“When your chance comes, if it comes, be sure you’re ready for it. That means work. It means there’s a lot to learn. The whole technique of the screen. It’s a very very difficult art to acquire. It isn’t just coming on and looking beautiful and being a tomato mouth blonde. It’s learning a great art and how to express that fire within. You see that you’re ready when that chance comes.”
- Cecil B. DeMille, Director
Michael Moore Drops the Zaniness to Take Aim at Bush & Co. in “Fahrenheit 9/11″ (by Peter Brunette, May 18, 2004) Documentary coverage presented by AFI / SilverDocs
Michael Moore is back, once again striking fear into the hearts of Republicans everywhere. After the almost shocking worldwide success of “Bowling for Columbine,” which won an Academy Award and grossed millions of dollars more than anyone expected, Moore now lines up George W. Bush and Co. firmly in his crosshairs and fires pointblank. The result, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” is a powerful, timely, and convincing assault on the family and friends who brought us the current mess in Iraq.
This time around, Moore drops the zaniness and high entertainment value evident in “Bowling for Columbine,” in favor of an elegiac approach that is less funny but ultimately, maybe, more politically effective. Only time will tell. A lot depends on how distribution shakes out, since Miramax’s parent Disney has forbidden the Weinstein brothers from distributing the film. Obviously someone will snatch it up immediately, but without the Miramax muscle, the film’s reach won’t be nearly as great.
“Fahrenheit 9/11″ begins with a recap of Bush’s theft of the presidency, as Moore presents interesting footage of Al Gore, as president of the Senate, ironically having to overrule the many African-American congressmen and congresswomen who were trying to officially protest the results of the election.
Next comes the shocking events of September 11th, which Moore makes fresh by choosing not to show the planes crashing into the twin towers, but merely a dark screen, with the sound of the crashes, followed by riveting pictures of people in shock and dismay. Somewhat surprisingly, it turns out these images still have the power to wring tears from viewers.
Read the Full Story @ indieWIRE.com
“Acting is ninety-nine percent sweat and one percent talent. But that talent had better be good.”
- Charlie Chaplin
The Contradictory Revelations of Pedro Almodovar’s “Bad Education” (by Peter Brunette, May 13, 2004) Cannes coverage presented by the Sundance Channel’s Anatomy of a Scene
The 57th edition of the Cannes Film Festival opened Wednesday night with Pedro Almodovar’s latest, the narratively inventive but emotionally tepid “La Mala Educacion” (Bad Education). While always watchable — and a qualitative quantum leap over last year’s fest opener, the ghastly French costume drama
“Fanfan La Tulipe” — the Spanish filmmaker’s most recent effort comes nowhere near the heights of recent triumphs like “All About My Mother” and “Talk to Her.” Mexican dreamboat and rising international star Gael Garcia Bernal, who’s at the film’s center, is by far the best thing about it, but after a
while even his seductive smile becomes tiring. Following the promising Hitchcockian opening credits (which so thrillingly recall the Saul Bass/Bernard Herrmann collaboration in such films as “Psycho” and “North By Northwest”), and an occasionally interesting set-up of the characters and situation, the film heads resolutely downhill.
Almodovar once again expertly works his trademark territory — the interplay of gender and sexuality, delivered in the simultaneously exploited and critiqued generic form of melodrama — but, as with the American scriptwriter Charlie
Kaufman’s latest films, here the director has mostly marshalled his talent toward the elaboration of a plot with a mind-boggling (but, unfortunately, not heart-boggling) series of Brechtian twists and turns. The central story concerns a promising love affair between two young boys at a boarding school, an affair that is doomed by the machinations of a pedophiliac priest named Father Manolo (Daniel Gimenez-Cacho).
Read the Full Story @ indieWIRE.com
More “Cannes” Coverage @ indieWIRE.com
“First, last and always, a player must have imagination. Imagination kindles the feelings, steers the actor through the character into emotion, enables him to reproduce feelings he himself has never experienced.”
