Steve Buscemi's Re-make of Interview now on DVD
by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Curiously, several reviews of Steve Buscemi’s latest directing project, in which he also acts the male lead as corrosively angry journalist Pierre Peders, inform readers that Peders and TV star named Katya (Sienna Miller) – main characters in the ill-fated interview at hand – once they are soaked in alcohol and dusted in cocaine, eventually have sex. What’s curious – unless you count one strenuous but fast aborted embrace – is that they don’t. Aside from alerting us that some reviewers don’t thoroughly watch the films they pass judgment on, such reports signal something more. That is the degree of dramatic sexual tension achieved in a full-length feature almost entirely comprising one marathon conversation that occurs mostly within one large Manhattan loft.
Here the plot turns on revelations, real and supposed, rather than action in the usual cinematic sense. An older journalist in serious withdrawal from politics who seriously doesn’t like women, Pierre cools his heels while a crisis unfolds in Washington. Instead his editor assigns him what he considers a fluff piece on a popular TV star. She is late. He quickly insults her – he’s watched none of her work – and she walks out. A mishap on the street that bloodies his head gains Pierre entrance to her near-by loft, where they engage in some hours of cat-and-mouse, he seeking dirt to print and she, more serious an actor than he knows, seeking insurance.
Interview is actor Buscemi’s ninth directing effort since Tree’s Lounge (1996); his most recent feature was 2005’s Lonesome Jim. Interview reprises late Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s 2003 film of the same title starring Dutch TV celebrity Katja Schuurman, filmed over five nights in Schuurman’s own loft. Buscemi’s re-make is the first of “Triple Theo,” a project that van Gogh envisioned before he died in 2004 at age 47 to re-make three of his films about difficulties between men and women, set in New York City and directed by invited US actor-directors.
Offered his pick first, Buscemi chose Interview – for its celebrity and media focus, and for its exploration of “who we seek connection with and how quickly both Pierre and Katya betray that connection.” He asked for Sienna Miller (Factory Girl, the new Alfie, Layer Cake), the UK-raised actor whose mother Jo ran Lee Strasberg’s London Actors’ Studio. Like Katya, Miller would be underestimated as mere eye candy. (Stanley Tucci directs and, with Patricia Clarkson, stars in the re-make of van Gogh’s Blind Date, which premieres this month at Sundance. John Turturro will direct and act in the third.)
Van Gogh’s long-time producer Gijs van de Westelaken carried Triple Theo forward. The project exemplifies a European-style collaboration over several films, with Buscemi employing many of the original Dutch crew. As previously, cinematographer Thomas Kist employed three digital cameras shooting simultaneously, a method allowing very long takes that both Buscemi and Miller say approximate the experience of stage acting. There are visual carry-overs too. Schuurman appears in the last scene, exiting a limo, and a framed snapshot of her with van Gogh sits among what we assume are family photos in Katya’s loft.
Van Gogh’s work is not yet well-known here. Buscemi’s Interview opened state-side in July for a non-spectacular three-month art house run – with DVD release three weeks ago – but it’s going to nearly 30 other countries so far, keenly anticipated both for its lineage and as a parable beyond obvious portrayal of two nasty people with secrets.
One source of that interest is van Gogh’s notoriety. An extremist shot and stabbed him to death in Amsterdam two months after his 10-minute English-language exposé about Islamic violence toward women aired on Dutch TV. Submission, which superimposed Koranic verses about misbehaving women on images of their bodies, emerged from collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament whose memoir Infidel uncovers her own earlier life as a Muslim woman. Van Gogh’s work was provocative and political; some compared his documentary work to Michael Moore’s.
