WEEK OF FEBRUARY 8
PART 2

The Final Cut

A Lions GateLions Gate Films release (in U.S.) of a Lions Gate Entertainment, Cinerenta presentation of an Industry EntertainmentIndustry Entertainment, Cinetheta production. (International sales: Lions Gate, Hollywood.) Produced by Nick WechslerNick Wechsler. Executive producers, Nancy Paloian-BreznikarNancy Paloian-Breznikar, Marco Mehlitz, Michael Ohoven, Marc ButanMarc Butan, Michael BurnsMichael Burns, Michael PaseornekMichael Paseornek, Guymon CasadyGuymon Casady. Co-producers, Eberhard Kayser, William Vince. Directed, written by Omar Naim.

Alan Hakman - Robin Williams
Delila - Mira Sorvino
Fletcher - Jim Caviezel
Thelma - Mimi Kuzyk
Hasan - Thom Bishops
Michael - Brendan Fletcher
Simon - Vincent Gale
Alan, age 9 - Casey Dubois
Louis, age 9 - Liam Ranger

By LESLIE FELPERIN

Confirming, after "Paycheck""Paycheck" and "Cypher," that memory hocus-pocus is the new method of sci-fi time travel, "The Final Cut" reps a stodgy contribution to the subgenre. Making his featurefeature debut, helmer Omar NaimOmar Naim displays a pulpy B-movie sensibility but little skill with thesps. A shtick-free Robin WilliamsRobin Williams underplays so much he makes his morose loner in "One Hour Photo""One Hour Photo" look like Mork. Striking visuals help, but pic won't make the final cut with either genre fans, who've seen it all and better before, or the arthouse crowd, who will sneer at pic's cliches.
In an unspecified time in the future, a biological chip called a Zoe is implanted in an unborn fetus and records everything a person sees from birth until death, offering the ultimate, real-time home movie. Alan Hakman (Williams) is a "cutter," an editor of Zoe footage who splices together mini-films from the chip's footage for funerals.

The buttoned-down Hakman sees himself as a modern "sin eater," absolving the dead by sifting through their entire lives to create "best of" reels that leave in only their happy moments and delete their crimes and secrets.

Considered the best in the business, but also disdained by other cutters for taking on shady clients (such as a secret wife batterer), Hakman has a secret of his own: As a 9-year-old (played by Casey Dubois), he encouraged a boy named Louis (Liam Ranger) to walk on a dangerous plank above a well and Louis fell to his death. Cutting is his expiation of a sin he can never forget.

However, this guilt plus his obsession with his job has poisoned his private life, particularly his last relationship, with antique-book dealer Delilah (Mira SorvinoMira Sorvino). (It didn't help that he has a fetish for watching himself in a mirror while having sex.)

Hakman is commissioned to cut the Zoe footage of a man named Bannister, who was a bio-chip company execexec. While deep in the footage, Hakman spots a grown man who looks uncannily like Louis, the kid Hakman thought died years ago.

Hakman's investigation of the man who looks like Louis, however, is complicated by Fletcher (Jim CaviezelJim Caviezel), an ex-cutter and now an anti-Zoe activist, who wants Bannister's footage to expose the chipmakers' lack of ethics.

Helmer Naim seems out of his depth when it comes to handling such unpredictable talents as Williams and Sorvino. The two have no onscreen sexual chemistry and pitch their perfs in completely different keys. Playing his part completely straight, Williams offers a lot of grimacing to suggest repressed anxiety, with a bit of brow-furrowing to connote stress.

Sorvino has an even tougher time with an underwritten role that mostly requires her to be shrill. Badly inserted revelations about how Hakman met her suggest more nuanced perfs may have been lost on the cutting-room floor.

Meanwhile, the Zoe clips shown -- shot on 24p digital format by second-unit director Rob Turner, according to press notes -- sport especially wooden vocal delivery by the actors playing the people whose p.o.v. "records" the footage.

Packed with potentially good ideas that don't quite pay off, the script never quite fuses separate narrative threads -- love story, political intrigue or tale of redemption. Many of the best concepts have been seen before, from the voyeurism theme explored more pungently in Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" back in 1960, to the memory-recording gimmick that was first substantially explored in Kathryn BigelowKathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days."

As if worried the audaud won't get what's going on, aural flashbacks reverberate on the soundtrack at key moments, intoning key plot points in shopworn style. The effect is unintentionally comic. Perhaps humor was the aim, given Naim playfully names one cutter Hakman (invoking Gene HackmanGene Hackman's turn in "The Conversation") and another cutter Thelma, clearly a tribute to Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's regular editor.

Tak FujimotoTak Fujimoto's widescreen camerawork is a two-edged sword, adding a pro polish but also calling to mind his work with M. Night ShyamalanM. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense," "Signs""Signs"), of which "The Final Cut" also feels derivative.

Easily the most pleasing and original element of pic is its production design by James Chinlund, who crafts a nifty burnished wooden cutting console for Hakman that looks like a cross between a Steenbeck, a laptop and a Chippendale desk.

Camera (Deluxe color, Panavision widescreen, DV-to-35mm), Tak Fujimoto; editors, Dede Allen, Robert Brakey; music, Brian Tyler; production designer, James Chinlund; costumes, Monique Prudhomme; sound (Dolby, DTS), Patrick Ramsay; special effects, Gary Paller; assistant director, Craig Matheson; second-unit director, Rob Turner; casting, Lynne Carrow, Susan Brouse, Sheila JaffeSheila Jaffe, Georgianne Walken. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (competing), Feb. 10, 2004. Running time: 103 MIN.

Blinding shaft: Li lights the way
WIDE ANGLE | Saibal Chatterjee
February 11

Blind Shaft has been making waves for its gritty, unrelenting study of the process of dehumanization.

Chinese screenwriter-director-editor Li Yang had the option of watering down the theme of his first feature film, Mang Jing (Blind Shaft), to get past his country's hawk-eyed censors. He opted not to. As a result, one of the most powerful films to emerge from China in recent years is proscribed in the country of its production. "The reason is quite obvious. Blind Shaft does not project a positive picture," says the soft-spoken but gutsy actor-turned-filmmaker who has the makings of a worthy inheritor of the turf carved out by China's best-known auteurs, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.

