Covering the recently completed Tribeca Film Festival is like a marathon sprint, with screenings all day and pieces to crank out well into the night (if you’re doing it right).  Except for the final day of award winning screenings, very little of the festival was actually seen in the Tribeca neighborhood proper (the Triangle Below Canal Street).  However, since it was founded to revitalize Lower Manhattan in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attack, the festival has become one of the most important North American film fests, rivaling or perhaps even surpassing Sundance and Toronto.  Like any festival of its size, there were a lot of hidden gems and a fair amount of dross to sift through. 

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The screening of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The White Meadow should have been the media focus of the festival.  Though Rasoulof’s himself is no stranger to Iran’s dungeons, the film’s editor, Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker in his own right, is still being held incommunicado in Evin Prison.  Thanks to the tenacious efforts of BH’s own John Simpson, readers should be well versed in Panahi’s story by now.  While not exactly the Tribeca lead for most outlets, the critical reaction was quite positive and deservedly so.  

Given the prevalence of tears and suffering in the archetypal Meadows, it is hard not to read additional meaning into its story. Frankly though, Rasoulof wisely keeps the political allegory largely obscure.  Still, there seem to be clear parallels between the bad karma the islander characters are suffering and the sins of the Islamic Revolutionary government.  Totally absorbing despite its unhurried pace, Meadows is a testament to the filmmaking talents of director Rasoulof and editor Panahi.  Resisting lazy classifications, Meadows was a clear highlight of Tribeca.  (more…)

It is one of the most troubling theological questions imaginable: is God’s love so all-encompassing even a monster like Hitler can find forgiveness?  While theoretical to us, the issue takes on momentous urgency for two delusional homeless men who believe they are Adolph Hitler and Jesus Christ.  It is a primal confrontation between the will to power and the power of love in Hitler Meets Christ, Brendan Keown’s independent film treatment of Big Hollywood contributor Michael Moriarty’s screenplay adapted from his original stage play Hitler and Christ Meet Death at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, now available on DVD. 

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Relocated from New York, the delusional Hitler and Christ now encounter each other in the seedier environs of Vancouver.  The contrast between them is immediately striking.  The Christ figure is neatly dressed, and essentially rational in his discourse, aside from his obvious identity crisis.  By contrast, Hitler is slovenly, crude, and erratic.  While on one level it makes sense their outward appearance would reflect the relative peace of their souls, one would expect the exact opposite from most “indie” films.  It would be the martial Hitler who would be clean and presentable, whereas the Christ would be unkempt and widely emotional in his arguments.  Yet, Moriarty has more surprises in store for the viewer. 

In terms of plot, Meets is relatively simple.  The two men meet and engage in moral-metaphysical debate.  However, the implications of their sparring are truly far-reaching.  Can the Christ surrogate make the Hitler stand-in seek absolution and recognize the horrors of Hitler’s crimes for what they were?  Or will this self-loathing Hitler successfully force his gentle companion to hate him as well.  (more…)

Pity the poor American consumer.  Evidently, a little charm and a winning smile are enough to sell them anything.  They voted for Obama after all, although this film probably does not have that example in mind.  It is those nefarious guerrilla marketers fleecing unsophisticated suburbanites that are supposed to stir our moral indignation in Derrick Borte’s The Joneses, which opens today in New York. 

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Steve Jones is not really Steve Jones.  He is a former car salesman hired by a shadowy marketing company to pose as the father in a Potemkin model family pushing high-end consumer goods on their unsuspecting neighbors.  His lovely wife Kate is really their boss or the slightly sinister sounding “cell” leader.  All ridiculously good-looking, the Joneses (Demi Moore, David Duchovny, Pineapple Express’s Amber Heard, and a dude from a cancelled CW show) effortlessly bedazzle those dumb, hardworking rubes.  Before they know it, they are buying ugly track suits and sports cars they cannot afford because of the “ripple effects” generated by the Joneses’ extremely unsubtle product placement. 

Therein lays the greatest problem with The Joneses.  While it unequivocally reproaches the supposedly predatory capitalism practiced by the phony family, it simply drips with contempt their hapless targets.  This is personified with excruciating clarity by the Joneses’ Mertzes: Larry and Summer, the couple next door.  Though he supposedly owns his own business, he is a classic hen-pecked husband, nauseatingly ineffectual in every way.  Summer is an equally unsympathetic figure, obsessed with her motivational tapes and her Mary Kaye-like cosmetics sales program.  Sure, the Joneses wreck havoc on their lives, but it seems like the film can hardly blame them for taking advantage of such easy marks.  (more…)

Finally, global warming gets the kind of attention it deserves: public mockery.  Even West Village audiences have to laugh when nature attacks in James Nguyen’s grade-Z environmental “thriller,” though he seems to have produced it in painful earnest.  Forget “so bad it’s good,” Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror is so bad it defies mortal powers of description, yet it rolled into New York’s IFC Center for a pair of midnight screenings this past weekend with an idiosyncratic buzz to rival Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. 

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Usually, a desperate subtitle like “Shock and Terror” is a sure sign a film will have precious little of either.  Indeed, such is the case with Birdemic, though viewers should be warned, the first fifteen minutes could potentially induce car-sickness, as the film slowly cruises the streets of a small Northern California town, constantly parking and stopping for gas along the way.  Our protagonist tonight will be Rod, a former computer programmer turned software salesmen, which we know because Nguyen relentlessly re-establishes his back-story over and over again. 

