This review was originally published during the 2008 Telluride Film Festival. Flame + Citron opens in New York tomorrow, and is already available on IFC In Theaters video on demand.
Flame & Citron, directed by former Dogme 95 auteur Ole Christian Madsen, walks a thin line between ass-kicking assassin movie and dense WWII period drama. The film recounts the true story of Bent and Jørgen, code names Flame and Citron, as they cruise around occupied Copenhagen offing Danish Nazis and German officers. In addition to action flick and period drama, the film also features a healthy dose of noir. The spare lighting and superb camera work showcase solid performances.
The film opens with several scenes of Bent and Jørgen carrying out their grim duty, knocking on doors, killing their mark, moving on, all overlaid with voice-over by Bent, which is both informative and moving. The plot steadily thickens, scene by scene, as more characters, each with their own motivations, begin to play a role. The ballooning cast of players is too much to keep track of in a first viewing, but this may well be the point. As the sabotage and double-crossing mounts, we’re forced to trust that Bent and Jørgen are doing the right thing, even if it’s confusing and ugly.
I was on vacation/self-imposed internet exile when David Hudson’s IFC blog, The Daily, ceased publishing at the end of last month, so I didn’t realise it had happened until nearly two weeks later. By that point, indieWIRE had stepped in to fill the void with cinemadaily, a five-day-a-week column that usually focuses on one blogospheric meme per day. It was something, but it wasn’t enough: I missed the quick-glance view of the entire day’s worth of news and chatter that Hudson used to offer, and I especially missed his summaries of the Arts sections of international weekend papers.
Today, Hudson is back with a new vehicle for his mad collation/curation skills. The Auteurs Daily will live on the cineaste site’s blog, the Notebook, with a twist: items that would have gone in the section that Hudson used to call Shorts will now be broadcast directly to Twitter. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been a dedicated Twitter disparager in the past,” Hudson writes, but he now belives the microblogging platform will be the perfect way to streamline his service whilst broadcasting it in a hyper-timely fashion. You can follow those tweets here. Welcome back, David!
The SXSW Film Festival is over. We didn’t make it to Austin this year, but we still had a festival experience in our very own home (Paul’s mom’s home, actually), thanks the IFC’s Festival Direct. While Joe Swanberg’s latest offering, Alexander the Last, was premeiring in Austin, we were watching it in a Michigan living room. We discuss how setting influences viewing, and the merits of the film.
We also discuss two other SXSW Festival Direct titles, Zift and Three Blind Mice.
Be sure to e-mail your most awkward movie watching moments involving sex scenes and your parents, to filmcouch [at] spout [dot] com.
Zift is one of five films to screen at SXSW this year which is being promoted as a simultaneous premiere at the festival and on Video on Demand via IFC (like all of its fellows in the series except for Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last, it comes to Austin and your living room after an extensive festival run; two of the films in the series, Paper Covers Rock and Medicine for Melancholy, screened at SXSW last year). We talked to Zift director Javor Gardev talked about meeting Americans in Argentina, offered the only fast and loose plot synopsis I’ve ever seen to invoke both Casablanca and Georges Bataille, and declared himself “the king of the blurb.” We can’t argue there. The Zift trailer, and his further answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, after the jump.
When Philippe Garrel’s most recent film premiered in competition at Cannes last year, it carried the French title La Frontière de l’aube; that was translated in English in the Cannes guide as Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. None of these titles give any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge. I named it as the best undistributed film of 2008; now, IFC is screening it theatrically in series at BAM in Brooklyn (starting tonight) and at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (Saturday, March 14), before it premieres on VOD.
A wife wins her unwitting freedom in the form of a camera before she finds herself behind the limits of her marriage. A husband refuses to look beyond himself, to see that the siren song no longer calls him. A marriage continues to spawn new lives, to add its frailty and its weight, its babies and its abuse into this world. Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is this brand of simple story, though a curious film. This is not to say the story is simply redundant or (heavens, no) boring, but, as you might guess, its curiosity refreshes the “period piece slash woman’s picture” frame that marketing (in a backwards-thinking move) will do its best to make appealing—thus subverting that the film’s evident wonder with light (and its negative) balloons its niggling tendencies into something advanced and graceful. Troell moulds what some may see as clichés away from strictures by—it’s simple, yes—observing the familiar and attending to how it forms, or how it can form, the new.