Buscemi, known more for personal, quirky films than message-themed “serious” projects, here successfully makes the transition to that kind of larger parable that van Gogh himself worked toward. Curiously, Buscemi’s Interview has a ready companion in Brian DePalma’s recent Iraq war film Redacted. Both films explore the kinds and degrees of extreme violence toward women that abide within some very mainstream men, including the accountability of the witness who does nothing and leaves the scene. Both films address how media refract, distort and depersonalize what we see. Both use sound and images from laptops, camcorders, cell phones and TV – Interview sometimes has several versions running at once on-screen. And Interview goes further, beyond the easy enough illusion that the media mechanistically does all this on its own. Buscemi’s Interview exposes, in the character of the hard-bitten newsroom veteran Pierre Peders, how part of journalistic culture even promotes and drives a specifically, aggressively macho worldview – ironically, in the heart of a profession dedicated to seeking, a worldview that springs precisely from hostility toward and fear of curiosity.
This review appeared in the 1/3/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t have a theatrical opening in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Steve Buscemi’s re-make of Theo van Gogh’s Interview was released on DVD 12/11/07; the original is available online with English subtitles in non-USA format for those who have zone-free DVD players. Also posted at http://www.moviecrossrhodes.blogspot.com/.
AGORA: Dragged from her chariot by a mob of fanatical vigilante Christian monks, the revered astronomer was stripped naked, skinned to her bones with sharp oyster shells, stoned and burned alive as possibly the first executed witch in history. A kind of purge that was apparently big business back then.
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1/6/08
1/2/08
BUBBLE: Steven Soderbergh
BUBBLE
Steven Soderbergh (Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Writer (WGA):
This Fargo-ish Coen brothers film has a heavy dose of the American television series. The Office, gives a new dimension to the Law and Order TV series that has put an indelible and up until now unchallenged face onto the legal apparatus in this country.
There are unforgettable lines spoken by characters from middle America who bring both a delight and a horror to viewers like me and probably you too.
The backdrop is a doll factory. There is something about images of body parts thrown around like just so much plastic that make for an uneasy and disturbing sight.
This same confused emotion is duplicated as the story of a local murder:, the crime and victim and perpetrator and detective all give a heavy dose of something quietly grotesque just like the doll's heads rolling around, painted just so but without benefit of a body to sustain them.
It is this quietly drawn message of alienated man that renders this film another Steven Soderbergh classic.
Don't miss it.
released January 2006
LindaZ
WBAI Women's Collective
WFCC member
12/30/07
Two Lane Blacktop DVD Review: The Road As Escape for Irony-Phobic US
Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Two Lane Blacktop On DVD
Director Monte Hellman
Cast: James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, Laura Bird
There's something perfect about musicians playing the two leads in this most enduring and mystique-laden of road movies, just re-released again two weeks before Christmas by Criterion on a snazzy two-disc set. It was also the only screen performance by either man. Director Monte Hellman first spotted his choice for the character called just "the driver" on a Los Angeles billboard advertising James Taylor's 1968 debut album, and Taylor kept his flowing locks for the part. These days, you can get the singer's newest CD compilation of live tracks with your latté at Starbucks. Beach Boys drummer-composer Dennis Wilson played "the mechanic," also nameless. The anniversary of Wilson's drowning in 1983, shortly after his 39th birthday,
is actually Friday.
As for the rest of the main cast, Hellman regular Warren Oates died a year before Wilson. Young and very slender here, he plays the garrulous, ever self-reinventing "GTO," nick-named for the gold car he drives in the film. And cast as "the girl," a hitch-hiker who works her way through all three men during the cross-country contest between the Pontiac and the customized matte gray '55 Chevy, Laura Bird made just two more films after this one, dying by suicide at age 25 in 1979. Harry Dean Stanton, who got his start with Hellman and here has a memorable cameo as a gay hitch-hiker who weeps when GTO rejects him, is now in his 80s. Hellman remains as wiry and frizzy-haired as ever, zestfully teaching film directing at the California Institute of the Arts. He calls *Two Lane Blacktop*, filmed over seven weeks in the early fall of 1970 for under one million dollars, a "time capsule" – for its youthful glimpse of this cast, its story filmed along the fabled and now largely disappeared old Route 66, and its dark watershed post-60s mood.
