Liberation's Forge: A tense moment from STONEWALL UPRISING.

And so now we catch up on a couple of very good films that opened last week, but — because there’s only so much podcasting I can do before my ears start to bleed — had to wait a week to be covered. In the case of the film featured in this episode, STONEWALL UPRISING, the delay turns out not to be too bad: We’re still in the midst of  Pride Week, after all, so this documentary remains relevant.

This is from Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, whom we met earlier this year with the release of their black metal documentary WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON. There are fewer church burnings in STONEWALL, but that doesn’t mean the event depicted — a 1969, NYC riot sparked when the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn and the patrons decided they’d had their fill of harassment — didn’t stoke its own kind of fire, specifically the birth of the gay rights movement. Davis and Heilbroner rally some great, eyewitness interviews — including the vice cop who led the raid — and manage to put the story in context with considerable footage from news shows and “educational” films showing how, even in the mid- to late-sixties, attitudes towards homosexuality had barely advanced beyond the let’s-burn-’em-at-the-stake stage. If you paired this up with another great doc released last week — 8: THE MORMON PROPOSITION, about the Mormon church’s concerted efforts to have their institutionalized homophobia turned into law — you’d get a good view of how far gay rights have come, and how far they still need to go.

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STONEWALL UPRISING
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A Worthy Complement.

A Heightened Sense of Irony: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) comes to terms with a lethal personal generator and a rampaging ego in IRON MAN 2.

This time, Dan Persons, Lawrence French, and Steve Biodrowski take a can opener to IRON MAN 2, the successful sequel to the 2008 blockbuster, starring Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. Does it live up to the original? Do the special effects give more bang for the buck? Can Tony Stark’s ego grow any bigger? And what’s up with Ivan Vanko’s teeth?

Also on this week’s agenda: A brief discussion of the trailer for J.J. Abrams super-secret SUPER EIGHT, observations on audience anticipation for both the upcoming THOR feature and the next installment of the TWILIGHT franchise, plus all the new releases on home video and the usual roundup of the week’s most newsworthy items.

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Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) takes on mob boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong).

Cinefantastique’s Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction Podcast returns with a blow-by-blow knock-down debate regarding the merits (or lack thereof) in the new comic-book superhero fantasy KICK ASS, starring Aaron Johnson, Chloe Moretz, and Nicolas Cage. Does the film kick ass, or does it fall flatter than an empty cape? Also on the agenda, the usual round-up of news, recommendations, and home video releases.

Postponing the Blast: Zoe Kazan in THE EXPLODING GIRL

So actress Zoe Kazan slips into the room, gives director Bradley Rust Gray a hug, and lingers a minute to answer a couple of questions. Quite unanticipated, obviously. Very welcome, actually. And pretty much fitting for the film being discussed, THE EXPLODING GIRL, which itself has a low-key, idiosyncratic structure and a spare, spontaneous feel. With that spur-of-the-moment spirit at work in the production, is it any wonder that the film’s creators have carried the attitude to their interview sessions? What plays out on the screen doesn’t always translate to the street, but in this case, I’m glad it did.

We’re doubling up on the interviews in this episode. First is a conversation with director Peter Hanson about his new documentary, TALES FROM THE SCRIPT, in which a powerhouse collection of screenwriters — including Frank Darabont, Shane Black, and Paul Schrader — take viewers through the somewhat tortured, occasionally triumphant life cycle of those who labor away at the word processor for fame and glory (and occasional big bucks). That’ll be followed by my conversation with Brad Gray about THE EXPLODING GIRL, a small and quite satisfying story about a young woman (Zoe Kazan) facing the end of one relationship, even as she ponders the start of another.

Two very good films, two interesting discussions. What more could you ask for? Click on the player to hear the show.

TALES FROM THE SCRIPT

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THE EXPLODING GIRL

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THE EXPLODING GIRL @ oscilloscope.net

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The original master of spontaneous narrative.

More Than the Sum of Her Accomplishments: Avery Klein-Cloud in OFF AND RUNNING.

Before we get to the topic at hand, lemme tell you about another screening I went to a last week. Not going to tell you which film that was, because I walked out in the middle — yes, it was that good — but the focus of that film was on this family that was straight out of the Twilight Zone, totally unreal. Honestly, these guys would’ve given Donna Reed the hives — the only time you usually see people this loving, nourishing, and supportive on the screen is when they’re trying lure gullible strangers down to the torture chamber in their basement. But there were no thumbscrews or branding irons for these guys; you were supposed to take them at face value. Nobody in his/her right mind could do that.

