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Vanya on the Run

Despite its title, The Italian is Russian. The title derives from a nickname Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov), the film’s 6-year-old protagonist, is given by his fellow “inmates” at a rural Russian orphanage after he is selected for adoption by an Italian couple. The couple comes to visit the orphanage to meet Vanya. They seem to be lovely, warm, prosperous people. They leave with a promise to come back for Vanya in two months, as soon as the paperwork clears. The other kids, with a mix of rueful envy and empathetic admiration, immediately start calling Vanya “the Italian.”

The adoption is a gift — Vanya’s a lucky one. But the two-month gap is enough time to instill doubts in him. First, there’s gossip from another boy about “good foreigners and bad foreigners,” with the bad ones allegedly adopting children only to harvest their organs. This doesn’t do too much to shake Vanya’s interest in being adopted. But soon after, a woman shows up at the orphanage searching for the son she’d abandoned years before. But she’s too late. A foreign couple has recently adopted him. That night, as the boys in Vanya’s room are being put to bed, one boy asks the older girl who is turning off the lights, “But how will she find [her son] now?” And as every boy in the room looks up, it’s clear they’re all really thinking the same thing: Will my mother come back looking for me?

Vanya worries about this, and despite constant counsel from older kids that his real mother will never come and he is very lucky to be adopted, Vanya decides to pursue his birth mother at all costs, which includes an escape from the orphanage.

The Italian is yet another foreign-language flick that’s a nod-to-neorealism children’s story. These types of movies make up an unusually large percentage of foreign-language movies that get widespread American distribution. Perhaps it’s because the plight of a child has a particularly universal emotional grip, one that cuts through language and cultural barriers in ways that other stories don’t. And perhaps it’s because Hollywood studios, and, really, the U.S. indie scene as well, seem incapable of making these kinds of movies.

But as gripping as Vanya’s personal story is and as pure and charismatic a performance as bright-eyed, towheaded young Spiridonov gives, The Italian works best in terms of its bigger picture: its detailed, absorbing depiction of a self-sustaining, Dickensian kid culture within the orphanage (one ruled with an iron-fisted collectivism that seems to be culturally specific) and the bleak post-collapse Russian backdrop the story plays out against.

As the story progresses, a disconnect may emerge between the viewpoint of the film and your own reaction. Director Andrei Kravchuk seems to endorse Vanya’s flight, perhaps instilling in the story a symbolic notion of a broken country healing old wounds. The adoption broker Vanya flees from is a self-serving, low-key Cruella De Vil type, but the adoption itself seems to be very good for him, more so than he — or perhaps Kravchuck — realizes. For much of Vanya’s journey, I found myself helplessly rooting for his capture.

The Italian

Opens Friday, April 6th

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

Tadpole Terrorist

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (already that national cinema’s all-time box-office champ) emerged at the Cannes Film Festival last year and has recently been making its way through U.S. theaters. As it does so, it provides a much-needed counterpoint to the recent spate of low-budget Hollywood horror flicks that have cluttered multiplexes in recent years. Rather than mixing gratuitous gore with deafening pop songs, here’s an imaginative creature-feature that mixes chills and thrills with comedy, social commentary, and bright blasts of cartoonish pop energy.

Slimy, silly, and often downright anarchic, this tale of a mutated sea monster that emerges from the Han River to terrorize Seoul is like a Mad magazine version of a horror movie, but it’s not quite a spoof. Instead, Bong commits to all his shifting tones. The slapstick, family warmth, raw fear, and barely submerged geopolitical critique are all equally embraced.

The Host opens in the year 2000 in the morgue of a U.S. Army base in South Korea as an American officer orders his Korean underling to dump gallons of toxic chemicals down the drain and, ultimately, into the Han River. Seven years later, the result is a giant mutated sea creature — a heaving monster tadpole with teeth and legs — spotted hanging like a possum from the Han River Bridge.

When the creature drops into the water, people rush to the banks of the river and, like children at the zoo, toss fast food and other debris into the water to “feed” the beast, which instead decides there are better dining options on land. This is the comic-horror high point of the movie, as the creature gallops clumsily through the city park in broad daylight, chomping at fleeing onlookers.

This sudden attack draws the film’s human protagonists — the riverside squid-shack-operating Park clan — into the mix. There’s an aging patriarch, suffering the indignity of his two deadbeat sons — one lazy, the other a bitter alcoholic. A daughter is an Olympic archer whose delayed release keeps her from greatness. The little miss sunshine of this dysfunctional family is the grade-schooler Hyun-seo, daughter of the lazy son.

Hyun-seo and her dad end up in the middle of the creature’s attack, with Hyun-seo abducted after her father grabs the wrong schoolgirl in the middle of a mob scene.

With Hyun-seo thought dead, the family goes into mourning, only to have her reappear via a cell-phone call from a sewer dungeon. With a mission to save their youngest family member, the Park clan breaks out of quarantine (the U.S. Army and South Korean government claim the creature hosts a deadly virus) and heads back to the Han to hunt for Hyun-seo. (And, really, how much better would Little Miss Sunshine have been if the family had had to combat a giant killer tadpole?)

