list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Shotgun Stories on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Shotgun_Stories/325090/default.aspx Title: Shotgun Stories
Year: 2007
Director: Jeff Nichols
Plot: Two families linked by the same father explode into a violent rivalry in this independent Southern gothic drama, the first feature from director Jeff Nichols. Cleaman Hayes lived and died in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had seven sons by two different women. After wedding Nicole (Natalie Canerday), Cleaman sired three sons, and his lack of concern for their future was reflected in the fact he barely gave them names -- they were dubbed Son (Michael Shannon), Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon). One day, Cleaman abandoned his wife and sons, and left them to survive in deep poverty that has trapped them to this day. Eventually Cleaman cleaned up his act, launched a successful business, married again, and raised four more sons -- Cleaman Jr. (Michael Abbott, Jr.), Mark (Travis Smith), Stephen (Lynsee Provence) and John (David Rhodes), all of whom were given the love and attention Cleaman denied his first three children. When Cleaman dies, all seven sons attend the funeral, and Son, overcome by bitterness, spits on his father's coffin and tells everyone how much he hated the man. Short tempered Mark answers Son with his fists, and a free-for-all breaks out between the two Hayes families. The anger and rivalry doesn't end at the end of the day, and soon a war has broken out between the clans, with no small amount of blood shed on either side. Shotgun Stories received its North American premiere at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 9
Number of Lists: 8
Number of blog posts: 6
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:09:30 GMTShotgun Stories2007Jeff NicholsTwo families linked by the same father explode into a violent rivalry in this independent Southern gothic drama, the first feature from director Jeff Nichols. Cleaman Hayes lived and died in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had seven sons by two different women. After wedding Nicole (Natalie Canerday), Cleaman sired three sons, and his lack of concern for their future was reflected in the fact he barely gave them names -- they were dubbed Son (<a href="http://www.spout.com/players/P___516240/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Michael Shannon</a>), Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon). One day, Cleaman abandoned his wife and sons, and left them to survive in deep poverty that has trapped them to this day. Eventually Cleaman cleaned up his act, launched a successful business, married again, and raised four more sons -- Cleaman Jr. (Michael Abbott, Jr.), Mark (Travis Smith), Stephen (Lynsee Provence) and John (David Rhodes), all of whom were given the love and attention Cleaman denied his first three children. When Cleaman dies, all seven sons attend the funeral, and Son, overcome by bitterness, spits on his father's coffin and tells everyone how much he hated the man. Short tempered Mark answers Son with his fists, and a free-for-all breaks out between the two Hayes families. The anger and rivalry doesn't end at the end of the day, and soon a war has broken out between the clans, with no small amount of blood shed on either side. Shotgun Stories received its North American premiere at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide9Taggedy Taggged (6-10)864http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s325090.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Shotgun_Stories/325090/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/2/39035.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/2/2009 9:00:46 AM
Body: 2008 was not the banner year that ‘07 turned out to be, but there were still plenty of movies worth watching. Sometimes end-of-year lists look like straight Oscar predictions, with little deviance from critic to critic, not so this year. Some of our favorite stuff was not playing in a theatre near you, some of it was. For the record, our complete lists are after the jump. But first! Wholphin 7 is out now! The geniuses over at McSweeny’s have once again curated a delightful collection of rare and unseen short films. We share our thoughts about a few favorites. One film we both loved, Glory at Sea, is available for free here.   (Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday) 0:00 - Intro, listener e-mail 2:59 - Wholphin 7 16:18 - Kevin’s list, Paul’s “soup” filmcouch-102 Paul’s unranked list: Tulpan Be Kind Rewind I Love Sarah Jane (entire film viewable) August Evening Shotgun Stories Revanche The Dark Knight Glory at Sea Kevin’s ranked list: 1. The Dark Knight 2. Let the Right One In 3. The Good, The Bad, and The Weird 4. Wall-E 5. Wellness 6. Happy-Go-Lucky 7. Glory at Sea 8. Waltz With Bashir 9. Medicine for Melancholy 10. Encounters at the End of the World Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:00:46 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/2/2009 9:00:46 AM 2008 was not the banner year that ‘07 turned out to be, but there were still plenty of movies worth watching. Sometimes end-of-year lists look like straight Oscar predictions, with little deviance from critic to critic, not so this year. Some of our favorite stuff was not playing in a theatre near you, some of it was. For the record, our complete lists are after the jump. But first! Wholphin 7 is out now! The geniuses over at McSweeny’s have once again curated a delightful collection of rare and unseen short films. We share our thoughts about a few favorites. One film we both loved, Glory at Sea, is available for free here.   (Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday) 0:00 - Intro, listener e-mail 2:59 - Wholphin 7 16:18 - Kevin’s list, Paul’s “soup” filmcouch-102 Paul’s unranked list: Tulpan Be Kind Rewind I Love Sarah Jane (entire film viewable) August Evening Shotgun Stories Revanche The Dark Knight Glory at Sea Kevin’s ranked list: 1. The Dark Knight 2. Let the Right One In 3. The Good, The Bad, and The Weird 4. Wall-E 5. Wellness 6. Happy-Go-Lucky 7. Glory at Sea 8. Waltz With Bashir 9. Medicine for Melancholy 10. Encounters at the End of the World Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/captainryannn/archive/2008/8/11/33880.aspx Post By: CaptainRyannn
Post To: CaptainRyannn Blog
Post Date: 8/11/2008 9:08:45 PM