That, of course, is a worse-case scenario, but film, documentaries included, have a tendency of viewing the family as if there was some sort of ideal that could be attained through hard work and lots ‘n’ lots of love. It’s only natural — we all want to see people pulling together to solve their problems. But anyone who makes the regular pilgrimage home for holidays knows better — the interchanges within any family are seldom tidy, and the problems that arise there are rarely prone to stock solutions.

Travis and Tovah, the two Jewish lesbians who are the heads of the house in the new documentary OFF AND RUNNING, eventually find that out when they decide to adopt an African-American baby. The baby girl, Avery, grows up to be a loving daughter, a good student and a top-notch athlete. She even manages to open up a line of communication with her birth mother. Initially, this is a good thing, then not so good when the woman stops responding to Travis’s letters. As filmmaker Nicole Opper shows, that sudden silence becomes the catalyst for a drama that explores a young woman’s quest for identity and a family’s struggle to deal with issues not covered in 101 Handy Tips for Raising Your Adopted Teenager.

Opper talked with me about what happens when one’s planned exploration of joyous, adoptive parenthood takes a sudden detour into unexplored territory, and what it’s like when your teen subjects are more and more accustomed to living the public life. Click on the player above to hear the interview.

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offandrunningthefilm.com

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More Athletic Dreams Deferred

]]> http://mightymoviepodcast.com/blog/2010/01/30/nicole-opper-on-off-and-running/feed/ 0 Activism,Controversy,Documentary,Drama,Emotion,Love,New York,Off Beat,Racism,Success Before we get to the topic at hand, lemme tell you about another screening I went to a last week. Not going to tell you which film that was, because I walked out in the middle -- yes, it was that good -- but the focus of that film was on this family ... Before we get to the topic at hand, lemme tell you about another screening I went to a last week. Not going to tell you which film that was, because I walked out in the middle -- yes, it was that good -- but the focus of that film was on this family that was straight out of the Twilight Zone, totally unreal. Honestly, these guys would've given Donna Reed the hives -- the only time you usually see people this loving, nourishing, and supportive on the screen is when they're trying lure gullible strangers down to the torture chamber in their basement. But there were no thumbscrews or branding irons for these guys; you were supposed to take them at face value. Nobody in his/her right mind could do that. That, of course, is a worse-case scenario, but film, documentaries included, have a tendency of viewing the family as if there was some sort of ideal that could be attained through hard work and lots 'n' lots of love. It's only natural -- we all want to see people pulling together to solve their problems. But anyone who makes the regular pilgrimage home for holidays knows better -- the interchanges within any family are seldom tidy, and the problems that arise there are rarely prone to stock solutions. Travis and Tovah, the two Jewish lesbians who are the heads of the house in the new documentary OFF AND RUNNING, eventually find that out when they decide to adopt an African-American baby. The baby girl, Avery, grows up to be a loving daughter, a good student and a top-notch athlete. She even manages to open up a line of communication with her birth mother. Initially, this is a good thing, then not so good when the woman stops responding to Travis's letters. As filmmaker Nicole Opper shows, that sudden silence becomes the catalyst for a drama that explores a young woman's quest for identity and a family's struggle to deal with issues not covered in 101 Handy Tips for Raising Your Adopted Teenager. Opper talked with me about what happens when one's planned exploration of joyous, adoptive parenthood takes a sudden detour into unexplored territory, and what it's like when your teen subjects are more and more accustomed to living the public life. Click on the player above to hear the interview. Trailer [youtube rIgzStLKbq0 nolink] offandrunningthefilm.com IMDB Listing Subscribe to MMP on iTunes Sign Up for E-Mail Updates [amazonify]B0007WFYBG[/amazonify] More Athletic Dreams Deferred Dan Persons no 19:46 http://mightymoviepodcast.com/blog/2009/11/23/tim-burton-at-moma/ http://mightymoviepodcast.com/blog/2009/11/23/tim-burton-at-moma/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:12:29 +0000 Dan Persons http://mightymoviepodcast.com/blog/?p=1363 So you go into this room at New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Tim Burton exhibit, and it’s like striking gold: the Jack Skellington figure is there, along with a choice selection of the replacement heads that were used to animate dialogue; there’s the creepy, completely covered baby Penguin wicker stroller from BATMAN RETURNS; you can see a MARS ATTACKS stop-motion figure and some test footage shot before Burton decided to go CG; plus the headless horseman figure and the EDWARD SCISSORHANDS outfit and ED WOOD’s angora sweater. Film geek heaven — and a must-have for MMP’s second video podcast.

