Danish director Kristian Levring is probably best known for his feature The King Is Alive, which was the fourth film put out under the Dogme 95 rules. His new movie Fear Me Not resides as the other end of that spectrum as a dark thriller that rests on the edge of becoming sinister at any moment. It’s a great commentary on modern day pharmaceuticals, and what they might or might not be doing to us.
Read on for our in-depth interview with Levring, in which he talks about pharmaceuticals, his favorite filmmakers, and the Dogme legacy.
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Jonathan Demme has had an extremely successful career ever since directing Caged Heat in 1974. He won the Oscar for Best Director in 1992 with Silence of the Lambs, and helped Tom Hanks act his way to a Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia. He’s also directed things as varied as a Saturday Night Live episode in 1980, the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, with a new Young movie on the way in next year’s Trunk Show.
Rachel Getting Married represents another big change for him, as the film was shot completely handheld, features a lot of improvised dialogue, and uses ambient music from musicians actually on the set. It’s about as close to a Dogma film as you can get these days. We sat down with Jonathan in Toronto, and read on to find out what inspirations he drew on for this film, why he wanted to cast director Paul Thomas Anderson as the male lead, and how he came to work with Anne Hathaway.
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This week we have two big-time offenders: Mike Myers’ The Love Guru, which has brought concern from Hindus, because the comedy seems to be making fun of the Hindu religion; and Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons, the “sequel” to The Da Vinci Code, adapted from Dan Brown’s bestseller. Earlier this week, the Vatican banned the latter production from all Catholic churches in Rome. The following statement from Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the diocese of Rome, was a favorite quote from the story: “Usually we read the script but in this case it wasn’t necessary. Just the name Dan Brown was enough.”
Of course, these days, religious organizations taking offense to a movie seems so commonplace that news like this is hardly even considered bad buzz. Neither The Love Guru nor Angels & Demons will be too aversely affected by the protests or boycotts. Both films will merely be added to the following list of major offenders (in alphabetical order so as not to offend anyone who thinks one is more offensive than another), as almost a genre cataloging than an inventory of condemned.
- Brokeback Mountain - Because of its promotion of “the homosexual lifestyle,” many right-wing Christian groups protested Ang Lee’s film. Most famously, it was pulled last-minute from a multiplex owned by Mormon businessman and Utah Jazz owner Larry H. Miller, though his motivation was not necessarily claimed to be religion-based. Despite there being hundreds of gay films throughout the years, because of its popularity, this one was the worst offender.
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