Body: Titles in bold represent a first time viewing. 346. Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)----------I thought that this was a pretty great collage-type film with the likeness of a more familiar title, Crash. Aside from Julianne Moore's performance, one of the few things I didn't like was the fact that the characters didn't connect with each other other than the bizarre finale at the end of the film. (7.5 / 10) 347. Stuck (Gordon, 2007)----------Based on a true story, stuck follows a wannabe-ghetto woman (Mena Suvari) after she hits a homeless man and drives him into her garage. The acting was terrible, the premise was good though. Towards the end, it began to pick up in terms of entertainment. (6 / 10) 348. Equilibrium (Wimmer, 2002)----------Christian Bale? Sweet. Reviews relating it to The Matrix? Awesome. This is why I initially checked out Equilibrium. The action was pretty sweet but every few minutes, I couldn't help but see a blatant plot-hole. Also, can someone answer me why do the people have dust fly out of them when they get shot? (7 / 10) 349. The New World (Malick, 2005)----------It seems that whenever Malick puts out a new movie, I become less and less interested. To me, Badlands was his best and his vast collection of movies since then have just seemed to have gone downhill. I appreciated the beautiful cinematography and music along with the great acting. But the pacing was just a little too slow for me. (7 / 10) 350. The Terminator (Cameron, 1984)----------It's funny to think that The Terminator, one of the most masculine movies of all time, came from the same guy who made Titanic, one of the most popular love stories of all time. I basically watched this for mere entertainment and it satisfied that. (7 / 10) 351. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991)----------Again, I just watched this purely for entertainment. I think it did a better job at doing that than the first one. The best thing about watching these movies is just pausing it at certain testosterone-filled moments and thinking, This is the governor of California. (7.5 / 10) 352. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Mostow, 2003)----------This got quite a bit of negative reviews. I wouldn't say that it was especially bad, but rather on par with the first one. The best part was how they ended it. It got me excited for Terminator Salvation. (7 / 10) 353. A Home at the End of the World (Mayer, 2004)----------Although the subject matter may not be something many of us can relate to, the themes definitely are. The overall mood and and portrayals of friendship and love make this worth watching alone. (7 / 10) 354. Undertow (Green, 2004)----------When I first watched this, it was decent. Once I delved into some reviews and analysis' I watched it again and fell in love with it. The story follows two brothers who live with their dad out in the southern forests. Their mysterious uncle comes around and suddenly a game of cat-and-mouse begins. The tone of the film stays consistent and I think that that is it's strongest point along with great performances by Jamie Bell and Josh Lucas. (8 / 10) 355. Antikörper / Antibodies (Alvart, 2005)----------Antibodies is a film that follows closely in the footsteps of The Silence of the Lambs. Our protagonist is a village cop and the antagonist is a serial killer whose finally been caught. The cinematography was good and the acting was average. The basic story-line is something that's been done plenty of times before but the sheer intensity that this takes it to puts Antibodies a little bit above the rest. (7.5 / 10) 356. Cidade de Deus / City of God (Meirelles, 2002)----------I've seen City of God countless times as it is my favorite film along with Once Upon a Time in America. It takes us through two decades in the lives of a handful of children / teenagers in the slums of Rio de Janerio. Most grow up to be hoods and murder and robbery isn't something uncommon in their lives. Our protagonist, Rocket, is an aspiring photographer and just so happens to be there as all of the violence breaks out. If you're okay with subtitles, be sure to check this one out. (10 / 10) 357. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Hurwitz, 2008)----------The whole 'Escape' part only really lasts about five minutes. The rest of the film is basically slapstick comedy executed in an non-comedic way. (5 / 10) 358. Shotgun Stories (Nichols, 2007)----------I have been looking forward to seeing this one for quite some time. After falling in love with the trailer, I had to see it. There are two sets of step-brothers. Their father just died. One set knew him as a loving man and the other knew him as a violent, neglecting one. A feud erupts between them and their egos don't allow themselves to stop until irreversible damage has been caused. This movie had some of the most real characters I've ever seen portrayed and it was as if I were watching this unfold in real life. (8.5 / 10) 359. My Bodyguard (Bill, 1980)-----------I rented this based off of Roger Ebert's shining review but found it to be just average in comparison to other tough-time-in-high-school films. The main kid is a rich boy who starts going to a public school. The bullys don't like this and pick on him. After getting pushed around he gets the tough-guy bodyguard and they become friends, but not after finding out a few secrets about each other. (6 / 10) 360. Kicking and Screaming (Baumbach, 1995)----------Unlike the 2005 comedy, this one is actually good. But it's not about a children's soccer team, but rather a group of friend who have just graduated from college and don't know what to do next. This has some of the most subtly humorous dialogue I've ever experienced and I couldn't help but laugh virtually the entire way through. The plot really isn't there, there's no character development or twists. This movie basically stands up on the dialogue and it's characters. The friendship that exists reminds me slightly of that of the American Pie trilogy. Great movie. Worthy of its Criterion stamp. (8 / 10) 361. Schizopolis (Soderbergh, 1996)----------What did I just watch? (?? / 10) 362. Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006)----------Featuring probably some of the best camera work and choreography in film in recent years, Children of Men was superb. To be able to shoot such busy scenes all in one shot takes a certain amount of skill. Watching the special features and commentary definitely gave me an idea of how much work went into this. Children of Men takes place about twenty years in the future where women are infertile and no one knows why. Immigrants are killed and the world is in chaos. An immigrant is found bearing a child and Theo (Clive Own) is in charge of getting her to safety. (8 / 10) 363. The Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005)----------Set in a 'Desperate Housewives' kind of neighborhood, shy-boy Dean, through a series of events, is in charge of getting drugs for the popular kids. With an all-star cast, The Chumscrubber is entertaining, dark, and comedic all at the same time. (7.5 / 10)
