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She
owns an IMDB
page stacked with credits that
many of her acting peers might take a lifetime to accumulate. But what
many folks don't realize is that no-budge MVP Amy Seimetz started out
with ambitions as a writer-director, which she takes to the limit in
her debut feature Sun
Don't Shine.
Seimetz says that someone told her "it's a surrealist movie posing as a
vérité movie," and from the jump, she's created
an immersive experience whose cinematography and sound design enrich a
minimal screenplay that pushes faces, character and passion to the
foreground, using a pulp-noir genre template as a structure for
something surprisingly visionary. At far too early an hour, Steve
Dollar sits with Seimetz to
talk about the film over coffee. Sun
Don't Shine
has its New York
premiere
this Saturday as part of Rooftop Films' SXSW Weekend program. Read
more >>
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Declaration of War, Tomboy, and more.
- What
We're Watching: Too Late Blues, Plot of Fear.
- Explore:
Retro Active - Piranha II: The Spawning; The Good, the Great and the
Grungy: Spotlight on Spaghetti Westerns.
- Contest:
Moonrise Kingdom Prize Pack Giveaway!
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"Irradiating
everything we know about tearjerkers, director Valerie Donzelli and
co-writer Jeremie Elkaim have turned the real-life challenge of their
infant son's cancer into a stylish, funny, postmodern romance," writes Joe
Williams of the Post Dispatch.
The French couple "wages war" against their son's illness with a
quirky,
life-affirming, never-maudlin panache. "As a filmmaker,
Donzelli deploys a heady, headlong style that recalls some early French
New Wave (lots of running across city streets, lots of exuberant music,
fast cuts, interior monologues and voice-over), but it never comes
across as precious, or predictable. Declaration of War feels
very present, very alive," adds Steven
Rea.
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Continuing
our look at gems from France comes this LGBT festival circuit award
winner from Water Lillies
director Celine Sciamma. A 10 year-old girl poses as "Mikael" when
others assume she is a boy when her family moves to a new suburban
neighborhood. Indiewire
calls this "a tender and warm tale of early sexual awakening, with an
amazing performance by Zoe Heran as the conflicted child." Slant's Diego
Costa adds, "Queer theorists
should be proud...Films like this...seem to know and accept the
inadequacy of complexity, or spectacle, of form and style when the task
at hand is expressing the unspeakability of the human condition." |
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Plot of Fear
is a pretty good title for such a twisted example of the giallo genre.
The "plot" starts out in a recognizable fashion, but eventually moves
into a series of flashbacks and twists, gets a little on the convoluted
side. The "fear" part comes at the thought of trying to describe the
"plot" part. Inspector Gaspare Lomenzo (Michele Placido), who has a
fashionable 1976 moustache, is assigned to solve a string of murders,
connected only by illustrations in a children's fairy tale book. Read more >>
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John
Cassavetes was a handsome,
severe actor in television and "B" movies when he raised a few dollars
to make the landmark independent movie Shadows
in 1959. After that, he juggled two sides of a career, in marketable
ventures ( The
Dirty Dozen,
Rosemary's
Baby,
The
Fury),
and in pure, artistic achievements ( Faces,
A
Woman Under the Influence,
Love Streams).
Sometimes these things crossed comfortably, as in his masterpiece The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie
-- set among the world of strip joints and contract murders -- or
uncomfortably, as in Gloria,
a script he wrote to sell, but ended up directing. Too
Late Blues actually wrestles
with the phenomenon itself: the struggle between staying true to your
art and making a living. The movie itself came about as a result of the
success of Shadows.
Read More >>
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RETRO
ACTIVE: James
Cameron
may be credited as the director of Piranha
II: The Spawning,
but given his own rocky participation in the project—his
Italian producers removed him from viewing or editing the footage he
shot, and thus he had little to do with its final form—it's
hard to slam the future "king of the world" for the legion of failures
that define this sub-B-movie. A sequel to
Joe Dante's smart and funny 1978
original (made with the
legendary Roger
Corman), Cameron's film is a
misshapen mess that, unlike its cheeky predecessor...
Read more >>
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Film Forum's curated three-week
examination of several classic
spaghetti westerns is a reasonable cross-section (the only
commonly cited staple that's missing is the 1970 comic hit They
Call Me Trinity)
of a genre still rarely closely examined except by dedicated cultists.
The digital projections of Django
and The Big Gundown
are among the better shown there so far, but many films are on 35mm, a
last-chance-to-see for New Yorkers. Vadim Rizov reviews some of the
highlights.
Read more >>
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One
more week to enter our Moonrise Kingdom prize pack giveaway!
Audiences
everywhere are buzzing over Moonrise Kingdom, the new movie directed by
two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Wes
Anderson. "Beguiling and endearing," (Joe Morgenstern), the
film is now playing in theaters. Read more >>
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Venus
in Transit
Podcasts!
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