Here are some quick reviews of two SDFF films that I watched via screeners before touching down in Denver, and the one film I managed to see in town before succumbing to jet lag/altitude exhaustion. Oddly and entirely accidentally, all three films have something to do with aging males and their identity crises.

Karl Rove, I Love You

A self-mocking psuedo-documentary from the mind of Dan Butler (a journeyman supporting actor best known for a recurring role on Frasier), Karl Rove, I Love You has far less to do with the titualar “ultimate supporting actor” than with the personal fallout of engagement in our super-polarized political culture. What begins as a documentary on Butler as the archetypical “invisible” character actor (he’s consistently compared to Philip Seymour Hoffman, only “less famous”) morphs into a document of Butler’s mid-life crisis passion project, a one man show designed to expose the world to the “Real” Karl Rove. Butler begins the project wanting to hit the Bush administration where it hurts, but slowly comes to empathise with Rove, turns his show into a mildly-satiric love-letter, and alienates his single-minded friends and collaborators in the process.

Not always laugh-out loud funny, but well-paced and consistently engaging, Karl Rove, I Love You uses the natural conflict between (pervasively and unquestioningly liberal, and largely openly gay) Hollywood and (socially conservative but morally ambiguous) Red State actors to explore how angry obsession can offer the same kind of madness, identity salvation and pure pleasure as romantic passion. But more interestingly, it’s also about breaking down a black-and-white cipher and finding a whole person. It always feels more like a sitcom than a credible documentary (and the last twenty minutes really push the limits of disbelief), but it’s just creepy enough to work.

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I’m getting ready to fill out my first-ever application for Butt-Numb-a-Thon, Harry Knowles’ annual 24 hour, marathon film festival. My tastes do not always neatly dovetail with Knowles’, but for years, friends who have attended past BNATs have come back with rapturous reports. Another cause for excitement: this BNAT will be the first to take place at the new Alamo Ritz, which is replacing the old and much-beloved Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin.

Like a Telluride for genre geeks, the lineup is a total mystery before the festival begins, and lucky attendees must stay in their seats for the full 24 hours or risk missing something. About half the films are vintage and/or lost classics, the other half are (generally) Hollywood films that have yet to be released. Last year’s audience was privy to the premieres of Knocked Up, Black Snake Moan, Rocky Balboa, 300 and Dreamgirls, as well as screenings of The Informers, Inherit the Wind, and a “1976 X-rated animated” film called Once Upon A Girl, which caused my friend Jette Kernion to write, “Harry, I am sending you the bill for any psychotherapy I may need as a result of watching this thing.”

The application is rigorous: in addition to answering questions about Kurt Russell movies and “celebrity sexual fantasies” (presumably, they’re not one and the same), you’re instructed to upload “your favorite photo of you from a past Halloween Celebration or Costumed affair.” Out of thousands of applicants, Knowles hand-picks the couple of hundred eventual attendees. My chances of being deemed worthy of attendance are probably pretty slim, so cross your fingers for me, and if you want to apply, all the info is here.

[Via Matt Dentler]

I did it: I survived Peter Bogdanovich’s 4 hour and 15 minute Tom Petty documentary, Running Down A Dream. I cannot call myself a Tom Petty fan–In fact, I’d probably be more inherently receptive to a four hour documentary about Peter Bogdanovich–but there’s something about this film that fascinates me. I think maybe it’s that, in terms of the nature and total efficiency of the production, it actually achieves Bogdanovich’s apparent lifelong ambition to emulate Howard Hawks.

But more on that in a future episode of FilmCouch. Right now, here’s what you need to know: it feels shorter than four hours, it’s gonna be a wet dream for Tom Petty fans, it’s screening in 20+ cities on October 15 (you can find out where and buy tickets at TomPetty.com), the DVD will be available at Best Buy only the next day, and it premieres on the Sundance Channel October 29.

Bogdanovich did a press conference after the screening, and surprisingly, in forty minutes he lapsed into just one impersonation of a dead film icon. It makes sense that he’d want to make most of his time on stage at Lincoln Center to promote the movie–after all, this is his first appearance at the New York Film Festival in almost forty years. “This is the first time I’ve had a film in the New York Film Festival since 1971, when I had two films at the festival, The Last Picture Show and my first version of Directed By John Ford,” Bogdanovich said. “Which [together] totaled about four hours. So every 37 years, I get four hours at the New York Film Festival.”

The director is well aware that the film’s length lends it a bit of stigma–and he’s more than prepared to defend it. Listen to him do so here. We’ll have more Bogdanovich soundbites on next week’s podcast.

 

 Peter Bogdanovich at the New York Film Festival: Play Now | Download

The Chicago International Film Festival begins today, and we’re excited to announce that we’ll have coverage here on SpoutBlog courtesy of Adam Fendelman and the crew from HollywoodChicago.com. Check back tomorrow morning for a report from the opening night gala for Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner, and much more.

Day 3 of NYFF 2007 brought surprisingly strong late-career efforts from two esteemed filmmakers previously thought to be several decades past their prime. To my mind, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is a greater creative success than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, although I suppose there’s no doubt as to which film will manage the greater commercial success (it’s not even a contest, really–the Rohmer has no U.S. distributor). Lumet’s film is a proper comeback, the work of a filmmaker returning to familiar themes and, if not exactly reinventing them, then certainly doing his most solid and engaging work in some time. But the Rohmer picture feels like a true farewell, and as final films go, I can’t imagine a more poignant send off.