As the Park clan embarks on this dangerous adventure, the authorities seem more concerned with tracking them than capturing or killing the monster itself. With the U.S. Army set to unleash an “Agent Yellow” chemical to stop a virus that may not exist and combat a threat of its own making, The Host is one long eyeball roll at American hubris and its impact on the Second World nations that “host” it. In this way, The Host is nothing if not an update of the most evocative Cold War monster movies. It’s worthy of the company.

The Host

Opening Friday, March 30th

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

Screenplay gimmicks just a ruse in Premonition.

A woman burns her hand on a stovetop, and halfway around the world, her twin sister feels the pain. A man has a dream that the plane he’s scheduled to be on is going to crash, so he skips the flight, only to find out that it did, indeed, go down. A woman is informed that her husband has been killed in a car accident, but the next day he’s alive and well. That last is the enigma at the heart of Premonition, a would-be brainteaser with no brains, a film that isn’t half as interesting as one of those old commercials for Time Life Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown series.

Sandra Bullock stars as Linda Hanson, stay-at-home mom of two girls, kinda happily married, and about to get the shock of her life: Her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has been killed in a car accident. After the sheriff gives her the bad news, Linda floats through the rest of her day in a numb fog, finally succumbing to sleep. When she wakes up, her husband is still alive.

She pieces together that she has inexplicably woken up several days before his death. She floats through this day in a confused fog and goes to sleep wondering if it’s all a dream. In the morning, she wakes to a house full of family and friends getting ready to go to the funeral of her again-dead husband.

And on and on and on. The plot unfolds linearly for Linda, as it does for the audience, but the chronological order of days is scrambled. Linda tries to understand what’s happening to her, complicated by the discovery of little mysteries such as a dead crow in her backyard, the cut-and-stitched face of one of her daughters, and a bottle of lithium prescribed for her by a doctor she’s never heard of.

Luckily for the audience, the days unfold with perfect, classic mystery-revelation timing. Apparently, this is meant to be meat enough for entertainment. Tiny riddles in Premonition do have solutions — pointlessly mundane solutions and never mind how they don’t hint at the larger question of why this is happening to Linda. No explanation is given that has any traction.

The chronological confusion is ultimately just a ruse to distract from the film’s actual story, which, if told in order, would interest no one. The coup de grace from screenwriter Bill Kelly (Blast from the Past) is a genuinely putrid ending. The audience laughed in incredulity when the credits rolled following that.

The things that could save such a weak story conceit — performance, direction, emotional connect — don’t: Bullock is fine but mostly just has to frown convincingly, while McMahon barely registers as a presence, dead or alive. Director Mennan Yapo ably uses the camera to suggest greater forces at work, but since the script doesn’t produce the supernatural goods, the visuals serve as an irritant, retroactively. And the fertile emotional ground that could be harvested in such a story is left fallow. This is a movie that isn’t about the process of grief so much as it is the process of screenwriting. Premonition should be taught at Hollywood industry seminars about how to turn a script with nothing to say into a greenlighted movie.

Premonition

Now showing

Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Crash Course

Will (Jude Law) is a workaholic architect whose firm has just opened new offices next to a massive urban-renewal project in a sketchy part of London. Liv (Robin Wright Penn) is Will’s longtime girlfriend with a teenaged, possibly mildly autistic daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), from a previous relationship. Miro (Rafi Gavron) is a 15-year-old, Bosnian-born scofflaw who breaks into the architect offices to snatch electronics. Amira (Juliette Binoche) is his widowed mother struggling to keep her son in school and out of prison. Throw in an Eastern European hooker (Vera Farmiga) who’s into PJ Harvey and you’ve got Breaking and Entering, the new film from Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient).

Bea obsessively practices gymnastics. Liv obsesses over her daughter’s condition and the pronounced disconnect she has with Will. Will obsesses with work, then the break-in, then Amira, once he comes in contact with her. At first view, the film focuses on these relationships and the difficulties each character has finding contentment.

Law again is playing the cad, but this time he brings forward a mix of anger and paralysis at the base of his straying heart. Wright Penn matches Law with her own pain, but neither role is particularly showy. Better still, even though Breaking and Entering is all conflict, it’s not oppressive or bleak. Best of all, there’s no foolish consistency when it comes to characterizing their relationship: The couple swings from argument to affection to distance, all in the breath of a conversation, and the shifts feel natural.

(As Bruno, the police investigator looking into the robberies, Ray Winstone again effects a sea change whenever he appears onscreen, as he has done a number of times in past films. Is it too late to cast him in everything?)

The film is chockablock full of little symbolisms, such as when a wild fox manages to enter Will’s courtyard. Mostly, such devices are allowed to fade into the background and percolate. But the last 20 minutes of the film are marked with a ferocious tidiness where all metaphors are explained. The worst are characters’ professions as puns on attributes they possess: Will, an architect, can’t build a bridge to Liv; Liv, a non-working documentary filmmaker, won’t look at Will; Amira, a seamstress, can mend Will’s soul.

