Posts published under “Film Fests”
SLIFF: 127 Hours (& About a Thousand Crappy Decibels)
127 HOURS (2010/SLIFF: PREVIEW) Oh, Danny Boy(le)! What has that horrible destroyer of quality cinema “Oscar” done to you? It certainly hasn’t dampened your relatively newfound affection for manipulative cheezeball OTT synth-rock score, or for your new fave composer and Slumdog Millionaire alum A.R. Rahman, who seems to have been under the impression that this was indeed a sequel to that misguided, overrated, Oscar-sweeping crapsterpiece with this samey collection of bombastic beats. Exhibit A: Your soon-to-be released and much buzzed about Oscar bait grossout adventure 127 Hours. It’s source material is a true story, however slight: Our oddball (read: dumbass) fitness adventure nut hero goes run-hiking ALONE through treacherous canyons in Utah when he suddenly finds himself trapped under a boulder in a remote crevasse. He struggles in vain for 127 hours or theareabouts, eventually freeing himself (SPOILER, SORTA) via chopping off his arm just under the elbow with a dull pocketknife. But while you succeeded in stretching this 20 minute, tops, story into an engaging full-length feature—much to the credit of a game and funny James Franco in the challenging role of the self-amputee—what ultimately knocked your film down a couple of letter grades for me was your Slumdog-esqe ham-fisted, overcooked visuals (Oh, split screens of office drones scored by Coldplay-in-overdrive-type tunes, etc, go fuck yourselves) and the aforementioned crap score. MIND YOU: This film will be a huge audience-pleasing hit, let there be no doubt about that. And it will likely be a Best Picture contender. *Sigh* I do hope that this is just the inevitable keep-making-what-the-people-want phase of your post-Oscar career that will eventually run its course, allowing you to tone down your current 30 Seconds to Mars music video treatment M.O. and move your focus from the flash-pots and blood bags into creating something a little subtler and hopefully a bit more resonant. Something more like your creepy sci-fi masterpiece Sunshine.
Don’t get me wrong here—127 Hours isn’t a terrible movie. And the scene with Franco taking his arm off will indeed stick with you. As for the rest, it’s certainly just as rousing as any other energy-drink-infused popcorn thriller. Aw, Danny. You break my heart.
My grade: C+
SLIFF 2010: An Evening with Harry Shearer
Eeeeeexcellent!
The 19th Annual Stella Artois St Louis International Film Festival (but still SLIFF, because SASLIFF just looks silly) kicked off on a more somber note than had originally been intended, with the sudden death last week of St. Louis-born filmmaker George Hickenlooper turning the opening gala screening/reception featuring his new buzzy film Casino Jack into a makeshift memorial ceremony. (Of course, I missed this reportedly moving tribute, due to a sneak preview of Burlesque playing across town in Chesterfield. There are priorities, people!) The film’s star, Kevin Spacey, was respectfully in attendance and, according to a SLIFF rep, later closed several bars and, eventually, sidewalks, in and around the Loop. Friendly!) After such gravitas, I think a laugh or two was definitely in order. Funny songs about priests molesting deaf boys, anyone?
An evening with this guy.
Well, if that sounds fun to you (and it surprisingly was!), you likely (wish you had) caught the following night’s packed but surprisingly not sold out SLIFF coup, An Evening With Harry Shearer, a fun and revealing two hour live interview/career retrospective of the comic actor/writer/director, already in town to promote his Hurricane Katrina exposé doc, The Big Uneasy, which was screening the following afternoon in the same venue, the gloriously unfashionable time machine known as the Hi-Pointe theater. Read more »
On Location: Peter Halter and Movies at the TCA
Peter Halter
TAOS COMMUNITY AUDITORIUM (October 17, 2010) Google Peter Halter and you’ll get his photo linked to a website listing him as one of the Presentation Specialists (i.e. Projectionists) for Sundance in 2011, as well as for the Doha Film Festival which is running next week. Cool. Peter is also the Programming Director for our own “Movies at the TCA,” a wonderful weekly event featuring indie films which have missed Taos (and are still new enough not to be on DVD).
This past week, Peter was showing Get Low and I was lucky enough to meet up with him in the projection booth to talk about movies, film festivals and how to program successfully for an audience as quirky as the one here in Taos. Peter has been working with the TCA and Taos for 16 years now, 5 years as the Programming Director. Among the other festivals he has worked are the Travers City Film Festival (Michael Moore’s event), Telluride, Durango and the Dominican Republic Global Film Festival. He was also part of Taos Talking Pictures, the legendary film festival that ran here between 1994 and 2003, and created some serious buzz by giving away land to award winners. Unfortunately for all of us movie lovers in town, the festival failed thanks to a combination of financial and political issues and nothing yet has risen to take its place, though there’s still some talk. Read more »
Ebertfest PS: The Virginia Theater
The Virginia Theater
12th ANNUAL ROGER EBERT’S FILM FESTIVAL, CHAMPAIGN, IL One of the coolest parts of Ebertfest is that, even though there is no shortage of manic, territorial weirdoes in line hours before each day’s first screening, it is entirely possible, with a Festival Pass, anyway, to walk up to the Virginia Theater only a few minutes before the scheduled show time and still secure yourself a wonderful seat with a great view. (Without a laminated Festival Pass, which covers all 13 screenings @ $12 a pop, individual ticket buyers are left lined up until a few minutes after the announced show time, when volunteers are able to count how many empty seats are still available. Ebertfest usually runs a full 30 minutes or more behind that scheduled time, btw.)
