Film Crew: Hollywood After Dark

Those wacky guys from Rifftrax (and Mystery Science Theater 3000), Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, are at it again. Think of Film Crew as MST3K without the silhouettes and robots, but still chock full of snarky comments on bad, obscure films -- serving as a survival mechanism for both commenter and viewer.

Continue Reading Film Crew's first riff: Hollywood After Dark

Finally, a chock-filled DVD releasing week again! We've got new anime, new kids movies, an Oscar-nominated Danish drama and other excellent international seletions, new indie flicks and dramas, a new season of Extras, new old noir, and much more. Enjoy!

Continue Reading New on DVD: July 10, 2007

Sweet Land is "a tale of pure Americana that speaks both to the immigrant experience and the nature of love," (Hollywood Reporter), this poignant film is set in Minnesota farm country in the early 20s. "A movie of extraordinary tenderness," wrote Entertainment Weekly's Owen Glieberman. "If Terrence Malick could ever banish the wispy art clouds from his brain and give in to the storyteller inside, perhaps he might make a movie as stirring. I want to be absolutely clear about what an independent triumph this is."

Continue Reading Sweet Land: A Love Story

Susanne Bier's drama After the Wedding was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and manages to be both sweeping, yet entirely intimate. "A highly original and unusually powerful drama that deserves comparison to the great Scandinavian films of the past," says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "After the Wedding would never pretend to have any answers, but in hands this skilled the act of exploration itself couldn't be more illuminating, or more dramatic," adds the LA Times' Kenneth Turan.

Mads Mikkelsen played the baddie in Casino Royale, but showing an entirely different side here you'll see why he's the biggest star in Denmark.

Continue Reading After the Wedding

By Hannah Eaves

"After the war, it was complete anarchy."

In November, GreenCine's Hannah Eaves spoke with John Sinno, co-producer of Sundance Documentary competitor Iraq in Fragments. A measured and touching film, Iraq in Fragments shies away from sensationalism to tell the story of the widening fragmentation of Iraq through the eyes of its people. The three segments, dealing roughly with the three largest religious-political factions in Iraq, seem at times like a fictional film, the camera is so absent and the framing so thoughtful. Such touches were rewarded at Sundance where Iraq in Fragments has just picked up prizes for best Documentary Directing, Excellence in Cinematography and Documentary Film Editing. It's been a long road for director James Longley, who spent two years in Iraq. Hannah Eaves sat down with him at Sundance in the days before his first public screening.

You've made two films about the Middle East now, Gaza Strip and Iraq in Fragments. When did you first become interested in the Middle East? How did that interest come about?

I don't really have any reason to be interested in the Middle East except that it's the most important international story happening right now in the world for the United States. Some people would disagree, I'm sure. There are people who think that China is the most important [story], but the Middle East continues to be extremely significant for a lot of different reasons. For people in the United States, it's also extremely misunderstood. People in the United States don't know very much about the Middle East and there is a lot of very simplistic, two-dimensional media that comes out. As a consumer of media I found that a bit frustrating and I really wanted to go to the Middle East myself and to see it myself and develop my own ideas about what was happening and really know, so I wouldn't have to take anyone's word for it. I wouldn't have to rely on what was being printed on the front page of the New York Times about the Gaza Strip because I would have been there and I would have seen it myself and I would know. You can infer then what the situation really is.

And how was it when you arrived for the first time? You must have had a jumping off point.

I decided I would make my first feature documentary before I turned 30 and so on my 29th birthday I bought a ticket to Tel Aviv and got on a plane and took a taxi down to the Gaza Strip, and that was that. When I went in, it was the beginning of January 2001, and it was raining and cold and not at all like you'd imagine the Middle East to be in movies! The Middle East of our imaginations, right? As you go into the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing point, which is at the north end of the strip, there are these long spaces of concrete barriers, these spaces the size of large parking lots where you are just kind of walking by yourself to get to the next checkpoint. There's just nobody and nothing around. It's the strangest thing. Nobody tells you which way to go.

I accidentally went off to the right thinking that was the way I should go into the Gaza Strip and wound up at the gates of an Israeli military base, where they nearly opened fire on me because I was walking along with these huge bags, you know, and they didn't speak a word of English. But luckily they spoke Russian, because of course, the soldiers are from Russia, and so I explained myself to them. But once inside the Gaza Strip, people were very nice and helpful and it was only a few days before I kind of had my feet on the ground and I found a translator, a fixer, to work with. I continued working with him through the entire film. In fact, at the start of Iraq in Fragments, I also worked with him. He went with me to Baghdad before the war.

