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Comedian
Bobcat
Goldthwait, whose career as a
filmmaker has yielded such dark and excoriating satirical fare as Shakes
the Clown
and World's
Greatest Dad,
has been making the festival rounds for months (now in wide release)
with his latest violent black comedy about a man and a teen on a
rampage, God Bless America.
Steve Dollar sat down with Goldthwait and costars Joel
Murray and Tara Lynne Barr at
SXSW '12 to chat about about their favorite reality TV shows, the death
of common decency and Diablo
Cody (don't ask, just see the
movie).
Read
more >>
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Michael, Kinyarwanda, We Were Here, and more.
- What
We're Watching: A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, Chronicle.
- Explore:
Film of the Week: I Wish, Retro Active: Vampire in Brooklyn.
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Steve
Dollar dubbed this film
"Queasiest New Austrian Film Not Made by
Michael Haneke or Ulrich Seidl," but
this low-key portrait of a pedophile and the 10-year-old boy he keeps
locked in his basement doesn't play for shock or feel-bad
sentimentality. Cinefamily's Hadrian
Belove champions Michael
as "the
most assured film debut of the year, and a flat out piece of pure
cinema." Director Markus Schleinzer creates an "incredibly private
universe, the secretive
world of his subject who does not share his life with anyone," and
"pull us into this world, hypnotically hooking us into the minutiae,
and emotional nuances, with a minimum of dialogue. He knows how to cut
away at just the right moment to pop your synapses and take your breath
away."
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Not
since Hotel
Rwanda has Roger
Ebert been educated about the
times before, after, and during the Rwandan Genocide, but Kinyarwanda,
based on the true and very personal stories of a man, a woman, and a
boy, shook him deeply. "Each vignette adds to the mosaic. Characters
from one turn up in another. Gradually a powerful outcome is arrived
at." Adds Lisa
Kennedy of the Denver Post, "The
film is not just a wrenching history lesson about how easily riven a
nation can become. It is also a moving tale about the struggle of
Rwandans to stitch their country back together." |
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"Director
David Weissman does everything you’re generally not supposed
to do in a documentary -- we get talking heads, old news footage, and
still photographs, and that’s about it -- but We
Were Here is never less than
riveting, thanks to the stories
themselves and the deep emotion with which they’re told,"
writes Alonso
Duralde. Told through a handful
of survivors, critics are almost unanimously banded behind the
eloquence
and power of this doc's story, chronicling the SF AIDs epidemic. Stephen
Holden adds, "As grim as some of
its images are, We Were Here
is above all a film about love: not romantic love but the kind that
really matters, in which people selflessly show up and keep on showing
up for one another in the worst of times." |
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A
couple caveats before we dive in here. Firstly, I am out of my depth
writing about the avant-garde, and bow to other qualified guides ( Michael
Sicinski, among others)
well-versed in this terrain. I’ll try to split the difference
between sounding like a pretentious wanker/a brain-dead rube writing
about this, but I’m in vaguely foreign territory here.
Secondly, Frampton’s films require the viewer to engage them
in a way that almost makes the viewer a co-creator in the
works. Read more >> |
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In a review aptly titled "LMFAO I Can Move S*it with My Mind: Teens
with Superpowers in Chronicle,"
Aaron
Hillis goes along for the ride
in this faux-found-footage flick brimming with teenage angst.
"Unlike typical hero-in-long-underwear-origin tales, there's a shrewd
naturalism to this outlandish fantasy that befits these emotionally
underdeveloped, horny, and otherwise average high schoolers." It's only
when "hostility bubbles over with superhuman hubris that the bromance
explodes in sinister, surprising, seamlessly CGI-enhanced ways."
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Vadim
Rizov reviews Hirokazu
Kore-eda's latest film, I
Wish,
which, like his last film to receive American distribution, 2008's Still
Walking,
uses trains as a functional metaphor. Japanese National Railways'
high-speed bullet trains serve a more optimistic function in I
Wish,
as well as providing some of its financing. Shane
Meadows made use of Eurostar's
funding for the delightful Somers
Town,
and Kore-eda is similarly adept in making sure he isn't compromised by
his financiers. Read
more >>
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Inspired
by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's fish-out-of-water vampire comedy Dark
Shadows, Nick Schager bites into this awfully conceived film made in
horror-comedy hell courtesy of Eddie
Murphy and Wes
Craven. The mid-90s-isms of this
wretched collaboration are plentiful—cue Salt-n-Pepa's
"Whatta Man" to underline Murphy's alpha-male sexiness? Read more >> |
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Supernatural
Teens
Podcasts!
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