"Dorian Blues covers extremely familiar territory, but does so with low-key wit and ingratiating charm," wrote Nathan Rabin in the AV Club of this cheerful gay coming of age dramedy. "Sharp performances and writing lend it a fresh appeal well above this genre's average," adds Variety's Dennis Harvey. An "assured debut for writer-director Tennyson Bardwell."
Alfonso Cuarón Dares to Hope
March 27, 2007 - 5:51pm — GreenCineStaffBy Sean Axmaker
"The end result doesn't matter; what matters is what we learn for the next one."
Alfonso Cuarón is one the freshest filmmaking voices to come out of Mexico in decade, along with Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu. It's no coincidence that the three are also friends and even collaborators, with Cuarón producing Del Toro's recent Pan's Labyrinth and teaming up with Del Toro to produce Sebastián Cordero's bitter thriller Cronicas.
The three caballeros have made their respective marks not simply in Hollywood but on the international filmmaking stage, with Cuarón as the elder statesman of the trio. He was the first to make his feature debut, a black comedy about machismo, AIDS, and middle class mores called Sólo con tu pareja, which struck a chord with young Mexican audiences and became the number one film in the country in 1992; and he was the first to cross over into Hollywood with his magical screen version of A Little Princess, a tender ode to childhood imagination and innocent optimism.
His career since has shown a refreshing diversity, from the sexy and unapologetically raw Y tu mamá también, a coming of age drama of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll with an eye-opening undercurrent of socio-political discovery, to the family friendly Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third film in the hit fantasy series about the famous boy wizard. What remains consistent is a vivid visual approach, different for each film but always vibrant and alive, a compassion for his characters and an empathy with youth, especially children and teenagers. "If I care to connect with anybody, it's young people," he confesses. "It's a selfish thing, because they keep you relevant."
His latest film, Children of Men, takes his career into unexpected - but decidedly relevant - territory. Based on a novel by P.D. James, it's set in a world where two decades of infertility have created a mood of hopelessness as devastating and destructive as a nuclear holocaust. The bleak, impoverished near future could be today reflected through a grimy, distorted mirror, but true to Cuarón's sensibility, the film becomes a road movie powered by the spark of hope.
The interview was conducted in early December in the midst of Cuarón's press tour in support of Children of Men. Though the gray flecks running through his unruly hair and scruffy beard gave away his age, his energy and attitude made him seem younger than his 45 years. Easy to laugh, eager to talk and passionate when discussing his work, he was a blast to interview, but he must have been hell on publicists. My interview started late; by the time it was over, he was an hour behind schedule. "Don't worry, we can go a little longer," he assured me after I got the five-minute warning. It wasn't even noon. His cell phone beeping with calls from Del Toro and Iñárritu didn't help his schedule, but it honestly felt more like a benediction than an intrusion when the director of Babel interrupted the conversation for a brief chat.
John Borowski: Investigating a Serial Killer
March 27, 2007 - 5:34pm — GreenCineStaffInterview By Chris Wiggum
John Borowski.s ALBERT FISH starts with the New York cityscape. The camera moves in and the Big Apple circa 1920 jumps to life: city sights and sounds are intercut at an increasingly frenzied pace. In the midst of this societal jumble is Albert Fish, serial killer and cannibal.
Borowski's chilling docudrama Albert Fish is now available on DVD.
Continue Reading John Borowski: Investigating a Serial Killer
Werner Herzog, Anarchist Saint
March 27, 2007 - 5:30pm — GreenCineStaff
"He is the most vital, mysterious and righteous moviemaking voice on the globe."
It seems that now, finally, recognition has arrived at Werner Herzog's feet, and for an inveterate, lifelong Herzogian (alright, since adolescence), his current presence in the cultural forebrain is something of a vindication. The crazed German, aging but tireless in his pursuit of earthly-cosmic poetic disjunctures, seems to be everywhere - 2006 sees two new films (Rescue Dawn and The Wild Blue Yonder), following last year's triumphant quasi-documentary hat trick (Grizzly Man, Wheel of Time and The White Diamond). Two Herzog world-beaters have seen theatrical rerelease this year (Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Kasper Hauser), he's been the subject of several major retrospectives, and the totemic guru-artiste figure for several films by others, including Linas Phillips's Walking to Werner. He's even been profiled in both Harper's and the New Yorker in the last eight months.
He's also had more films made about him than any other filmmaker, period. Once with Fassbinder and Wenders one of the triplet godheads of the German New Wave (or New German Cinema), Herzog remains the world's most notorious filmmaking Odysseus/Faust, for whom no landscape has been too daunting and no price too formidable, an impulsive cultural outlaw besieged by wanderlust and symbolic extremism, a reckless, Romantic psycho making dangerous movies, in which he might happily fit as the hero, without regards for life, limb and profit. All told, his oeuvre constitutes a four-dimensional fresco of the planet, its most human-resistant landscapes and our dubious dramas in confronting the chaos. What's not to love?
