REMINDER: Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo On The Cliff will be screening at the 65th Venice International Film Festival on August 31st (event listing). From all accounts so far of the film it seems Miyazaki explores new ground this time around with details so intricate and dense that anything less than seeing it on film on the big screen would be a crying shame. It even lead to a member of KineJapan wondering if even Blu-Ray would be able to represent its multitude of details and artistic touches. At the moment from everything I’m hearing, Summer 2009 would be the earliest Disney would release it in the US. Some additional images for Ponyo at the link below.

Synopsis:

This is the story of Ponyo, a little fish from the sea who struggles to realize her dream of living with a boy named Sosuke. It also tells of how five-year old Sosuke manages to keep a most solemn promise.

Ponyo On The Cliff places Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid in a contemporary Japanese setting. It is a tale of childhood love and adventure.

A little seaside town and a house at the top of a cliff. A small cast of characters. The ocean as a living presence. A world where magic and alchemy are accepted as part of the ordinary.

The sea below, like our subconscious mind, intersects with the wave-tossed surface above. By distorting normal space and contorting normal shapes, the sea is animated not as a backdrop to the story, but as one of its principal characters.

A little boy and a little girl, love and responsibility, the ocean and life - these things, and that which is most elemental to them, are depicted in the most basic way in Ponyo On The Cliff. This is my response to the afflictions and uncertainty of our times.

- Hayao Miyazaki

Cinemocracy In Action!  A while back I announced the upcoming Impact Film Festival at The Evening Class.  I’ve since received the festival’s official announcement of the confirmed panelists and moderators for its slate of films set to screen for lawmakers, candidates and delegates at the Democratic National Convention ("DNC").  Three U.S. Senators, eight U.S. Representatives, one Mayor, eight leading journalists/ commentators, as many party and issue activists along with luminaries Sheila Johnson, Kerry Kennedy, Davis Guggenheim and Grace Guggenheim, Hillary Rosen, James Hoffa and others are set to participate.  Panelists for the Republican National Convention ("RNC") will be released in a subsequent announcement.

“This Festival set out to have an impact on political discourse and we are honored to have so many lawmakers, journalists and activists joining our filmmakers and subjects to discuss the issues and priorities explored in our exceptional films,” said Jody Arlington, one of the Festival;s three co-founders.

Discussions will include the national debt, fair trade, Hurricane Katrina, stem-cell research, homelessness, and global water politics.  Films screening include Accidental Advocate, Battle in Seattle, The Black List, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, Flow, Freeheld, I.O.U.S.A., Kicking It, Robert Kennedy Remembered, Trouble the Water and 14 Women.

Continue Reading "IMPACT FILM FESTIVAL—Democratic National Convention Lineup"...

If in an alternate universe, Edgar Wright had a brother living in Iceland making his own Spaced feature on the fanboy culture, then Astrópía (Dorks & Damsels) is at that film and Gunnar B. Gudmundsson is that brother (no they are not really related). Astrópía is a rush of fantasy cinema that is drawn to parallel the current world of fanboys. It’s a refreshing and highly entertaining comedic spin through all things fanboy that is dare say the most charming film in theaters this year. You don’t have to know a single thing about it to enjoy it as Gudmundsson carefully layers the film whereby novices and more intimately familiar audiences can follow along. He also wonderfully realizes the real world of the characters and shows us in full detail their fantasy worlds. If ever there were a perfect film for Comic-Con audiences, this is it. Astrópía makes certain to poke fun at everything while also highlighting its thrills and excitement without ever seeming condescending. In any other hands this film certainly would have been plagued with too broad or simplistic takes showing how nerdy everyone is that reads comics, LARPs, watches cult videos and more. Gudmundsson and the Astrópía screenwriters have demystified this culture, which is a very diverse and passionate one and has now made walking into a comic book store feel cooler than a Reservoir Dogs movie opening. This indie low budget gem is by far one of my favorites for 2008.

I recently interviewed Gunnar B. Gudmundsson to go over Astrópía in more detail and learn about its making. Interview follows after the link bump. 

Continue Reading "NIFFF 2008 - Gunnar B. Gudmundsson Talks Astropia/Dorks & Damsels"...

A few years back at the 48th San Francisco International Film Festival the organizers shone a spotlight on a sextet of films representing an emergent wave of independent film coming out of Malaysia, a multi-cultural society where the development of digital video and the growing sophistication of a new, cine-literate generation had taken the international film festival circuit by storm.  For me, the showcase was a thrilling exposure to the social realities and divergent voices of Malaysia’s diverse ethnicities.  Included among that showcase was the world premiere of Woo Ming Jin’s Lampu merah mati (Monday Morning Glory, 2005).