I pull out my camcorder and power up, and am instantly intercepted by a MoMA PR person, who politely but firmly informs me that practically nothing in the room, save for Edward and Headless and a vitrine with some figures from THE CORPSE BRIDE, can be filmed.

“Including,” she points out, “the angora sweater.”

Okay, I can dig that, for whatever reasons legal or contextual, stuff may be off-limits (fortunately, no such prohibitions existed for the rest of the exhibit, and, as you’ll see in the video, it’s a big durn exhibit). But specifically throwing the barbed wire up around the angora sweater? Really? Is there some sort of legal constraint, or is this humble strip of fluff so iconic of… something… that dissemination of its presence here could completely blow the intent of the exhibit?

So sorry, all you PLAN 9 maniacs. You want to worship at the alter of the angora, you’re just going to have to make a pilgrimage to New York. Happily, once you’ve performed your obeisances, you’ll then have an opportunity to drink deeply of Tim Burton’s mad genius. There are tons of concept work here, drawn by Burton’s own hand, plus a stunning variety of original and heretofore unseen artwork, sculptures and installations created specifically for the exhibit, and a copy of the hard-to-see HANSEL AND GRETEL adaptation that Burton directed for Disney in 1982.

A lot of the film stuff — including concept designs for ALICE IN WONDERLAND and the aborted Burton version of SUPERMAN RETURNS — was not verboten, so you get a taste of it in this podcast, along with a good sampling of original art, some thoughts from the exhibit’s curators on the director’s life and work, and some footage of Burton’s very Tim Burtonesque appearance at the press presentation. Click on the player above to get a look.

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Burton & Sondheim: Together at Last

Michael Almereyda's PARADISE

Let’s forget about narrative for now, shall we? Let’s not focus on narrative, let’s live in the moment. And let’s consider a documentary focused on isolated pieces of time, how those pieces can be compiled into a portrait of life as it is lived around the world.

Michael Almereyda is no stranger to toying with film form. He set his version of HAMLET — starring Ethan Hawke — in the present day; in HAPPY HERE AND NOW he melded virtual reality with noir trappings; and he’s previously turned a documentary lens on such artists as Sam Shepard and William Eggleston. His latest documentary, the deceptively free-form PARADISE, was shot over some ten years using a consumer-grade camcorder, and spans the globe and a pretty wide swath of human experience. There are moments here of surreal beauty (a group of firefighters at night are captured in long-shot, their flashlights stabbing eerily through the smoke), some at once elegiac and curious (children at play during a family pig roast), and others just of pure joy (a rock band performs at an impromptu, free concert). The accumulative effect is strange and beautiful, yet rooted firmly in an accessible reality. No beginnings, no ends, no real story arc here, but still an affecting — dare I say, paradisiacal — experience.

I got to talk to Almereyda about the challenge of patching together a decades-worth of recorded impressions, and how they came together to form his own song of innocence and experience. Click on the player above to hear the interview.

In the documentary WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, director Ondi Timoner focuses on two of Harris’ most prominent and controversial ventures: Quiet: We Live in Public, an experiment in which 100 people were shut into a Soho, NY basement with all the comforts of home, plus 24/7 surveillance, mandatory uniforms, communal sleeping quarters, fascistic interrogators, and a fully-stocked armory (danger, Will Robinson!); and weliveinpublic.com, essentially the same concept, but located in his loft and turned on himself and his then-girlfriend (who, not all that surprisingly, pretty quickly became his then-not-girlfriend). That FEMA raids and Harris’ shredding sanity eventually play into the drama probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone.

Timoner is best known for the incredible rock doc, DIG!, which also focused on a artist too sold on the purity of his genius: Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Like that film, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC shows what happens when one follows a dangerous idea to its logical conclusion. Added here though, is an acknowledgment that Harris, however mad his dreams, well foresaw how that nightmare would become our everyday reality — in that way, the film serves both as a disturbing and mesmerizing drama, and a sobering warning.

Click on the player above to hear my interview with Timoner.

UPDATE: The New York run of the film has been extended through September 10th.

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www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com

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More Incendiary Genius

Don't Worry, It's Not the Brown Acid: Demetri Martin (center) and Paul Dano (right) take a trip under Ang Lee's supervision.

If I was to be completely honest about it, I’d have to say that my disappointment at not being able to attend Woodstock had less to do with the possibility of experiencing the performances of Joplin, Hendrix, The Who, et al, than with my fourteen-year-old, hyper-hormonal self missing the opportunity to see a real, live nekkid hippie chick in the flesh.

