Movies

Four years after Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore gets back on the soapbox (film-wise anyway) with a "searing and provocative follow-up," according to press notes. Paramount Vantage will be peddling the film this week in Cannes but it won't be in theaters until 2009. Full release after the jump.  read more »

The Weinstein Co. is taking Fraggle Rock to the big screen! Jim Henson's classic series will become a live-action musical, directed by Hoodwinked! director Cory Edwards. The original show premiered on HBO in 1983 and ran five seasons. The Weinsteins, determined to get more cozy and "family-friendly" recently, are probably banking on a blockbuster opening, since the first three seasons were recently released on DVD to big sales. According to Variety, "core characters Gogo, Wembley, Mokey, Boober and Red [will be taken] outside of their home in Fraggle Rock, where they interact with humans, which they think are aliens." There will apparently be puppets and humans in the show but when we first heard this story, we couldn't help but wonder which actors would play the puppets. We think Carrot Top would make a good Red. And former Hobbit Sean Astin might make a good Wembley. That kind of movie might send kids screaming from the theater. (We're totally going to have the theme song stuck in our heads for the rest of the day, by the way. Sigh). More from Variety after the jump.  read more »

THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS
Running Time 78 minutes
Written by Maureen Medved
Directed by Bryce McDonald
Starring Ellen Page

On the heels of Juno and Smart People, Ellen Page is back, temporarily out of luck, in the dense and dreary Canadian film The Tracey Fragments. Filmed almost entirely in annoying split-screen frames, this audacious puzzlement is worth seeing, I guess, for some startling and innovative visual designs. But it doesn’t amount to anything more substantial than a technical tour de force. In the film’s evocation of a teenage girl’s mind-set following an unsettling event, it resembles the equally pretentious Evan Rachel Wood-Uma Thurman fiasco, The Life Before Her Eyes.

Traumatized by the disappearance of her younger brother, social outcast Tracey (Ellen Page, exploring another troubled-teen identity crisis in ugly clothes) leaves her small town for the bright lights of … Winnipeg? Have you ever seen Winnipeg? I told you it was a head scratcher. Anyway, she’s alone and broke, so she wanders the streets and hangs out on a city bus, encountering other weird outsiders and, every once in a while, catching a glimpse of someone who might be her missing brother. Director Bruce McDonald, a Canadian cinematheque favorite whose work is rarely seen outside of the Toronto International Film Festival for good reasons, shuttles between tones wildly to reflect the vertiginous nature of Tracey’s rapidly changing mood swings. They careen from schoolgirl fantasies about a punk named Billy Zero, to quasi-surreal run-ins with a remote, ineffective shrink and her near-catatonic parents, to frenzied accounts of high-school persecution. The voice-over narration is peppered with the kind of obscenities that oscillate between shocking and endearingly childish, at which Ellen Page excels. Worse, the use of double images is consistently maddening. It’s not a new device, just deadlier than a blank screen. Mr. McDonald pushes the envelope so far that he eventually tears the screen apart—literally—in an effort to capture Tracey’s internal head trips. Or maybe he just wants to keep the audience awake.

Everything fails, as this horror drags on for 78 minutes of misery. The only redeeming factor is Ellen Page, who is both infuriating and touching. But her fan base will not only sleep through The Tracey Fragments—they’ll snore.

BEFORE THE RAINS
Running Time 98 minutes
Written by Cathy Rabin
Directed by Santosh Sivan
Starring Henry Moores, Rahul Bose, Nandita Das

Grateful for small favors, I applaud Before the Rains, a lovely, lyrical film with perfect timing that is a welcome relief from BlackBerrys, iPods, gas taxes, punk rock, the failing economy and the boredom of cutthroat election campaigns.