Blind Shaft, a Chinese-German co-production, has been making waves around the world for its gritty, unrelenting study of the process of dehumanization seen within the amoral environs of a bleak, almost documentary-style coalmine setting. It won the Silver Bear at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival before going on to sweep all the major prizes at the Asian Film Festival in Deauville.

In November last year, it was screened in the 'New Asian Classics' section at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles. The applause it drew was unstinted. The 'New York Times' described Blind Shaft as "a true piece of film magic". Most recently, Li's film played in the main International Competition section of the 2004 Bangkok International Film Festival and its three central actors, two of them complete amateurs, jointly walked away with the Best Actor award.

How does Li Yang manage to travel around the globe with Blind Shaft despite the restrictions imposed on the film at home? "The post-production," he reveals, "was done in Australia, so the master negative is not in China." Yet, the ride hasn't always been smooth for the young filmmaker. "My film was selected for the 2003 International Film Festival of India. I had even dispatched a print to the organizers, but it was withdrawn at the last minute under international political pressure," alleges Li, who trained at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute and the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany, the country where he began his filmmaking career with a series of documentaries.

It is, of course, not difficult to see why Blind Shaft has fallen foul of the Chinese authorities. The bitterly satirical tone of the film is set early on by a nonchalant statement made by a character: "There is a shortage of everything but people in China." Building on that premise, Li crafts a riveting film that provides an unflinching look at the severe distortions that have crept into Chinese life and industry following the rapid growth of consumerism fuelled by the desperation to keep new capitalist edifices in place.

Blind Shaft examines evil and avarice through the tale of two coalminers, Song and Tang, who work in one of the numerous hazardous and unregulated mines in northern China. One frosty winter morning the two men kill Tang's brother in a pit and then cause a cave-in to make the incident look like a mishap. The owner buys their silence with a hefty payoff.

Emboldened by the easy success of that misdeed, Tang ensnares a 16-year-old boy and hatches another heinous plot to make a quick buck. This time around, his younger accomplice, Song, himself a father of a 16-year-old son, develops pangs of conscience. But Tang feels no such remorse. Cracks grow in the partnership as a consequence.

Li's storytelling style is almost clinical, shorn as it is of all extraneous embellishments. The severely constricted camera angles and sustained low-key lighting heightens the sense of claustrophobia that exists in this dank world of exploited and underpaid workers, often investing the film with the look of a black and white production. It's just the perfect ambience for the approach that Li adopts, peeling off layer after shocking layer from the truth that lies at the heart darkness. The innocence of a 16-year-old are played off against the well-meaning wiles of Song and the unwavering heartlessness of Tang, leading to a startling climax that provides as much a universal commentary on pecuniary greed and the duality human nature as an expose of a well-concealed industrial scam of enormous proportions.

The making of Blind Shaft was fraught with danger. Li Yang had to tap personal connections in the government and the coal mining industry to get the project off the ground. The conditions were hard as the heavy and incendiary lighting equipment were always a threat in the depths of the earth. Many of the technicians deserted the project midstream, but the actors slugged it out. Two days after Li shouted "Cut" for the final time, the mine that served as the film's principal location collapsed killing several miners in real life. In an eerie replay of the film script, the survivors were bribed not to report the accident to the government.

Despite the big struggle that the production and exhibition of Blind Shaft has proved to be, Li isn't through with controversial themes. "My next film," he announces, "will be about the Cultural Revolution. I am currently working on the script." Stay tuned -- the story of Li Yang has obviously only just begun.

Linklater's 'Sunset' a Treat at Berlin

By Scott Roxborough

Scott Roxborough writes for The Hollywood Reporter.
Berlin (THR) -- Berlin Film Festival goers got a welcome relief from the wet gray weather and the mostly underwhelming movies of offer in this year's Competition when Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset," screened Tuesday to an enthusiastic and grateful Berlin crowd of journalists and critics.

Linklater and the film's stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, received a standing ovation at the press conference following the screening, with international journalists welcoming the talent like old friends.

Linklater's last trip to Berlin was nine years ago when "Before Sunrise" won the Silver Bear. His new film, which picks up the "Before Sunrise" story and characters nine years on, will be trying to repeat or beat that feat at the 2004 event.

The director said despite the financial success of "Before Sunrise," which made its $2.5 million budget back several times over, it was a struggle to find funding for "Before Sunset." Castle Rock Entertainment eventually stepped in to back the low budget effort and Warner Bros. new indie label Warner Independent Pictures has acquired the film for U.S. release.

"There are not many sequels made to movies that make so little money [in total] as ours did, so we are proud of that," added star Ethan Hawke.

Linklater said he had been pondering making a "Before" sequel "almost from the day we wrapped shooting on the first film," but things only really fell into place after Hawke and Delpy agreed to do a cameo in Linklater's "Waking Life" in which they reprised their "Before Sunrise" roles.

"After that, we knew we had to make this film, to continue this story," the director said.

Berlin critics have commented on the tight formal structure of "Before Sunset," which unfolds in real time with no cutaways, flashbacks or other cinematic "tricks."

"It was much more difficult than it looks," Linklater said. "If there was a scene that didn't work, we couldn't cut it out like you can in most movies. We couldn't fix it in the editing room."

Julie Delpy, who co-wrote the script to "Before Sunset" with Linklater and Hawke, dispelled the illusion that the seemingly spontaneous dialogue in the film was the result of improvisation.

"There was no improvising at all but we worked very, very hard to make the delivery and the performances as natural as possible," the French actress explained.

Berlin's celebrity obsessed press, which has been disappointed by the lower star wattage of this year's Festival, couldn't help asking a few tabloid questions of star Ethan Hawke. But while declining to comment on his recent break-up with wife Uma Thurman, Hawke said he accepts the often unwanted attention that comes with Hollywood celebrity.

"I see the tabloid hassle as a sort of luxury tax for the good things that happen in my life, for the life I am allowed to leave [as a successful actor]," Hawke explained.

