Bat For Lashes - Letting Go Of Ghosts - Creating The Haunted Man

Bat For Lashes is one if the few artist to come out of the UK over the last few years who has interested me. Adele aside  (am a fan of that beautiful voice and full figured reality check on pop stardom) Bat has only had her way with some critics here and some goth folk that could not see beyond the initial fashion statement .. so here she talks about her career and positions her new album and new single.  Was delight toi find this on the Tribeca Film site 

THREE AIDS MOVIES: One is dishonest

jim Fouratt’s REEL DEAL Movies That Matter

ACT UP Documentaries : How to Survive a Plague (second look) and UNITED IN ANGER: the History of ACT UP + WE WERE HERE Two documentaries have arrived that purport to tell the truth about ACT UP: David France's HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE and Jim Hubbard's UNITED IN ANGER:THE HISTORY OF ACT UP. They are two very different approaches trying to tell the story and impact of ACT UP. One is an adult fairy tale and the other a mostly visual timeline. Both draw upon much of the same visual documentation and focus on ACT UP-NY despite how ACT UP became an international movement. The directors had once been roommates.Hubbard was a members of ACT UP-NY (as was I ). France, a journalist, started his career writing about AIDS . Hubbard was an experimental filmmaker who had lost to AIDS in 1985 his significant other, Roger Jacoby, a well known experimental filmmaker who dated back to the Warhol years Both directors share an insider point-of-view. I suggest this became both a strength and a weakness when it came to objectivity. It is also what gave me trouble in distancing myself to form a critical point of view after my first view of each. Note: after seeing the world premier of PLAGUE at Sundance I did file the next day a review published in Westview and on social media . After a few weeks and some distance from the emotional impact of seeing people alive on screen that I loved and who are now dead, I began to have second, more critical thoughts and concerns about the documentaries. Hence my second look at PLAGUE and a comparison with UNITED IN ANGER Lets go to the Movies