When the film works, which it does, on balance, it captures a transitional period in a relationship, a community, a country, a world. Classes, nationalities, ethnicities, accents, and perspectives on — and from — the law rub up against each other in this story about a rough part of town (King’s Cross, London) getting a shiny new facade from some well-intentioned imperialists. What this transformation means for the future comes out in the wash, and, in the film anyway, the kids are gonna be alright. It’s perhaps a conclusion that only a film anxious to leave no loose ends could come to.

“There is a moral to this tale,” a character reads in a book of fairy tales. “Jam makes fingers sticky.” Would that the film heeded its own mission statement.

Breaking and Entering

Now showing

Studio on the Square

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News News Feature

International Masterworks

The Memphis International Film Festival truly earns its name this year by featuring 58 films from 13 countries. One excellent point of entry into worldwide cinema MIFF provides is the International Masters Series, screenings of four notable films from four preeminent filmmakers, presented in glorious 35mm format on the silver screens of Studio on the Square.

Note: Ming-liang Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn was not available for screening. It plays Sunday, March 25th, at 7:30 p.m.

All About My Mother, Spain, 1999

In Pedro Almodóvar’s masterpiece All About My Mother, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), a young man who wants to be a writer, celebrates his 17th birthday with his single mother, Manuela (Cecelia Roth), by going to see a staging of A Streetcar Named Desire. Esteban is in awe of the actress portraying Blanche DuBois, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes, who also stars in The Devil’s Backbone, another film in the International Masters Series), so he and his mom wait for her after the show to get an autograph. Chasing after Huma’s taxi, Esteban is fatally struck by a car.

So it is that Almodóvar quickly removes the character that most resembles himself. Esteban clearly is awed by his mother, Huma, Blanche, Stella, and, in another reference, Bette Davis in All About Eve. These women inform Esteban’s sensitivity to life and inspire his passion for writing, just as they clearly do Almodóvar. But All About My Mother isn’t so much about Almodóvar’s passion for these feminine icons as it is about the women themselves. This is no fetishistic work of idolatry nor is it a trumped-up platitude on the sanctity of women.

A character comments, “A woman is her hair, nails, and lips.” It’s with this physical descriptive of womanhood that the film immerses itself. The women who inhabit the film — mothers, daughters, lesbians, actresses, or transsexuals — take their cue of what a woman is from what famous women look and act like. The ensemble cast enriches the film with a unique personality that is worthy of the cinematic and literary allusions it makes. Almodóvar continually casts characters in the light of new references to famous roles so that as soon as you’ve got a grasp on the symbolism, the role orientation changes. That the film feels as unscripted as everyday life while turning in on itself like a golden spiral tattles on Almodóvar’s greatest worth as a filmmaker: as a writer.

Screening Friday, March 23rd, 10 p.m.; Sunday, March 25th, noon

The Flower of Evil, France, 2003

If you didn’t know Cahiers du Cinéma iconoclast and French New Wave instigator Claude Chabrol was still making movies, don’t feel left out. Chabrol hasn’t gotten a lot of play in the States, or at least not much that could be felt in Memphis, for some time now. That the 77-year-old Chabrol is still churning out pictures about every year and a half perhaps is only mildly surprising. That he’s still got some game, however, 60-plus features in, is more unexpected.

In The Flower of Evil, Chabrol’s 2003 familial mystery, Francois (Benoît Magimel) comes home to France, after spending four years in America, to find his step-mom Anne Charpin-Vasseur (Nathalie Baye) in the thick of a mayoral campaign, his father Gérard Vasseur (Bernard Le Coq) chafing at the thought of it, his aunt Line (Suzanne Flon) a dear presence, and his step-sister/cousin Michèle (Mélanie Doutey) as hot as ever. Skeletons long locked in the Charpin and Vasseur family closets are rattled by an anonymous leaflet distributed to smear the candidate: namely, that Aunt Line murdered her own father, a Nazi sympathizer, years before (a mystery set up in the film’s opening sequence).

Next comes a surprising little scene: the family discussing the leaflet, casually acknowledging in their conversation that every word is true. Just when you expect the murder to be the focus of the film, it gets resolved. In its place is the real thrust of The Flower of Evil: how the two old French families, the Charpins and the Vasseurs, keep playing out lives that echo down generations. “Time doesn’t exist,” one character says. “Life is a perpetual present.”

Measuring life in generations rather than individuals gives the film a unique perspective on death, especially for a murder mystery: The Flower of Evil doesn’t see murder as the ultimate affront. It’s a change of pace that gives the film an insouciant air. From a writer/director who has killed scores of characters in a long career, it’s perhaps a most appropriate statement on mortality.

Screening Friday, March 23rd, 2:30 p.m.