*Two Lane Blacktop* starts in Los Angeles at one of the LA Street Racers' rowdy, well-attended and very illegal midnight drag matches. Police sirens sour what starts off looking like a good evening for the driver and the mechanic, two lanky guys in jeans and tee-shirts without much attention span for anything but fast cars who finance a rambling lifestyle by racing their
souped-up Chevy. Whether on local dirt tracks, at street drag club events or in ad hoc contests struck up in gas stations along the way, their adversaries routinely under-estimate both the car and the young men. Without much specific intention they head east – a reversal of the mythic American way west that underscores the moment's alienation.
One morning during breakfast, they watch a blond teenager through a diner window. Just feet away in the parking lot, she hauls her duffel from an old van and dumps it into their back seat for no better reason than it's the closest car available. Before long, in a deceptively simple and languid maneuver that Hellman says is the real start of the film, these three set the hook for GTO in a desert gas station. He's been eying that Chevy in the passing lane himself and so proposes a race to Washington, DC. They'll race "for pinks" – what's at stake is the losing car's pink registration card.
Along the way, the three men vie irritably for the girl's wandering attentions, race other cars, narrowly avoid crashes and cops, meet odd folk in backwaters, stop for repairs and occasionally day-dream about a vague future after Washington that may consist of checking out Florida's beaches or maybe "run over to Arizona and build a house." As laconic as the driver and the mechanic both are – Hellman says their lines are more soundtrack than dialogue, not meant to move the story any more than the songs on their car's radio – GTO is talkative. With each new stranger, GTO effortlessly spins himself a colorful new history and purpose. Soon we're anticipating this as each new encounter gets under way. Similarly, by the time this quartet lands in the movie's final diner, we know who that girl's going with next simply because there's a motorcycle parked out front.
Warren Oates, though not the lead here, made four films for Hellman – besides *Two Lane* *Blacktop*, two Westerns, *The Shooting* (1966) and *China 9, Liberty 37* (1978), and the contemporary Southern Gothic-tinged * Cockfighter* (1974). Arguably all are road movies, a genre too often dismissed as low budget primitive. An excellent companion to Hellman's work
is Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's 2005 documentary, *Wanderlust*– an absorbing 90 minutes that's only a Netflix click away – with filmmakers like Callie Kouri (screenwriter, *Thelma and Louise*), who sees the road movie emerge quite organically from the Western, and Walter Salles (director, *The Motorcycle Diaries*) notices that young countries with unsettled identities make these movies ("You never see a Swiss road movie."), and Alison Anders (director, *Gas Food Lodging* and a commentary track speaker for *Two Lane Blacktop*) remarks that the only place irony-phobic Americans willingly tolerate shades of gray is the road.
Proving he's still got chops, Hellman directed the bonus features. A film teacher, he speaks especially well about making movies. Early on he piles five Cal Arts grad students into his van to visit the film's shooting locations. He explains how shooting in Technoscope provided the best depth of field for a story where often he's got two or three characters inside a car or in three different planes and wants them all in focus (you'll watch for this next time you're at the movies, promise). Or elsewhere, how filming in a pelting rainstorm unexpectedly infused his favorite gas station scene with enormous energy because throughout this scene all the cast members ran
from spot to spot to avoid getting wet. He and James Taylor, facing off in simple wooden chairs, ask one another the questions each has harbored for 37 years. When Taylor – now short-haired and balding, he still hadn't seen *Two Lane Blacktop* during this conversation – diffidently apologizes for his youthful bursts of temper, Hellman laughs it off with the kind of generosity
that you sense informs his classrooms now as it once must have his movie sets. And the producers discuss how the 60s unraveled – that, as one puts it, "America was having a nervous breakdown, and lots of the people wandering around never stopped." For once, "blast from the past" lives up to its name.