Linklater said the experience of making the sequel was so good, he was already pondering a third "Before" movie. One journalist at the press conference joked that if the next entry in a "Before" franchise takes another nine years to make, taking its characters into their mid-40s, it should be titled "Before Divorce."

A Film Festival With Weighty Themes
By ALAN RIDING

Published: February 10, 2004

BERLIN, Feb. 9 — Political movies may rank alongside biopics as worthy endeavors that rarely succeed at the box office, but at least they have a safe haven at the Berlin International Film Festival. Born of the politics of the cold war, the Berlinale, as it is known, continues to address serious political and social issues.

"As long as I am director, the Berlinale will always be in some way political because I am working in the tradition of the festival," Dieter Kosslick said on Thursday just before the 54th edition, which will end on Sunday. Of course it also needs star power, provided this year by American movies like "Cold Mountain" and "Something's Gotta Give," which used Berlin to start their European releases. But there are enough political movies in competition to secure the festival's identity.

One of this year's themes, Mr. Kosslick said, was South Africa, to note the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid. And he was helped by John Boorman's "Country of My Skull," which combined a weighty subject with Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson in leading roles. Sony Pictures Classics acquired North American rights to the film even before it was shown.

The film, based on a nonfiction book of that name by Antjie Krog, follows South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it tries to heal the wounds of apartheid by inviting perpetrators of racial violence to confess their crimes in front of their victims. The screen version then injects a love story between a white South African radio reporter, Anna Malan (Ms. Binoche), and a black Washington Post reporter, Langston Whitfield (Mr. Jackson).

The film centers on Anna as an Afrikaaner who faces the horrors done in the name of her race, Mr. Boorman ("Deliverance" and "Hope and Glory") told reporters. "Her relationship with Langston mirrors the larger situation in the commission and the country — people finding ways of coming together and finding love," he said.

The strongest scenes show the commission as it travels around South African villages to hear witnesses and confessions. But halfway through the movie the love story begins to swamp the political story in sentimentality, and in the end the movie disappointed most film critics here.

If one purpose of political movies is to raise moral issues, "Svjedoci" ("Witnesses") by the Croatian director Vinko Bresan proved more convincing. Based on Jurica Pavicic's novel "Alabaster Sheep," it is set in the early 1990's during Croatia's war with Serbia and opens with three Croatian soldiers on leave from the front who decide to blow up the home of a Serb still living in Croatia. Through incompetence, they end up shooting the man and kidnapping his small daughter.

What follows is more unexpected. Even as dead and wounded Croats are being brought back from the war front, a few people in the town, notably a police detective and a journalist, decide that the cold-blooded murder of a Serb civilian, even one said to be getting rich as a smuggler, is not acceptable. To scrutinize this question from all sides, Mr. Bresan breaks the linear narrative by returning to key moments and seeing them from the point of view of different characters.

While the moral dilemmas raised are universal, Mr. Bresan also sought to draw attention to crimes committed by Croatians. "In our society, our war crimes are not yet fully discussed or even defined," he said. "It is necessary to talk of a system of evil created within our own society. And it is something difficult to fight, even with laws. If the film's ending is optimistic, it is not our reality, but what we would like to wish for."

Less directly political but no less effective is Hans Petter Moland's "Beautiful Country," based on an idea by Terrence Malick, who is also one of its producers. The movie follows Binh (Damien Nguyen), a young Vietnamese fathered by a G.I. during the Vietnam War, as he leaves his village for Ho Chi Minh City and eventually heads for the United States to find his father.

Accompanied by his small half-brother, Binh arrives in a small boat in Malaysia where, in a refugee camp, he meets Ling (Ling Bai), a beautiful Chinese woman who also dreams of reaching America. They soon find themselves with scores of other migrants in the hold of a dilapidated ship run by a smuggler captain (Tim Roth). Binh's little brother dies on board, but Binh and Ling make it to New York, where Binh continues to search for his father (Nick Nolte).

What makes the movie so gripping is not only the fine acting by Mr. Nguyen and Ms. Bai but also the ordinariness of the experience of the migrants: on any day there may be thousands of similar refugees from Asia and Africa crossing the seas in such perilous rust buckets.

"We did not want to glorify anything," said Mr. Molland, a Norwegian director ("Aberdeen"). "The film is an odyssey and we tried to be true to the spirit of the voyage, which is not heroic."

The migration issue, so topical in Europe today, is also examined in two films to be shown later this week. Ken Loach's "Ae Fond Kiss" echoes the "Romeo and Juliet" theme as Casim, the son of Pakistani immigrants to Scotland, falls in love with a young Catholic woman. And "Gegen die Wand" ("Head-On"), by the Turkish-German director Faith Akin, dwells on Sibel, the daughter of Turkish immigrants to Germany, who is trying to escape her strict Muslim home.

Perhaps the surprise of the festival so far is "El Abrazo Partido" ("Lost Embrace") by the young Argentine director Daniel Burman. Made for under $1 million, it follows Ariel (Daniel Hendler), the grandson of Jews from Poland, as he tries to obtain a Polish passport to escape the narrow world of Jewish shopkeepers in the Barrio del Once in Buenos Aires. What holds him is the mystery of why his father left one day for Israel and never returned.

In its portrayal of the daily lives and loves of the struggling shopkeepers in a run-down mall, the movie provided the first humor of the festival's competition program, a humor that is both Jewish and Argentine.

The movie also explores the absent father-son relationship that consumes Ariel. "I think it is interesting to show that father-son relationships are fictitious," the director said. "They have to be built, compared to the mother-son relationship, which is a given. So the film is also about how someone goes about constructing the image of his father."

The Film Farmer Goes to Market in Berlin

Talbot keeps quiet about his personal Berlinale favorites.



On Saturday, Dan Talbot and his six colleagues on the Berlinale jury will present their picks for the film festival’s top awards. DW-WORLD spoke with the New York film distributor and movie theater owner.

Dan Talbot came to the movies by way of collecting stamps. As a young boy growing up in New York, he owned colorful editions from such far-away places as France, China and Zanzibar. “I think that was the beginning,” the 77-year-old says during a conversation with DW-WORLD in the Berlinale’s VIP lounge. “It ignited my imagination about the outside world.”