]]>Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:08:45 GMTCaptainRyannnCaptainRyannn Blog8/11/2008 9:08:45 PMTitles in bold represent a first time viewing. 346. Magnolia (Anderson, 1999)----------I thought that this was a pretty great collage-type film with the likeness of a more familiar title, Crash. Aside from Julianne Moore's performance, one of the few things I didn't like was the fact that the characters didn't connect with each other other than the bizarre finale at the end of the film. (7.5 / 10) 347. Stuck (Gordon, 2007)----------Based on a true story, stuck follows a wannabe-ghetto woman (Mena Suvari) after she hits a homeless man and drives him into her garage. The acting was terrible, the premise was good though. Towards the end, it began to pick up in terms of entertainment. (6 / 10) 348. Equilibrium (Wimmer, 2002)----------Christian Bale? Sweet. Reviews relating it to The Matrix? Awesome. This is why I initially checked out Equilibrium. The action was pretty sweet but every few minutes, I couldn't help but see a blatant plot-hole. Also, can someone answer me why do the people have dust fly out of them when they get shot? (7 / 10) 349. The New World (Malick, 2005)----------It seems that whenever Malick puts out a new movie, I become less and less interested. To me, Badlands was his best and his vast collection of movies since then have just seemed to have gone downhill. I appreciated the beautiful cinematography and music along with the great acting. But the pacing was just a little too slow for me. (7 / 10) 350. The Terminator (Cameron, 1984)----------It's funny to think that The Terminator, one of the most masculine movies of all time, came from the same guy who made Titanic, one of the most popular love stories of all time. I basically watched this for mere entertainment and it satisfied that. (7 / 10) 351. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991)----------Again, I just watched this purely for entertainment. I think it did a better job at doing that than the first one. The best thing about watching these movies is just pausing it at certain testosterone-filled moments and thinking, This is the governor of California. (7.5 / 10) 352. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Mostow, 2003)----------This got quite a bit of negative reviews. I wouldn't say that it was especially bad, but rather on par with the first one. The best part was how they ended it. It got me excited for Terminator Salvation. (7 / 10) 353. A Home at the End of the World (Mayer, 2004)----------Although the subject matter may not be something many of us can relate to, the themes definitely are. The overall mood and and portrayals of friendship and love make this worth watching alone. (7 / 10) 354. Undertow (Green, 2004)----------When I first watched this, it was decent. Once I delved into some reviews and analysis' I watched it again and fell in love with it. The story follows two brothers who live with their dad out in the southern forests. Their mysterious uncle comes around and suddenly a game of cat-and-mouse begins. The tone of the film stays consistent and I think that that is it's strongest point along with great performances by Jamie Bell and Josh Lucas. (8 / 10) 355. Antik&ouml;rper / Antibodies (Alvart, 2005)----------Antibodies is a film that follows closely in the footsteps of The Silence of the Lambs. Our protagonist is a village cop and the antagonist is a serial killer whose finally been caught. The cinematography was good and the acting was average. The basic story-line is something that's been done plenty of times before but the sheer intensity that this takes it to puts Antibodies a little bit above the rest. (7.5 / 10) 356. Cidade de Deus / City of God (Meirelles, 2002)----------I've seen City of God countless times as it is my favorite film along with Once Upon a Time in America. It takes us through two decades in the lives of a handful of children / teenagers in the slums of Rio de Janerio. Most grow up to be hoods and murder and robbery isn't something uncommon in their lives. Our protagonist, Rocket, is an aspiring photographer and just so happens to be there as all of the violence breaks out. If you're okay with subtitles, be sure to check this one out. (10 / 10) 357. Harold &amp; Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Hurwitz, 2008)----------The whole 'Escape' part only really lasts about five minutes. The rest of the film is basically slapstick comedy executed in an non-comedic way. (5 / 10) 358. Shotgun Stories (Nichols, 2007)----------I have been looking forward to seeing this one for quite some time. After falling in love with the trailer, I had to see it. There are two sets of step-brothers. Their father just died. One set knew him as a loving man and the other knew him as a violent, neglecting one. A feud erupts between them and their egos don't allow themselves to stop until irreversible damage has been caused. This movie had some of the most real characters I've ever seen portrayed and it was as if I were watching this unfold in real life. (8.5 / 10) 359. My Bodyguard (Bill, 1980)-----------I rented this based off of Roger Ebert's shining review but found it to be just average in comparison to other tough-time-in-high-school films. The main kid is a rich boy who starts going to a public school. The bullys don't like this and pick on him. After getting pushed around he gets the tough-guy bodyguard and they become friends, but not after finding out a few secrets about each other. (6 / 10) 360. Kicking and Screaming (Baumbach, 1995)----------Unlike the 2005 comedy, this one is actually good. But it's not about a children's soccer team, but rather a group of friend who have just graduated from college and don't know what to do next. This has some of the most subtly humorous dialogue I've ever experienced and I couldn't help but laugh virtually the entire way through. The plot really isn't there, there's no character development or twists. This movie basically stands up on the dialogue and it's characters. The friendship that exists reminds me slightly of that of the American Pie trilogy. Great movie. Worthy of its Criterion stamp. (8 / 10) 361. Schizopolis (Soderbergh, 1996)----------What did I just watch? (?? / 10) 362. Children of Men (Cuar&oacute;n, 2006)----------Featuring probably some of the best camera work and choreography in film in recent years, Children of Men was superb. To be able to shoot such busy scenes all in one shot takes a certain amount of skill. Watching the special features and commentary definitely gave me an idea of how much work went into this. Children of Men takes place about twenty years in the future where women are infertile and no one knows why. Immigrants are killed and the world is in chaos. An immigrant is found bearing a child and Theo (Clive Own) is in charge of getting her to safety. (8 / 10) 363. The Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005)----------Set in a 'Desperate Housewives' kind of neighborhood, shy-boy Dean, through a series of events, is in charge of getting drugs for the popular kids. With an all-star cast, The Chumscrubber is entertaining, dark, and comedic all at the same time. (7.5 / 10) http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/3/26/26622.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 3/26/2008 1:01:24 PM