Dispatching to indieWire from the 2007 Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dennis Lim reiterated that “[t]he growing diversity of Malaysian film reflects the irreducible complexity of Malaysian society, which is composed of not fully integrated Malay, Chinese, and Indian ethnic groups and where identity is intricately bound up with race, religion, class and stark differences between rural and urban experiences.” The world premiere of Woo Ming Jin’s sophomore feature The Elephant and the Sea proved to be the discovery of the Rotterdam International for Lim who praised the film’s “economical storytelling, evocative details, dry wit, and ample visual intelligence” and who concluded that—with any luck—the film would have a festival life in its future.

Luck prevailed.  The Elephant and the Sea went on to screen at roughly 30 film festivals, winning the “Best Director” and “Critics” Awards at last year’s Cine Digital Seoul Film Festival; the “Special Jury Award” at the Torino Film Festival, and another “Best Director” Award at Spain’s recently concluded DIBA Digital Barcelona Film Festival.

Continue Reading "REVIEW of THE ELEPHANT AND THE SEA"...

One of the interesting things about David Goodis’s career, Steve Seid mentioned by way of introduction to François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), is that—even though Goodis’s first connection to filmmaking occurred in 1947 with Dark Passage and The Unfaithful—attempts to adapt his work have continued to the present day; Seid recently met someone working with Goodis’s 1951 novel Cassidy’s Girl. Along the way, going all the way back to 1954-1955, the French have been particularly attracted to Goodis’s novels and—of the twelve existing feature adaptations—eight have their roots in French filmmaking.

The earliest was Pierre Chenals’ Section des disparus made in Argentina during the mid-50s, continuing on with Henri Verneuil’s Le Casse (The Burglars, 1971), René Clement’s La Course du Lièvre à Travers Les Champs (And Hope To Die, 1972), Jean-Jacques Beineix’s La Lune Dans Le Caniveau (Moon in the Gutter, 1983), and Francis Girod’s Descente Aux Enfers (Descent Into Hell, 1986). The French outdid the Americans, picking up and running with Goodis’s work, even though Goodis is a Philadelphian and his writing is set in specific American locales. François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player—the best known of the Goodis films ("and perhaps even the best")—is included among these French adaptations.

Seid credited Detroit author Mike White, who has written extensively on Goodis and who administers Cashiers du Cinemart, as “nearly a counselor” on the PFA series. White generously helped Seid locate certain of the films and agreed to introduce Shoot the Piano Player. His generosity, in fact, has extended to Twitch, to whom Mike has offered his written notes on the film. Thanks, Mike!

Continue Reading "STREETS OF NO RETURN: SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER—Introductory Remarks by Essayist Mike White"...

PFA curator Steve Seid reiterated that David Goodis—in the wake of the 1947 film adaptation of his novel Dark Passage—quickly secured a contract as a studio writer in Hollywood; but, had a rapid downfall and by 1950 moved back to Philadelphia. “The irony is that you can see in a single double-bill the entire output from his time in Los Angeles,” Seid quipped. Other filmic adaptations like Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall eventually lead Goodis’s work back to Hollywood; but, not the author himself.

Seid then introduced Dan Hodges, a San Franciscan author specializing in film noir, whose work will be included in the forthcoming 4th Edition of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. Hodges is also a key figure in the San Franciscan film noir salon The Danger & Despair Knitting Circle.

Continue Reading "STREETS OF NO RETURN: THE UNFAITHFUL—Introductory Remarks By Noir Historian Dan Hodges"...

Why are most mainstream film awards crap? I don’t know; don’t ask me.

The Festival Filem Malaysia (Malaysian film awards) continues to be a baffling, mind-boggling affair year after year. They once snubbed one of the most important Malaysian filmmakers, Yasmin Ahmad, with the excuse that her films continue to show nothing new or different. Like many other awards events, the decisions can sometimes be rather weird. For example, for this year’s awards, probably the worst film released this year, the laughable horror film Congkak, picked up four nominations, including, gulp, Best Director. That itself, is a horror story. It also got one for Best Sound, when the direction for the sound seemed to be to make everything as loud as possible.

But among the jury this year is independent filmmaker Amir Muhammad, whose mainstream film, Susuk, co-directed with Naeim Ghalili, picked up 8 nominations, including Best Cinematography (by Devan R.) and Best Score (by Hardesh Singh). Osman Ali’s crime drama, Anak Halal, leads the pack with 12 nominations. Mamat Khalid’s noir comedy horror, Kala Malam Bulan Mengambang, and Wayang by Hatta Azad Khan, are tied at second with 11 nominations each.

