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The Grand

Mean Street: Mickle's Nifty Urb ...
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"Eeek! A... rat? One of the creatures in Jim Mickle's Mulberry Street By Eric Kohn Zombie movies have been rife with metaphor since George Romero made Night of the Living Dead, but the allegorical implications of walking corpses aren’t built into the package. Most of the Italian entries in the genre provide heaps of gore and traumatizing cannibalistic imagery, but they generally come up short on social implications. Which gives the entertainment value of those movies a freer hand -- without external meaning, a bunch of lumbering monsters just need to look scary. Contemporary angles of horror movies walk a much more trepidatious line between pretentious distraction (consider the shot of the World Trade Center towers in the recent remake of The Omen) and convenient add-on (taking potshots at globalization and tourism in Hostel, in between the money shots of amputation). Jim Mickle’s Mulberry Street, a low budget attempt to find the proper balance, more or less pull ... " [More]

Numb

Matt Perry, Uncomfortably Numb
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"Matthew Perry, smoked out in Harris Goldberg's Numb By Michelle Orange From this afternoon’s random sampling one might deduce that, like slime mold, all the sad young men have picked up and headed for the water. California, to be exact. Numb, Good Time Max, and In Search of a Midnight Kiss all seemed to have a bizarre number of things in common: dysfunctional men who move to Los Angeles; mothers who are either cold bitches or fare-thee-well featherweight and fathers who are absent or oblivious; a woman who’s going to fix everything (OK, only two of them have that); and a key character reference made via masturbation (one wants to jerk off on a bunny rabbit, another to his roommate’s girlfriend and the third to a three-second snippet of porn on a loop). I’m not even sure what all of this means, but it was too obvious not to note. Especially that last one. I only know one guy in LA, and I feel like I should give him a call. Maybe I can tell him about sli ... " [More]

Nanking

With a Friend Like This...
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"Friends forever: Daniel Auteuil and Julie Gayet in My Best Friend By Eric Kohn So much of the festival environment relies on finding new talent that the presence of established artists practically seems like an afterthought. The tenuous relationship between career success and festival recognition doesn’t apply to filmmakers whose name alone attracts a crowd. This year, Tribeca held a spot for Patrice Leconte, one of the finest contemporary French filmmakers, for his sizably budgeted comedy My Best Friend. The movie arrived at the festival with a distribution deal through IFC Films in place (it hits theaters July 13), meaning that its inclusion in the festival primarily serves to guarantee that some quality offerings that only a veteran can provide. But what’s in a name? Not everything, unfortunately. I’ve admired Leconte’s inquisitive character studies for years; his magnificent reworking of The Prince and the Pauper in 2002’s The Man on the Trai ... " [More]

Live!

Live! With Eva Mendes
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"Earlier in the festival we had the chance to check in with Eva Mendes, the star and co-producer of the scathing television satire Live! The narrative directing debut of Oscar-winning documentarian Bill Guttentag, Live! traces the efforts of a bloodthirsty network executive (played by Mendes) who seeks to up the reality-TV stakes by broadcasting a Russian roulette program. Mendes spoke with us about transitioning as a producer, the dearth of good women's roles in Hollywood and how to use the phrase "Red Bull" as a verb.Watch this and more Tribeca coverage on ReelerTV Discuss Live! and other Tribeca titles at Spout. Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler " [More]

Charlie Bartlett

Being Charlie Bartlett
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"The other day we had a word with Anton Yelchin, the young actor who plays the title role of the high-school comedy Charlie Bartlett. Yelchin's character achieves folk hero status among his peers after assuming the role of his unofficial campus psychiatrist (and prescription drug dispenser). The film premiered at Tribeca and will open this summer in New York.Watch this and more Tribeca coverage on ReelerTV Discuss Charlie Bartlett and other Tribeca titles at Spout. Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler " [More]

Havoc 2: Normal Adolescent Behavior

A Walker Wonk's Wet Dream
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"The namesake of Stephen Kijak's documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man By Vadim Rizov If you're not a music geek and the thought of watching Jarvis Cocker issue a string of bons mots doesn't get you all hot and bothered -– especially if you don’t know or care who Jarvis Cocker actually is -- you might as well skip down to the rest of the reviews. Like most music docs, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man preaches to the converted, rolling out a seemingly incongruous coalition of musicians and music geeks united only to praise its subject as one of the most influential. Musicians. Ever. Other highlights of the film include: listening to excerpts from Walker's songs; watching goofy screen-saver-ish illustrations accompany Walker’s songs; and listening to Walker talk about his songs. In other words, pure cinematic value disassociated from the subject is at a low premium, although the doc is as well-assembled as these things get. Director Stephen Kijak's main task is to locate the roots ... " [More]