I’m normally one of those nerds who cannot properly enjoy a film unless I’m in a very specific location within the theater—not too close, never all the way in back, and definitely somewhere in the center—but the Virginia Theater (capable of seating something like 1500 mopes) has maybe 5 bad seats in the whole joint. Our first experience in the Virginia—Day 1’s sold out Pink Floyd: The Wall screening—led us to seats that normally would have been unbearable to this finicky film fancier: the very last row of an extensive balcony. We discovered quickly enough that, with the Virginia’s ENORMOUS, stage-filling screen and crystal clear sound system—not to mention the room’s stellar natural acoustics—sometimes the very last row in of an extensive balcony can be the best seat in the house. After bouncing around to a few different locations in subsequent screenings we discovered one advantage to the floor seating, however: leg room. The floor actually has some, which becomes increasingly more important with each successive screening. While the floor seats generally go first to those previously mentioned manic, territorial weirdoes, they tend to leave several options open for we lazy latecomers on the room’s far right, non-Ebert section (our King sits on a raised black leather throne/recliner in the very last row on the center/left and decidedly more crowded section), a vantage point that, in smaller theaters with smaller screens, would have bothered me. But in the Virginia? Perfect.
Ebertfest Day 5: 2008 Didn’t Suck
Song Sung Blue
12th ANNUAL ROGER EBERT’S FILM FESTIVAL, CHAMPAIGN, IL This year’s Ebertfest seems to favor an apparently quite golden year: 2008. Selections from 2008 included Departures, Synecdoche, New York, Vincent: A Life in Color, Trucker, and Ebertfest Day 5’s sole presentation, Song Sung Blue. This complex and revealing doc—equal parts inspirational romance and family tragedy—by first-time director Greg Kohs tells the story of Lightning & Thunder, a regional Milwaukee Neil Diamond tribute band/husband & wife singing duo led by Claire (“Thunder,” specializing in Patsy Cline) and Mike Sardina (“Lightning,” mulleted, tanned, and croaking like prime 1978 ND incarnate). After a promising start circa 1990, with sold-out bookings all over Milwaukee and Chicago and a special invite by Eddie Vedder to perform an encore with Pearl Jam in front of 30,000 people, the band hit the skids in the wake of a tragedy involving a car crashing into the Sardina’s home, and never quite managed to reclaim their local celebrity or fan base. What starts out as the purest sweetheart romance—Mike is outspokenly nuts about Claire, and at the peak of their success the couple marries in front of 800-ish folks at the Wisconsin State Fair—turns into a harrowing second act in the fallout of the accident, as the decidedly day job-free couple’s relationship is tested to the extreme when bookers, for the cruelest of reasons (that I won’t reveal here), refuse to hire them. Then depression and increasingly crushing poverty takes its toll. Read more »
Ebertfest Day 4: A Day in Color
12th ANNUAL ROGER EBERT’S FILM FESTIVAL, CHAMPAIGN, IL OK! On with Day 4, which brought us the longest and most varied lineup yet: 2003’s I Capture the Castle, 2008’s Vincent: A Life in Color, 2008’s Trucker, and 1987’s Barfly.
Thanks to your God and his dumb volcano, actor Bill Nighy was unable to attend the packed screening of director Tim Fywell’s I Capture the Castle, a family friendly (well, European family friendly, due to a couple of boobs) coming-of-age story featuring Nighy as an eccentric (er, more like went-to-jail-once-for-trying-to-stab-his-wife nutz), once famous writer of fiction who lives with his spiritual, nudist ladyfriend and three charmingly verbose, precocious children in a crumbling ancient castle in the isolated English countryside where he struggles with writer’s block and the girls dream of young gentlemen coming and taking them away.
I Capture the Castle
Nighy is excellent as usual in portraying this sad, fractured man, and Rose Byrne and Romola Garai are adorable as his winsome daughters in this adaption of a 1949 book by Dodie Smith, an author mostly known for her 1956 children’s classic The Hundred and One Dalmations. While this is a fine effort by longtime British TV director Fywell, it very much feels like a fun, smart, and a little OTT made-for-BBC TV drama—nothing less, mind you, but not a whole lot more. Read more »
Ebertfest Day 3: Pigtails Over 30 Always a Bad Idea
RESPECT!