I think that people are looking at Che not as a film, but as a indie miniseries. It’s four hours long, in two parts, and is all in Spanish. They overlook the fact that it had a very successful screening run, despite it’s massive runtime, and look at it only as a VOD property, or as some sort of artistic folly.
And maybe it is a folly. A more awards friendly strategy would have been to put out only part one in 2008 and part two (if you produced it at all) in 2009. An arthouse Lord of the Rings.
…[But] the new art house is your house and the sooner the business realities of film reflect this, the better off we’ll all be.
Web video pioneer Kent Nichols, who with partner Douglas Sarine is currently writing/directing the remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, blogs a refrain that’s been floating around in somewhat less concrete form for awhile: that the Academy’s total snubbing of Che, particularly its failure to nominate Benicio Del Toro for Best Actor, is a sign of bias against (if not a deliberate effort to punish IFC and Soderbergh for) the film’s non-traditional, quick-to-VOD release strategy.
This is one of a number of pieces I read over the weekend which essentially make the point that audiences are moving in one direction, and the Academy is moving in another. The biggest evidence of this trend is the fact that a number of Oscar-nominated films recently pushed into platform release by their indie arm distributors have failed to see the expected post-nomination box office bump, whilst “snubbed” films like Revolutionary Road are doing kind of okay.
I think the phrase I used was “petit-point-on-Kleenex,” and a lot of it seemed to have that situation. But no, I think people know more about film now than they knew then. And I think critics really have a more accurate sense of how pictures are put together, and why certain things work the way they do. People know a little more about the business. There were so many great pictures in the ’70s; I think, gradually, people were looking at them in a serious way.
Didion was responding to a question from Hillis inregards to her circa 1973 essay “In Hollywood,” in which she also declared that there are only three “non-Industry people in New York whose version of Hollywood corresponds at any point with the reality of the place” –– all daughters of former moguls –– and includes “reviewers being courted by Industry people” amongst those “who do not understand the mise of the local scene” and are thus likely to try to flirt at a Hollywood dinner party.
In the IFC interview, Didion also praises The Reader, talks about the future of the Tuesday Weld-starring adaptation of Play it as it Lays, and refuses to lament the loss of old, seedy New York.
Historic news! David Hudson, the master of film blogging behind GreenCine Daily, is leaving that site to start a new blog for IFC. That blog, called The Daily, will launch January 1. Meanwhile, GreenCine Daily will be taken over by Aaron Hillis, freelance writer and co-founder of Benten Films.
Why is this a big deal? In the brief history of the film blogosphere, nobody has ever even tried to aggregate film news and commentary as thoroughly and elegantly as David Hudson. And maybe it’s holiday season fuzzy headed-ness on my part, but the idea that there will soon be two places for me to go for curated bloggy aggregation kind of blows my mind.
If you’ve read this blog with any regularity, you’ll know that, as a work of stand-alone cinema, I am notcrazy about Che. However, that doesn’t mean that I was anything but thrilled to hear that the Steven Soderbergh film sold out most of its weekend shows at the Ziegfeld in New York and the Landmark in Los Angeles. Here are five reasons why Che’s +$30k opening weekend per screen average is –– say it with me now –– Good For Cinema:
Fear(s) of the Dark opens in limited release on Wednesday, October 22, presented by IFC Films. The film, produced in France, features animated shorts by six talented graphic artists. It looks really good, and really scary. As any fan of Japanese anime will tell you, the American idea that animated content is only for children is not only false, but is in fact a tragic misconception stifling an entire art form.
Fear(s) is definitely something I want to see now, and it’s definitely something that would have scared the crap out of me as a kid. Which is why I find Guillermo del Toro’s pullquote on the film’s IFC page so funny: “Rusty alleyways and vaporous ghosts painted by the masters of dread. Razor-sharp images that will slice your eye and nest there forever. Thrilling, disturbing and haunting. Bring the kids!” Thanks Guillermo, now countless parents are going to have to let their kids sleep with the lights on at least until Christmas.
