6 posts tagged “film”
You don’t have to brave the hype and cold of Sundance to spot the next generation of cinematic talent. The festival’s organizers have mounted a virtual film festival of unprecedented scope, with 46 dramatic, documentary, and animated short films that you can watch online free of charge.
The first batch got posted late yesterday (more will be added every day through January 21), including Happiness — not to be confused with the current Will Smith feature — which is about a spinster who visits a shop near her New York home and buys a mysterious sealed box that’s simply labeled Happiness.
It’s a beautifully shot film with precious little dialogue. And since it’s only 11 minutes long, we won’t say anything more about it other than that it’s sort of the anti–Sex and the City and that it captures the hopeful hollowness of contemporary consumer culture with the sweet, sad precision of Lost in Translation.
Complete list of short films and their online premiere dates.
Showing someone getting shot in the head is fine, but suggested oral sex? Nope (Boys Don’t Cry). A fully-clothed character admitting she masturbates twice a day? Not allowed (Jersey Girl). Doggie-style sex between puppets? Forget it (Team America).
In Kirby Dick’s wry documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (out on DVD 1/23), you get to see not only the above supposedly naughty bits (which prompted, respectively, initial NC-17, R, and NC-17 ratings), but spy on some of the ultrasecretive Motion Picture Association of America censors themselves — Dick hired a private eye to hunt them down. (Spoiler: They’re a bunch of yahoos.)
Why does it matter? As various blindsided filmmakers explain in interviews, studios routinely force them to recut their work to get a “better” rating — because, for instance, NC-17 movies are harder to distribute.
Prepare to be offended by what the MPAA thinks is offensive (e.g., female sexual pleasure).
By the way, missionary-style puppet sex? That’s fine.
Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is one of those films a lot of people know they ought to have seen, but didn’t necessarily get around to it when it first aired on HBO. Now coming out on DVD (12/19), this devastating chronicle of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina serves as the essential, definitive documentation of an American tragedy.
What makes this four-hour, four-part retelling so powerful is that it puts the random images of suffering (and government ineptitude) we all saw on the TV news in context; through eyewitness testimony, and in forensic detail, we learn exactly what happened and why.
Some 100 interviewees made their way into the final cut of this elegiac film: an eloquent, angry, rattled range of New Orleans residents; local and national politicians and activists (Governor Kathleen Blanco, Mayor Ray Nagin, the inevitable Reverend Al Sharpton); and cultural figures (such as Wynton Marsalis).
Unlike most of the media, which lost interest in the city after the Superdome cleared out, Lee and his crew descended on New Orleans three months after Katrina. The result is a documentary with a particularly clear-eyed, long-view perspective on what America really lost when this city went under.
If you are in New York, take a moment to go to the preview screening of "God Grew Tired of Us", a documentary about three young Sudanese men who after 10 years wandering in the African wilderness, escaped from Sudan to a refugee camp in Kenya and were later selected by the International Rescue Committee for resettlement in the United States.
Directed by Christopher Quinn, "God Grew Tired of Us", was the winner of both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Narrated by Nicole Kidman.
The preview screening will be followed by a special conversation with director Christopher Quinn and John Dau, one of the Lost Boys featured in the film.
Info:
Preview Screening and Q&A with Director
Thursday, January 4, 2007
8:00PM - 10:00PM
The JCC in Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Avenue at 76th Street
Limited to two tickets per guest. Call 646 505 5708 to register.
More about the film: www.godgrewtiredofus.com
What happens when someone falls in love but circumstances prevent him from doing anything about it? Like, say, a septuagenarian who falls for a 19-year-old?
You’re probably thinking: It gets creepy, fast. But when the old dude in question is a movie character played by the still oddly mesmerizing Peter O’Toole, and the script is by Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette), the answer gets a lot more nuanced. In the improbable love story Venus (out 12/20), Maurice (O’Toole) is an elegant, elderly actor who becomes enamored of his buddy Ian’s rather uncouth grandniece, Jessie.
Maurice, a matinee idol in his day, is by turns dashing and pathetic, charming and irritating, wise and clueless. This isn’t Lolita: Maurice has enough propriety, generally, to know that he shouldn’t push his luck. And young Jessie, a wary, working-class hard-ass, isn’t shy about slapping him when he does. But at the same time, she’s fascinated and a little bit touched by the attentions of this goofy old chap.
This is a small, smart, poignant film about finding hope through the simple pleasure of appreciating — and being appreciated.
Right from the start, Notes on a Scandal (in theaters 12/27) is a grand, guilty pleasure, thanks to Dame Judi Dench’s fearless, go-for-broke portrayal of the film’s unreliable narrator. “Teaching is crowd control,” Dench’s Barbara Covett says in an early voice-over, and it’s clear this bitter old battle-ax won’t have much nice to say about any of her students or fellow teachers, which instantly makes the movie extremely funny.
But almost immediately, too, it becomes a tense psychological thriller, because Barbara’s obsessed with the naive new art teacher, Sheba, played by an equally terrific Cate Blanchett. And Sheba, in turn, becomes obsessed with a cute, charismatic 15-year-old schoolboy, who’s obsessed with her. And guess who happens to see them hooking up and who then becomes obsessed with using that ruinous secret.
Even if you saw all of this coming (particularly if you read the Zoë Heller novel from which the movie’s adapted), you’ll still be transfixed, because Dench and Blanchett thrillingly dance and duel their way to the finish like women on the verge of something much worse than a nervous breakdown.
Screaming! Slapping! Shoving! An overheated Philip Glass score!
It’s all deliciously, awesomely over-the-top.