Helmed and lensed by the distinguished Indian director-cinematographer Santosh Sivan (Asoka), and set in southern India in 1937, it tells the exotic tale of a foreigner torn between two worlds, who pays a supreme price for cultural confusion. Henry Moores (Linus Roache, the star of the memorable Antonia Bird film Priest) is an English businessman-adventurer with a dream of building a spice plantation in Kerala. But his plans first require a new road to be cleared through the hills and jungles of a vast terrain rarely visited by white men, and he needs the money and manpower to do it. To secure the aid of the local villagers, he depends on his trusted right-hand assistant, a native named T.K. (Rahul Bose). To serve his baser needs, he depends on his housekeeper, Sajani (Nandita Das), a mercurial and intelligent girl who also becomes his lover. A journey together to collect honey in the forest turns into a sexually charged encounter witnessed by two local boys, who waste no time in spreading news of the affair to Sajani’s village. The scandal turns this warm, loyal and respectable woman into a social outcast: beaten by her husband, turned away by her family and forced into hiding. The risk escalates and the tension mounts when Henry’s wife (the elegiac Jennifer Ehle) and son arrive from England. Domestic demands rein him in temporarily, but the jealous, resentful Sajani will not be cast aside so easily. Threatened with death in her own village, she turns to T.K. for help and Henry for refuge. Henry is too cowardly to confess his infidelity, so he does what many men in his position do. The result is a tragedy that ends one life and ruins another. How long can power and privilege protect a foreigner when sin becomes a tribal matter?

A sweeping film filled with lush scenery and breath-tightening suspense, Before the Rains has the look of a fine, erotically charged period epic (think The Painted Veil) driven by emotion, but as it binds its characters tighter within their self-made moral dilemmas, it shifts into the gears of a good film noir. As with his homosexual man of the cloth in Priest, Linus Roache again excels as a mild man capable of desperate acts of weakness fueled by sexual desire. But it’s the Indian actors who illumine Before the Rains, capturing the colonized Indians’ compromised dignity. Shades of the well-made narrative films of the old school here, but I’ll take Somerset Maugham over Speed Racer anytime.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center, in collaboration with the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., has added an extremely rare archival find to their felicitously conjoined tributes to Jennifer Jones and Charles Boyer. The series has been imaginatively programmed by Joanna Ney, staff programmer for the society. On May 21, a screening of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) at 3:30 will be preceded by a nine-minute series of screen tests of Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones ordered by David Selznick, and conducted by Josef von Sternberg. The illustrious Sternberg was solemnly instructed by Selznick to produce the same intense passion with Peck and Jones that Sternberg had previously achieved with Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco in 1930. Daniel Selznick will be on hand to tell the full story of the nine-minute screen test. The screening will be held at the Walter Reade Theatre on Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street.

SANGRE DE MI SANGRE
Running time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Christopher Zalla
Starring Jorge Adrian Espandola, Jesús Ochoa, Armando Hernández

Christopher Zalla’s Sangre de Mi Sangre (Blood of My Blood), from his own screenplay (in Spanish with English subtitles), has been honored as the first Spanish-language film to win the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and one can see why. Though its Mexican immigrant characters express themselves almost entirely in Spanish, the film was actually shot in a lower-class Brooklyn neighborhood with a longingly ironic view of the Manhattan skyline. Most of the footage was rendered with a mobile hand-held camera, and its noirish narrative is antithetical to the feel-good sentimentality of the recent Mexican mother-son reunion in Under the Same Moon.

According to the production notes, “Filmmaker Christopher Zalla began writing Sangre de Mi Sangre in the week following September 11th because he felt compelled to make a movie about his city. However, the actual story for the movie started in a Brooklyn restaurant kitchen, where Zalla came to know several young Mexican immigrants who worked there. ‘These guys are coming here when they are very young and working for twenty, sometimes thirty years before returning home. They are so hardworking, some don’t even take a day off. I imagined a character who, for some reason, didn’t have a family at home—and so was forced to stash it. It was really that pile of money—that pile of paper really—being the only thing someone has to show for the last twenty years of their lives—that gave birth to the movie.’”

The movie begins with a container carrying Mexican immigrants to New York City. Two of the younger immigrants strike up an acquaintance. Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espandola) confides to Juan (Armando Hernández) that he is carrying a letter from his late mother to be delivered to his father, Diego (Jesús Ochoa), supposedly a wealthy restaurant owner in New York City. When the truck finally arrives in New York, Pedro is awakened from a long sleep to discover to his horror that Juan has stolen his pack with all his credentials, money and the letter to his father from his mother.

