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Hate-Watching Hating Breitbart
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Let’s say that you and your friends get accused of being racist. And let’s say there’s nothing in your heart that fits that accusation. You know you’re a celebrator of freedom, a passionate American who wishes all people could enjoy the best that this country has to offer. You’re white, incidentally. Still, you’re accused, and your reputation is tarnished, so you elect to fight back. How to go about it? If you’re the late Andrew Breitbart, champion of the Tea Party’s virtue against the likes of Janeane Garofalo, the answer is clear: Point out as often as you can that, no, it’s actually black people who are the racists. You don’t put it in those words, of course. No. You yell at the media—&l »
Cannes Diary: What Are the Women in Their Dresses Hoping For?
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Nearly everyone I know who has seen the official poster for the 66th Cannes Film Festival -- a bird's-eye view of a kiss between a young Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward -- has been crazy about it. The couple's lips meet in the center of a perfect sunburst. She's two o'clock, he's eight o'clock -- between them, they've got the whole day and night covered. Adapted from a photograph taken in 1963 during the filming of Melville Shavelson's A New Kind of Love, it's as romantic a movie image as you could hope for, a link to cinema's past that also feels strikingly modern. A gargantuan version of this poster has been hoisted high above the entrance to the Grand Théâtre Lumière here in Cannes, the theater where all the gala premieres are held. And while »
Cannes: Not Even the Gifted Emma Watson Can Raise The Bling Ring
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
The biggest puzzlement of these early days of the festival comes from Sofia Coppola, one of my favorite working directors. Until now, I have loved every one of Coppola's movies: I love her sure and delicate touch, and she's better than any other contemporary filmmaker at capturing the greatness of small moments. The Bling Ring is the first of her pictures that I actively dislike—I sense no mystery, no depth there. Perhaps this just isn't the right material for Coppola. Based on real events, The Bling Ring follows a bunch of acquisitive, precocious kids who learn they can break into celebrities' houses, steal their stuff, and get away with it. In the movie, as in real life, these scofflaws broke into Paris Hilton's home some half a dozen times. (Hilton »
Cannes: Young & Beautiful is a Portrait of a 17-Year-Old French Call Girl
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
François Ozon's Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a 17-year-old French call girl, is a story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and kid brother; no one, least of all mom (Géraldine Pailhas), is too happy when her secret profession comes to light. The picture is reasonably compelling, particularly in the way Ozon outlines the tender relationship between Isabelle and one of her much older clients. And it's more restrained than many of Ozon's pictures—there's no exhausting campiness here. But Young & Beautiful might have worked better wit »
Jerry Schatzberg's Road Pictures Scarecrow Hits Film Forum
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Elusive, loose-limbed, as messy and sun-touched as the American '70s, Jerry Schatzberg's 1973 Scarecrow is a road picture, a buddy comedy, a woe-is-man tragedy, a lopsided competition in Method externalization pitting young Gene Hackman against an even younger Al Pacino. Neither a complete failure (it won the Palme d'Or but was stiffed stateside) nor a lost masterpiece, the film today stands as a flawed, fascinating testament to a time of discovery in Hollywood: of how stories could be told onscreen, of what great actors might find within themselves, of just what in the hell this country had become in the late-'60s crackup.
Playing train-hopping vagabonds in a U.S. of diners and hippies, lumbering Hackman and teensy Pacino are as physically mismatched as some pie-toss »
Go Goa Gone Goes Home Unhappy
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Most jokes don't translate very well in Go Goa Gone, a Bollywood horror comedy influenced by Shaun of the Dead. The creators clearly like Edgar Wright's galvanizing pastiche, but only vaguely know what kind of story they want to tell—and not at all how to tell it. The film starts out as a romantic comedy starring a trio of emotionally stunted bros: Hardik (Kunal Khemu), the over-confident horny one; Luv (Vir Das), the sad-sack nice guy; and Bunny (Anand Tiwari), the painfully shy nerd nobody cares about. On a mission to score, these three dudes travel to a remote island just off of Goa, and are subsequently attacked by zombies at an underground rave hosted by the Russian mafia. The manchildren get pitted against unyielding (but solicitous!) women and zombies, but bo »
Teasing Apart Palestine's Effort to Become State 194
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
In April, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad resigned from office, five months after Palestine received non-member observer state status at the United Nations. The new documentary State 194 teases apart Fayyad's efforts to make Palestine the 194th member state of the U.N., and how those efforts were received in Palestine, Israel, and abroad. Filmmaker Dan Setton highlights the grinding political processes that halted the realization of a two-state solution and full recognition of Palestine. The best part of State 194 is its domesticity, its low-key approach to a conflict that has been widely sensationalized in the media. Fayyad is depicted not just as an international spokesperson for a peaceful struggle, but as a man whose wife criticizes him for not packing enough »