The Devil’s Backbone, Spain/Mexico, 2001

What is it about 1930s and ’40s Franco Spain that attracts Mexican writer/director Guillermo del Toro so? Del Toro has gotten all kinds of pub from his 2007 Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, set in Fascist Spain at the height of World War II. But that film marked a return to the setting for the filmmaker. His first sortie there was his excellent 2001 ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone. In it, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), the son of a leftist soldier, is sent to a school of “Reds looking after Reds’ children.” There, Carlos encounters the ghost of a boy who disappeared months before. Unlike in most other ghost stories, though, The Devil’s Backbone isn’t about the specter so much as it is about evil men who continue to live.

The film has a killer central image: a dud bomb unexploded after an air-raid drop, embedded in the middle of the school’s courtyard. The explosive device serves as a kind of opposite to Alfred Hitchcock’s theoretical bomb: It’s inert, never threatening to go off, irrelevant to the plot but full of meaning nonetheless.

The core question in The Devil’s Backbone is, What is a ghost? Is it “a tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect in amber.” Whatever the answer, the film is sure to haunt you for some time.

Screening Saturday, March 24th, 9:30 p.m.

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News News Feature

The Festival’s New Groove

In 2006, the Memphis Film Forum opened its seventh edition of the Memphis International Film Festival with a special sneak preview of New Orleans Music in Exile, Robert Mugge’s downbeat documentary about Crescent City musicians coping with the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. As the closing credits rolled at the Paradiso theater and the attending filmmaker received his due ovation, Cowboy Mouth, a hard-touring New Orleans band prominently featured in Mugge’s film, launched into “Jenny Says” and electrified a near-capacity crowd at Newby’s, miles away on the Highland strip.

The timing of these two potentially synergistic events was purely coincidental. There was no official cross-promotion, no shuttle service trafficking festival attendees between the two venues. Was the Memphis International Film Festival failing to capitalize on this happy accident and its host city’s reputation as the primal nexus of modern American music? Could be.

“Our identity is about to change,” says Memphis Film Forum chairman Lisa Bobal. “The nature of living in a musical city like Memphis means we always get this great selection of music-oriented films. So in the future we’ll be moving more toward becoming a film and music festival.”

With its International Masters series and a selection of movies and music videos from around the globe, MIFF’s 2007 festival has plenty to offer fans of world cinema. But for all the foreign affairs, this year’s 58-film lineup has an unmistakably Southern accent. Oh Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?, which opens the festival, is an effective concert film showcasing John Maxwell, an actor who has spent the last 26 years touring the world in a lyrical one-man show about Mississippi modernist William Faulkner.

Four very different documentaries — Living the Blues, Iron City Blues, Hard Times, and The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam — explore and exploit different facets of the music that made Beale Street famous. The apocalyptic short film Quincy & Althea is a black comedy set in post-Katrina New Orleans with landscapes as futuristic and frightening as they are familiar.

“All of this happened on its own,” Bobal says.

Over the next five years, the Memphis Film Forum and its new concert-promoting sponsor, TCB Entertainment, will actively transform MIFF into an event that celebrates cinema all day and music all night.

The epiphany to change directions struck at the International Film Festival Summit, when Bobal was talking to Film Threat editor and author of The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, Chris Gore, who was shocked to discover that a festival in Memphis didn’t have a strong musical component. When he asked why she didn’t capitalize on the city’s musical reputation, Bobal only had one answer.

“We’re all volunteers,” she says. “We just haven’t had the manpower … . But now with TCB as our sponsor, I’m confident we can step up the entertainment.”

There’s no ongoing musical component attached to this year’s festival, although Craig Schuster, a songwriter and pianist with a flare for Detroit soul and Southern rock, will play the festival’s Rat Pack-themed awards party at the Warehouse, 36 G.E. Patterson, on Saturday, March 24th. Admission to the party is $10 at the door, though festival-pass holders get in free.

Blues Notes

Films about hard times, disaster, destruction,disruption, and lawn-mower racing.

It’s 1958, and a 22 year-old, trench-coat-clad Dan Rather reports from the scene of an unspeakable terrorist attack on the American homeland: “Right now I’m standing in front of Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee,” he says. “Last night, it was rocked by a bomb blast. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the state fire marshal are investigating.”

The Clinton 12, Keith Henry McDaniel’s exhaustive, interview-driven documentary about the first integrated public high school in the South after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, is a detailed portrait of dark and troubled times. James Earl Jones narrates the story of a black and white community that stood shoulder to shoulder — prejudices intact — to fight for justice against a wave of violent racial hatred. Its score is all improvisational jazz, but the interviews ring with the unmistakable sounds of white Southern gospel and gutbucket blues.

It’s just one of several films selected to appear at this year’s MIFF that deals with hardships and cultural unrest and that causes voices to be raised in song. Doug Lenox’s short film Quincy & Althea uses an uneventful domestic squabble between the title characters as a device to put New Orleans’ shattered, hopeless landscape on the big screen. Though set in New York, Cadillac Man tells the true blue story of a homeless man who finds success as a writer but is incapable of returning to a more conventional lifestyle.

Four other documentary films take a close look at the occasionally joyous, often sorrowful music born of hardship. Collectively, these films exult and exploit the song of the South and present a clear, sometimes disquieting picture of the 12-bar form we call the blues.