*******
*This review appeared in the 12/27/07 issue of the Syracuse* City Eagle *weekly, where "Make it Snappy" is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn't open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.*
Posted By Nancy Keefe Rhodes to *www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com*
Nancy Keefe Rhodes
nancykeeferhodes@gmail
www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com
Covering film, photo & visual arts
Two Lane Blacktop On DVD
Director Monte Hellman
Cast: James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, Laura Bird
There's something perfect about musicians playing the two leads in this most enduring and mystique-laden of road movies, just re-released again two weeks before Christmas by Criterion on a snazzy two-disc set. It was also the only screen performance by either man. Director Monte Hellman first spotted his choice for the character called just "the driver" on a Los Angeles billboard advertising James Taylor's 1968 debut album, and Taylor kept his flowing locks for the part. These days, you can get the singer's newest CD compilation of live tracks with your latté at Starbucks. Beach Boys drummer-composer Dennis Wilson played "the mechanic," also nameless. The anniversary of Wilson's drowning in 1983, shortly after his 39th birthday,
is actually Friday.
As for the rest of the main cast, Hellman regular Warren Oates died a year before Wilson. Young and very slender here, he plays the garrulous, ever self-reinventing "GTO," nick-named for the gold car he drives in the film. And cast as "the girl," a hitch-hiker who works her way through all three men during the cross-country contest between the Pontiac and the customized matte gray '55 Chevy, Laura Bird made just two more films after this one, dying by suicide at age 25 in 1979. Harry Dean Stanton, who got his start with Hellman and here has a memorable cameo as a gay hitch-hiker who weeps when GTO rejects him, is now in his 80s. Hellman remains as wiry and frizzy-haired as ever, zestfully teaching film directing at the California Institute of the Arts. He calls *Two Lane Blacktop*, filmed over seven weeks in the early fall of 1970 for under one million dollars, a "time capsule" – for its youthful glimpse of this cast, its story filmed along the fabled and now largely disappeared old Route 66, and its dark watershed post-60s mood.
*Two Lane Blacktop* starts in Los Angeles at one of the LA Street Racers' rowdy, well-attended and very illegal midnight drag matches. Police sirens sour what starts off looking like a good evening for the driver and the mechanic, two lanky guys in jeans and tee-shirts without much attention span for anything but fast cars who finance a rambling lifestyle by racing their
souped-up Chevy. Whether on local dirt tracks, at street drag club events or in ad hoc contests struck up in gas stations along the way, their adversaries routinely under-estimate both the car and the young men. Without much specific intention they head east – a reversal of the mythic American way west that underscores the moment's alienation.
One morning during breakfast, they watch a blond teenager through a diner window. Just feet away in the parking lot, she hauls her duffel from an old van and dumps it into their back seat for no better reason than it's the closest car available. Before long, in a deceptively simple and languid maneuver that Hellman says is the real start of the film, these three set the hook for GTO in a desert gas station. He's been eying that Chevy in the passing lane himself and so proposes a race to Washington, DC. They'll race "for pinks" – what's at stake is the losing car's pink registration card.
Along the way, the three men vie irritably for the girl's wandering attentions, race other cars, narrowly avoid crashes and cops, meet odd folk in backwaters, stop for repairs and occasionally day-dream about a vague future after Washington that may consist of checking out Florida's beaches or maybe "run over to Arizona and build a house." As laconic as the driver and the mechanic both are – Hellman says their lines are more soundtrack than dialogue, not meant to move the story any more than the songs on their car's radio – GTO is talkative. With each new stranger, GTO effortlessly spins himself a colorful new history and purpose. Soon we're anticipating this as each new encounter gets under way. Similarly, by the time this quartet lands in the movie's final diner, we know who that girl's going with next simply because there's a motorcycle parked out front.