In the digital film category, there are no international-award winners this year. For example, Woo Ming Jin’s The Elephant And The Sea is conspicuously missing,and so is Liew Seng Tat’s Flower In The Pocket. Instead, we have the horrid TV movie Wirasiswi. A consolation here would be 22-year-old Mark Tan’s commendable debut, Jarum Halus.

The strangest of all? A Best Art Direction nomination for Johnny Bikin Filem, a film that was to have been released in March but has disappeared once again into oblivion.

Full list of nominations after the break:

Continue Reading "Festival Filem Malaysia: ANAK HALAL leads the noms"...

Kicking off the “Streets of No Return” series with a screening of Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), PFA curator Steve Seid outlined in his introductory remarks that hopefully—along with the series’ objective of spotlighting the work of a lesser-known pulp writer like David Goodis—would be an attempt to gain a sense (over the length of the series) of the concept of filmic adaptation of literary works; to finesse what’s left behind when novels are adapted, or what is included to make them screenworthy; and to determine if justice has been done to the writings of David Goodis.

Succinctly profiling that Goodis began writing in the late ‘30s, with a brief irreconcilable stint in Hollywood in the late ‘40s, Goodis parted ways with Hollywood to return to “a decrepit life” in his hometown Philadelphia until his death in the ‘60s.  Even while he was alive, however, non-Hollywood film directors began adapting his books and Seid boasted that all but three of those adaptations would be included in the series.

Continue Reading "Streets of No Return: DARK PASSAGE—Introductory Remarks By Steve Seid and Barry Gifford"...

Every year Germany’s Fantasy Filmfest roams the country with a large selection of the best genre pictures from around the globe, making stops in Berlin, Hamburg, Köln, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Nürnberg, Stuttgart and Munich.  The lineup is always impressive and this year is no exception, with the likes of Acolytes, Dance of the Dead, Eden Lake, Evangelion 1.0 and lots, lots more on the bill.  The complete lineup has just been announced and you can check it out now.

Jesus Franco is one of the most prolific filmmakers alive and one of the few that makes Miike look lazy by comparison, which is really saying something! At the 2008 NIFFF (Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival) in Switzerland I sat down with him and went over a wide variety of topics.

In this interview we talk about:
* On Projects Like Far Out That Pay Homage to Him
* Making Films Then Versus Now
* Favorites of the Films That He Made
- Venus in Furs from 1969 aka Black Angel
* He Really Likes Jerry Bruckheimer
* On Daniel White

Interview after the link bump.

Continue Reading "NIFFF 2008 - More with Jesus Franco"...

“It’s surprising that pulp writer David Goodis never named a novel Cul-de-Sac,” ponders Pacific Film Archives curator Steve Seid, “His stories conjure a dead end, littered with the wreckage of lonely losers and lowlifes. An ill fate befalls the typical Goodis fall guy, who often glimpses the high life, however fleetingly, but then through some irascible compulsion or sinister defect must stumble back to the seamy streets. Goodis’s own life follows the same pattern: at age thirty, he saw his novel Dark Passage adapted for the screen and parlayed that into a contract at Warner Bros., but his questionable proclivities made him an outcast even in Hollywood. Back in his hometown of Philadelphia, he churned out paperback originals while prowling the seedy saloons with unguarded desire. At age forty-nine, he was dead of cirrhosis. Though Goodis persisted in relative obscurity, his works falling in and out of print, filmmakers mined his shady novels for their criminal content. Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall and Paul Wendkos’s The Burglar were grim highlights of the American mid-fifties, while across the pond, cinema’s continental ops found his soiled vision most suitable for their noir knockoffs. Truffaut’s fanciful but faithful Shoot the Piano Player was the first in a lineup of a half-dozen suspects, all with a French accent. Goodis’s pulp is not about plot; it’s about the struggles of his beautiful losers to free themselves from sordid obsession and inbred failure. It’s also about Goodis’s smothering fixation with the fall—from grace, perhaps, or just from the curb to the gutter.”

Whereas Steve Seid’s curatorial involvement with the Gabriel Figueroa series might have been more administrative than creative, there’s no question that the PFA program “Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis” is Seid’s bawling baby, as he revealed when he spoke briefly with me about the upcoming series. For general information on Goodis, check out his IMdb and Wikpedia profiles. Kelly Vance gets on the horn with Elliot Lavine who helps her assess the PFA series for The East Bay Express.

Continue Reading "Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis—Interview With Curator Steve Seid"...