Talbot became a regular movie goer and re-enacted scenes on the street with his friends. Much later, he ended up running the New Yorker Theater. He also founded New Yorker Films and became a leading importer of foreign productions, bringing the work of German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder to an American audience, among others. Talbot now owns Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, one of the city’s premier venues for foreign and independent movies.

Power in his hands

For ten days, however, he has taken a break from his regular duties to join the jury at this year’s Berlinale. It’s a relatively novel role for Talbot, who says he only sat on one other jury at a film festival before.

“I love it, but it’s a lot of work,” Talbot says, adding that he’s watching at least three films a day. “Seeing a movie as a juror is very different from seeing it as a distributor. As a distributor I make professional judgements. Here, I have the responsibility of giving out awards. I don’t like to have power in my hands, but that’s what’s happening.”

Has he walked out of a screening so far? “I’m not going to answer that,” Talbot says and smiles. Despite his schedule as a jury member, Talbot still tries to catch a few other movies on the side. “I feel like a farmer going to market, looking for good stuff,” he says, wearing a “film farmer’s” all-black outfit with orange and purple festival badges as the only spots of color.

Bringing Lenin to New York

While searching for new stuff, Talbot has already lined up another movie for his theater. He’ll be showing German blockbuster “Good Bye, Lenin!,” a comedy about a young man who conceals the fall of the Berlin Wall from his ailing mother. The movie failed to gain an Oscar nomination for best foreign film this year, but Talbot still believes that it will find its American audience. “It’s a very German story, but I think it transcends its Germanness,” he says. “It’s a human story. So many people’s lives were affected by the Wall.”

Then time’s up. After two press interviews, Talbot gets ready to head back to the festival when he’s told that the next team of journalists is waiting with questions. “Another interview,” he asks, almost in disbelief. “I’m like a movie star!”

Busy Mann at the Berlinale; Also, A Look Back at the New Hollywood, and More

by Eugene Hernandez

Ron Mann takes a moment to chat about his Berlinale doc, "Go Further," and an upcoming project about mushrooms at the Telefilm Canada booth at the European Film Market. Photo by Eugene Hernandez.

Canadian Documentary filmmaker Ron Mann ("Twist," "Grass") is in Berlin with "Go Further," his documentary about actor and activist Woody Harrelson's tour along the West Coast of the United States to promote organic living. Mann, whose film is playing in the large Panorama section, is busy not only promoting his current doc, but also looking for films for a new distribution label he has launched back home. Finally, the filmmaker is laying the foundation for a new film project, about mushrooms.

Despite heavy interest from a leading U.S. specialty company, Mann has decided to go with Richard Abramowitz for the U.S. release of "Go Further." Abramowitz is currently releasing Neil Young's "Greendale" and Craig Highberger's "Superstar in a Housedress." "Go Further" will debut in Mann's native Canada via Mongrel Media with an Earth Day launch. The director told indieWIRE that Criterion has nabbed the DVD rights to the movie. read the whole article

Rotterdam '04: The planet's best film fest features The Missing —both this year and next
Eclectic Avenue
by Dennis Lim /Village Voice
February 11 - 17, 2004

ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS—How fitting that the big winner at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival was called The Missing—no, not the Ron Howard western, but a plaintive Taiwanese drama about the fear of sudden loss. This was an event unavoidably colored by the imminent departure of fest director Simon Field, a world-class movie buff who in his eight-year tenure elevated Rotterdam's trademark eclecticism to a veritable manifesto of open-mindedness. No other festival has been as attuned to cinema's secret histories and potential futures, as supportive of its evolution in the developing world, as eager to explore its cross-pollinations with fine art and new media.

Field's final installment did not disappoint. Beyond the omnivorous main program, Rotterdam '04 also showcased a holy grail of American independent film (the long-lost original Shadows; see J. Hoberman's report, February 4-10); accorded retros to Raul Ruiz and Ken Jacobs; and repeatedly roped current events into the frame. A nightclub was converted into a war-gaming arcade; a multimedia exhibit featured a 3-D tour through bin Laden's last-known residence. In the "Homefront USA" section, films ranged from the activist to the accidentally topical, suggesting a very different State of the Union from the one Bush had offered a few days earlier. (The methodology was sometimes no less suspect than the Bush administration's: The hicksploitation doc This Ain't No Heartland, for instance, purports to depict the "average" Midwesterner's response to the Iraq war but restricts its interview pool to drunken rednecks and flag-collecting shut-ins.)

September 11 and U.S. foreign policy were recurring themes. Kinji and Kenta Fukasaku's Battle Royale II posits a teens-vs.-adults showdown in the wake of a "Millennium Anti-Terrorism Law." Elmar Fischer's The Friend chronicles the fraying bond between a Berlin student and his Yemeni roommate, who goes from fresh-faced party boy to bearded radical and disappears shortly before the WTC attacks. The most confrontational September 11 references—trumping an idiotic Homefront USA short that scored the collapsing twin towers to the Beach Boys' "I Get Around"—could be found in Japanese video artist Tsuchiya Yutaka's DV feature about voyeur-cam obsession, Peep "TV" Show, in which someone appears to be masturbating to 9-11 footage, and the burning towers are dreamily termed a "beautiful sight." Crude and even willfully odious, it's also hard to dismiss. Amid the tasteless stunt provocation and alienated misfit poses are prickly, sophisticated ideas about the bulimic consumption of mass-mediated spectacle.

Still, there was no film denser with nutty, in-your-face philosophizing than Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell, a world premiere and an early hot ticket for obvious reasons: Adapted from Breillat's own book Pornocracy, it re-teamed her with porn stud Rocco Siffredi. As her 10th film (or rather, Xth film), this would be, the director promised, "the X of the X-rated film." Imagine Georges Bataille doing DVD commentary for a Zalman King movie: A straight woman (Amira Casar) hires a gay man (Siffredi) to "watch me where I'm unwatchable." The two talk sex theory and attempt the occasional demonstration, aided by a generous array of props: A stone dildo gets a workout. A used tampon is deployed as a tea bag. The man, in an experimental mood, seeks inspiration from a rack of gardening tools (a pun on " 'ho"?). Whether you buy Breillat's philosophy of desire and disgust, there's no denying the movie's heady rigor and conviction. The levels of disconnect add further interest: The point of view is the man's (a first for a Breillat film), but his narration is delivered by Breillat herself.