Warren Oates, though not the lead here, made four films for Hellman – besides *Two Lane* *Blacktop*, two Westerns, *The Shooting* (1966) and *China 9, Liberty 37* (1978), and the contemporary Southern Gothic-tinged * Cockfighter* (1974). Arguably all are road movies, a genre too often dismissed as low budget primitive. An excellent companion to Hellman's work
is Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's 2005 documentary, *Wanderlust*– an absorbing 90 minutes that's only a Netflix click away – with filmmakers like Callie Kouri (screenwriter, *Thelma and Louise*), who sees the road movie emerge quite organically from the Western, and Walter Salles (director, *The Motorcycle Diaries*) notices that young countries with unsettled identities make these movies ("You never see a Swiss road movie."), and Alison Anders (director, *Gas Food Lodging* and a commentary track speaker for *Two Lane Blacktop*) remarks that the only place irony-phobic Americans willingly tolerate shades of gray is the road.
Proving he's still got chops, Hellman directed the bonus features. A film teacher, he speaks especially well about making movies. Early on he piles five Cal Arts grad students into his van to visit the film's shooting locations. He explains how shooting in Technoscope provided the best depth of field for a story where often he's got two or three characters inside a car or in three different planes and wants them all in focus (you'll watch for this next time you're at the movies, promise). Or elsewhere, how filming in a pelting rainstorm unexpectedly infused his favorite gas station scene with enormous energy because throughout this scene all the cast members ran
from spot to spot to avoid getting wet. He and James Taylor, facing off in simple wooden chairs, ask one another the questions each has harbored for 37 years. When Taylor – now short-haired and balding, he still hadn't seen *Two Lane Blacktop* during this conversation – diffidently apologizes for his youthful bursts of temper, Hellman laughs it off with the kind of generosity
that you sense informs his classrooms now as it once must have his movie sets. And the producers discuss how the 60s unraveled – that, as one puts it, "America was having a nervous breakdown, and lots of the people wandering around never stopped." For once, "blast from the past" lives up to its name.
*******
*This review appeared in the 12/27/07 issue of the Syracuse* City Eagle *weekly, where "Make it Snappy" is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn't open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.*
Posted By Nancy Keefe Rhodes to *www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com*
Nancy Keefe Rhodes
nancykeeferhodes@gmail
www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com
Covering film, photo & visual arts
12/29/07
Women Film Critics Circle Awards 2007
The Women Film Critics Circle held their annual on-air WFCC Awards Ceremony 2007 on Thursday, December 13th. The Ceremony for the Best and Worst Picks from a woman's point of view, aired on WBAI Radio in NY 99.5 FM at 11am, and on Web Radio at wbai.org. On hand to present and discuss the awards in-studio and by phone, were WFCC members.
The Women Film Critics Circle is an association of 40 women film critics and scholars from around the country, who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media. They came together three years ago to form the first women critics organization ever in the country, in the belief that women’s perspectives and voices in film criticism need to be recognized fully. WFCC also prides itself on being the most culturally and racially diverse critics group in the country by far, and best reflecting the diversity of movie audiences.
