Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Elegy  (2008)

The Wackness  (2008)

Egotastic has a couple of artfully lit but not particularly safe for work clips from Elegy, which feature a naked Penelope Cruz in bed with Ben Kingsley. I don’t know much about this film––it premiered at Berlinale, where Jurgen Fauth described how Cruz’s “breasts even become a plot point”––but surely, this is the most pre-release attention ever given to anything directed by Isabel Coixet, and that’s probably ultimately a good thing. Still, it points to an alarming trend of indie/art films which position the 65 year-old Kingsley as a sex symbol to much, much younger women. If it takes three examples to make a trend, we can easily find the other two in Kingsley’s next film to hit the American marketplace, Sundance crowd pleaser The Wackness.

The 31-year age difference between Kingsley and Cruz makes their coupling only slightly less convincing than the actor’s love-at-first-sight meet-cute with a character played by Jane Adams in The Wackness. Adams is 43, but in Jonathan Levine’s film, she looks and acts younger. The “just add pot” instant chemistry between these two “loveable losers” is one of the more repellent indie film cliches in a film replete with them (I’ll save my commentary on the other cliches for my review, which we’ll post later this week around the time of The Wackness‘ premiere at Tribeca).

Much has been made of Kingsley’s make-out scene with 21-year old Mary-Kate Olsen in The Wackness, but at least the film seems to be playing that as obviously ridiculous (although, with The Wackness, you never know––the film’s internal Ridiculous-o-meter is pretty unreliable). But the film clearly wants us to take the Adams/Kingsley romance seriously, which makes it way more disturbing that the couple of shots of Kingsley slobbering on, to paraphrase Lindsay Lohan, a piece of “Full House ass.”

Under discussion:

Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project  (2006)

This is England  (2006)

A Walk Into the Sea  (2006)

My Winnipeg  (2007)

The Tribeca Film Festival opens tomorrow (with Baby Mama, a film I haven’t seen but am rooting for via sheer love for Miss Liz Lemon), and there are a number of films on the schedule that we’ve covered at other festivals and can reccommend, including Baghead, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* and especially Mister Lonely. After the jump, you’ll find a look at some of the films and events that I’m looking forward to covering over the next couple of weeks. The festival concludes on May 4.

2001: A Space Odyssey: A gem of a special event. First, a 40th anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece. Then, a panel discussion, featuring astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actor Matthew Modine, science writer Ann Druyan, artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky and NPR’s Ira Flatow.

My Winnipeg: Guy Maddin’s latest, a highly dramatized personal doc about his hometown, was one of my favorite films of 2007, but I never got around to reviewing it at Toronto. I’m looking forward to seeing it again at Tribeca and finally publishing a review before its release via IFC this spring.

My Marlon and Brando: An experimental narrative that dramatizes the real-life story of a romance between an Iraqi actor named Hama Ali Khan and Turkish actress Ayça Damgaci. In spring of 2003, as the war in Iraq began, Damgaci headed into Iraq to find Khan. Damgaci plays herself, and actuals video love letters made by Khan are woven throughout. The Tribeca catalog describes the film as “something wonderful and new in the history of lovers beseeching.” Sold! See the English-language trailer at YouTube.

Somers Town: Shane Meadows, director of another of my 2007 favorites, This is England, reteams with young England co-star Thomas Turgoose for another coming-of-age drama, this one about the friendship between two boys who fall for the same girl

Guest of Cindy Sherman: Tribeca often makes it a point to showcase non-conventional, independently produced documentaries about artists, with A Walk into the Sea and the woefully underseen Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project as recent examples. In this competition feature, videographer Paul H-O documents his relationship––as both documentarian and love interest––to art star Cindy Sherman.

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans: As a Katrina doc completist, I’d be remiss to not check out Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie’s portrait of the Faubourg Tremé section of New Orleans, also known as the Sixth Ward. The filmmakers began following residents of the area years before the storm and continued to track their lives through the Hurricane and its aftermath.

I Am Because We Are: A documentary written, produced by and starring Madonna, about AIDS orphans in Malawi, the country she somewhat controversially adopted a child from? I am because I can’t look away.

Other films on my screening list: The Auteur, Chevolution, Secret of the Grain, Milosevic on Trial, Eden, The Chicken, The Fish and the King Crab, Lou Reed’s Berlin, The Objective, Milky Way Liberation Front, Lost Indulgence.

Under discussion:

Strange Culture  (2006)

Yesterday, a judge threw out all charges against Steve Kurtz, the artist who had spent the past four years defending himself against false accusations of bio-terrorism, as detailed in Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s must-see hybrid doc Strange Culture. The AP has the story, via GreenCine Daily. I wrote about the film, which earned a mention on my Best of 2007 round-up, on SpoutBlog when it screened in New York last year; I originally covered the film and interviewed the director when it premiered at Sundance.