As the hipster kleptomaniac at the center of Josh Safdie’s adorable debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Eleonore Hendricks steals a lot of things, but mainly the audiences’ hearts. The twentysomething actress, despite her newfound indie cinema fame, still works at the video store Cinema Nolita and binges on way too much Lukas Moodysson. After just wrapping Eric Juhola’s short film The Nowhere Kids (a fictional speculation on Gotham Award nominee and Slamdance winner Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa), Hendricks is getting ready to begin production on Safdie’s new project, Go Get Some Rosemary. In the meantime, I caught up with her to chat about Barbara Loden’s Wanda, her extra special week of moviegoing and why she gave up listening to WFMU. …Read more
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?”
“Narrative Jackass.” That’s the genre shorthand Micheal Tully has invented to describe Benny and Josh Safdie’s latest short film, There is Nothing You Can Do, and it’s pretty fitting.
The film was shot by Josh on a tiny prosumer video camera on a real-life, New York City bus crowded with both actors and unknowing actual riders. It stars Eleonore Hendricks from The Pleasure of Being Robbed as a young mother, and Benny Safdie as an irate businessman who complains that the noise coming Eleonore’s baby is distracting him from reading his newspaper. Various regular Safdie associates, including Ronald Bronstein, are planted around the bus, and when Benny starts harassing Eleonore, some of them rise to her defense.
The Safdies and crew pull off the street theater element so flawlessly that I’d love to see them turn this into a regular series––but not so regular that average New Yorkers start to recognize their troupe.
FILMMAKER Magazine is doing a sort of “where are they now?” with past with former honorees of their “25 New Faces of Independent Film” list (see this year’s installment here). This catch-up with Ronald Bronstein has some interesting bits of news about how the Frownland director/Butterknife star has been spending his time.
First, though Frownland is still without U.S. distribution, it has been added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. “I took this as a good indicator that it was time to stop pushing the forlorned thing, assume it’ll have some kind of life ahead of it, and move onto my next project with more active fervor,” Bronstein says. That project is currently in rehearsals, with plans to shoot this winter.
Meanwhile, Bronstein says he plans to continue his “semi-reluctant plunge into acting” with a lead role in the next feature by Josh and Bennie Safdie. To celebrate that bit of good news, I’ve embedded the Jerry Lewis-inspired Safdie short Jerry Ruis, Shall We Do This? above, which we gave an award to when I was on the short film jury at CineVegas last month.
Despite (or, perhaps, in reaction to) grumblings in France that too few of the home country’s filmmakers had found a slot on the schedule for the Cannes Film Festival, the just-announced Directors’ Fortnight sidebar is overwhelmingly made up of French co-productions. Oh, and the closing Fortnight film? Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed.
Baby Mama will compete at the box office this weekend from its comic polar opposite, Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. As keeping a notebook puts it, it’s like “a psychic microcosm of the democratic primary. Baby Mama is to Hillary as Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo is to Barack!”
Jimmy Fallon, having apparently abandoned his movie career after Factory Girl, will soon be announced as Conan O’Brien’s replacement as host of NBC’s 12:30 pm chat show.
In his round-up of the various stories on Matt Dentler leaving SXSW for Cinetic, David Hudson pays tribute to Dentler’s years at the festival. “As I’ve said here in the past, any history of American independent cinema in the 00s is going to have to include a passage on the impact of Matt’s smarts, instincts and sheer guts as a programmer.” David also links to Scott Kirsner, who has some reservations about the digital division of Cinetic that will becomes Dentler’s new home, at least in terms of its potential attractiveness to filmmakers.
Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind may have failed to make much of an impact at the box office, but as Liz Shannon Miller reports at NewTeeVee, it did touch off a serious wave of low-budget remake making on the web. Of the three “Sweded” mini-masterpieces she considers, by favorite is the above take on An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it, and join the fight to keep polar bears from taking our jobs. Related: this plus The Pleasure of Being Robbed makes two recent works to employ use of a fake polar bear. I just have to find one more fake polar bear in popular culture, and I can pitch a trend piece to the New York Times!
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?”
Despite (or, perhaps, in reaction to) 
While I gather my final thoughts on the 