The Women Film Critics Circle Awards 2007
BEST PICTURE BY A WOMAN **TIE**
*Away From Her: Sarah Polley
*Talk To Me: Kasi Lemmons
BEST PICTURE ABOUT WOMEN
*Juno: Jason Reitman
BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
*Juno: Diablo Cody
BEST ACTRESS
*Laura Linney: The Savages
BEST COMEDIC PERFORMANCE
*Amy Adams: Enchanted
BEST ACTOR
*Daniel Day-Lewis: There Will Be Blood
BEST YOUNG ACTRESS
*Saoirse Ronan: Atonement
BEST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE **TIE**
*Hairspray
*Life Support
BEST FOREIGN FILM: **TIE**
*La Vie En Rose
*Persepolis
BEST MUSIC
*Hairspray: Nikki Blonsky, Queen Latifah
BEST THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED MOVIE BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
*Life Support
**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women:
*Redacted
**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: For best expressing the woman of color experience in America:
*The Great Debaters
**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity:
*A Mighty Heart
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
*Judi Dench
SPECIAL MENTION FOR A FEMALE’S RIGHT TO MALE ROLES IN MOVIES:
*Cate Blanchett: I'm Not There
ACTING AND ACTIVISM
*Angelina Jolie
BEST DOCUMENTARIES:
ABOVE AND BEYOND:
*Redacted [mixed media]
GROUNDBREAKER:
*Strange Culture: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
COURAGE IN FILMMAKING:
*Meeting Resistance: Molly Bingham, co-director
BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES **TIE**
*Away From Her
*Becoming Jane
MOST OFFENSIVE MALE CHARACTERS
Crazy Love [Burt Pugach] *****Winning Loser
Norbit [Rasputia] *****Winning Looser
Good Luck Chuck
The Heartbreak Kid
Knocked Up
Revolver
Superbad
Who's Your Caddy
WFCC TOP TEN HALL OF SHAME
Black Snake Moan***Winning Loser
Exterminating Angels***Winning Loser
Goya's Ghost***Winning Loser
Atonement
Captivity
Gone Baby Gone
Hairspray/Edna [John Travolta]
Lust, Caution
Norbit/Rasputia [Eddie Murphy]
Red Road
BEST ANIMATED FEMALE:
*Enchanted: Elle
BEST FAMILY FILM
*Enchanted
**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower rack in her bathroom, to make it look like a suicide. He later confessed that he was having a "bad day." Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.
**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD; The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.
**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her leftist political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for female stars in those days. Morley maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.
**The Women's Right To Male Roles In Movies Award is intended to challenge that men have not only the most prominent roles in films, but also the most complex and fully drawn out characters. So when an actress can fight for access to such a role, and it may be rewritten for her, it is one of substance, and free of the usual shallow or demonizing female stereotypes.
The Women Film Critics Circle website is WFCC.wordpress.com, and they can be reached at: Criticalwomen@gmail.com.
Prairie Miller
The Women Film Critics Circle is an association of 40 women film critics and scholars from around the country, who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media. They came together three years ago to form the first women critics organization ever in the country, in the belief that women’s perspectives and voices in film criticism need to be recognized fully. WFCC also prides itself on being the most culturally and racially diverse critics group in the country by far, and best reflecting the diversity of movie audiences.
The Women Film Critics Circle Awards 2007
BEST PICTURE BY A WOMAN **TIE**
*Away From Her: Sarah Polley
*Talk To Me: Kasi Lemmons
BEST PICTURE ABOUT WOMEN
*Juno: Jason Reitman
BEST WOMAN STORYTELLER [Screenwriting Award]
*Juno: Diablo Cody
BEST ACTRESS
*Laura Linney: The Savages
BEST COMEDIC PERFORMANCE
*Amy Adams: Enchanted
BEST ACTOR
*Daniel Day-Lewis: There Will Be Blood
BEST YOUNG ACTRESS
*Saoirse Ronan: Atonement
BEST FEMALE IMAGES IN A MOVIE **TIE**
*Hairspray
*Life Support
BEST FOREIGN FILM: **TIE**
*La Vie En Rose
*Persepolis
BEST MUSIC
*Hairspray: Nikki Blonsky, Queen Latifah
BEST THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED MOVIE BY OR ABOUT WOMEN
*Life Support
**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: For a film that most passionately opposes violence against women:
*Redacted
**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD: For best expressing the woman of color experience in America:
*The Great Debaters