While Birdemic takes its sweet time getting going, Rod puts the moves on Nathalie, a fashion model whose last shoot was at the one-hour photo mart (I’m not making this up).  About a third of the way into the film you will start to wonder if these beastly birds are ever going to show up.  When they do, they make George Reeves’s 1950’s Superman look like The Matrix.  If the cheesiness of the visual effects were not distracting enough, it sounds like Nguyen cut the mikes before the end of each scene, because there are weird audio drop-outs throughout the film.  To be fair though, it hardly matters.  (more…)

Through a strange confluence of business and aesthetic judgments, Magnolia Pictures acquired both the best and worst films of last year’s Tribeca Film Festival.  This is the week to accentuate the positive, because Conor McPherson’s haunting The Eclipse now returns to New York for its regular theatrical opening.  (The worst, a dreary, polemic Indie misnamed Wonderful World, has mercifully already come and gone.)  Despite its uncanny elements though, it would be a mistake to dismiss the film as a mere ghost story.  It is an emotionally complex work that should serve as an example to Hollywood how to integrate the supernatural into an adult character-driven drama. 

The village of Cobh in County Cork certainly looks like a picturesque seaport conducive to haunting.  It also hosts an annual literary festival where widower Michael Farr volunteers, even though he has long forsaken his literary ambitions.  At the current festival, he has been assigned to schlep two famous authors: the arrogant popular novelist Nicholas Holden and Lena Morelle, a sensitive writer of literary supernatural fiction. To Morelle’s eternal regret, she shared an ill-advised night of passion with the married Holden at previous conference and would now prefer to forget the entire matter.  Unfortunately, he is not so inclined. 

When not shuttling around his literary guests, Farr tends to his two children and visits Malachy McNeill, the dying father of his late wife.  Late one night, Farr wakens to spy a figure that might be his father-in-law stalking through the house.  Although he is still quite lucid and can be accounted for during the times in question, Farr continues to be haunted by something that resembles the irascible old man, in visitations of increasing intensity.  (more…)

Consider them the flowers of evil.  Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia are hybrid flowers crossbred to commemorate the North Korean dictators.  Evidently, personality cults have to get a little creative when they have already built imposing statuary in every public square.  Despite this flower fetish, the degree of social control exercised by the Communist state apparatus is reminiscent of 1984, but the ruling Kim dynasty added elements of random cruelty that arguably surpasses everything imagined in Orwell’s speculative novel.  Brave survivors of DPRK concentration camps give harrowing testimony of Kim Jong-il’s police state in N.C. Heiken’s remarkable documentary Kimjongilia, which opens today in New York City. 

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Kang Chol-hwan never learned what crime his grandfather supposedly committed, but he understood only too well what he was guilty of.  He was related to his grandfather.  Such is the nature of Kim Jong-il’s North Korea, where families of ostensive state enemies are purged to the third generation, as matter of course.  Even suicide is not an escape from the Communist North, because it is well understood all surviving relatives would be condemned to prison camps, which is tantamount to a death sentence in most cases. 

Though some might intellectually accept the closed nature of North Korean society and sneer at its inclusion in the “Axis of Evil,” the extent of Kim Jong-il’s oppression truly defies human comprehension.  Intellectual and artistic freedoms simply do not exist there.  It might sound like a sick joke, but concert pianist Kim Cheol-woong explains he had no choice but to cross the border into China once he had been overheard playing the work of Richard Clayderman, a French easy listening recording artist.  (more…)

Here in New York, the taxes are excessive, rent is exorbitant, and our elected leaders are national laughing stocks, but if you love going to the movies, it is one of the best places to live.  We are usually the first and sometimes only city to get most theatrical releases, particularly idiosyncratic documentaries and foreign films.  We also get a chance to see thousands of unsold films playing New York Film Festivals, often in hopes of attracting a distribution deal.  This is the beat I have covered for four years on my blog and will now periodically report on for Big Hollywood, provided I keep it fresh and snappy. 

Of course, festivals vary widely in terms of size and quality, but the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual Rendezvous with French Cinema is a fair place to start.  Every time an Eastern European festival opens, it is like an early Christmas for me, because there will always be several films deeply critical of their former Communist overlords.  Yet, it seems even the French are more even-handed than Hollywood when addressing the Cold War on film.  A case in point was Rendezvous’s opening selection, Christian Carion’s Farewell, which was inspired by the real life case of KGB Colonel Vladimir Vetrov (renamed Grigoriev in the film).  

The disillusioned Colonel was charged with reviewing every last piece of Soviet intel, so he understands full well the extent to which western intelligence agencies were compromised.  As a result, he approaches a bewildered French businessman unconnected to the espionage world to pass on his staggering cache of classified information.  (more…)

A film that won the NAACP’s Image Award for Outstanding Foreign Motion Picture and was the toast of the right-leaning blogosphere (including your very own Big Hollywood) would sound like it must have reached the broadest-based audience a film could hope for.  Yet, it was essentially shut-out during the rest of the recent award season and was sadly neglected by the critical community.  That is because Cyrus Nowrasteh’s The Stoning of Soraya M. boldly addresses a controversial topic: the appalling lack of rights granted to women in the Islamist world. 

The United Nations estimates as many as 5,000 Islamic women fall victim to so-called “honor killings” every year.  Whether reported or not, each instance is an appalling crime, utterly incompatible with any concept of honor.  It is the true nature of such honor killings Nowrasteh and his co-screenwriter (and wife) Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh graphically dramatize in the viscerally intense The Stoning of Soraya M., which richly deserves to be revisited now that it has been released on DVD. 

Freidoune Sahebjam was a French-Iranian journalist who exposed many of the Islamic Revolutionary regime’s human rights abuses.  When passing through a provincial town, a chance encounter with Zahra, a sophisticated older woman of the Shah’s secular era, leads to the biggest story of his career.  Just the day before, her niece Soraya was gruesomely executed for the crime of inconveniencing her husband.  As Sahebjam interviews Zahra, she bears witness to the terrible injustice that befell Soraya.  (more…)