’s first film, Shotgun Stories. Shotgun Stories, a very good movie in its own right, showcases Nichols’s particular skill for building and sustaining tension and capturing the nuances of interpersonal relationships. But where Shotgun Stories at times feels aloof and seems to linger too long on some scenes, Take Shelter is tightly edited and intimately involves the viewer in the lives of its characters.
Lucky McKee's film The Woman, was easily one of the most shocking at Sundance. Reactions have been pretty extreme and it's certainly an 'interesting' movie. With the film on many people's minds, we decided to sit down with Mr. McKee and ask him a couple questions about the movie.
If I asked you to name some films that take place in New England, where the wedding weekend brings together a painfully dysfunctional famly to butt heads and cry for several days, it wouldn't be too hard to list a few. Among these are probably Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married. Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day seems to be a marriage, if you will, between these two earlier films. Sure, you'll substitute pedophilia for domestic abuse, and self-mutilation for drug addiction, but all the basic parts are there. Because of the similarities, I originally passed on Another Happy Day in favor of catching Araki's Kaboom. But once Another Happy Day won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, it seemed I ought to give it a chance.
Homages to those crazy grindhouse films of the seventies, even when done well, usually don’t impress me. The exception to the rule is the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino double feature, Grindhouse. But 2010′s Machete left me feeling a bit bored. What director Jason Eisner has done in Hobo With A Shotgun deserves to be taken notice of. Although I’m still unsure of whether that attention should be of a positive or negative nature.
Hobo With A Shotgun is the second fake trailer that accompanied the Rodriguez/Tarantino project that’s been made into a feature film. As would be expected, the story follows a hobo played by Rutger Hauer. The unnamed transient rode the rails into a Canadian town full of pure insanity. It’s run by two brothers who are real sadistic freaks. The two murder anyone they please in twisted ways rivaling the creativity of the Saw films, or Hostel. So our hobo, with the help of a hooker with a heart of gold, and of course, a shotgun, decide to serve up the town a steaming plate of justice.
On May 12th, 2008, the largest earthquake in China’s history hit, it devastated the Wenchuan region. It killed around 68,000, and dramatically affected the lives of five million people. Director Tao Gu visited the crumbling city shortly after and interviewed his parents, who survived when the majority of their friends and neighbors died. The words of their interviews are backdropped by some stunning images and cinematography. Gu’s ability to frame, and capture a elegant piece of the tragedy is frequently breathtaking.
In the wake of having his film picked up by IFC, Matthew Chapman, the director of The Ledge chatted with us for a while about religion and politics, his film, and a bit about his great, great grandfather, Charles Darwin. The Ledge is his newest film, now playing at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
The Woman is written, directed, and portrayed with a heavy hand. When everything is done with speakers blasting, and not just the soundtrack, then it is hard to have any moment of surprise without blowing an eardrum. I can’t say people won’t like the film, because I heard chuckles in the audience. And even I jumped a few times at the wild, dirty grimaces that flashed on the screen. But the whole bloody mess felt like just that: a bloody mess. Is The Woman a horror film? Is it a dark comedy? I don’t think it can be both, or at least director Lucky McKee struck out trying to do it here.
McKee is talented, and I felt there were glimpses of real suspense throughout the film, but it was all lost by the end. Violence has become so saturated in film these days that it can purposefully be made comical. But the psychological, physical, sexual, and emotional domestic violence portrayed in the film is just not something that can be laughed at, no matter how deep the social commentary one can read between the lines.
