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After giving the film Eleven Minutes a favorable review in the Village Voice, Aaron Hillis also managed to talk to the film's subject, sharp-witted fashion designer Jay McCarroll. They covered what it's like to have his life exposed to the masses, misconceptions people have gleaned from his screen personality, and why he only retains the memories that have been recorded on camera. The interview podcast is now up on GreenCine Daily. Read more >> |
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In This Dispatch:
- What's New: Two terrific docs, and a lot more.
- What We're Watching: Whole Shootin' Match, Le Leon and Viva.
- Explore: Oscar decompression.
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Kurt Kuenne uses film to explore the murder of his oldest friend and the unbelievable legal and emotional madness that ensued. "I don't know how to review this film," wrote Erik Davis on Cinematical. "It's so personal, so emotional and so powerful that if I dedicate a paragraph to a few technical issues, it would completely take away from the fact that this was one of the best documentaries I have ever watched in my entire life." Adds Village Voice's Martin Tsai: "A true-crime story so gripping, devastating, and ultimately unforgettable that it easily trumps any thriller Hollywood has to offer this year." |
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The true-life story of the passionate three-decade relationship between British writer Christopher Isherwood and American portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior. " Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit," wrote David Edelstein in New York Magazine. Adds David Wiegand (SF Chronicle): "This is the portrait of a marriage as full and enviable as the greatest unions in literature. " |
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Roger Ebert wrote that this 1979 movie "had a decisive influence on American independent film." Adds the New York Times as it receives its first release on DVD: "Among the films in that first [Sundance] Film Festival was Eagle Pennell’s 16-millimeter, black-and-white feature, The Whole Shootin’ Match, a laconic comedy about a pair of lovable Texas losers who try and fail at a series of get-rich-quick schemes. Though the top prize went to the considerably more urbane Girlfriends it was Pennell’s film that had the greater influence in the long run. Seen today, it almost seems a template for the typical Sundance movie: a desolate, semirural setting; a serio-comic tone that drifts from anticlimax to anticlimax; characters who may be financially challenged but are rich in human emotions and cultural heritage." 2nd DVD features " The King of Texas," a documentary on the self-dramatizing, self-destructive Pennell. More here >>
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When you are suddenly confronted with some gorgeous, widescreen, black-and-white cinematography in a new movie -- as in Santiago Otheguy's La León -- do you experience, as I do, something like "the shock of the old"? This happens as you're simultaneously whisked back in time to those pre-color films of the 30s, 40s and 50s and are now suddenly re-experiencing them via all the current technology available to today's cinematographers. It can be a marvelous thing, even if, and this is unfortunately true to some extent of La León, you're watching an example of the "less is less" school of moviemaking... Read review >> |
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"It takes skill — a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft — to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art," wrote Owen Glieberman in Entertainment Weekly. " Viva, written and directed by its star, Anna Biller, could just about be the third featurette in Grindhouse. It's a lovingly re-created, almost fetishistically spot-on tribute to the candy-colored soft-core sexploitation films that sprouted up like weeds in the late '60s and early '70s." Adds Robert Abele: the film "pops with parodic joy--in the hoary double-entendres and presentational acting styles--and hotly lighted 35-millimeter cinematography that evokes lounge music album covers and Playboy ads." |
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Thanks again to everyone who dropped by our Oscar live blog on Sunday night! We really appreciated your contributions and hope you enjoyed our panelists as we trudged on through 4.5 hours of Oscar mayhem. If you missed any part of our chat you can replay it at your leisure here.
Meanwhile, as a sort of post-game wrap-up, Aaron Hillis has 10 Random Questions About the Oscars. |
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Black History Month
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