Body: Shotgun Stories, the impressively accomplished feature debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols, has a few obvious affinities with the directorial work of its producer, David Gordon Green. Beyond the fact that both filmmakers have a demonstrated interest in the personal tragedies of working class families in the small-town South, much of the commonality lies in the aesthetic sense that Green has been fairly accused of adopting from Terrence Malick. But if Shotgun’s courting of visual pleasure via deliberate pacing and a certain transluscent golden glow fail to reinvent the wheel, at least credit Nichols with picking the seconds that suit the material. A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy. (more…) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » karina
]]>Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:01:24 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog3/26/2008 1:01:24 PM Shotgun Stories, the impressively accomplished feature debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols, has a few obvious affinities with the directorial work of its producer, David Gordon Green. Beyond the fact that both filmmakers have a demonstrated interest in the personal tragedies of working class families in the small-town South, much of the commonality lies in the aesthetic sense that Green has been fairly accused of adopting from Terrence Malick. But if Shotgun’s courting of visual pleasure via deliberate pacing and a certain transluscent golden glow fail to reinvent the wheel, at least credit Nichols with picking the seconds that suit the material. A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy. (more…) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » karina http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/3/26/26621.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 3/26/2008 1:01:16 PM
Body: Shotgun Stories, the impressively accomplished feature debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols, has a few obvious affinities with the directorial work of its producer, David Gordon Green. Beyond the fact that both filmmakers have a demonstrated interest in the personal tragedies of working class families in the small-town South, much of the commonality lies in the aesthetic sense that Green has been fairly accused of adopting from Terrence Malick. But if Shotgun’s courting of visual pleasure via deliberate pacing and a certain transluscent golden glow fail to reinvent the wheel, at least credit Nichols with picking the seconds that suit the material. A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy. (more…) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:01:16 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com3/26/2008 1:01:16 PM Shotgun Stories, the impressively accomplished feature debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols, has a few obvious affinities with the directorial work of its producer, David Gordon Green. Beyond the fact that both filmmakers have a demonstrated interest in the personal tragedies of working class families in the small-town South, much of the commonality lies in the aesthetic sense that Green has been fairly accused of adopting from Terrence Malick. But if Shotgun’s courting of visual pleasure via deliberate pacing and a certain transluscent golden glow fail to reinvent the wheel, at least credit Nichols with picking the seconds that suit the material. A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy. (more…) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/thereeler/archive/2007/4/28/7762.aspx Post By: TheReeler
Post To: The Reeler on Spout
Post Date: 4/28/2007 7:54:19 AM
Body: Tribeca's trenchant trio: The men of Shotgun Stories By Vadim Rizov Shotgun Stories is a genuinely exciting debut from an unknown quantity -- a rarity at Tribeca, even if the film itself is too weird and unbalanced to be an unqualified success. Jeff Nichols' debut plays like hicksploitation run through a David Gordon Green filter -- not terribly surprising, since the man himself is one of the producers. The mixture is as unstable as it sounds: The pitch-perfect framing and performances are all in service of a tone that's impossible to pin down. Is Shotgun Stories a mocking vision of the Deep South with actors straining to keep straight faces? Probably not -- the film's too steeped in its location shooting to be a giant put-on, and Nichols is an Arkansas native -- but this is a story about taciturn men whose most-used word is "Shee-it" and who don't seem to think any time is a bad time to crack open a Miller High Life. Son (Michael Shannon), Boy (first-timer Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) are brothers in an unidentified Arkansas. Son has a low-skill, low-paying job, which makes him the stand-out of the clan. "I used to be able to divide up to four decimal points in my head," he says, lamenting his place in life and inability to move above a yearly income of $20,000. Boy coaches the lackluster local high school basketball team and lives in his van; Kid works alongside Son but still lives in a tent on Son's lawn. Son and Kid are taciturn types, while Boy is the Paul Schneider of this film, an awkward fat goofball. The film's opening stasis is broken by news of their dad's death. Dad -- formerly a mean drunk -- got religion and ditched the family to remarry when they were kids, leaving them, as Son says, "in the hands of a hateful woman." The trio of brothers show up at dad's funeral, leaving his new family - which has four brothers -- with a few choice words and spit on dad's coffin. The Southern blood feud is on.It's hard to judge Nichols' intentions completely: do people in Arkansas really take any excuse for senseless revenge killings and general ass-kicking? In any case, a film of 90 minutes devotes maybe all of three to actual incidents of violence, keeping the tone oddly but pleasingly becalmed. (Even Green’s Undertow made more overt concessions to conventional drama.) Less difficult to swallow is the brothers' complicated relationship to their town, equal parts disdain for its shiftless inactivity and a willingness to take advantage of its inconsequentiality to be slobs. Kid announces at one point that he's taking his girlfriend to a buffet. "Special," replies Son, and the sarcasm is perfectly leavened with the acknowledgment that there's nothing else to do. The rest is all hanging out, camaraderie, the occasional burst of tension and rapturous fields and sun flares. Regardless of intention, this is Tribeca's most exciting debut. The film was inexplicably rejected by Sundance, and their loss was Berlin’s gain and now ours. Another startlingly good out-of-nowhere film – albeit not of quite the same caliber – is Mascha Novikova and Frank van den Engel’s Between Heaven and Earth, easily the best documentary I’ve seen in competition so far. It begins with a long, long tracking shot of a man in a Puma track suit riding his motorcycle and carrying a monkey. It’s initially a startling image, but the duration