There are many similarities between the two films - there's no omnipresent narrator, you're telling the story through the people who are there, through their own experiences. You also choose again to see the situation through the eyes of young boys.

If I were a woman director, for example, I would probably not choose to have male kids as subjects in the film, necessarily. There's a big division between the genders socially. I found that the easiest way and the fastest, most efficient way to get inside the culture was, (a) through the eyes of a child and (b) through the eyes of a man. In Iraq I tried a number of times to hire women translators to work with me so that I would be able to have female main characters in the film and I was unsuccessful. One woman I spoke with said, "Look, I'd be very happy to work with you, but my family would object and I could work with you in this city," where she was, "but I wouldn't be able to travel with you, and I certainly couldn't spend the night outside with some man."

So there are these considerations that are just there and in the culture. That was in the more liberal part of Iraq, which is the Kurdish region up north in Sulaymaniyah, which is the most liberal city in Iraq. Women go uncovered and you can buy alcohol in stores right on the street; there are bars, it's the most liberal place, and still, it was impossible for her to have this working relationship, even there. In Baghdad it was much worse, and in the south, while I was in Nasiriyah and Najaf, you know, I can't recall even ever having a conversation with a woman.

So these kinds of cultural considerations really play a heavy role in the decisions you make in terms of the practicality of putting together a documentary film. Adults in general usually have more of a problem being followed around by some guy with a camera, not for one day, and not for one week, but for maybe a year. Most adults in the United States or anywhere else would have a problem with that; it's not an easy thing to get that kind of access. With children, it's far easier. Far, far, easier.

interviewed By Heather Johnson

Twentysomething director Cam Archer doesn.t have much interest in conveying the often self-involved dramas of his own generation. The inner lives of teenagers provides much more interesting filmmaking fodder. In our 20s, we discover more fully who we are; in our teens, we struggle to be like everyone else and for everyone to like us. If that doesn.t happen, the results can be brutal, and lead to years of therapy in our 30s.

His new film, Wild Tigers I Have Known, is now out on DVD.

Continue Reading Wild Tigers I Have Known: Cam Archer's Study of Adolescent Angst

A quiet releasing week, of course, given the midweek holiday, so don't expect much today. But there are definitely some winners in the batch found here. Check out this week's releases, and the titles coming out through the summer (new titles added weekly!)

Happy 4th of July!

Continue Reading Going Fourth: New on DVD July 3, 2007

By Craig Phillips

Even with all the previously unreleased films coming out on DVD each week, you could nonetheless do a thousand of these lists, alas.

At any rate, as a follow-up to my previous column on MIA DVDs, here is another group of films (with two by John Huston, natch) we're crying out for, in no particular order.

(Click on to see the list!) [Updated as things arrive on DVD.]

Continue Reading The Return of the MIA DVD list (UPDATED! 11/08)

By Michael Guillen

(Originally appeared February 3, 2007)

"...sex, certainly sexual identity, is so complicated."

So, Maria, down the line do you think Puccini for Beginners will be included in a Screwball Comedy Film Festival?

Wouldn't that be nice? I would be honored to be included.

Screwball comedies are obviously a genre with which you are clearly familiar and comfortable playing with. Why screwball comedies?

Well, I guess it's a certain amount of nostalgia. I grew up watching those movies. I was lucky enough to have my mother take my sister and me on Friday nights to see the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C. Long before kids stayed at home and watched videos, we went and saw black-and-white movies. I grew up with a great love of that form and later studied it quite extensively on my own, reading about how they made the movies and who the filmmakers were. I'm curious with how this film will do because it's a form that's hard to pull off, and I don't know if even I did it as well as I should have. It's a tough form in a time when we have so many problems, y'know? The fact that I decided to do a screwball comedy when we're faced with this horrible war in Iraq and the rise of the Christian Right and all that stuff, I hope is not a mistake on my part.

I hardly think so. We all need a good laugh during times like these, and besides, weren't the screwball comedies a direct response to the Depression? Perhaps it's an essential dyad: hard times and good laughs? Puccini For Beginners came to San Francisco last year as the opening night feature for Frameline 30. Unfortunately, I missed it at that time, but I'm curious to know how it did with the crowd.

A surprisingly hearty list of new DVD titles out today, including a new set of Mystery Science Theater classics (well, the movies aren't classics, but their commentary makes these episodes classic), comedy from Louis C.K., a new volume of Noein, a harrowing environmental doc and a harrowing Mark Wahlberg actioner - wait, that one isn't harrowing, it's ludicrous, and fun. Plus the Chris Marker two-fer mentioned elsewhere. See all of 'em by clicking below.

Continue Reading New on DVD: June 26, 2007