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"After Mysterious Skin, which was so dark and serious and heavy, I was really looking to do something that was completely different," Gregg Araki tells David D'Arcy in a new interview on GreenCine. That's when he remembered "the funniest script that I ever read," Smiley Face. But the stoner comedy would rise or fall on the performance of an actress front and center of nearly every frame. And Araki found her in Anna Faris: "There are so many beautiful 20-something ingénues out there, but I think she has a comic gift. In terms of her abilities and the way she uses her face and her body, she's totally unique, like a Carole Lombard or a Lucille Ball." After a too-short theatrical run, Smiley Face is out on DVD today. Read article >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: 3:10 to Yuma, Golden Door and much more.
- What We're Watching: Last Legion, Real Dirt on Farmer John, and Picadilly.
- Explore: More Best of '07 Lists.
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"The rousing new Western 3:10 to Yuma has the sweep of an epic and the economy of a stopwatch," wrote critic Michael Sragow of this well-crafted remake. "Expands and improves in many ways on the fine original - there's actually a 2nd act here, for one," adds GreenCine's own Craig Phillips. " Russell Crowe's villain-hero Ben Wade is one of his more beautifully nuanced characters." See our interview with director James Mangold and co-star Peter Fonda. |
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Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door, "Called 'Nuovomondo' in its native Italy is, writes Michael Wilmington, "bittersweet, neither as comic and sentimental as Charlie Chaplin's 1917 great silent comedy "The Immigrant," nor as cynical and epic as Elia Kazan's 1963 "America, America," but close to both." Adds the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris, "so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears." Cinematography is by the great Agnes Godard. |
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This one may have disappeared from view rather quickly, but James Van Maanen thinks it got a raw deal: All hail the throwback new action film The Last Legion--or, if not all, at least those of us who fondly remember films like The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn, from an era before special effects had effectively drowned out pesky little things like plot and characterization. Remember when an exciting action scene could stimulate the eye, ear and mind without non-stop, let's-be-in-twenty-places-at-once editing, and a villain could command the screen without having to be an eight-legged monster, robot or shape-shifter supreme? For those interested in discovering what a movie might look like that adheres to those elderly verities yet... Read full review here >>
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New to DVD this week is this little gem of a documentary, an audience award winner at Slamdance, which will inspire you to go out and start your own local farm. "This is a loving, moving, inspiring, quirky documentary that was made while the lives it records were being lived," wrote Roger Ebert of Taggart Siegel's film about an outcast Midwestern farmer who transforms his world amidst a failing economy,vicious rumors, and violence. "Offers one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition," wrote Jeannette Catsoulis in the NY Times. "It's an unflinching account of what farming takes -- and, more important, what it gives back."
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This 1929 backstage drama was one of those half-silent, half-talkie hybrids that came out right at the dawn of the sound era, but is of particular note, writes Dylan de Thomas, after "seeing silent film star Anna Mae Wong's (Hollywood's first Asian-American star) introductory scene... I was stunned at her beauty and bracing modernity, making watching the rest of the over-the-top film a foregone conclusion." Look fast for Charles Laughton and a very young Ray Milland, too. |
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We finished off our Best of 2007 lists with GreenCine editor David Hudson's list of the year's best, followed in close succession by Dylan de Thomas' list of the best films he saw on DVD (and a couple he snuck out to see in theater). Both of them, and Craig Phillips, had Zodiac on their lists. Go here for all our Best Of lists, and keep reading GreenCine Daily for tips on the scores of other Best (and Worst) of 2007 lists that have come from the film blogosphere. |
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Brrrrr!
GC GCs! It's never too late to give to the ones you love |
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