of the shot precludes any accusations of exploitative quirkiness and makes the film’s art fag credentials clear. Eventually, things become clearer: The man is carrying a monkey because he’s a circus performer, one of Uzbekistan’s traveling troupers. He and his family travel from city to city, performing various, mildly death-defying feats of weight-lifting, tightrope walking, and the like. The framing of his daughter’s high-wire act is mesmerizing, the ropes forming crisp diagonals while a perfect sun flare blocks off part of the frame. You might be forgiven for slowly coming to realize that this is a political documentary, considering the film doesn’t unveil its true nature for 20 minutes. The man isn’t just a performer, he’s a member of the dissident political party ERK, and he spent six-and-a-half years in jail for it at one point. Novikova conducts interviews with the family in Russian, interpolating the performance footage with slow revelations about Uzbekistan’s appallingly oppressive political climate and how it’s taken its toll on the family. By the time performance footage is shown for the last time (one too many times, really), the expressions on the family’s faces have changed meaning, making clear an emotional dynamic that was unseeable at the start. Formally crisp if overlong, the film is constantly gorgeous in its HD photography and reasonably entrancing throughout. The result would still probably work better as a medium-length film; that Novikova and den Engel chose (perhaps for market reasons) to go for a short feature is understandable and, given the results, an overall good thing. In Variety parlance, A Dirty Carnival is "slickly lensed," and thinking of A Dirty Carnival in Hollywood terms makes sense. A Korean gangster movie with few plot surprises and regular bits of violence, Yoo Ha's film is a generic but smoothly assembled entertainment. Byong-Doo (Jo In-Seong) is a small-time gangster who collects debts for his various bosses while struggling to keep his family afloat. The clan's hierarchy is impossibly complicated, with seemingly everyone bowed to as boss bowing to an even higher boss. Byong-Doo can't move up; his duplicitous boss Sang-Cheol (Yun Je-Mun) keeps promising him promotions and rescinding them. A desperate Byong-Doo does as all film gangsters must, killing, stabbing and betraying as necessary to work up the ladder. Crime, of course, does not pay, and the film builds to the inevitable tragic if unaffecting conclusion. A Dirty Carnival is vastly entertaining for a while before running out of steam during its overblown 140 minutes, but it's still a good time for people who know exactly what they like. There's a convincing case to be made that Korea is the new Hollywood, putting out competent assembly-line entertainment with greater flair than the real article can manage these days. The one genuinely original element here is a sub-plot that cleverly morphs into the main plot about Byong-Doo's childhood friend Min-Ho (Nam-Gung Min), now an aspiring filmmaker. Min-Ho finds Byong-Doo again because he wants real stories and research for his gangster script. As the film moves on, he gets his movie and success, but at an unprecedented cost. In the background of all this seriousness you can almost hear Yoo Ha snickering to himself: All this trouble to make a lousy movie? Couldn't be worth it. This may be the only time I ever bash a film for not being crowd-pleasing enough, but here goes: Pablo Trapero's Born and Bred is a perfectly fun in occasional-to-minute patches but inexplicably feels the needs to throw in intimations of tragedy relentlessly, leading to heavy-handedness and tonal schizophrenia. Santiago (Guillermo Pfening) runs an interior decorating business with his wife Milli (Martina Gusman) while maintaining a bickering marriage that alternates between great sex and passive-aggressive arguments with Milli about everything under the sun. On the way to a weekend retreat at Milli's mom's country house, there's a horrific car crash, and an abrupt cut finds Santiago in the wilds of Argentina's Patagonia region, trying on his best mountain-man look while hanging out with a bunch of other machos and trying to forget the past. Until the crash, sad to say, there's little to recommend here. Trapero has an excellent eye for widescreen compositions, but the opening scenes of domestic life are neither entrancingly beatific nor weighed down with weird overtones of what's to come; they're simply filler to set up what's to come. Life with the machos is considerably more fun, encompassing such slacker jobs as shooting animals for furs and working at an airport where the harsh weather conditions allow for take-off seemingly only ever other day. But Santiago is Tortured, and his endless crying jags and psychotic freak-outs don't let the comic scenes build any momentum. Life at the airport in particular is a blast -- they spend most of their time waking up sleeping passengers just to inform them that their flight is cancelled and abusing the emergency alarm to invite each other to tea. All redeeming elements are quashed when Santiago finally spills his guts therapeutically and returns home to the dumbest non-genre twist ending ever. Trapero, along with Lucrecia Martel (La Cienaga, The Holy Girl) is considered one of Argentina's most promising new auteurs, but, visual flair aside, he has a long way to go. It's pretty hard to fuck up inherently fascinating home movies, and Péter Forgács mostly does justice to his material. Miss Universe 1929 is assembled from footage of Lisl Goldarbeiter, mostly taken by her lovestruck admirer (and cousin) Marci Tenczer. Both born in 1909, Lisl and Marti maintained a friendship even though she moved to Austria and he to Hungary. Lisl grew up to be Miss Austria, which led in turn to her appearing at and winning Miss Universe in Galveston, Texas. Legendary director King Vidor was among the panel of judges, and offered her a two-year contract if she would consent to learn stage English, but a homesick Lisl returned to Austria and got married, albeit not to Marti. As the title date indicates, and constant interpolations of archival footage of marching right-wingers remind us, this turned out to be a bad move. Miss Universe 1929 is most interesting in its opening, with plenty of footage of turn-of-the-century Viennese cafes and early talking footage of Lisl enunciating her happiness in heavily-accented English. Forgács understands how to freeze-frame crucial moments of the rough surviving footage, pausing at key moments when the subject unwittingly looks directly into the lens and creates an inadvertent portrait. Understandably, the film eventually turns to the rise of the Nazis and the inevitable calamities that befell the families, a sad but also familiar and unsurprising story that at least has the perk of a happy ending. As engaging as it is for its first half, Miss Universe 1929 is a TV documentary and it shows: nothing here demands big-screen viewing, let