Another provocateur who owes his international reputation to Rotterdam, the prolific Takashi Miike delivered one of his sloppiest yet: Zebraman, a superhero spoof that resoundingly fails to live up to its excellent tagline, "Striping evil." More successfully goofball, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Doppelgänger, in which an A.I. researcher (Koji Yakusho) faces off against his double, mutates from supernatural thriller to black farce. Introducing the movie, Kurosawa claimed it would be "incredibly easy to understand," since, to avoid any confusing ambiguities, he'd simply split this protagonist in two. A misleading assertion, of course, since the pleasure of this fizzy, fittingly schizoid movie lies in not being able to tell the original and the supposed duplicate apart.

As always, there were encouraging finds among the unknown quantities. From Belgium, Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern's Aaltra is an improbably hilarious wheelchair road movie that traces a throughline from Tati to Kaurismäki to the Farrellys. (More flagrantly incorrect, the German Freakstars 3000 stages an American Idol-style contest for the mentally handicapped.) Observing a Dutch woman's post-mastectomy anguish, Martin Koolhoven's The South creeps from Dardenne-like realism to tabloidy, Fassbinderian tragedy. And in Buena Vida Delivery, Argentine director Leonardo Di Cesare extrapolates the universal dread of in-law invasion to a comic extreme.

But the fest's most lauded neophyte was The Missing director Lee Kang-sheng, best known as the reticent center of gravity in Tsai Ming-liang's movies. His film patiently monitors a woman's panic and despair in the hours after she loses her grandson at a park. A ghost story of sorts, The Missing is also an absorbing meditation on public space, and an eye-opening portrait of Taipei much the way Crimson Gold is one of Tehran. Lee's mentor Tsai, meanwhile, played a key role in the festival's most memorable moment. At Field's goodbye ceremony, fest co-director Sandra den Hamer (who will continue at the helm) unveiled a surprise gift: shorts for the occasion by some of Field's favorite filmmakers, including Jan Svankmajer and Abolfazl Jalili. Tsai's contribution, Moonlight Over the Water, was the most emotional and elemental: dusk, a riverbed, low tide, two stray dogs, and a tremulously haunting pop song. Magical in its simplicity, his gorgeous elegy perfectly captured the melancholy pall that hovered over Rotterdam '04.

4 Blighty producers eye Foresight funds
Prescience provides funding via Section 48 tax break

By ADAM DAWTREY

BERLIN -- Brit producers Jeremy Thomas, Andrew Eaton, Simon Channing-Williams and Richard Holmes have signed up with a new £10 million ($18 million) production fund being launched by Prescience Film Finance.
The Prescience fund, dubbed Foresight Film, uses the U.K.'s Section 48 film tax break, and is unaffected by the British government's shock move Tuesday to outlaw film funds that operate outside Section 48.

Foresight has first refusal to provide up to 25% of the budget for nine potential projects with a total budget of $72 million the four producers are hoping to set up in the 2004-05 tax year.

Projects include Michael Winterbottom's "Tristan Shandy," "A Star Called Henry" and Emma Thompson's "Fast Forward," all from Eaton and Winterbottom's Revolution Films; Terry Gilliam's "Tideland," Carine Adler's "Stray" and Brian Skeet's "Synchro" from Thomas; "White Bhaji" from Holmes; and "Cork" and "Brothers of the Head" from Channing-Williams.

Prescience is run by industry veterans Paul Brett and Tim Smith. Producer Stephen Woolley is on the advisory board, along with reps of the fund's tax adviser WJB Chiltern and its promoter Park Caledonia.

"The combination of highly commercial, quality productions, a very competitive overall structure and the tried and tested advantages of Section 48 make Foresight Film a very strong proposition for investors in what is probably the final opportunity to benefit from this form of tax relief," said Smith.

The banning of non-Section 48 funds has strengthened Foresight Film's position as it launches its fund-raising over the next couple of weeks.

"Our agreements with these leading independent British producers provide the (investors) with access to the cream of the U.K.'s production output for 2004/2005 and, coupled with the quality of the team behind Foresight Film, should significantly reduce investor risk and create the opportunity of genuine upside," Brett said.

Sundance Verite

By Pat Aufderheide, AlterNet
February 10, 2004

The Sundance Film Festival is part high school (did you get invited to the party?), part bazaar (check out high-fashion underwear, and drive the Tuareg!), and part dark-night-of-the-soul (freezing ankles while waiting for the bus).

Oh yeah, and then there's the movies.

The festival that started out to celebrate the creativity of independent film artists has become a never-failing source of irony – one of the world's most important film markets and, willy-nilly, the midwife of new Hollywood trends. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Documentaries – less glamorous, more socially relevant, sometimes overtly political – were always the quieter side of Sundance. Not anymore. This year, Sundance opened with a splashy and historically insightful surfing doc, Riding Giants by Stacy Peralta, whose last hit was Dogtown and Z-Boys. Other documentarians with far less flashy fare captured the interest of the cell-phone brigades sent out by distributors.

Among the dozens of documentaries shown at Sundance, here are my faves. Most will end up on television and some will show up before that at a theater near you.

Control Room

A great entry into the What They Really Think of Us genre for the High Imperial Era. Jehane Noujaim, a Lebanese-Syrian-American who earlier directed the critically acclaimed Startup.com, spent the three months of the U.S. invasion of Iraq at the headquarters of Al-Jazeera, the independent Arab TV news channel in Qatar. Watch Al-Jazeera's resident intellectual, Hassan Ibrahim, face down U.S. Marine journalist-wrangler Josh Rushing. Catch the translator calmly interpret President Bush's pronouncement and then wrinkle his nose with distaste. And listen to senior producer Sameer Khader explain why showing civilian casualties sounds like journalism to him. This is great cinema verité, and it's a must-see for journalists. What was the hard part? "It was hard to see people who went to Al-Jazeera for freedom of speech and who expected U.S. support to be so disappointed," said Noujaim. "And U.S. bombing of their offices was a terrible moment."