Pedro, alone and penniless, struggles to survive in a strange city. In the course of his desperate search for food, he is befriended by a Mexican female street urchin, Magda (Paola Mendoza), with whom he reluctantly turns tricks for voyeuristic paying clients. His path nearly crosses that of Juan and Diego a few times, but Pedro never makes the right connection.

For his part, Juan, having stolen Pedro’s identity, slowly wins over the suspicious Diego, who turns out to be a lowly dishwasher and cook in a short-order joint. Still, he does have a stash, acquired in the years he felt betrayed by his promiscuous wife in Mexico. As the suspense develops, Juan and Pedro display similar resources of ingenuity and persistence in order to eke out a living in a strange land without having command of its language.

Diego is revealed as a strong-willed stoic who has lived a long and lonely life with no need for other people, and the prospect of a belated fatherhood does not enchant him at first. But as Juan exercises all his charms and wiles, Diego becomes vulnerable to the call of long-lost love. The ending is even more shocking than that of Yella. I guess this is my week for surprises from the truly independent cinema in both German and Spanish.

Mr. Zalla, the writer-director, and Benjamin Odell, his invaluable producer, are both graduates of Columbia’s School of the Arts. They recruited their major male characters from established personalities in the Mexican media, most notably Jesús Ochoa, the winner of two Ariels (the Mexican Academy Award) for Best Supporting Actor. Ochoa also played the corrupt cop in the Denzel Washington vehicle Man of Fire, and he gives the role of Diego both depth and substance. For the role of Magda, Mr. Zalla and Mr. Odell went to New York’s Mexican-American community to find Paola Mendoza, a much-honored performer in the film On the Outs, a story of a 17-year-old mother addicted to crack cocaine.

All in all, Sangre de Mi Sangre stacks up as an original achievement in its own chosen genre, that of the troubled immigrant in a land of advertised promise, who too often is inflicted with pain and exploitation.

YELLA
Running Time 89 minutes
Written and directed by Christian Petzold
Starring Nina Hoss, David Striesow, Hinnerk Schöenmann

Christian Petzold’s Yella, from his own screenplay (in German with English subtitles), tells the haunting story of a mood-driven woman named Yella (Nina Hoss) who decides one day to leave her loser husband, Ben (Hinnerk Schöenmann), and their home in a small town in the former East Germany for a new career and life in the West. Her specialty is reading balance sheets with an uncanny perceptiveness, a talent that proves invaluable in business negotiations.

She attracts the attention of a handsome business executive named Philipp (David Striesow), and after several business confabs at which she demonstrates her corporate skills and killer instincts, Yella and Philipp become lovers. Yet, all the while there is an ominous foreboding of doom in Yella’s otherwise triumphant adaptation to the capitalist ethos. I can’t tell you much more about this strange film without giving away its trick plot. Suffice it to say that Ms. Hoss provides a performance that is as phenomenal as any I have ever encountered. Yet, she has been appearing and reportedly excelling in German movies, stage plays and television productions since at least 1996, and I have never, ever seen her perform in any medium. This suggests the still uncertain vagaries of foreign film distribution in America.

As it happens, Yella premiered at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival, where its star received the Silver Bear Prize for Best Actress. It was also selected as Best Picture by the German Film Critics Association in 2008, and is the recipient of four 2008 Lola Award nominations (Germany’s Academy Awards) in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Cinematography.

Right now, the long neglected German cinema seems to be experiencing something of a golden age, with such startling works as The Lives of Others, The Counterfeiters, Four Minutes and, now, Yella. One can only hope that we will have the opportunity to see a larger proportion of German productions in the future.

Seldom before have I ever been so absorbed in a female character on the screen as I was with Ms. Hoss’s Yella, as she kept trying to escape a past that was drawing her back inexorably. It was only after the shock ending that I could fully appreciate the subtleties and nuances of her portrayal. It is possible, of course, that Yella won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. As with any independent film these days, there is a certain vagueness and indistinctness in the often slightly menacing mise-en-scène. But the satiric focus of the negotiations is always sharp and clear. Suddenly, Yella’s character, which often seems to be merely drifting, comes to life with a vengeance. Eventually, Yella displays a flair for intrigue that suggests that she has mastered the cruel disciplines of the most ruthless forms of capitalism. Yet the fear is also always present even in the midst of success.