Living the Blues

Everybody knows the romanticized image of the bluesman. He’s a hard-drinking, fast-loving rapscallion with a guitar tuned by Satan and a gift for signing bad recording contracts. The familiar image doesn’t seem quite so romantic in Tim Bryant’s documentary, Living the Blues, an intimate portrait of nine elderly and often obscure blues artists, including Precious Bryant, Neal Pattman, and Etta Baker.

Bryant’s filmmaking style is visually static. The stories and music, however, are vibrant, colorful, and occasionally explosive. Pattman, a salty shouter and harmonica virtuoso, talks about losing his arm and the constant need to “come up fighting.” Rufus McKenzie angrily declares that he’s never been out of slavery and sadly recalls a time when a seemingly kind white couple served him a sandwich in their dog’s bowl. This film is the real deal, filled with loss, fury, joy, and, of course, music.

Iron City Blues

Biker and blues artist Big Mike Griffin wasn’t afraid to visit Iron City, Tennessee, a secluded town on the Alabama border that hasn’t had a police officer on the town payroll since the last one was run off in 1989.

“I’m 6′-10″ and had my trusty 40-cal. Glock with me,” he says. “So I felt really secure.”

Scott Jackson’s Iron City Blues is a frustrating but ultimately fascinating snapshot of a scary and occasionally bizarre world of meth, moonshine, kids racing lawn mowers — and bodies floating in the river. It’s also a less-than-satisfying document of how Big Mike turns his experiences in Iron City into a blues song.

“As far as I know, nobody’s ever made a documentary about how a blues song is made,” Jackson explains. “And I thought that would be an interesting way to approach the film.” Unfortunately, Big Mike and his “A-Team” of musicians aren’t nearly as interesting as Iron City’s last police officer, a mayor who can’t help “looking the other way,” or Monkey Tidwell, a 73-year-old gnome who loves his whiskey and knows where all the bodies are buried.

At its best, Iron City Blues captures a quirky, undeniably intimidating community of gun-toting rebels who would rather die free than live by somebody else’s rules. And then there’s Big Mike’s blues, which isn’t bad, but it can’t hold a candle to cigar-chomping children who delight in shooting blue lights off cop cars.

Hard Times

Scene from The Clinton 12

Filmmaker Damien Blaylock has martial artist turned musician Steven Seagal to thank for his recent exposure to the blues — and for Hard Times, a documentary portrait of St. Louis’ best-dressed harmonica player, Big George Brock.

“I was in Memphis working on a project for [Seagal]. He was bringing in all these guest artists, and that’s where I met Big George,” Blaylock says. It’s also where Blaylock and Roger Stolle, the blues and folk-art enthusiast behind Cat Head productions in Clarksdale, Mississippi, came up with the idea for creating a short promotional film about Brock’s life and career as a St. Louis tavern owner who’s played with artists like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed.

“We realized pretty quickly that we were going to have to do something bigger than a short,” Blaylock says.

Hard Times follows Brock from St. Louis to the Mississippi cotton fields where he was born and raised. Even if all the close-up shots of Brock’s giant, ring-laden hands picking cotton are ultimately exploitive, any one of them would make a great album cover.

“I guess [my film] could be seen as propaganda,” Blaylock says, explaining why he only interviewed Brock and nobody else. “My goal was to make it a detailed portrait of him and his world.”

The Clarksdale jook joint jam

While driving through Mississippi working as consultant for the Robert Johnson estate, musician and producer Gary Vincent had an epiphany. “All the juke joints are disappearing,” he says. “There are lots of reasons: hip-hop, drugs … .” Vincent realized that somebody needed to preserve the authentic spirit of the Mississippi roadhouse on film.

Hard Times

Initially, Vincent planned to make live recordings of the regional musicians who play Ground Zero Blues Club, actor Morgan Freeman’s fabulously funky blues club. “But I realized that if we produce a lot of unknowns, we won’t sell a lot of product,” Vincent says. That’s when he came up with the idea of The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam, a series of concerts shot at Ground Zero and featuring a slate of established recording artists playing alongside the bluesmen who influenced them.

“I don’t buy into the theory that real blues has to sound ratty,” Vincent says. “But you can make it too slick. Fortunately, you can’t make people like George Thorogood or Delaney Bramlett sound too slick.”

The first installment of The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam preserves the authentic spirit of Delta juke joints by paring Delaware destroyer George Thorogood, whose inescapable hit “Bad to the Bone” has been featured in countless films and TV commercials, with Muddy Waters’ and Howlin’ Wolf’s saxman Eddie Shaw. The concert doc opens with Thorogood telling a whopper about how he gave Shaw and the Wolf their start in show business. Cute.

Being William Faulkner

Even director Jimbo Barnett isn’t quite sure what to make of his film Oh Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?

“It’s always a tough sell putting a stage play on film,” Barnett says, “and I guess that’s why we tried so hard to disguise it as much like a movie as we could.”