Céladon won quite a few hearts in Toronto, but it didn’t seem to go over so well here in New York. I know more than a few members of the press corps didn’t make it to the final frame, and after the screening, I heard a lot of “awful”s and “interminable”s. I’ll admit that it may not be Rohmer’s finest hour in terms of filmmaking craft; when Alison Willmore compares the film to a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s not entirely wrong. But I would argue that the plotting needs to be as deliberate as it is, and the overall technique as rudimentary, in order for the film to work as a romantic fable.

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photo by Karina Longworth

Last year at a New York Film Festival press conference following the premiere of Inland Empire, David Lynch announced that he would never again go back to shooting on film. Yesterday, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival press screening of his HD-shot feature, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, veteran filmmaker Sidney Lumet made an almost identical declaration, predicting that celluloid will be all but obsolete in five years. “I don’t think there’s one director who has ever liked film,” Lumet said. “It’s a pain in the ass, it’s cumbersome, and it’s rigid in its rules.”

Check out the audio clip below for Lumet’s elaboration on the rise of HD, why he thinks “naturalistic photography” is an oxy moron, and anecdotes on the how the drawbacks of celluloid stifled both Dog Day Afternoon and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (the female voice heard at the beginning and end of the clip is NYFF selection committee member/EW film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, who moderated yesterday’s conversation). We’ll have more coverage of Lumet’s excellent Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead later today.

 

 Sydney Lumet On Film vs. HD @ NYFF 2007: Play Now | Download

For the New York coterie of film critics, bloggers, and anyone else who can make a reasonable case for a press or industry pass, the first day of New York Film Festival press screenings every September is something akin to the first day of school. (That is, for people who really, really liked school.) But it’s also kind of like embarking on a four-week vacation right in the middle of the city. Screenings are held at Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side, a part of town that I personally rarely have occasion to visit, and once you’ve made your way through a maze of construction and up a hidden escalator to the Walter Reed Theater, it’s difficult to hold on to everyday concerns and not get completely wrapped up in the excitement of what is about to unfold.

NYFF press screenings are perhaps most appreciated for their leisurely schedule. Each day starts out with a fair amount of breakfasty schmoozing over the bagels, juice and coffee provided every morning by the press screening sponsor. There are generally just two screenings a day, five days a week, for four weeks. Most screenings are followed by a lengthy press conference; this year, the only American filmmaker whose work is in the fest who is conspicuously absent from the press conference schedule is Gus Van Sant. It’s the rare film festival that’s actually possible to cover in the nooks and crannies of a normal day job––although, having tried that last year, I have to say that I far prefer camping out at Lincoln Center for full days to sneaking in screenings here and there during lulls in the odd work day.

Because I’m still working on some Toronto odds and ends, I was only able put in a half day at yesterday’s NYFF 2007 opener, but I’ll be able to catch the afternoon film, Masayuki Suo’s I Just Didn’t Do It, when it re-screens later in the fest (if you can’t wait, Keith Uhlich has already reviewed it here). In the morning, I did catch Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. More on that after the jump.

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Big, classy, Oscar-bait World War II dramas don’t really get much better than Atonement, Joe Wright’s swooning adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel. If the last half hour or so seems to drag to a bit of an anti-climax, it’s only because the first forty minutes are so exhiliaratingly jam-packed with style, plot and character nuance, that the rest of the film is necessarily spent with both characters and viewers struggling to comprehend the full weight of what came before. Atonement swells to an early high and then glides down to earth, and it’s only at the deceptively low end that the film’s massive emotional arc becomes apparent.

It’s in this early section that Wright perfects an almost seamless method of time-shifting, in order to display events several times from the point of view of different players–a brilliant cinematic interpretation of an extremely novelistic device. The action begins on a languid summer day in 1935, on the impossibly grande English country estate of the Tallis family. Precocious, play-writing 13 year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) watches from an upstairs window as her older sister Cecelia (Keira Knightley) has an ambiguous, compromising altercation at an outdoor fountain with Robbie (James McAvoy), a servant’s son whose Cambridge education has been paid for by Cecelia and Briony’s father. Briony slams the window and we cut back in time, to Ceclia flouncing out of the mansion and onto the grounds, where she meets up with Robbie and strolls with him out to the fountain. The incident looks very different from the ground, and it soon becomes clear that Robbie and Cecilia are dancing around their mutual but unspoken love.

Over the course of the evening, Briony will witness three additional incidents, two directly involving Ceclia and Robbie and another open to interpretation, and she will drastically misinterpret all. Out of some mix of jealousy and younger-sister frustration, Briony carelessly manipulates these misunderstandings, until the sisters can only watch––Cecelia, without recourse; Briony, it seems, without guilt––as Robbie is removed from their lives for the foreseeable future.

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In this second-to-last installment of ReelerTV from Toronto, Stu sits down with the legendary Phil Donahue, who is in town promoting his first documentary effort, Body of War. The film tracks the recovery of Tomas Young, a young American soldier paralyzed from the waist down after serving just days in Iraq. And Karina takes a look at Operation Filmmaker, Nina Davenport’s portrait of a young Iraqi wannabe-filmmaker who takes advantage of liberal Hollywood guilt to get his foot in the proverbial door.