Pieta Tells of Redemption and Rebirth and Mother-son Handjobs
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
A Jesus-and-Mary dynamic becomes psychosexually twisted—replete with a horrific mother-son handjob—in Pietà, an intriguing tale of redemption and rebirth from director Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring; 3-Iron) that eventually segues into a more conventional revenge drama. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a loan shark who cripples deadbeats in order to collect his money via insurance payouts; his life is upended after he's approached by a woman (Cho Min-soo) claiming to be his long-lost mom. This maternal figure soon transforms the thug through her saintly remorse for abandoning Kang-do and her benevolence toward him despite his nasty profession. It's during the first hour, however, that Kim's expertly modulated morality play is »
Watch Erased with the Sound Off and You'll Still Know What's Going On
16 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Mix a dollop of The Bourne Identity, a dash (or two) of Taken, and a pinch of the spy classic Three Days of the Condor (1975), stir it all together, and you get Erased, a thriller whose storytelling ingredients are so familiar that one could watch it with the sound off and still know what's going on. Aaron Eckhart is Ben Logan, a recently widowed private security analyst living in Brussels who awakes one morning to find his office empty, his co-workers in the morgue, and his personal identity wiped away. With his rebellious teenage daughter, Amy (Liana Liberato), in tow, Ben begins dodging assassins. As luck would have it, he's a retired black-ops agent, so, game on. German director Philipp Stölzl proves adept at staging fight scenes in confined spaces, »
High-speed Motor Racing Goes Green in Charge
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Charge opens with the noise, velocity, and adrenaline of the Isle of Man's Tt motorcycle race, a 37-mile mountain course taken at speeds of 200 mph. But this story is about the Tt's zero-emissions grand prix, a looming folly. Even some proponents of the 2009 experiment seemed circumspect, and fans raged. People come to the Tt "to see hard men ride hard motorcycles, not piss about on battery-powered scrap," rants one pub-goer. These are quiet bikes—birds smash into them!—that in the first year couldn't approach 100 mph. The riders marvel at the scenery, which blurs by in regular races. But documentarian Mark Neale, with drama provided by narrator Ewan McGregor and editor Rochelle Watson, shows there's no dearth of adrenaline as engineering teams face challenges every »
A Respectable Cast Can't Bring The English Teacher Any Laughs
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
A film seemingly produced only because it boasts enough sizable roles to entice multiple stars, Craig Zisk's The English Teacher reveals that a respectable cast and much noisy boisterousness isn't enough to generate a single laugh. Introduced by a stuffy female British narrator as a spinster with no marriage prospects, high school English teacher Linda (Julianne Moore) finds her staid, solitary life upended when former student Jason (Michael Angarano) returns home from New York with an unpublished play that she and drama teacher Carl (Nathan Lane) adore and demand to stage. Close-minded small-town administrators who'd rather put on Our Town soon prove the least of Linda's problems once she sleeps with Jason and—after he proves to be a two-timing sleazeball—the »
Old Dog Gazes on Tibet's Fears for the Future
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
There's a fantastic moment in Old Dog where writer-director Pema Tseden lets the camera roll beyond a scene's pivotal moment, in which elderly Tibetan sheep farmer Akku declines a wealthy Chinese mainland businessman's offer to buy his old mastiff. The viewer watches as a sheep that's gotten outside the farm's fence struggles to return to its flock. There are no edits; we watch in real time as the animal works it out. This lovely, unrushed bit could be interpreted any number of ways in a film about modernity's erosion of traditional Tibetan culture. Fears about the future also play out in a subplot about a young married couple's possible infertility. Shot on digital by cinematographer Sonthar Gyal, Old Dog has the look and feel of a documentary, which adds senses of urgen »
33 Postcards's Chinese Orphan Visits Her Murderous Aussie Sponsor, Feel-goodery Ensues
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Haphazardly veering between bloody prison stabbings and angelic orphans out-wholesoming the von Trapp brood, the bilingual Aussie drama 33 Postcards is a film as rootless as its foundling protagonist. Director Pauline Chan wastes a novel premise—the real-life voyage of a Chinese teen to visit her generous Australian sponsor, who turns out to be a murderer in prison—by flattening all emotional interactions and ethical quandaries into a platonic ideal of two-dimensionality. Taking the place of the feisty Maria is implausibly naive Mei Mei (Zhu Lin, eager as a puppy but expressive as a newt), an aspiring children's choir director. When her orphanage is invited to sing in Sydney, Mei Mei seizes the chance to meet her longtime benefactor and pen pal, Dean (Guy Pearce), wh »
Circumstantial Evidence of a Shared History Aside, Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria Tracks Conversion to the Hebrew Faith