Let the Church Say Amen

Here's one to make you revisit your prefab opinions of evangelical Christians. David Peterson spent a year with the members of a tiny storefront church in one of the most blasted-out corners of downtown Washington, D.C. For these African-Americans, the church provides the only social life, counseling and economic safety net they have. It's not only a poignant tale of mutual support, it's a damning condemnation of a government and society (there's a pointed clip of Bush near the end) that leaves it to a storefront ministry to meet a life's worth of needs. Peterson brought several members of the church to Sundance. "Several have never been on an airplane," he said. "It's such a joy that their story is told here."

Super Size Me

Ever wonder what happens to people who eat at McDonald's all the time? Morgan Spurlock, a New Yorker in film production whose girlfriend is a vegan chef, decided to find out when he read about a lawsuit against McDonald's. The film goes with him across the country as he eats breakfast, lunch and dinner under the Golden Arches, and takes on the pounds and liver damage to prove it. Along the way he also takes on the entire fast-food industry, especially for its Pied Pipering of children. It's Michael Moore-ish without the diffuse hostility. This was one of the hotter tickets at Sundance; Spurlock won best doc director, and cable channel A&E laid claim to it after a theatrical run. It should be shown in schools everywhere.

Deadline

A great film for anyone working against the death penalty. Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson follow the path toward the decision of plain-speaking former Illinois Gov. George Ryan to commute the sentences of 167 death-row inmates. Along the way, we meet some wrongfully convicted men, freed not because of the legal system but because of journalism students' research at Northwestern University. Ryan showed up at the Sundance premiere, as did some of the wrongfully convicted. They reminded partygoers that they can support anti-death penalty work by going to deadlinethemovie.com and clicking "take action," and so can you.

Heir to an Execution

A far more personal take on the death penalty, and possibly the last word on the Rosenberg executions. Granddaughter Ivy Meeropol, with investment from HBO (where the film will end up), explores her grandparents' story. The issue is no longer guilt or innocence. Her family accepts that Julius conducted industrial espionage but did not commit the crime for which he was executed, and Ethel was innocent. She instead sets out to understand why Julius and Ethel accepted execution and the context of the terrible event. The star of the film is her father, the charismatic and loving Michael Meeropol, who can still recall the horrifying events of his early youth moment-by-moment.

Farmingville

Another cinema verité triumph, taking us inside an America all around us that we don't usually look at. Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini spent three years in a small working-class town in Long Island, where mostly illegal Mexicans have been congregating to take the jobs Americans won't do in Long Island's wealthier towns. They chronicle the rise of a mostly white, anti-immigrant movement that erupts into hate crimes and chart how local governments and organizations struggle to resolve the conflict. The film, funded by a special public TV fund to foster diversity, won a special jury prize, and will air on public TV's leading series for independent work, P.O.V. later this year. (So will another Sundance film funded by public TV's Independent Television Service, Chisholm '72 Unbought and Unbossed, an important slice of election history.)

International documentaries have usually taken a back seat at Sundance, but coprogrammer Diane Weyermann, a lawyer who used to head the human rights-oriented Soros Documentary Fund, is changing that. This year a clutch of remarkable films provided small but important windows into vast realities beyond our borders. My favorites included:

Disbelief

Who really set the bombs that blew up an entire Moscow apartment complex, and with it a young woman's mother and boyfriend? St.Petersburg-based filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov is pretty sure he's found the people who know the answer. They charge that President Putin's government has created horrific terrorist incidents and blamed them on Chechen nationalists, in order to create support for its unpopular leadership. The gripping film features the young woman and her sister, married to a Wisconsin man.

"We searched for a U.S. character because we wanted to win international attention for this issue," Nekrasov said. "Governments can too easily use terrorism as a weapon to intimidate their own publics. An undemocratic country is now a threat to the entire world."

Screaming Men

In a rare upbeat offering, Mika Ronkainen gives us an insider's look at an astonishing Finnish Screaming Men's Choir. Led by the fanatical Petri Serviö, who invented it, choir members dress like Agent Smith (of the Matrix) and strut to their places robotically, at which time they holler, chant and scream national anthems and folk songs in unison. They say it's very cathartic. It's also popular worldwide. It's true: Life is strange. Ronkainen told me he thinks it gets even stranger north of Helsinki.

Patricia Aufderheide, a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, was culture editor of In These Times from 1978 to 1982. Now a senior editor of the magazine, her most recent book is The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat.

Playing her age
By Rosalie Higson
February 11, 2004
THE blonde actor with the distinctive voice and sexy laugh has made her name in risky, character-driven, independent films built on budgets that would barely pay for a Hollywood star's facelift. And she's come into her own at 42 – an age that in Los Angeles would be considered box-office poison for a leading lady.

Patricia Clarkson's career may be unorthodox by Hollywood standards but wherever she goes, accolades follow. Her recent awards are almost too numerous to list – critics' circles love her, as do Sundance and Emmy juries.

Clarkson had four films in and out of competition at the 2003 Sundance film festival, and won the coveted Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance. She had a Golden Globe nomination for Pieces of April this year. And won a 2003 Emmy for her guest role in Six Feet Under. Lars von Trier invited her to work with him on Dogville, and she was Julianne Moore's best friend Eleanor in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. Now she has a 2004 Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her part as a mother dying of cancer in Peter Hedges's Pieces of April, another cinematic gem made for less than $300,000.

Clarkson is caught up in the publicity whirl for The Station Agent, which is in cinemas now. It has really touched people's hearts, she says, on the phone from New York. The unlikely plot follows the adventures of a dwarf trainspotter (Peter Dinklage) who moves to a small town to get away from people. There he encounters a talkative Cuban cook (Bobby Cannavale) and a lonely artist (Clarkson). Written and directed by first-timer Tom McCarthy, it took out best film at Sundance 2003 as well as the audience award, and has had a dream US box-office run.