Barnett has little need to worry, though his “disguise” — glamour shots of Maxwell walking through Oxford, Mississippi — is about as effective as putting a pair of sunglasses on an elephant.

Oh Mr. Faulkner is unmistakably a cinematic document of a live event, in the spirit of Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia. As Maxwell (playing Faulkner) holds forth on such topics as race, politics, and the death of his brother, the film captures the dark humor and cantankerous nature of one of literature’s most difficult personalities. If anything, the artificial construct is refreshing. The famously pithy author springs vividly from the screen, holding viewers in his thrall from the first grumpy salutation.

“That’s all because of John Maxwell,” Barnett says. “He’s a true Mississippi treasure.”

Memphis Flyer: It can’t be easy living in such close quarters with William Faulkner for 27 years.

John Maxwell: Well, I only know a very small part of who Faulkner was, and I don’t claim to do a definitive portrait. When I walk out on stage, I hope Faulkner is there with me. But he’s not around if I’m not on stage. Right now, I’m living in a kind of dream bubble. I never thought that I could make a living as an actor in Mississippi. But I have.

What was the inspiration for creating the piece?

I came up with the idea for doing a one-man show about Faulkner when I was teaching community college in Jackson, Mississippi. His letters had just come out, and when I read them, I told my wife Sandy, “I don’t know if I can do this, but I think there’s material here for a play.”

What was the attraction?

I guess it’s like reading any of the classics. I was attracted to the author’s internal rhythms. It goes beyond the cerebral and touches the soul. I know some people get tangled up in Faulkner’s convoluted sentence structures, but I grew up on a cotton farm in Pickens, Mississippi, and I know these rhythms. When I read these books, I have an emotional response — deep, archetypal kinds of feelings.

Does the passage of time change the play — either how you perform it or how audiences respond?

Well, my age affects it, certainly. I was 35 when I started doing it, and I’m 62 now. I used to have to age up, now I try to age down. And there are parts I play much differently than I did when I started. At some point, I realized I just needed to trust the material, settle in, and ride it to wherever it took me.

You’ve performed all over the world. Is any one audience better than the other?

I don’t like to generalize large groups of people, but Southern audiences are usually the best. They understand storytellers. They see the twinkle in Faulkner’s eye, and they get it. I feel no moral responsibility to tell the truth, but as a storyteller, I do have an ethical responsibility to entertain.

Memphis International Film Festival Schedule

Thursday, March 22, 2007

7:30 p.m. A Very Small Trilogy of Loneliness 7 min.

Short

Oh Mr. Faulkner, Do you Write? 83 min. Feature

Friday, March 23, 2007

2:30 p.m. International Masters – The Flower of Evil

– Claude Chabrol 104 min. Feature

2:30 p.m. Hello Again Everybody/Messenger

80 min. Documentary

4:30 p.m. The Silent/Beautiful Dreamer

116 min. Short/Feature

4:30 p.m. Soul of Justice/Building Bridges

75 min. Documentary

7:30 p.m. The Clarksdale Jook Joint Jam/Iron City Blues

97 min. Documentary

10 p.m. International Masters – All About My

Mother – Pedro Almodóvar 101 min. Feature

Midnight Cutting Edge Shorts: A.W.O.L., Broken,

Deface, The Grass Grows, A Perfect Day,

The Projectionist 95 min. Shorts

Midnight Music Videos: Gone,

The Squares-I’m Sorry You’re Perfect, Lost, She’s a Dog,

Slowly Surfacing, Twenty, Rock ‘N Tokyo

164 min. Music Videos

Saturday, March 24, 2007

10 a.m. Of Good Courage 61 min. Documentary

10 a.m. The Clinton 12 88 min. Documentary

Noon Hard Times/Living the Blues

109 min. Documentary

Noon Mojave Phone Booth 88 min. Feature

2:30 p.m. Comedy Shorts: Alive and Well,

And Now a Word From Our Sponsors,

Bye Bye Benjamin, The Frank Anderson, Karma Cafe,

Quincy & Althea 73 min. Shorts

2:30 p.m. An American Opera

92 min. Documentary

4:30 p.m. Animated Shorts: Barney the Terrier,

Everything Will Be Okay, Idea Development, Mirage,

Nasuh, Saul Goodman, The Waif of Persephone

76 min. Shorts

4:30 p.m. Forgiven 83 min. Feature

7 p.m. Isaac Hayes Tribute Feature

9:30 p.m. International Masters –

The Devil’s Backbone – Guillermo del Toro 106 min.

Feature

9:30 p.m. MIFF 8 awards party at

the Warehouse

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Noon Forfeit 83 min. Feature

Noon Stirring it Up/By the Side of the Road

142 min. Documentary

Noon International Masters – All About My Mother

– Pedro Almodóvar 101 min. Feature

2 p.m. Do Not Go Gently/Cadillac Man

93 min. Documentary

3 p.m. Cutting Edge Shorts: Grace, Broken,

Making Do, Pop Foul, Raw Footage, Rosario, Tell

Tale, Thomas in Bloom 108 min. Shorts

4:30 p.m. A Map for Saturday 90 min. Feature

5 p.m. Vanaja 111min. Documentary

7:30 p.m. International Masters –

Goodbye, Dragon Inn – Ming-liang Tsai – 82 min.