**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For best exemplifying a woman’s place in history or society, and a courageous search for identity:
*A Mighty Heart
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
*Judi Dench
SPECIAL MENTION FOR A FEMALE’S RIGHT TO MALE ROLES IN MOVIES:
*Cate Blanchett: I'm Not There
ACTING AND ACTIVISM
*Angelina Jolie
BEST DOCUMENTARIES:
ABOVE AND BEYOND:
*Redacted [mixed media]
GROUNDBREAKER:
*Strange Culture: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
COURAGE IN FILMMAKING:
*Meeting Resistance: Molly Bingham, co-director
BEST EQUALITY OF THE SEXES **TIE**
*Away From Her
*Becoming Jane
MOST OFFENSIVE MALE CHARACTERS
Crazy Love [Burt Pugach] *****Winning Loser
Norbit [Rasputia] *****Winning Looser
Good Luck Chuck
The Heartbreak Kid
Knocked Up
Revolver
Superbad
Who's Your Caddy
WFCC TOP TEN HALL OF SHAME
Black Snake Moan***Winning Loser
Exterminating Angels***Winning Loser
Goya's Ghost***Winning Loser
Atonement
Captivity
Gone Baby Gone
Hairspray/Edna [John Travolta]
Lust, Caution
Norbit/Rasputia [Eddie Murphy]
Red Road
BEST ANIMATED FEMALE:
*Enchanted: Elle
BEST FAMILY FILM
*Enchanted
**ADRIENNE SHELLY AWARD: Adrienne Shelly was a promising actress and filmmaker who was brutally strangled in her apartment in 2006 at the age of forty by a construction worker in the building, after she complained about noise. Her killer tried to cover up his crime by hanging her from a shower rack in her bathroom, to make it look like a suicide. He later confessed that he was having a "bad day." Shelly, who left behind a baby daughter, had just completed her film Waitress, which she also starred in, and which was honored at Sundance after her death.
**JOSEPHINE BAKER AWARD; The daughter of a laundress and a musician, Baker overcame being born black, female and poor, and marriage at age fifteen, to become an internationally acclaimed legendary performer, starring in the films Princess Tam Tam, Moulin Rouge and Zou Zou. She also survived the race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois as a child, and later expatriated to France to escape US racism. After participating heroically in the underground French Resistance during WWII, Baker returned to the US where she was a crusader for racial equality. Her activism led to attacks against her by reporter Walter Winchell who denounced her as a communist, leading her to wage a battle against him. Baker was instrumental in ending segregation in many theaters and clubs, where she refused to perform unless integration was implemented.
**KAREN MORLEY AWARD: Karen Morley was a promising Hollywood star in the 1930s, in such films as Mata Hari and Our Daily Bread. She was driven out of Hollywood for her leftist political convictions by the Blacklist and for refusing to testify against other actors, while Robert Taylor and Sterling Hayden were informants against her. And also for daring to have a child and become a mother, unacceptable for female stars in those days. Morley maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.
**The Women's Right To Male Roles In Movies Award is intended to challenge that men have not only the most prominent roles in films, but also the most complex and fully drawn out characters. So when an actress can fight for access to such a role, and it may be rewritten for her, it is one of substance, and free of the usual shallow or demonizing female stereotypes.
The Women Film Critics Circle website is WFCC.wordpress.com, and they can be reached at: Criticalwomen@gmail.com.
Prairie Miller
Kurt Cobain About A Son
Kurt Donald Cobain ( February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994), was an American musician, best known for his roles as lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the Seattle-based rockband Nirvana.
Cobain formed Nirvana in 1987 with Krist Novoselic
Kurt Cobain About A Son
documentary
Sidetrack films
To review a film that you don't like is usually not worth the effort. Given the plethora of memorable, enjoyable and valuable films begging for attention i wouldn't undertake to do this thankless job except.........
Kurt Cobain About A son is an exception. The running time is 1:36.48 which translates into well over two hours of listening to a few men ramble on about a relatively uneventful , non remarkable life, past and relatively present of the son of a middle American tree logger who didn't understand children nor did he seem to strive to gain this knowledge or any other knowledge of particular value.