In his comments on the film and its heroine, the director confirms the intentionality of his effects: “I like characters who want to bring something together, who have a plan. I like their work on the plan, the scheme, but also their failures. Yella is both a very modern and very old-fashioned young woman. She wants to go out into the flexible and shifting world, but she also wants to stay home. While we were making the film, we often thought about those American ballads that often convey this idea, being in movement, being on the road, but yet always singing and telling stories about home. This is why the David Ackles song ‘The Road to Cairo’ is heard in the film. This inner conflict, Yella has it too. A state of suspension: enduring this is what Yella has to deal with.”

Ultimately, Yella is to be commended for not preaching sermons on the inadequacy and even malignancy of our social and political institutions. Instead, it suggests that we are all walking on a tightrope to reach an illusory other side, but with oblivion lurking at every step. Our plight is almost comical, but not quite. In any event, Yella is a film to be seen and savored, and Ms. Hoss serves up a delicious feast to a discriminating palate.

Poor Speed Racer! The much-maligned flick from the wacky-pants Wachowski brothers failed to make even a dent in Iron Man at the box office last weekend. Adding insult to injury, Speed Racer’s opening-weekend earnings were just about even with the Cameron Diaz-Ashton Kutcher romantic comedy What Happens in Vegas, which cost a whole lot less to make. Yeouch. Iron Man’s charmed run could come to an end this weekend, though, as the The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian hits theaters. Bring on the Tilda Swinton!

IN QUIETER, NON-SPECIAL-EFFECTS film news this weekend, Fugitive Pieces opens at the Quad Cinema. Based on the prize-winning novel by Anne Michaels, the film opens during World War II, where Jakob, a young Polish boy, witnesses the murder of his parents by Nazis, who then abduct his beloved sister. Jakob hides in a forest, and is rescued by a kindly Greek geologist (Rade Serbedzija), who smuggles him to Greece for the duration of the war, and then emigrates with him to Canada. Unsurprisingly, grown-up Jakob (Stephen Dillane) has loads of issues, frozen in a place where he can’t bear to remember things from his past, and yet unwilling to forget them.

For a film that covers such difficult ground, Fugitive Pieces stays true to the poetic language of its source material, and is a remarkably dreamy and lyrical movie (its director, Jeremy Podeswa, is the son of a Holocaust survivor, and clearly had an emotional connection to the story). Time flashes back and forth between 1940s Poland, ’60s- and ’70s-era Canada, and the whitewashed splendor of past and present-day Zakynthos—an island that seems too beautiful for any sort of atrocity, German or otherwise. Beautiful women appear to be Jakob’s undoing and, perhaps, salvation: As visions of his pretty older sister haunt him, his first marriage to a vivacious chattering blonde (played wonderfully by Rosamund Pike, who portrayed Jane Bennett in Pride & Prejudice) implodes, and he seems doomed to a loner’s life, scribbling his thoughts into a notebook.

We happen to be on a major Stephen Dillane kick at the moment, between his portrayal of Thomas Jefferson in John Adams and as an upper-crusty aristocrat in the upcoming Savage Grace. And remember his sweetly suffering Leonard Woolf in The Hours? He’s the perfect actor for this particular role, as he’s able to convey a symphony’s worth of emotional turmoil without saying a word. Dear Hollywood, more Dillane please!

Fugitive Pieces opens on Friday at the Quad Cinema.

Donnie Darko’s little sister is all grown up and heading to LA. Or at least she will be when S. Darko, the sequel to the 2001 cult film, Donnie Darko, starts shooting May 18.  read more »

Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches made his comeback by appearing on the Juno soundtrack with his other half Kimya Dawson. They wrote that sacchrine-sweet song that Ellen Page and Michael Cera's characters sing to each other in the last scene, "Anyone Else But You." He answered some questions for the Gothamist blog, reminiscing about the Lower East Side, discussing his new album and telling his "only in New York story" in which a young kid tried to pay him to have sex with him.  read more »