New Waves have had a way of getting coopted and commercialized, but the GNW turned out a little differently: of Herzog's contemporaries, only Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff have gone to Hollywood, with often woeful results. Fassbinder, of course, clogged his arteries on melodramatic pork, while Werner Schroeter has become a festival laughingstock (see Deux, Isabelle Huppert's most ignominious moment). The most bizarre of them all, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, has piddled away his gifts on German culture TV, and hasn't made a film in almost a decade.
Following Sean
March 27, 2007 - 5:05pm — underdog
Following Sean: Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury in the late 1960s. Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, Arlyck returned to San Francisco in search of who the adult Sean might have become. "At its exhilarating best, Following Sean is reminiscent of the lauded British documentaries that began with 7 Up." (San Francisco Chronicle) "What promises to be a standard postmortem on 60s ideology becomes a thoughtful essay on the choices we all make between work, family, and personal freedom." (Chicago Reader)
The film screened to great success at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It's out now on DVD.
New on DVD: March 27, 2007
March 27, 2007 - 1:35pm — underdog
Of Civil Wrongs & Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story
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Our Price: $20.95
Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: In 1942, Fred Korematsu was an average 23-year-old California native working as a shipyard welder. But when he refused to obey Executive Order 9006, which sent 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry i... more>>>
GITMO: The New Rules of War
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Jolting and impossible to ignore, this provocative and intelligent exposé cuts through the official lies and cover-ups to find out what really goes on at America's central gulag in the war on terror, ... more>>>
Following Sean
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: What happens to a 4-year-old kid who grew up smoking pot and running barefoot on the wild streets of 1960s San Francisco? In FOLLOWING SEAN, a magical blend of deeply intriguing personal narrative and... more>>>
Color Me Kubrick
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Our Price: $25.95
Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: In the mid-'90s, an Englishman by the name of Alan Conway (John Malkovich) conned many people into believing that he was the reclusive American director Stanley Kubrick, despite the fact ... more>>>
The Beatles, Hamburg and the Hamburg Sound
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Children of Men
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Y Tu Mamá También and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban director Alfonso Cuarón returns to the helm to tell this futuristic tale in which soci... more>>>
Sleepers
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Our Price: $30.95
Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: This four-part British miniseries took place just after the fall of the Soviet Union. Going through Kremlin files, a team of Soviet bureaucrats discover that two KGB "sleepers," or secret agents, were... more>>>
Bottom of the Ninth
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Directed by Oscar nominee Chuck Braverman (Curtain Call; American Time Capsule), BOTTOM OF THE NINTH, is a real-life Bull Durham. This documentary chronicles a season with the Somerset Patriots, a min... more>>>
Whose Line Is It Anyway: The Complete Seasons 1 and 2
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: After the British version of WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY? brought improvisational comedy to the masses, the American version of the show borrowed the same formula and achieved the same results. The show h... more>>>
Vintage World Series Films: Toronto Blue Jays 1992 and 1993
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Hacking Democracy
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: The disturbingly shocking HBO documentary HACKING DEMOCRACY bravely tangles with our nation's ills at the heart of democracy. The film the Diebold corporation doesn't want you to see, this revelatory ... more>>>
Happy Feet
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: In the world of the emperor penguin, a simple song can mean the difference between a lifetime of happiness and an eternity of loneliness. When a penguin named Mumble is born without the ability to sin... more>>>
Early Bergman Box Set (Eclipse Collection)
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Before The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries established him as one of the great masters of cinema, Ingmar Bergman created a series of less well known, devastating psychological character studies, ma... more>>>
Lola
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: In this tender family drama, Lola is a single mother living in Mexico City who earns her living as a street vendor. She and the other unlicensed vendors like her must keep an eagle eye out for the pol... more>>>
Shutter
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: A shock accident on a lonely country road has terrifying repercussions for a Bangkok photographer and his frightened wife in the Thai horror sensation that chilled audiences at the Gerardmer and Bangk... more>>>
Men at Work
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Hikaru No Go, Vol. 7: The Young Lions Tournament
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Based on the traditional Japanese strategy game Go, the anime series HIKARU NO GO brims with both exciting competition and philosophical subtlety. Hikura lives the life of a normal grade-schooler unti... more>>>
Naruto, Vol. 10: Surviving the Cut!
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Based on a popular manga and video game, the Cartoon Network anime series NARUTO follows the adventures of a 12-year-old orphan boy who dreams of becoming his village's number-one ninja. Unfortunately... more>>>
Albert Fish
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Albert Fish, the horrific true story of elderly cannibal, sadomasochist, and serial killer, who lured children to their deaths in Depression-era New York City. Distorting biblical tales, Albert Fish t... more>>>
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Noted Japanese documentary director Kazuo Hara makes an obsessive, compelling film about Takeda Miyuki, his former lover. Drawn by her letters, he goes to Okinawa and documents this remarkably strong-... more>>>
20 Fingers
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Banned in its home country, this Iranian drama offers an intimate view into the relationships between men and women. Organized into seven conversations between different couples--each played by direct... more>>>
Pervert!