"It's this crazy. Wherever I go, I'm mobbed like a rock star, and it's just this beautiful small film that Tom wrote for the three of us," Clarkson says. It's a good example of why she loves to work in the independent arena. A custom-made script, a passionate crew and a cast with tough theatre experience who bond rather than buckle under the tight schedules and budgets. "It took some time to get made but we finally got the money together and that was it. We made it for $500,000 and shot it in 20 days – and phew!" she says.

McCarthy says that before working with Clarkson he was intimidated by her talent, but she put him at ease before filming began with her warmth. As for Clarkson, she says: "I was sent this beautiful script and couldn't believe that he had gotten it so right."

Such roles are compensation for bad lunches, she says. "I've been offered such great parts, I can't say no. And even though I've worked with many first-time directors, my luck has been so good. I'm knocking wood as I say that but I get great impulses, great vibes from them and it goes forward from there. They're projects I want to be a part of."

Clarkson had a long career in off-Broadway productions and has made more than 40 film and television movies, mostly in fairly lacklustre productions. She began as Kevin Costner's wife in The Untouchables and Clint Eastwood's girl in The Dead Pool, then fell into a string of average movies until her 1998 role as the drug-addicted, ageing German actress Greta, in Lisa Cholodenko's High Art, which she credits with kick-starting her career again.

Now Clarkson is embracing her newfound celebrity. Being the youngest of five sisters growing up in New Orleans gave her an earthy, humorous take on life. In person she is the opposite of the downbeat characters she depicts so well on screen. With her southern charm and low, husky voice she is incredibly vibrant, punctuating her conversation with "Wows" and infectious, slightly wicked laughter.

Even working with the notoriously difficult and demanding director von Trier in Dogville was good for her. "Lars is very improvisational, very kind of wild, but I love that and I had a wonderful time working like that, and I also loved working with Nicole (Kidman). It was an extraordinary cast, but I really like that way Lars works so I had a very good experience with him. Wow."

She is doubly happy with her career, she says, now that she is 42 and in her prime and able to play her age with no frills: "Tom wrote The Station Agent part not for a 30-year-old woman, but a very much 40-year-old woman. Having been 30 and having been 40, there's a huge difference and he got it right. But it still can be interesting and sexy and funny and vibrant and he managed to do all of that. It's all those things – and I was between these two sexy guys and that was just fine by me."

Clarkson has just finished another movie – The Dying Gaul, Craig Lucas's offbeat story of a three-way relationship between a gay writer, a bisexual film producer and his wife – and looks forward to doing absolutely nothing for a few weeks until she takes to the stage as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire in New York in March.

As our allotted 15 minutes' conversation draws to a close we say our goodbyes and thank yous. But before we are disconnected the publicist asks, "Pattie, how are you?" and I overhear her reply, "Hoo Wee. What's next? Bring it on."

Pieces of April opens nationally on March 4.

Film Director Honored for Life's Work
Associated Press

BERLIN - Argentine director Fernando Solanas was recognized for his lifetime's work, receiving the Berlin International Film Festival's honorary Golden Bear award ahead of a screening of his new documentary.

Organizers cited Solanas' observations of Argentina and its political and social climate over more than three decades, starting with his documentary movie debut, "La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces)," in 1967.

Festival chief Dieter Kosslick described him as an "outstanding and courageous director."

Solanas' 1972 feature film, "Los Hijos de Fierro (Sons of Fierro)," was banned in Argentina, and in the mid-1970s, he went into exile in Paris. He returned to his homeland the following decade, going on to make "El Sur (The South)," which won the best director prize at Cannes in 1988.

Solanas, now 67, served as a member of the Argentine parliament from 1993 to 1997, when he returned to filmmaking.

The Berlin festival marked his lifetime achievement award Tuesday by screening his new documentary, "Memoria del saqueo (A Social Genocide)," which addresses Argentina's recent crises - tackling issues such as corruption and squandering of public money.

"My film aims at contributing to the urgent and indispensable discussion under way in my country, in Latin America, in the entire world, on the inhumanity of globalization," Solanas said in a statement. "At the same time it aspires to prove that another world is possible."

Cultivating New Talent at the '04 Berlinale

by Eugene Hernandez

The 2nd Berlinale Talent Campus, housed at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Photo by Eugene Hernandez.

More than 500 filmmakers from 84 countries, the majority are directors and writers, are gathering in Berlin at the second Talent Campus, a week long Berlinale event intended to cultivate new talent via special seminars, panels and networking opportunities.

Calling the Talent Campus "a week-long summer camp for filmmakers," attendee Elizabeth Lucas, a filmmaker from New York added, "There is unbelievable access to top people." The director, whose short "Isabella Rico," has screened on the festival circuit, is shopping a pair of scripts here in Berlin. She told indieWIRE that the Talent Campus has been valuable in helping her get the lay of the land as she sorts out strategies for her approach to people in the film industry. read the whole article here

Cuts Off the Heads, Loves the Elbows

American Fine Arts Co.
"Hair in the Gate," from John Water's current show at the New Museum.

By MIM UDOVITCH

Published: February 8, 2004


As a filmmaker, John Waters could always see both the trash in glamour and the glamour in trash. His earlier, underground movies, starring the plus-size drag queen Divine (who died in 1988), are as exuberant in their devotion to the outré as they were, and in some ways still are, shocking.

Starting with the commercial success of "Hairspray" (1988), now a Broadway musical, Mr. Waters's movies began to move from the margins to the mainstream, but his iconoclasm is very much in evidence in "John Waters: Change of Life," a retrospective of his photographs at the New Museum for Contemporary Art through April 15. Photographed straight off his television screen, these shots, rearranged and juxtaposed, wittily implode some aspect of the film, star or theme represented. ("Mental," for example, shows nine actresses at the most loopily over-the-top moments of their respective Big Nervous Breakdown scenes.) The show also includes some early, rarely seen films, as well as samples from Mr. Waters's vast collection of ephemera — publicity stills, books and other offbeat objects, like a toy electric chair.

In his art- and book-filled Greenwich Village apartment, Mr. Waters, 57, recently took a break from editing his next movie, about sex addicts who have suffered head injuries, to talk to Mim Udovitch about his lesser-known work as a fine artist.