Ang Lee’s TAKING WOODSTOCK isn’t anywhere near as adolescently single-minded in its obsessions, but in a similar way, music isn’t really an issue for the film. The main character, Elliot Tiber — played by Demetri Martin and based on the real-life guy who was instrumental in bringing the fest to Max Yasgur’s farm — never gets a chance to witness the fest, despite several abortive attempts. Instead, Woodstock is both a front-and-center catalyst for the film’s drama and tangental influence for changes the characters, Elliot prime amongst them, will go through. Director Lee latches onto the almost universally familiar iconography — mostly as was conveyed by Michael Wadleigh in WOODSTOCK — to give us an alt-view of events from the perspective of the locals, exploring how that chaos percolated down to affect small yet profound (Ang Lee, remember?) changes in those observers.

It’s broad in its way — there’s a theater group that sheds its clothing at the slightest provocation, and Liev Schreiber turns up as an ex-marine-turned-quite-burly-transvestite (interestingly, comic actor Eugene Levy delivers a shrewd, nuanced performance as Max Yasgur) — but it’s in the service of a sweet and somewhat yearning examination of a period when people could dream of the world being better, and could imagine the steps that might be taken to make it so.

Click on the player above to hear my interview with Ang Lee.

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www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/taking_woodstock

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Here’s Where the Music Is

It’s a grand irony that you can live in New York, one of the greatest theater cities in the world, and not be able to swing the cost of tickets without taking out a second mortgage on your apartment. I’d heard the critics falling all over themselves in praise of Passing Strange — a hard-driving mix of rock concert and musical co-created by singer/songwriter Stew, his creative partner� Heidi Rodewald, and director Annie Dorsen that tracks the semi-autobiographical story of a young, African-American man as he grows as both artist and human — and was forced to say to myself, “Sounds pretty cool. Too bad I’ll never get to see it.”

Fortunately, Spike Lee was a long-time fan of the show, and more than willing to commit the final performances to film. The result manages to convey what everyone was raving about, with an intimacy rare to see in stage-to-film productions. Even better, it’s available at a price that those of us with more constrained means can handle. (That eight dollar box of Junior Mints, however, is another issue.)

I got a chance to sit down with both Spike and Stew and, in a more informal than usual conversation, we discussed Spike’s motivation for taking on the show, the occasional bumps that occur when heavily invested creators turn their project over to an equally inspired filmmaker, and whether the sound of voices lifted in song will be heard in future Spike Lee joints.

Click the player above to hear the interview.

Trailer

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Sorry, No Official Website
(This is 2009, Right?)

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Legendary Opening Titles

]]> http://mightymoviepodcast.com/blog/2009/08/19/spike-lee-stew-on-passing-strange-the-movie/feed/ 0 Art,Comedy,Concert,Drama,Emotion,Europe,Love,Music,Musical,New York,Off Beat,Rock It's got trenchant insights into art and identity, and you can dance to it. - It's a grand irony that you can live in New York, one of the greatest theater cities in the world, and not be able to swing the cost of tickets without taking out a second mo... It's got trenchant insights into art and identity, and you can dance to it. It's a grand irony that you can live in New York, one of the greatest theater cities in the world, and not be able to swing the cost of tickets without taking out a second mortgage on your apartment. I'd heard the critics falling all over themselves in praise of Passing Strange -- a hard-driving mix of rock concert and musical co-created by singer/songwriter Stew, his creative partner� Heidi Rodewald, and director Annie Dorsen that tracks the semi-autobiographical story of a young, African-American man as he grows as both artist and human -- and was forced to say to myself, "Sounds pretty cool. Too bad I'll never get to see it." Fortunately, Spike Lee was a long-time fan of the show, and more than willing to commit the final performances to film. The result manages to convey what everyone was raving about, with an intimacy rare to see in stage-to-film productions. Even better, it's available at a price that those of us with more constrained means can handle. (That eight dollar box of Junior Mints, however, is another issue.) I got a chance to sit down with both Spike and Stew and, in a more informal than usual conversation, we discussed Spike's motivation for taking on the show, the occasional bumps that occur when heavily invested creators turn their project over to an equally inspired filmmaker, and whether the sound of voices lifted in song will be heard in future Spike Lee joints. Click the player above to hear the interview. Trailer [youtube kNFbc7gLzQE nolink] Sorry, No Official Website (This is 2009, Right?) IMDB Listing Subscribe to MMP on iTunes Sign Up for E-Mail Updates [amazonify]B0024EWP6W[/amazonify] Legendary Opening Titles Dan Persons no