Feature

7:30 p.m. Last Flight Home 70 min. Documentary

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Stand-up to silver screen: Chris Rock’s baby steps

Stand-up comedians have a notoriously difficult time finding suitable vehicles for translating whatever it is that makes them successful on stage into quality movies. Chris Rock has just as poor a track record in film as any comic. It’s not for lack of talent: He’s his generation’s Richard Pryor, if anybody is. So why is it that the man Entertainment Weekly placed at the top of their “Funniest People in America” list in 2004 has never headlined a real box-office smash?

Rock probably need not look any further than his own filmography to lay the blame. But, to his credit, he’s taken matters into his own hands. He wrote and directed himself in the forgettable Head of State in 2003, and now he’s back again doing triple duty with I Think I Love My Wife.

Rock’s movie is based on, of all things, Eric Rohmer’s 1972 French art-house hit Chloe in the Afternoon. The remake has Rock as Richard Cooper, one of the few African Americans working for a mid-sized investment firm; he’s white collar, the others are service staff. Richard’s been married for years to Brenda (Gina Torres), and they have two young kids. Their home is filled with the detritus of everyday suburban parenthood: dinosaurs, dirty laundry, kids’ half-finished craft projects, home-improvement shows on the TV. The Coopers’ marriage is a sexless one; they talk about it at marriage counseling. In voiceover, Richard says it all: “I’m bored out of my fucking mind.”

Into this, an acquaintance from Richard’s single life resurfaces: Nikki (Kerry Washington), who’s beautiful and impertinent, confronting him with questions about his marriage. She ties up his seven-year-itch brain with her siren song just as she repulses him with obnoxious, damaged-girl games.

Rock’s performance is uneven. His narration lacks conviction, and the comedy often seems ripped from his stand-up routine rather than being an organic extension of his character. But he’s also convincing acting the square to Washington’s vamp tramp. (To achieve the look, Rock has his character wear glasses; it’s like his version of Robin Williams’ beard.)

Similarly, Rock hits and misses as a screenwriter. Richard’s moral uncertainty isn’t fully fleshed out — it’s Rohmer in the set-up but not in the details — and the film lacks narrative focus. But I Think I Love My Wife draws sharp observations of its characters, such as how the Coopers try to raise race-blind children by spelling rather than saying “white” and “black.” It’s also nice to see a movie where the worn-out “carpe diem” theme is trashed in favor of suggesting that life should be lived knowing it ain’t short at all.

For all its flaws, Rock’s newest is a big step in the right direction. That it can be termed a “disappointment” rather than just “bad” means there might still be hope for Chris Rock as a movie actor. He’s no Pauly Shore, after all.

I Think I Love My Wife

Opening Friday, March 16th

Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ministry of Fear

As dull as the Oscars are, I’ve been impressed with the annual bestowal of an utterly random award to some performer or film that had no business being nominated. Think of such inscrutable honors as Best Picture statues for Shakespeare in Love and Crash or a Best Actor award for Roberto Benigni. This year, the curveball Oscar hurtled past Guillermo Del Toro’s astonishing Gothic fable Pan’s Labyrinth and plunked the German-made The Lives of Others for Best Foreign Language Film. While it is a surprise choice, The Lives of Others is a worthy one.

The film is set in East Germany during the ominous Orwellian year 1984, when as many as one in 50 East Germans was some kind of informant for the country’s state security (Stasi) organization. Stasi’s alleged mission was “to know everything” — about everyone — and know it at any cost, even if that meant blacklisting dissidents, staging endless interrogations of innocent suspects, or arranging mysterious disappearances. Our window into this world is Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a master interrogator and part-time Stasi instructor with a fierce commitment to his job. Muhlke characterizes Wiesler as simultaneously firm and meek, officious and deferential; he’s like Gene Hackman’s wiretapper in The Conversation if he had grown up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall.

Alas, Wiesler is an idealist who sees his comrades embrace the sybaritism of unchecked power with too much smugness, so he is primed for a change in attitudes when he begins to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). As he listens to their conversations, Wiesler develops a voyeuristic kinship with Dreyman and Sieland — half out of concern and, it seems, half out of some kind of sexual jealousy. As Dreyman prepares an article exposing East German suicide statistics, Wiesler risks his career and his previous beliefs to protect them.

Although writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck eventually wrong-foots his narrative 90 minutes in, his film sustains a mood of everyday dread and paranoia, and he knows how to engineer effective, low-key suspense sequences. His chief stylistic signature is the repeated use of languorous pans that parallel the insidious invasion of Stasi surveillance into citizens’ lives. Sadly, his cast is more uneven than his camera. Aside from Gedeck’s dark, compelling performance, the conscientious dissidents in the film are dullards as bland as their home furnishings.