alone the $18 cost of admission. This is what PBS was made for, and the film's appearance here is frankly a slot-filler. To be as quick-pitch reductive as possible, Diego Luna's Chávez aspires to be a Mexican When We Were Kings with greater formal daring. Vigorous and entertaining if not entirely convincing, the documentary posits Julio Cesar Chávez not just as a great boxer but as a key to understanding Mexico during the '90s. Instead of dragging us through a talking-heads-with-clips recap of Chávez's career, Luna jazzes it up, speeding through the first decade of fights before stopping for 10 minutes for a discussion of political corruption under the Carlos Salinas regime, with only the tenuous thread of Salinas' and Chávez's friendship to draw it in. His daring is admirable, but while most of the segments are interesting and keep things from getting too same-y, Luna never gets under Chávez's skin. At 78 minutes, the man himself is surprisingly absent from the screen, as relatives, promoters and reporters fill in. The result is a portrait of someone who's not there. While Muhammad Ali is invoked a few times (and, God bless him, Don King does show up to preach some typically insane gibberish), Chavez never acquires a personality or importance any greater than that of a superbly gifted boxer. Still, Chávez is an entertaining enough dossier that has the advantages of 35mm lensing (a luscious rarity in most documentaries) and playful form. Most actors' vanity projects aren't nearly this entertaining. Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout: Shotgun Stories Between Heaven and Earth A Dirty Carnival Born and Bred Miss Universe 1929 Chavez Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler
]]>Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:54:19 GMTTheReelerThe Reeler on Spout4/28/2007 7:54:19 AMTribeca's trenchant trio: The men of Shotgun Stories By Vadim Rizov Shotgun Stories is a genuinely exciting debut from an unknown quantity -- a rarity at Tribeca, even if the film itself is too weird and unbalanced to be an unqualified success. Jeff Nichols' debut plays like hicksploitation run through a David Gordon Green filter -- not terribly surprising, since the man himself is one of the producers. The mixture is as unstable as it sounds: The pitch-perfect framing and performances are all in service of a tone that's impossible to pin down. Is Shotgun Stories a mocking vision of the Deep South with actors straining to keep straight faces? Probably not -- the film's too steeped in its location shooting to be a giant put-on, and Nichols is an Arkansas native -- but this is a story about taciturn men whose most-used word is "Shee-it" and who don't seem to think any time is a bad time to crack open a Miller High Life. Son (Michael Shannon), Boy (first-timer Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) are brothers in an unidentified Arkansas. Son has a low-skill, low-paying job, which makes him the stand-out of the clan. "I used to be able to divide up to four decimal points in my head," he says, lamenting his place in life and inability to move above a yearly income of $20,000. Boy coaches the lackluster local high school basketball team and lives in his van; Kid works alongside Son but still lives in a tent on Son's lawn. Son and Kid are taciturn types, while Boy is the Paul Schneider of this film, an awkward fat goofball. The film's opening stasis is broken by news of their dad's death. Dad -- formerly a mean drunk -- got religion and ditched the family to remarry when they were kids, leaving them, as Son says, "in the hands of a hateful woman." The trio of brothers show up at dad's funeral, leaving his new family - which has four brothers -- with a few choice words and spit on dad's coffin. The Southern blood feud is on.It's hard to judge Nichols' intentions completely: do people in Arkansas really take any excuse for senseless revenge killings and general ass-kicking? In any case, a film of 90 minutes devotes maybe all of three to actual incidents of violence, keeping the tone oddly but pleasingly becalmed. (Even Green’s Undertow made more overt concessions to conventional drama.) Less difficult to swallow is the brothers' complicated relationship to their town, equal parts disdain for its shiftless inactivity and a willingness to take advantage of its inconsequentiality to be slobs. Kid announces at one point that he's taking his girlfriend to a buffet. "Special," replies Son, and the sarcasm is perfectly leavened with the acknowledgment that there's nothing else to do. The rest is all hanging out, camaraderie, the occasional burst of tension and rapturous fields and sun flares. Regardless of intention, this is Tribeca's most exciting debut. The film was inexplicably rejected by Sundance, and their loss was Berlin’s gain and now ours. Another startlingly good out-of-nowhere film – albeit not of quite the same caliber – is Mascha Novikova and Frank van den Engel’s Between Heaven and Earth, easily the best documentary I’ve seen in competition so far. It begins with a long, long tracking shot of a man in a Puma track suit riding his motorcycle and carrying a monkey. It’s initially a startling image, but the duration of the shot precludes any accusations of exploitative quirkiness and makes the film’s art fag credentials clear. Eventually, things become clearer: The man is carrying a monkey because he’s a circus performer, one of Uzbekistan’s traveling troupers. He and his family travel from city to city, performing various, mildly death-defying feats of weight-lifting, tightrope walking, and the like. The framing of his daughter’s high-wire act is mesmerizing, the ropes forming crisp diagonals while a perfect sun flare blocks off part of the frame. You might be forgiven for slowly coming to realize that this is a political documentary, considering the film doesn’t unveil its true nature for 20 minutes. The man isn’t just a performer, he’s a member of the dissident political party ERK, and he spent six-and-a-half years in jail for it at one point. Novikova conducts interviews with the family in Russian, interpolating the performance footage with slow revelations about Uzbekistan’s appallingly oppressive political climate and how it’s taken its toll on the family. By the time performance footage is shown for the last time (one too many times, really), the expressions on the family’s faces have changed meaning, making clear an emotional dynamic that was unseeable at the start. Formally crisp if overlong, the film is constantly gorgeous in its HD photography and reasonably entrancing throughout. The result would still probably work better as a medium-length film; that Novikova and den Engel chose (perhaps for market reasons) to go for a short feature is understandable and, given the results, an overall good thing. In Variety parlance, A Dirty Carnival is "slickly lensed," and thinking of A Dirty Carnival in Hollywood terms makes sense. A Korean gangster movie with few plot surprises