The son, however, needs to break out of the town of primary origin, Aberdeen, He is in search of a non existent place where he envisions himself comfortable. Eventually he enters the demanding almost inhuman world of the celebrity punk rock music star with equal distaste and difficultly.
This story of human ascendancy is worth maybe an hour and a half. There are no exceptional film sets, no outstanding character arcs.few interesting faces to feast one's eyes upon Editing by a sympathetic and competent professional is sorely lacking
But
what this film has, what compelled me to see Kurt Cobain About A Son more than once was the visual images. From frame to frame, the transitions were awesome, each frame arresting.
Kurt Cobain About a Son is a movie for an aspiring film maker, for a visual artist, for anyone who would not hesitate to turn off the sound to enhance the visual experience with silence.
But this film is not about Kurt Cobain, It does not feature his death, it sidesteps the impact of the devastating journey that led to this momentous self mutilating event which inspired other troubled youths to follow in his wake.
The film goes so far out of its way to avoid what is most pressing about Kurt Cobain that it fails as a film. It stands alone as a film worthy of viewing while silence reigns.
A note about the man, Kurt Cobain. He was riddled with conflict that he could never own up to. He loved to be different and he seemed singularly unable to understand or accept the price of his detachment from those he needed most, his fans, his friends, his environment. But what really mattered more than the development of his person, or his art was his state of perpetual pain that set him apart from life, from others.
He was a man possessed of pain turned into anger that he tried to disown and mitigate with his four hundred dollar a day drug habit, and his music. Tragically, he failed.
I recommend this film with a heavy dose of reservation. Maybe one day it will be redone with a better focus captured in a shortened version.
LindaZ
WFCC
WBAI Women's collective
Cobain formed Nirvana in 1987 with Krist Novoselic
Kurt Cobain About A Son
documentary
Sidetrack films
To review a film that you don't like is usually not worth the effort. Given the plethora of memorable, enjoyable and valuable films begging for attention i wouldn't undertake to do this thankless job except.........
Kurt Cobain About A son is an exception. The running time is 1:36.48 which translates into well over two hours of listening to a few men ramble on about a relatively uneventful , non remarkable life, past and relatively present of the son of a middle American tree logger who didn't understand children nor did he seem to strive to gain this knowledge or any other knowledge of particular value.
The son, however, needs to break out of the town of primary origin, Aberdeen, He is in search of a non existent place where he envisions himself comfortable. Eventually he enters the demanding almost inhuman world of the celebrity punk rock music star with equal distaste and difficultly.
This story of human ascendancy is worth maybe an hour and a half. There are no exceptional film sets, no outstanding character arcs.few interesting faces to feast one's eyes upon Editing by a sympathetic and competent professional is sorely lacking
But
what this film has, what compelled me to see Kurt Cobain About A Son more than once was the visual images. From frame to frame, the transitions were awesome, each frame arresting.
Kurt Cobain About a Son is a movie for an aspiring film maker, for a visual artist, for anyone who would not hesitate to turn off the sound to enhance the visual experience with silence.
But this film is not about Kurt Cobain, It does not feature his death, it sidesteps the impact of the devastating journey that led to this momentous self mutilating event which inspired other troubled youths to follow in his wake.
The film goes so far out of its way to avoid what is most pressing about Kurt Cobain that it fails as a film. It stands alone as a film worthy of viewing while silence reigns.
A note about the man, Kurt Cobain. He was riddled with conflict that he could never own up to. He loved to be different and he seemed singularly unable to understand or accept the price of his detachment from those he needed most, his fans, his friends, his environment. But what really mattered more than the development of his person, or his art was his state of perpetual pain that set him apart from life, from others.
He was a man possessed of pain turned into anger that he tried to disown and mitigate with his four hundred dollar a day drug habit, and his music. Tragically, he failed.
I recommend this film with a heavy dose of reservation. Maybe one day it will be redone with a better focus captured in a shortened version.
LindaZ
WFCC
WBAI Women's collective
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