Von Donnersmarck is much more interested in the film’s villains anyway. With his average-guy looks, slightly ill-fitting suits, and slighter mustache, Wiesler’s school chum and superior Lieutenant Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) is a grinning, chilling corporate climber. But Grubitz’s smiling menace pales compared to the actions of his boss, Minister Hempf. As Hempf, Thomas Thieme is a man with extinguished eyes and the guttural mumble of those who never need to speak up. His corpulent, defeated gait gives the impression that his body’s business of breathing and walking is the responsibility of some absentee flunky, and he’s offended that he has to do it himself.

Even though he sets the film’s plot in motion, Hempf occupies relatively little screen time. Yet he hovers over the proceedings like an all-seeing security camera, and he survives the 1989 fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall to reappear near the film’s end. At a theatrical performance, Hempf chides and taunts an older, sadder Dreyman, softly informing the playwright that his place was bugged. As the film shows Dreyman’s own artistic reconciliation with his East German past, the minister’s face still lingers, nearly blotting out the final, reconciliatory freeze-frame. Some ghosts aren’t that easy to banish.

The Lives of Others

Opening Friday, March 16th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
News The Fly-By

Q&A: Neimus Williams, Lincoln in “Black Snake Moan”

Overton High School junior Neimus Williams was a lanky, basketball-loving 15-year-old when he went down to Beale Street to audition for Craig Brewer’s film Black Snake Moan.

“There were too many people to count and they all had resumes,” Williams says, admitting that the odds of being cast in a speaking role seemed awfully small. But Brewer was smitten with Williams’ reading and cast him in the pivotal role of Lincoln, the young man Christina Ricci’s Rae surprises in a big, big way. — by Chris Davis

Flyer: Three weeks passed between the time you auditioned and the time you were offered the role. Had you given up hope?

Neimus Williams: I never gave up hope. I was at home when they called because I’d fractured my wrist. I was going to sleep when the phone started ringing. I looked over and saw [the caller I.D.] said “Paramount Pictures,” and I lit up like a Christmas tree. When I answered the phone, the person asked if they could speak to a parent or guardian. I told them nobody was here and that’s when they said they wanted me to play the part. Then I really lit up like a Christmas tree.

Did your friends treat you different when they found out you were in a movie?

No. But some of them wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, “You ain’t in no movie.”

In your very first film, you’ve got a big scene with Samuel L. Jackson. That’s not bad work.

The first time I met Sam he scared me. We were shooting in Mississippi and I was with Craig going over lines when I looked over and saw him. I asked, “Is that Samuel L. Jackson over there?” and Craig said, “Yeah, go meet him.” So I said, “Hi, I’m Neimus,” and I guess I was looking away because [Sam] said, “Don’t look over there, look at me!” And he had this tone in his voice. It scared me.

Did Christina Ricci scare you?

I guess it was the fourth or fifth day when I first met Christina. We were shooting the scene where I go to Lazarus’ house with the basket. You know, where she jumps on me. And Craig had been teasing me all day, saying, “Oooh, Neimus, you’re going to be kissed a lot.” But she started out working at a young age, too, so it was really good working with her and seeing how she’d handled it.

Did you hang out with Justin Timberlake?

Yeah, we’d meet up between scenes or in the makeup trailer. That was the first time I’d ever met a superstar before. And there was this girl who didn’t think I was in a movie. Well, I called her and put Justin on the phone. There wasn’t anything else she could say.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Black Meme Watch

Even if you don’t like his films, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Brewer for knowing how to plant an image in the public consciousness. After the release of Hustle & Flow, it was impossible to turn on the television without hearing someone say, “It’s hard out here for a [fill in the blank].” With the opening of Black Snake Moan, watch for the emergence of a new catchphrase: “Chain [fill in the blank] to a radiator.”

It all began when the snarky entertainment and gossip Web site The Defamer suggested that Britney Spears would be back in rehab “just as soon as one of her concerned parents tranquilize her and schlep their daughter’s unconscious form back to Malibu, where she’ll be chained to a gold-plated radiator until she lasts at least two days in a treatment facility.” The Defamer followed that post up, noting that “[Kevin Federline] found the mother of his children undergoing the latest in rehabilitatory advancements, chained to a radiator in a Confederate flag cut-off.”

Trash-film guru John Waters jumped in on the action when he showed up at the independent-film Spirit Awards with a chain around his waist saying, “I wouldn’t mind if Samuel Jackson chained me to a radiator.” Finally, in a glowing review for New York magazine, critic David Edelstein asks all the Brewer-haters to search their hearts. “Wouldn’t you have chained Anna Nicole to your radiator if you could have saved her?” he writes. “Wouldn’t you chain Britney to your radiator?”

Spellcheck Moan

“Are you ready for The Sexorcist?” asks Boston Herald critic James Verniere at the top of his scathing Black Snake Moan review. Verniere says BSM is like the Erskine Caldwell novel “God’s Little Acre on Oxycontin and acid,” though his criticisms are somewhat diluted by the fact that he refers to Christina Ricci’s character Rae as Mae … five times. Somebody needs to chain that guy to a radiator.