Introducing Emilio Fernández‘s Enamorada, PFA curator Steve Seid admitted that the film’s English translation “Woman In Love” isn’t entirely accurate.  Quoting Judy Bloch’s PFA capsule, Enamorada speaks more interestingly “about a man in love.” Enamorada—which translates more correctly as “Beloved”, in the sense of a man’s love for his beloved—expresses the love General José Juan Reyes (Pedro Armendáriz) feels for Beatriz Peñafiel (María Félix).  But then again, it’s not only his love for her as a woman but for the civilizing power of the Catholic faith that she represents.  “[W]hat captivates, even mesmerizes, is the film’s portrayal of revolution and religion as conjoined elements of the Mexican character,” Bloch writes.  “The general,” she adds, “confuses Beatriz with Jesus.”

Continue Reading "Hecho Por México: The Films of Gabriel Figueroa—Enamorada (1946)"...

“Figueroa skies.” The image conjures the big sky country of the Mexican desert, embraced in high contrast by billowing cumulus clouds enhanced by infrared filters, and limned by the persevering thorn of the impoverished agave and the heartfelt offerings of ubiquitous cala lilies. Beneath these immense skies, Mexicanidad toils the soil, tolls cathedral bells to call the common soul to mass, and tells fiery stories of evolving revolutions.

In his introduction to the PFA series celebrating the artistry of Gabriel Figueroa—Hecho Por México—curator Steve Seid writes: “Gabriel Figueroa was more than a cinematographer. A consummate artist, he captured with grandeur a sense of Mexico that would—as the poet Carlos Fuentes affectionately observed—bring us to ‘see Figueroa’s Mexico and not the one that really existed.’ Beginning in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, Figueroa’s rich chiaroscuro embodied Mexico’s entrenched contrasts—the monumental faces weathered like the arid land, the expressively lit cathedrals dark against turbulent skies, the timeless agave, stark and prickly. The painters Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco were Figueroa’s intimates, and their influence can be detected in what Siqueiros called ‘murals that travel.’ Figueroa was the man who made manifest Luis Buñuel’s sardonic surrealism by underscoring mundane but unexpected details. And he will forever be associated with director Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández, who said with remarkable swagger, ‘There only exists one Mexico: the one I invented’—but it was Figueroa’s highly dramatic feel for the land that engendered this invention. In the mid-thirties, Figueroa apprenticed to Hollywood cinematographer Gregg Toland, and was much admired by American directors such as John Ford and John Huston, who used his signature style to great effect. He cut a dashing figure across the film industry, but his social conscience always preceded him: Gabriel Figueroa’s aim was to give back to Mexican culture a dignified image of itself, and this he did, al lo grande.”

Though hosting duties during the San Francisco Silent Film Festival precluded my attending the opening doublebill of PFA’s Figueroa series—Let’s Go With Pancho Villa! (1935) and The Pearl (1943)—I’ve committed myself to the remainder of the selection. To prepare for the experience, I met up with Steve Seid for a few words on the series. 

Continue Reading "Hecho Por México: The Films of Gabriel Figueroa—Interview With Curator Steve Seid"...

As international film festivals go few are on the scale of Venice and the premiere Italian fest has just announced their complete lineup.  Notable titles in competition?  Darren ARonofsky’s The Wrestler, Takeshi Kitano’s Achilles and the Tortoise, Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff, Oshii’s Sky Crawlers, Barbet Schroeder’s Inju and Yu Lik-Wai’s Plastic City.  Outside of competition?  Plenty to love there as well:  the Coen’s Burn After Reading, Fabrice Du Welz’s Vinyan, the new Coffin Joe film and loads more.

Tomas Alfredson has crafted one of the most memorable films I’ve ever seen with his latest effort, Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). I recently had the chance to talk with him about his film. Magnet will be releasing the film to US theaters in late October and festival audiences can catch it at the upcoming Fantastic Fest in Austin and the Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia in Spain. The interview follows after the link bump.

In times with endless remakes and a general malaise in cinematic storytelling, it’s refreshing for a film like Let the Right One In to come along that weaves classical stories we are already familiar with, that offers up something new and fresh that we have never experienced before on the big screen. We have seen coming of age films dealing with isolation and bullying before. We have seen films that deal with vampires before. Alfredson and crew go beyond where previous films have gone to offer up this universal tale that take us the audience to new terrain and unimagined heights of classical cinematic storytelling. Like the best films it lets our imagination soar, our hearts connect to what is happening on screen, a relief from our daily grind and that rare moment of redemption and euphoria where we feel our lense of life is forever altered. The films redemptive powers not only work for the characters in the film, but for the audience that experiences it as well. There is no bigger joy in cinema for 2008 than Let the Right One In. With it paving the way and becoming a festival darling from Tribeca to NIFFF to Fantasia and more, the future of new cinema has never looked brighter.

Continue Reading "NIFFF 2008 - Let the Right One In Interview"...