MIM UDOVITCH How did you get started on these photographs?

JOHN WATERS I selfishly wanted a still from one of my own movies that I didn't have, so I just took a picture off my television set in the dark — and it worked, to my amazement and shock. Then I started doing stills from other people's movies and putting them together to make a new narrative. So basically I was a script doctor. I was a very severe one.

UDOVITCH Down to five frames.

WATERS Well, that's what they say: high concept.

UDOVITCH And what was the first image you wanted?

WATERS It was of Divine in "Multiple Maniacs." The piece is called "Divine in Ecstasy" and it was the moment between when Divine was raped by a woman and a female impersonator, and the one second after that when the Infant of Prague appeared to her. I wanted that one-second look on her face.

UDOVITCH I love that one. It looks like Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Teresa." There is a surprising crossover.

WATERS Well, look at another piece I have, "Movie Star Jesus." It's like an S & M bar — I mean, a nude man on a cross? It's amazing that children and families put that over their beds. So I found every movie star image of Christ. It's a very sexual thing. They're all framed from below. It's like a "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" shot, where you can look up a girl's skirt.

UDOVITCH How about the genesis of "Sonny for President," which depends on the viewer's ability to recognize a series of photos of Sonny Bono through the years from the top several inches of his head alone?

WATERS Yes, you know you're really famous if people can identify you from your bangs. I was with Sonny a month before he died, and his hair was still it. I believe if he hadn't died, he could have taken that hair all the way to the White House.

UDOVITCH And what about "Sophia Loren Decapitated"? Where did you get that idea?

WATERS I got that idea because I read that Joan Crawford always did that, when she got divorced she kept the pictures in the frames in her house, she just ripped the husband's head off. Which I thought was really a very artistic idea, actually. Especially if you didn't have irony about it, which I don't think she did. And I picked Sophia Loren because I don't hate her and I don't love her. I did recycle the heads, though, I used them in another piece about five years later. And ripping them off was fun, it was like being a stalker. It was like what you fear if you've ever done one interview and your picture's in the paper, that someone is at home sticking pins in you or cutting your head off. In the art world, you want people looking at a picture and reading all sorts of things into it. You don't want that in the movie world.

UDOVITCH And I'd like to mention, just because it's so exquisite, "Grace Kelly's Elbows."

WATERS My abstract piece. I just wanted to show that you sometimes notice a detail about a star that's incredibly obscure and that no one's ever mentioned. Grace Kelly did have incredibly beautiful elbows.

UDOVITCH Not the loveliest body part for most people.

WATERS No, it's really hard to have beautiful elbows. It's my fetishizing one tiny detail of a star, or one percentage of a frame in the movie.

UDOVITCH Do you think it's harder to be transgressive now than it used to be?

UDOVITCH How do you hope to redirect someone's vision with the "Manson Copies" series, "Manson Copies Divine's Hairdo," "Manson Copies Brad Pitt" and "Manson Copies Richard Gere"?

WATERS Well, every five years Charles Manson has a parole hearing, and I watch it for one reason: he has a new look every time. So I watch him, then I find an unsuspecting movie star who happens to look exactly like him in that incarnation, and pair them together, to show that no matter what, Manson's more famous. That's a terrible thing to say. But basically, still, if you showed a picture of Brad Pitt and Manson to people, I think more people would identify Manson, which I think is a very frightening thing about American fame. This year, he wouldn't come out for his parole hearing because they made him wear handcuffs. It was a fashion decision.

UDOVITCH You made the film of the Kennedy assassination starring Divine as Jackie Kennedy — from which you took the photographs for the "Zapruder" piece — in 1965. To parody that event only two years after it happened must have seemed incredibly radical.

WATERS Yes, and I still lived with my parents. It was on their suburban street. And, yes, people were really upset about it. I entered it in some festival in Baltimore, and they not only stopped the film, they called the Internal Revenue and reported me as being pernicious. I always remember the word because I was so excited by it. But to film that was worse than illegal, it was so disrespectful. And it was the same thing with eating feces in "Pink Flamingos." There was no law against it, but it was worse than hard-core sex. That's why I did it. They never could cut it, because there was no law, even though it is beyond any community standards.

UDOVITCH And still is. "Fear Factor" tries for the same effect, in a way — but your work is always very humane, and reality TV never is.

WATERS I've never seen a reality TV show in my life, I'm a true virgin.

UDOVITCH You're not at all curious?

WATERS No. I'm in the Writers Guild. I refuse to watch reality TV.

UDOVITCH What's your favorite piece of ephemera in the show?

WATERS Maybe the ceramic piece of Michael Jackson holding the baby over the hotel balcony. The National Enquirer ran a piece outraged by it. That's how I knew there was such a thing to order.

UDOVITCH Wait. I thought that was, like, a Jeff Koonsian sculpture. It's a commercial piece of merchandise?

WATERS Yeah. You can buy it right now, look online.

UDOVITCH Who would buy that?

WATERS I bought about 50 of them.

UDOVITCH Besides you.

WATERS I don't know. I guess that's why they put it in the show.

UDOVITCH Do you feel you have any mentors?

WATERS Tennessee Williams made me realize that everything they told me in school was a lie and I didn't have to pay attention to it. Warhol certainly influenced me when he so wisely put homosexuality and drugs together, finally, where they belonged. Little Richard, because I wanted to be the white him in the hippie world. That's why I have this mustache. And Jean Genet, of course. I don't even remember that I named Divine after the character in "Our Lady of the Flowers," but I'm sure I did. They made me have the nerve to do what I wanted to do, so that I didn't care that I didn't fit in, that nobody else really liked what I liked when I was growing up.

UDOVITCH Finally, tell me why you did the "Peyton Place — The Movie" piece.

WATERS Well, Grace Metalious was my first idol. And in the book, some phrase like "the `V' of Betty's crotch" was the first dirty thing I can ever remember reading. But when the movie came out, any time there was something sexual they would cut to a tree blossoming, or if someone was frigid, a frozen lake. So I just did the cutaway shots. You look at it and think, what are these, bad National Geographic shots? But really, they're filthy. They're the shots that Hollywood couldn't show.