They can’t all be world premieres, you know. So quit your complaining and suck up the cream of the other festivals, lovingly curated for you by an underpaid festival staffer. Floating on the surface of the great cinematic morass are the new film from Steven Soderbergh (good news, it’s shorter than Che!) and Michael Caine adding some dodder to Death Wish. Among the documentaries, the wistful trembling of Michel Gondry’s family tree is matched only by the weirdness of the global baby market. Click on the titles for trailers where available.
A guy sitting behind the desk is not everybody’s idea of entertainment. Spalding Gray, however, wasn’t everybody. His monologues explored history, show business, and his complex personal history and ailments in a way that was as riveting as open-heart surgery. Collaborator Steven Soderbergh has drawn on 90 hours of footage to fashion the late performer’s neurotic autobiography.
Crying With Laughter
Cinema has never really gotten to grips with the lonely hell of the stand-up comic. Maybe spritzing for a living is just too much of a one man show. Director Justin Molotnikov’s Scottish take adds a helping of revenge to the patter. Joey (Stephen McCole) tells a funny tale onstage about an old school friend. Alas, the buddy is in the audience and he ain’t laughing. This is one heckler Joey is going to regret snapping back at.
If you’re hoping to see Sasha Grey do what she’s famous for, then you might be disappointed. If you’re looking for an arty take on the sex trade, complete with flashbacks, flashforwards, competing voiceovers, etc., this might take your fancy. Grey is easy on the eye, but couldn’t act her way out of a used condom. It’s directed by Steven Soderbergh, so the film reeks intelligence. That’s not necessarily the same as “entertaining.” The bottom line of this post-bailout film is it’s all about $$$.
Sam Mendes‘ follow-up to Revolutionary Road has been attracting plenty of notice because a) it won’t be as heavy going as Revolutionary Road and b) it’s written by husband and wife Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. The film is a road movie, with couple John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph trying to find some place to raise their first-born, and discovering a little bit of America on the way.
To celebrate the poster for Steven Soderbergh‘s The Girlfriend Experience, we originally intended to post a bunch of Soderbergh posters. Then somebody thought it might be a better idea to do movie posters featuring lips. A noble notion or an idea which revealed its half-assedry after about three films? The answer lies, of course, after the jump.
In the latest batch of trailers from the Tribeca Film Festival, Sam Rockwell asks “Can you hear me Major Tom,” South Korea makes light of debt collecting, the Danes make light of steroids, an off-site goes off-kilter, there’s a Turkish spin on A Christmas Tale, George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh produce a documentary on the child sex trade, and Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna still look pretty good together.
The second in our intermittent series of trailers from the Tribeca Film Festival. In the current load, a Colombian woman walks New York’s mean streets, Danes take a fistful of Prozac, Soderbergh takes on sex, Argentine women go outlaw, a babysitter takes a bad call, the British make fun of Americans (and themselves), Spencer Tracy argues for the monkeys, Eric Bana goes all J.G. Ballard on us, and there’s a lot of midget-on-Mr. Met violence.
Entre Nos (Gloria La Morte and Paola Mendoza, 2009)
An immigrant mother must look after her children in the big city when dad runs out on the family.
Many are nursing St. Patrick’s hangovers at the moment, so when better to take a sample of the Tribeca Film Festival line-up? All day today we’ll be posting trailers from the films featured in this year’s fest, which kicks off on April 22. To begin, we’ve got a timely documentary on Wall St., a documentary about a blind child, a spot-on Blaxsploitation parody, a very grimy trailer for William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band, a look at “business artist” Mark Kostabi, an investigation into anti-Semitism, an Oscar winner, and Kristin Scott Thomas grimacing through a Noel Coward adaptation.
American Casino (Leslie Cockburn, 2009)
The gamblers from Bear Stearns, Standard & Poor’s, and other future “I Love the 2000s” staples tell all.
Poor Tribeca International Film Festival. They release their slate to great fanfare and all they get are a bunch of people saying that the recession has made movie-going no fun and another handful of cineastes wondering how to fill up the last two weeks in April. So they’ve decided to toss out a few more feature-length bones to remind us that watching Uzbek animation and Ben Lyons being ushered to the front of the line can be a wonderful thing. If not quite as wonderful as ice cream. The new line-up includes films from Steven Soderbergh, Eric Bana, and Cheryl Hines; a star turn from John Hurt and a woman who has done oral; a biting British satire; and two trawls through the nether world of New York film-making. More after the jump! (more…)
Now that Slavoj Zizek is a movie star and Malcolm Gladwell can fill rock star venues, it’s probably just a lazy short-hand to contend that Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s celebrity is all but inconceivable now. He’s remembered in English-speaking territories for his films–raw spins on Italian life, Christianity, and the sacred and blasphemous pillars of Western literature. In Italy, however, Pasolini was a one-man culture industry. He established himself as a poet, novelist, journalist, intellectual, documentary maker, radical irritant and all-around literary celebrity. PPP burned too brightly to last until his 80s, but if he had, today would have been his birthday.
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