- Alla Nazimova, revolutionary Russian actress (1879-1945)
Quote from the great Max Reinhardt (1873 – 1943), one of the most picturesque, eclectic, original, innovative and influential actor/directors of the modern theatre.
“Shakespeare is the greatest, the only truly imcomparable boon that the theatre has had. He was poet, actor, and producer in one. He painted landscapes and fashioned architectural scenes with his words. In his plays everything is bathed in music and flows into dance. He stands nearest to the Creator. It is a wonderful full-rounded world that he made-the earth with all its flowers, the sea with all its storms, the light of the sun, the moon, the stars; fire with all its terrors and the air with all its spirits-and in between, human beings with all their passions, their humor and tragedy, beings of elemental grandeur and, at the same time, utter truth. His omnipotence is infinite. He was Hamlet, King Claudius, Ophelia, and Polonius in one person. Othello and Iago, Brutus and Cassius, Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff and Prince Henry, Shylock and Antonio, Bottom and Titania, and the whole line of merry and sorrowful fools lived within him. He engendered them and brought them to birth; they were part of his inscrutable being. Over them he hovers like a godhead, invisible and intangible. Nothing of him is there but this great world. Yet in it he is ever present and mighty. He lives eternally.”
Disney Stops Miramax From Releasing Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911″ (by Eugene Hernandez, May 5, 2004) Documentary coverage presented by AFI / SilverDocs
The Walt Disney Company will not allow its specialty division, Miramax Films, to distribute Michael Moore’s anticipated new documentary “Fahrenheit 911,” the director said early today. Moore announced the news to his large Internet audience with a letter entitled, “Disney Has Blocked the Distribution of My New Film.” The movie, which was financed by Miramax, is set to have its world premiere later this month at the Cannes Film Festival.
Moore indicated, on his website, that yesterday he was informed that Disney would not allow Miramax to distribute the new documentary that takes aim at the Bush administration.
Moore has said that the film includes an exploration of links between President Bush and Osama bin Laden’s family, as well as criticism of the war in Iraq. Moore has also indicated his intention to have the new film in U.S. theaters before the upcoming presidential election, perhaps as early as this
summer.
Read the Full Story @ indieWIRE.com
More “Documentary” Coverage @ indieWIRE.com
More “Cannes” Coverage @ indieWIRE.com
Julie Bertucelli Talks About Her Accomplished Debut, “Since Otar Left” (by Erica Abeel, April 30, 2004)
They just keep coming, these girlish French filmmakers who could double as ingenues, turning out remarkably assured first features. The recent crop includes Delphine Gleize with “Carnages,” Julie Lopes-Curval with “Seaside,” and Marina de Van with “In My Skin.” Now Julie Bertucelli, newest girl on
the block, steps up to the plate with “Since Otar Left,” awarded the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes 2003 before its screening at the 2003 New York Film Festival. Zeitgeist Films opens “Otar” in theaters today. Set in post-Soviet
Georgia and Paris, “Otar” is a finely calibrated film about exile, longing, and the lies we tell for love. Women of three generations — Eka, the wily grandmother, her embittered daughter Marina, and Ada, her educated granddaughter, who
somehow mothers them all — bunk together in a dilapidated apartment, enduring the blackouts and skittish phone service of post-communist Georgia. Eka lives for letters and phone calls from her beloved son Otar, a medical student working in construction in Paris without a visa. When Otar is killed in
an accident, Marina and Ada resolve to conceal the truth rather than break Eka’s heart — a lie that spawns a growing web of deception.
Focusing on telling gestures and never straining for effect, the film creates a moving triptych of women who cobble together a life out of odd bits and pieces, like the battered bric-a-brac Marina hawks at the bazaar to raise cash. A lesser
director would have mounted a tear-fest in the sequence that shows Eka — portrayed by the charismatic 90-year-old Esther Gorontin — hobbling through Paris in search of her son. But at every turn, Bertucelli balances pathos with humorous and surprising revelations about snatching hope from adversity.
Read the Full Story @ indieWIRE.com