and regular bits of violence, Yoo Ha's film is a generic but smoothly assembled entertainment. Byong-Doo (Jo In-Seong) is a small-time gangster who collects debts for his various bosses while struggling to keep his family afloat. The clan's hierarchy is impossibly complicated, with seemingly everyone bowed to as boss bowing to an even higher boss. Byong-Doo can't move up; his duplicitous boss Sang-Cheol (Yun Je-Mun) keeps promising him promotions and rescinding them. A desperate Byong-Doo does as all film gangsters must, killing, stabbing and betraying as necessary to work up the ladder. Crime, of course, does not pay, and the film builds to the inevitable tragic if unaffecting conclusion. A Dirty Carnival is vastly entertaining for a while before running out of steam during its overblown 140 minutes, but it's still a good time for people who know exactly what they like. There's a convincing case to be made that Korea is the new Hollywood, putting out competent assembly-line entertainment with greater flair than the real article can manage these days. The one genuinely original element here is a sub-plot that cleverly morphs into the main plot about Byong-Doo's childhood friend Min-Ho (Nam-Gung Min), now an aspiring filmmaker. Min-Ho finds Byong-Doo again because he wants real stories and research for his gangster script. As the film moves on, he gets his movie and success, but at an unprecedented cost. In the background of all this seriousness you can almost hear Yoo Ha snickering to himself: All this trouble to make a lousy movie? Couldn't be worth it. This may be the only time I ever bash a film for not being crowd-pleasing enough, but here goes: Pablo Trapero's Born and Bred is a perfectly fun in occasional-to-minute patches but inexplicably feels the needs to throw in intimations of tragedy relentlessly, leading to heavy-handedness and tonal schizophrenia. Santiago (Guillermo Pfening) runs an interior decorating business with his wife Milli (Martina Gusman) while maintaining a bickering marriage that alternates between great sex and passive-aggressive arguments with Milli about everything under the sun. On the way to a weekend retreat at Milli's mom's country house, there's a horrific car crash, and an abrupt cut finds Santiago in the wilds of Argentina's Patagonia region, trying on his best mountain-man look while hanging out with a bunch of other machos and trying to forget the past. Until the crash, sad to say, there's little to recommend here. Trapero has an excellent eye for widescreen compositions, but the opening scenes of domestic life are neither entrancingly beatific nor weighed down with weird overtones of what's to come; they're simply filler to set up what's to come. Life with the machos is considerably more fun, encompassing such slacker jobs as shooting animals for furs and working at an airport where the harsh weather conditions allow for take-off seemingly only ever other day. But Santiago is Tortured, and his endless crying jags and psychotic freak-outs don't let the comic scenes build any momentum. Life at the airport in particular is a blast -- they spend most of their time waking up sleeping passengers just to inform them that their flight is cancelled and abusing the emergency alarm to invite each other to tea. All redeeming elements are quashed when Santiago finally spills his guts therapeutically and returns home to the dumbest non-genre twist ending ever. Trapero, along with Lucrecia Martel (La Cienaga, The Holy Girl) is considered one of Argentina's most promising new auteurs, but, visual flair aside, he has a long way to go. It's pretty hard to fuck up inherently fascinating home movies, and Péter Forgács mostly does justice to his material. Miss Universe 1929 is assembled from footage of Lisl Goldarbeiter, mostly taken by her lovestruck admirer (and cousin) Marci Tenczer. Both born in 1909, Lisl and Marti maintained a friendship even though she moved to Austria and he to Hungary. Lisl grew up to be Miss Austria, which led in turn to her appearing at and winning Miss Universe in Galveston, Texas. Legendary director King Vidor was among the panel of judges, and offered her a two-year contract if she would consent to learn stage English, but a homesick Lisl returned to Austria and got married, albeit not to Marti. As the title date indicates, and constant interpolations of archival footage of marching right-wingers remind us, this turned out to be a bad move. Miss Universe 1929 is most interesting in its opening, with plenty of footage of turn-of-the-century Viennese cafes and early talking footage of Lisl enunciating her happiness in heavily-accented English. Forgács understands how to freeze-frame crucial moments of the rough surviving footage, pausing at key moments when the subject unwittingly looks directly into the lens and creates an inadvertent portrait. Understandably, the film eventually turns to the rise of the Nazis and the inevitable calamities that befell the families, a sad but also familiar and unsurprising story that at least has the perk of a happy ending. As engaging as it is for its first half, Miss Universe 1929 is a TV documentary and it shows: nothing here demands big-screen viewing, let alone the $18 cost of admission. This is what PBS was made for, and the film's appearance here is frankly a slot-filler. To be as quick-pitch reductive as possible, Diego Luna's Chávez aspires to be a Mexican When We Were Kings with greater formal daring. Vigorous and entertaining if not entirely convincing, the documentary posits Julio Cesar Chávez not just as a great boxer but as a key to understanding Mexico during the '90s. Instead of dragging us through a talking-heads-with-clips recap of Chávez's career, Luna jazzes it up, speeding through the first decade of fights before stopping for 10 minutes for a discussion of political corruption under the Carlos Salinas regime, with only the tenuous thread of Salinas' and Chávez's friendship to draw it in. His daring is admirable, but while most of the segments are interesting and keep things from getting too same-y, Luna never gets under Chávez's skin. At 78 minutes, the man himself is surprisingly absent from the screen, as relatives, promoters and reporters fill in. The result is a portrait of someone who's not there. While Muhammad Ali is invoked a few times (and, God bless him, Don King does show up to preach some typically insane gibberish), Chavez never acquires a personality or importance any greater than that of a superbly gifted boxer. Still, Chávez is an entertaining enough dossier that has the advantages of 35mm lensing (a luscious rarity in most documentaries) and playful form. Most actors' vanity projects aren't nearly this entertaining. Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout: Shotgun Stories Between Heaven and Earth A Dirty Carnival Born and Bred Miss Universe 1929 Chavez Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/father/MemberTagFilms.aspxfather
Number of films tagged: 3580