This review originally ran during the SXSW Film Festival. The Pleasure of Being Robbed opens in NY today and is available on IFC Video on Demand.
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson.
It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
Ever since word broke at Toronto that IFC had picked up Steven Soderbergh’s Che for US distribution, there have been conflicting rumors as to how the company, known for its day-and-date theatrical and VOD releases, would handle a film of this length, scope, and potential Oscar cachet. At yesterday’s NYFF press conference, Soderbergh talked a bit about the “roadshow” concept, through which the entire two-part film will first hit theaters.
He confirmed that in each market the film enters, it’ll screen for just one week, on one screen, with ticket buyers paying a premium (probably $25 each, including full-color printed program) for the experience. “I think that’s the ideal way to see it,” the director said, although he acknowledged that “it’s a lot to ask of an audience, to throw away an entire day.”
A source told me last night that IFC is banking that a lot of people are going to want to throw away their days on Che.
The other night, someone with knowledge of these things approached me at a party and said, “Have you heard that Magnolia’s bought Che? I’ve never heard a more premature rumor in my life.” Any suspicion in my mind that this party chat was mere misdirection has just been proved unfounded with IFC’s announcement that they’ve bought Steven Soderbergh’s epic for U.S. release.
In not specifying that IFC will release the two halves of the film separately, the press release implies that Che’s “two stand-alone parts” will be shown in theaters back-to-back. But this is the only specific language regarding their distribution plan:
Che will be released for one week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December. The company will then re-open the film in January through IFC In Theaters, its day-and-date distribution platform which makes independent films available to a national audience in theaters and on-demand, simultaneously. It will also be included in the company’s exclusive video rental deal with Blockbuster Video.
I’ve pasted the full release after the jump. More when we get it.
UPDATE: Anne Thompson clarifies the “one movie, or two?” issue: “IFC will open the full four-hour movie with an intermission for one-week Oscar-qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles before opening Che Part One (The Argentine) in 15 to 25 key markets in January; Part Two (The Guerilla) will follow the Oscar nominations announcement.”
“Sexuality is one of the great mysteries of humanity.” Or so declares famous, 50-something novelist Charles Saint-Denis, near the beginning of Claude Chabrol’s latest film, A Girl Cut in Two. A bit too much of an on-the-nose of a thesis statement for a film about various crimes of passion? It might have been, if not for the portentousness with which actor Francois Berleand delivers the line, and the distance at which Chabrol places the camera in order to shoot it. Even if Charles’ young, vivacious but sexually naive weather girl mistress Gabrielle (a just-barely grown-up Ludivine Sagnier) accepts each of her lovers words of supposed wisdom at face value, Chabrol doesn’t exactly give the impression that we should.
Gabrielle’s last name translates to “snow”, and the obvious joke seems to be that Charles seems to believe she’s pure as an un-mussed embankment until he starts driving her. But as Charles vacillates between the poles holding up his romantically mopey middle-age––Gabrielle, his work, and a long-standing wife who choses to deny rather than suffer over her “perfect man”’s indiscretions––his young love interest is also being courted by Paul Gaudens, a spoiled scion who won’t take her coy nos for an answer. Gabrielle bounces between the two, always with a wider eye for Charles who, paradoxically but inevitably, only wants her after he’s pushed her away.
The script is transposed from the story of Evelyn Nesbit, the early-20th century it girl whose teenage relationship with an older sexual mentor led to tragedy once she settled with someone more age-appropriate but far crazier. A cursory familiarity with how that real-life story turned out will spoil a few of Girl’s beats, but the constellation of plot points isn’t what’s important here. Though Girl does eventually build up to a murder, there’s no mystery concerning how or why––that crime happens out in the open, while the events that animate it are largely kept discreet. At 78, the living master of the French thriller is less interested in forensics than in the perplexities of violent acts a bit outside the jurisdiction of the French police––those that happen behind closed doors, inspired by the insanity of desire. The joke’s on Charles if he thinks that he, as one who strip-mines human behavior for a living, is closer to cracking the case than anyone else.
A click on the image above will take you to an exclusive clip from A Girl Cut in Two. The movie opens this Friday, August 15 in New York at the IFC Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and will also be available On Demand via IFC in Theaters. It’ll roll out to further cities in the coming weeks.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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