Descent

Lugacy Talks Dawson and Descent
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"ReelerTV paid a visit to Tribeca Cinemas earlier this week to talk with filmmaker Talia Lugacy, whose dark rape-revenge tale Descent is one of the festival's most anticipated, controversial titles. Co-produced by and starring Rosario Dawson, the film screens today and Friday, followed each day by a Q&A with Lugacy, Dawson and co-writer Brian Priest. Watch this and more Tribeca coverage on ReelerTV Discuss Descent and all of Tribeca's titles at Spout. Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler " [More]

Half Moon

Half Moon Over Tribeca
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"Ismail Ghaffari and Hedieh Tehrani in the strange, compelling Half Moon By Vadim Rizov A long time ago I caught Bahman Ghobadi's A Time For Drunken Horses, easily one of the most miserable films I've ever seen. Not only were the characters orphaned Kurdish kids (that is, orphans within a society itself orphaned and oppressed by surrounding territories), one of them was a deformed dwarf. Something must've changed since then. I missed the intervening films, but Ghobadi's Half Moon isn't just stranger than most Iranian films dare to be, it's outright bizarre by any standard. A group of Kurdish musicians set out to perform in newly liberated Kurdish Iraq, having labored for seven months to get the permit. Things predictably go from optimism to worst-case scenario in record time, but for very odd reasons. Lead musician Mamo (Ismail Ghaffari) makes a pit stop along the way to collect his female vocalist Hesho (Hedieh Tehrani). She's no ordinary singer, th ... " [More]

Napoleon and Me

Auteil's Napoleon Dynamite
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"Daniel Autiel as the iconic French emperor in Napoleon and Me By Michelle Orange There’s a vague Last King of Scotland vibe to Napoleon and Me, Paola Virzì’s fleet-footed costume drama, although no one -- thank Christ -- is strung up by his nipples, and Daniel Auteuil foregoes Whitaker’s frothy flash for a creepy calm as Napoleon. The idealistic counterpart in question is Martino (Elio Germano), a young writer living on the Italian island of Elba in 1814, when Napoleon arrives there in exile. Enraged not just by the presence but the prevalence of the former Emperor (most of the Italians welcome him like a god), Martino decides it is his destiny to assassinate him while he has the chance. That chance gets a lot better when Napoleon enlists Martino to be his “librarian,” which includes following the little man around while he dazzles the dopey locals (who are hoping N. can help bring about their own economic miracle) and writing down each pearl ... " [More]

The Bubble

Devil Thrives in the Details
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"One of the many Darfur atrocities haunting the dcoumentary The Devil Came on Horseback By Eric Kohn Activist causes take kindly to the documentary format because it provides an immediate venue for expression. Sign all the petitions you want, but at the end of the day, the power of image wins out. So it goes with The Devil Came on Horseback, which explores the horrific genocide of Darfur by letting the visuals tell the story. In fact, gut-wrenching stills and video of natives who suffered at the hands of the government-armed milita group Janjaweed don’t only lead the narrative -- they dictate its existence. Consistent in its method and indisputably well-made, The Devil Came on Horseback could do for Darfur awareness what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. Directors Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern keenly follow the experiences of US Marine Capt. Brian Steidle, a hardened fighter whose position in the area as the village massacres began to increase in frequency g ... " [More]

Still Life

Still Life, Tribeca's Masterpiece
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"One of the stiller moments in Jia Zhang Ke's Still Life By Vadim Rizov Unless something miraculous happens, Still Life will be Tribeca's designated masterpiece and, with any justice, competition winner. Not that it'll really benefit at this late date; even after winning the Golden Lion at Venice and screening at a plethora of other festivals, Still Life still has no American distributor. Surprising, given that Still Life is a lean 108 minutes and classifies as relatively accessibly for Jia Zhang Ke, whose previous films have such inviting IMDB genre tags as "ennui" and "disenchantment." A tip: The characters are not the story. Han Sanming (as a miner named Han Sanming) arrives in Fengjie after having been gone for 16 years to find his ex-wife, only to learn that the entire area has been flooded as part of China's massive Three Gorges hydroelectric program (ongoing since 1993, to be complete by 2009, and forcing the relocation of more than 1.2 million people in t ... " [More]

Purple Violets

Black White + Gray Area
By TheReeler in The Reeler on Spout
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"(L-R) Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, the subjects of Black White + Gray By Michelle Orange That fact that Tribeca is filled with what are essentially competent television biographies of figures who would never make it past a preliminary production meeting at A&E has both good points and bad. The good, of course, is that we get to learn of people other than those who sell advertising; Anita O’Day and Scott Walker are two on offer at Tribeca this year. But the bad is that the format is so tried and true that many filmmakers see no reason to deviate from it. Perhaps a sale to a television network is the goal for many festival directors, and who could blame them? Not one hour ago, after limping away from a six-hour movie marathon in a theater complex, I found myself contemplating a wall of boxed cinnamon buns beside an elderly lady at my local grocery store. She turned to me and said, “I remember when four of these were 99 cents -- we’d each buy a box and take them to the ... " [More]

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