Number of people who tagged: 51

Number of times used: 213

]]>Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:51:56 GMT358051213Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/brothers/MemberTagFilms.aspxbrothers
Number of films tagged: 79

Number of people who tagged: 42

Number of times used: 96

]]>Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:09:23 GMT794296Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/gun/MemberTagFilms.aspxgun
Number of films tagged: 203

Number of people who tagged: 23

Number of times used: 86

]]>Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:49:59 GMT2032386Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/southern/MemberTagFilms.aspxsouthern
Number of films tagged: 11

Number of people who tagged: 15

Number of times used: 17

]]>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:19:29 GMT111517Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/estrangement/MemberTagFilms.aspxestrangement
Number of films tagged: 282

Number of people who tagged: 6

Number of times used: 9

]]>Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:02:59 GMT28269Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/feud/MemberTagFilms.aspxfeud
Number of films tagged: 285

Number of people who tagged: 6

Number of times used: 7

]]>Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:13:42 GMT28567Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/bitterness/MemberTagFilms.aspxbitterness
Number of films tagged: 79

Number of people who tagged: 4

Number of times used: 4

]]>Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:01:34 GMT7944Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/ben/MemberTagFilms.aspxben
Number of films tagged: 3

Number of people who tagged: 3

Number of times used: 3

]]>Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:21:33 GMT333Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/familyties/MemberTagFilms.aspxfamilyties
Number of films tagged: 4

Number of people who tagged: 3

Number of times used: 4

]]>Sun, 01 Jul 2007 01:33:36 GMT434Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/lucero/MemberTagFilms.aspxlucero
Number of films tagged: 4

Number of people who tagged: 2

Number of times used: 4

]]>Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:21:21 GMT424Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/tribeca2007/MemberTagFilms.aspxtribeca2007
Number of films tagged: 114

Number of people who tagged: 2

Number of times used: 115

]]>Fri, 23 Nov 2007 05:53:45 GMT1142115Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/nichols/MemberTagFilms.aspxnichols
Number of films tagged: 1

Number of people who tagged: 1

Number of times used: 1

]]>Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:21:33 GMT111Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/thereeler/MemberTagFilms.aspxthereeler
Number of films tagged: 116

Number of people who tagged: 1

Number of times used: 116

]]>Mon, 07 May 2007 13:42:31 GMT1161116Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/steprelative/MemberTagFilms.aspxsteprelative
Number of films tagged: 40

Number of people who tagged: 0

Number of times used: 0

]]>Mon, 16 Jul 2007 10:53:40 GMT4000Tag