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: A hapless young man stumbles across a diabolical serial killer in the middle of the desert in this campy homage to the exploitation films of the 1960s and '70s. Pervert! stars Sean Andrews... more>>>
Buddha's Palm
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Candy
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: A free-spirited art student and a roguish poet find their addiction to each other taking a back seat to their taste for heroin in director Neil Armfield's intensely personal tale of recreational drug ... more>>>
Rumbling Hearts vol. 3
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Heartbreak High
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Hundra
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: In this routine, violent, and often trite female version of Conan, Hundra (Laurene Landon) is an Amazon whose tribe is slaughtered one day while she is away hunting, now it is up to her to find a suit... more>>>
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Vol. 1
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Princesas
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: A middle-class prostitute strikes up an unlikely friendship with an immigrant streetwalker from the Dominican Republic in director Fernando León de Aranoa's compassionate, humanistic drama. Caye comes... more>>>
Bleach vol. 3: The Substitute
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Kurosaki Ichigo has always had the uncanny ability to see spirits and ghosts. Despite his unusual skill, he lives the normal life of a 15-year-old boy, aside from the moments when his rambunctious fat... more>>>
Woyzeck
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: Hungarian director Janos Szasz based this film on a famous 1837 German play, changing the alienated title character from a soldier to a railroad worker. Woyzeck (Lajos Kovacs) is a slov... more>>>
Curse of the Golden Flower
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: A dying love between two powerful people leads to deceit, infidelity, and conspiracy in this epic-scale historical drama from director Zhang Yimou. During the latter days of the Tang dynasty, the Empe... more>>>
Basilisk vol. 6: Fate's Finest Hour
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Synopsis: This historical anime is just like ROMEO AND JULIET--but with ninjas and a higher body count. Set in 17th-century Japan, BASILISK centers on two rival families as they fight to see who will be the nex... more>>>
Tokko vol. 1
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Releases: 2007-03-27
Click below for all releases COMING SOON:
Children of Men: "Shockingly immediate"
March 27, 2007 - 10:49am — underdog
Children of Men ($22.45): A late arrival to many best of 2006 lists, Alfonso Cuarón's brilliant, nerve-jangling adaptation of P.D. James' chilling allegory is "dank, hallucinated, shockingly immediate," wrote J Hoberman in the Village Voice. "It's a measure of Cuarón's directorial chops that [it] functions equally well as fantasy and thriller. Like Spielberg's War of the Worlds and the Wachowski Brothers' V for Vendetta (and more consistently than either), the movie attempts to fuse contemporary life with pulp mythology."
Dig those long tracking shots, too - absolutely jaw-dropping.
Sean Axmaker also recently interviewed Cuarón for GreenCine.
Eight million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.
March 21, 2007 - 4:18pm — underdogNaked City: Jules Dassin's classic noir by was unusual for its on- location shooting in New York City - quite rare for the late 1940s. As Criterion writes in their write-up for this sparkling new DVD edition, "As influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction, this double Academy Award winner remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir, living and breathing in the promises and perils of the Big Apple, from its lowest depths to its highest skyscrapers."
Continue Reading Eight million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.
Addiction: On DVD, too.
March 21, 2007 - 1:35pm — underdog
Addiction: HBO's stellar new documentary strives to break through the myths and explain what addiction really is, what causes it and what can solve it. If that sounds depressing, know that the film consists of nine separate segments directed by some of the medium's best directors, including Albert Maysles, Eugene Jarecki, Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker, and Barbara Kopple. The San Francisco Chronicle calls Addiction "extraordinary." The 4-disc set includes 3 discs of additional content that will not premiere on the network.
New on DVD: March 20, 2007
March 20, 2007 - 2:24pm — underdogAnimated Soviet Propaganda
March 20, 2007 - 11:05am — underdog
A real curio just arrived on DVD which should pique the interest of animation buffs and those interested in 20th century propaganda:
The New York Times wrote at length about the set this week:
A four-disc boxed set that includes both a two-hour documentary and six hours’ worth of short films, “Animated Soviet Propaganda” opens a window on a lost art from a lost world. Animation began in Russia under the czars, with the morbid wit of Ladislaw Starewicz’s stop-motion creations using the stiff little bodies of insects. (In “The Camerman’s Revenge” a grasshopper uses a movie camera to catch his unfaithful mate in flagrante delicto.) But after revolution and civil war, film acquired a new importance to the state.
With the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, Lenin proclaimed the cinema the most important of all the arts, presumably for its ability to communicate directly with the oppressed and widely illiterate masses; in that same year Stalin was named general secretary of the central committee and the Soviet censorship office was established — two developments that did not facilitate the free exchange of ideas.
Read the whole piece here.
Critic J Hoberman wrote about this on the Village Voice here.
A big chunk of part 1 is up on Google Video here >>
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