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Boomer comedies and teen party flicks aren't the only movies buoyed by their soundtracks. Jeff L. Lieberman's new doc, Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria, is punctuated with the holy music of the small clusters of Igbo people who have converted to Judaism—mash-ups of Hebrew scripture and African rhythms that thrill the ear with the discovery of the new. (Seeing kosher meals prepared from local staples like cassava and yam is a similarly expansive experience.) Centered on the spiritual journey of Shmuel (formerly Sam), a young Igbo man who wants to become a rabbi, the film regularly widens its focus to offer context: of the history of the Igbo in Nigeria and those later brought in captivity to America; of the similarities between Igbo custom and Judaic law; of the legends of »
Tracing America's Relationship to the Middle East in Valentino's Ghost
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Coming fast on the heels of revelations confirming that the CIA indeed had a hand in shaping the script for Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, here's documentarian Michael Singh's examination of the ways U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is tightly tied to the images of Arabs and Muslims that appear in American and European media. A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling. Singh deftly weaves newspaper articles, interviews with academics (Harvard's Niall Ferguson, George Washington University's Melani McAlister), and archival newscasts, with clips from films including Rudolph Valentino's silent classic The Sheik, Otto Preminger's Exodus, and 2000's Rul »
Elemental Ushers in Pollution Porn
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Can a film be too beautiful? With its appreciative close-ups of bubbling, pearl-gray rivers and dramatic vistas of green-gray oil sands, the eco-doc Elemental is so stunningly shot it might well be pollution porn, if anyone wanted such a thing. Fighting to eliminate these gorgeous toxin-scapes are the film's heroes—Rajendra Singh, Eriel Deranger, and Jay Harman—three activists with vastly different personalities and backgrounds striving to repair their local environs with the imperfect tools available to them. The soft-spoken but impatient Singh, a water activist, tries to convince his fellow citizens to protect the sacred Ganges River from excessive damming and human waste. The earnestly indignant Deranger, a Native Canadian, has taken up the even more quixotic miss »
Honing in on Jean-Francois Sivadier and His Star Natalie Dessay in Becoming Traviata
15 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
"A great singer, chandeliers, champagne, and costumes—we see this at a distance," Jean-François Sivadier says deep into Becoming Traviata, a spare and ravishing doc that positions viewers in the rehearsal room in the weeks leading up to his minimalist production of Verdi's La Traviata. Sivadier is encouraging his star, Natalie Dessay, before a gutsy, scraping-out-the-soul performance of "È Strano" on a stage stripped of the usual operatic extravagance. His vision—shared by the film's director, Philippe Béziat—is of that distance obliterated, of arias and singers and feelings laid bare. Dessay, as much a trouper as she is a brilliant vocalist, puts her head in her hands and then digs deep, pulling from herself a bruised and gorgeous l »
Cannes: The Selfish Giant is Great Boys-to-Men Drama
14 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Considering that the Cannes experience consists mostly of critics and other assorted ornery types shambling into theaters, sitting in front of a screenful of flickering images for a few hours and then, like Flash Gordon’s Mole People, tumbling back out into daylight, news travels surprisingly fast. Earlier today, a colleague and I had just stepped out of a midmorning screening of a rather steamy and interesting little thriller, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, when a third colleague began thinking aloud about what he might see next. Earlier in the morning, some of our friends who are surprisingly adept at being in two places at once had seen a picture called The Selfish Giant, screening not in the main competition, but in the Quinza »
Amy Poehler's New Comedy Partner Is David Simon
14 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Officially, the crowd crammed into the basement of the Paley Center on Thursday night had come for edification. Here was a panel discussion on the topic of Excellence in the Media, featuring Peabody Award-winners and -bestowers, hosted by documentarian (and class of '98 Peabody winner) Pat Mitchell, who actually kicked things off by declaiming from the Wikipedia definition of "excellence" -- certainly an homage to a beloved old Simpsons, that once-excellent show that scored its Peabody in 1996. Really, though, most people were there to enjoy excellent TV people Amy Poehler and David Simon being told how excellent they are. There was lots of this, along with insi »
Fast & Furious 6: Oh, This Is Why We Have Car Chases
14 May 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
There’s one key truth that separates the tank-topped gearheads of the Fast and Furious movies from the rest of us. Every problem these lugnuts face can be solved by doing the one thing these lugnuts love most: driving really fast. It’s like if you could deal with your taxes by hunkering down with a season of Justified.
Over the course of six films, now, these heroic outlaws have raced their Hot Wheels for justice, for wealth, for respect, to clear their names, to save the world from terrorists. The cast—a sort of super-Model U.N., the hotness global rather than localized—and their cars have raced through L.A., Rio, and Tokyo, against tankers and trains and candy-colored drift-cars so shiny and darling they might have been confected by Pixar. »
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