12th ANNUAL ROGER EBERT’S FILM FESTIVAL, CHAMPAIGN, IL Day 3 has brought an exciting and emotionally exhausting lineup: 2008’s Departures, 1929’s Man With the Movie Camera, and 2008’s Synecdoche, New York.
An introduction by retired University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor David Bordwell (the author of several books on film aesthetics and history) warned the packed-in audience that we were about to experience a masterful film in the tradition of Japanese “wet” movies—a genre of ultra emotional films that, along with a few laughs, are guaranteed to jerk a few tears from this eager and (often too?) agreeable audience. The film, director Yôjirô Takita’s masterpiece and Foreign Language Academy Award winner Departures, follows a thirtysomething cellist, Daigo (played by one time teen J-pop sensation Masahiro Motoki), who, upon learning the orchestra that he was barely good enough to get into has been dissolved, must find a way to make a living for himself and his winsome and initially supportive wife, Ikuei (played by the beauty Tsutomu Yamazaki).
Departures
The journey takes the couple from glitzy Tokyo to Daigo’s childhood village, to live rent-free in the home of his recently deceased mother. After answering an enticing classified ad for work in “depatures”—Daigo initially guessing it is related to the tourism industry—he discovers the position is for an encoffiner, a quiet, ritualized service involving preparing dead bodies in front of the families for their coffins and eventual cremation. Death is a taboo subject in Japan, and while Daigo takes the job, he keeps what he does for a living from his wife. The story, also involving Daigo coming to terms with the father who abandoned him as a child, is heartbreaking and breathtaking and all of those other long words that leave you spent and weeping in a theater full of strangers. This is great cinema, constructed by a master. Read more »
Ebertfest Day 2: SML Loves The Smell Of Nerds, Waffles In The Morning
Munyurangabo
12th ANNUAL ROGER EBERT’S FILM FESTIVAL, CHAMPAIGN, IL Good morning! Thank you Country Inn & Suites Champaign for your bountiful continental breakfast (just like they enjoy on THE continent, surely) and your neverending pile of constantly replenishing cookies. That’s right. (!) Now onto (slightly more) important matters: Ebertfest Day 2 presented SML with an eclectic mix: 2007’s Munyurangabo, 1994’s The New Age, and the 2001 reconstruction of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, 1979’s Apocalypse Now Redux.
Some of you may remember one half of SML’s disappointing first attempt at viewing Munyurangabo at SLIFF last year. Luckily, Mr. Ebert has made it possible for one to finally view this extraordinary film under the best possible conditions: an actual FILM presentation (no DVD shit up in Roger’s house!), on the majestic Virginia Theater’s ENORMOUS screen, and followed by a revealing Q&A with the film’s director/co-writer, Arkansas kid done good Lee Isaac Chung, along with co-writer/producer Sam Anderson and co-producer Jenny Lund. Chung explained that the film was created during a period when he, accompanying his wife who was volunteering at a Christian mission in Rwanda, taught a group of locals a course on filmmaking. The result, completely lacking in Western artifice, feels like 97 minutes of genuine Rwandan life. Though Chung and Anderson are billed as co-writers, the former explained that, while they came up with the general premise and what they wanted to accomplish story-wise, scene by scene, they left it up to the actors to create their actual dialogue, resulting in astonishingly natural, unforced performances. Read more »
Ebertfest Day 1: This Is His Happening
In line @ Ebertfest, 9am.
12th ANNUAL ROGER EBERT’S FILM FESTIVAL, CHAMPAIGN, IL In declaring this day Ebertfest Day, the effusive and really sorta too long proclamation by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn compared Roger Ebert to Abe Lincoln, citing the Gettysburg Address as being “all about people, as Roger Ebert is all about people.” We dunno if we’d go THAT far, but sitting in the packed Virginia Theater, in a crowd of RE’s biggest admirers, the hyperbole is more than easily forgiven. After RE graciously accepted the honor with a few lines spoken by his MacBook, his wife and Ebertfest host Chaz Ebert said, “To paraphrase Roger’s immortal words from [his script for] Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, he wants to say that ‘This is his happening, and it’s freaking him out!’”
With the 12th Annual Robert Ebert’s Film Festival (aka Ebertfest) opening night announcements out of the way, the rapt audience of oldies and college kids turned their focus to tonight’s double feature: a much ballyhooed rare 70mm print of 1982′s Pink Floyd: The Wall and 2007′s You, the Living. Read more »
Quick Note: Ebertfest, Ho!
As promised, SML is heading to Ebertfest this week. We’ll be tweeting our immediate observations about the movies and panels, and attempting to post at the end of each day—assuming we don’t abandon ship after Day 1’s screening of The Wall. (Note to selves: Pick up downers on the drive up.) Movie lineup here and panel schedule here.