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE director David France. After recovering from seeing people alive that I worked with in ACT UP that are now dead I began to have second thoughts about this beautifully crafted narrative-like documentary. David France is a well known magazine writer. His personal style I would suggest is high-end tabloid journalism. He picks a hot button subject and then tailors his article to make sure it sizzles. Often leaving out critical facts that would complicate his story telling. It may work for New York magazine but violates some of the basic rules as I understand them of documentary filmmaking. France picks and chooses facts that push his narrative but violates the search for truth and integrity that is essential to authentic documentary filmmaking. His subject is actually the Treatment Action Group (TAG) a break-off group from ACT UP-NYC. TAG was emboldened by Larry Kramer's demand for fast tracking experimental drugs into bodies in trouble. TAG members became known as “Larry’s Storm Troopers.” They had all been active members of ACT UP. First they mostly seceded from the ACT UP Treatment and Data committee . Then, because of Kramer’s opposition, failed in their attempt to appropriate ACT UP's treasury and take it with them. They wanted out of ACT UP leaving behind the debate raging over the lack of drug testing in women and children's bodies, clean needle distribution and direct action targets. Only men, adult white male bodies, were being tested in all but a very tiny number of clinical trials. TAG choose rather to sit inside at the table with federal government officials and PHARMA reps while ACT UP demonstrated in the streets.. (Elinor Burkett's The Gravest Show in Town is the best examination of the pitfalls and merits of such a strategy) TAG was, with PHARMA support, successful in fundamentally changing the rules of clinical trials. This change not only impacted on the AIDS community, but also changed the protections for any clinical trial participant including those conducted on prisoners. No longer were PHARMA or government responsible for any failures or negative side effects care. PHARMA was no longer required to provide when effectiveness had been established the drugs free of charge to any trial participant who wanted then. Those rules had been in place to protect clinical trial participants. These were critical changes in the trial rules and relieved the sponsors of the clinical trial of almost any liability and responsibilities other than providing the product being tested and collecting the researchers data. TAG was desperate as most of their members were either HIV+ or had full blown AIDS. It was a time when people were dropping dead daily. The Center for Disease Control , rather than compromising, caved in on all their legitimate safety issues in place that TAG with the support of PHARMA demanded be changed. Resulting in TAG members and their doctors having fast track access to still experimental drugs. Drugs without data on dosage and side effects documented. While this access did in fact prolong some people's lives it also caused deaths because of lack of information regarding dose levels and interactions. This was particularly true with the drug DDI. The Treatment and Data members who pushed hardest for the fast tracking of experimental drugs like DDI were the same members who left to form TAG. Some celebrity members of ACT UP who through their TAG connections got access to the trial drugs died quickly. Eventually dosage levels were lowered and access became widespread... but not until some members of ACT UP had died from high dose DDI use. All of this is left out of PLAGUE, except for a vague afterthought reference to finally questioning how fast to fast track unproven drugs. As well as a throw away line about all political organizations having at some point problems internally. This shocking lack of respect for facts and context is what ultimately makes PLAGUE a well crafted fairytale and a dishonest documentary. France choose two men from ACT UP to focus his story telling. The charismatic Bob Rafsky, who came out in his early forties, responsibly left a marriage and a child and became sick with AIDS. While supportive, Rafsky was not a member of TAG. He in fact was a member of a different Act Up cell working on finding a cure for AIDS/HIV. He did not leave ACT UP. Rafsky in many ways was the public voice of anger in ACT UP. he saw himself covered with KS lesions knowing he was dying. Angry and articulate Bob Rafsky was fearless even when weak and wasting away. Standing up to Bill Clinton is no easy task. But Rafsky did as seen in the documentary The other was the very photogenic ex-Wall Street wiz kid, Peter Staley who after his diagnosis mid-80’s with AIDS left his job. It was known within ACT UP at the time that Staley rather than suing for bias compensation choose to settle for an undisclosed amount rumored to be in the high six figures. As is usual in settlement, the terms were subject to strict non-disclosure legal restrictions. Staley was one of the few people with AIDS in ACT UP that had that kind of money. Staley also had been one of stars in the Gay Men’s Health Crisis safe sex videos which Jesse Helms had attacked on the U.S. Senate floor. He even became entrepreneurial as an activist with a profitable mail order AIDS drug delivery service which he took over when the two founders died of AIDS .This service provided a cover for sick people who were afraid because of potential risk to career and reputation to disclose that they had AIDS/HIV. It protected their identity in acquiring drugs. Staley was the activist chosen by the International AIDS Conference the year they met in San Francisco to be the voice of AIDS activism from the podium. He hobnobbed with the likes of David Geffin, Elizabeth Taylor and Dr. Matilda Krim. After the release of protease inhibitors, Staley like many other HIV+ men for whom the new drug "cocktail" actually worked (about 50 % of those who had been on the drug trail previously) , was given an extension on life. Yet he fell into the sinkhole of crystal meth addiction like so many other gay HIV + men. Staley years later finally cleaned up and to his credit devised a crystal meth educational campaign targeting gay meth addicts. This is worthy of a separate documentary While there were many women active in Act Up, only two women were insiders in TAG: Dr. Iris Long, a scientist who taught basic science to the TAG members and inspired Mark Harrington to write the TAG treatment manual ( he was awarded a MacArther Genius award ($250,000)and Gurance Franke-Ruta, a 17 year old healthy teen. TAG was a white, gay male dominated group. When Larry Kramer who had inspired the members of TAG to take action, became in TAG's eyes more a liability than as assert when they sat down with PHARMA reps and government agency honchos, they tossed him aside. Only the San Francisco speech is referenced in France’s PLAGUE. These are some examples of the critical information left out by France to advance his story telling. Seductive in craft, PLAGUE in fact is not an honest documentary. France's shocking lack of respect for facts and context is what ultimately makes PLAGUE a well crafted fairytale and a dishonest documentary. It is like an expensive, well made Madison Avenue perfume ad (think Dior} masked in social justice costuming. France's product skims the surface creating like the best of Hollywood action films larger than life heroes to build to a crowd cheering anthem rather than presenting the complicated construction of the emblematic, history-changing, crucial AIDS activist group. ACT UP deserves better, as does TAG. Today Larry Kramer can be heard saying TAG 's success killed Act UP. How to Survive a Plague trailer UNITED IN ANGER: THE AIDS HISTORY PROJECT Director: Jim Hubbard

Experimental film maker Jim Hubbard with author/playwright, academic Sarah Schulman created the Ford Foundation funded ACT UP Oral History project and has to date filmed close to 128 oral histories of women and men active in ACTUP-NY and a few other chapters. Fortunately they were able to speak with some of the members who are now AIDS death statics like film editor/actor Jim Lyons and artist/activist Ray Navarro. Hubbard used not only his own shot film footage but also incorporates footage from a variety of sources including ACT UP-NY’s media collectives including DIVA TV. Relying on the visual aspect of film to tell the history of ACTUP- NY, he roots UNITED IN ANGER in collectivity documenting the successful media grabbing ACT UP actions including the re-creation of the YIPPIE stock market action, the invasion of the nightly CBS news with Dan Rather, the mammoth national action,at the FDA headquarters, the ACT UP women led prime time baseball game “No glove, No love” Shea stadium surprise, the controversial St Patrick's Cathedral Mass die in, the White House mass burial and ashes delivery protest. What one sees in this footage and the footage of actual ACT UP meetings as well as road trips to the International AIDS Conference in SF and Montreal is the diversity of people attracted to ACT UP and the strong role of women of all ages in ACT UP that is lacking in David France's PLAGUE. Hubbard succeeds in capturing the group dynamics of the ACT UP general membership meetings and the group dynamic of consensus building on issues and tactics and their implementation through the collectivity of affinity groups. And most importantly in the darkest moments of AIDS how direct action was both empowering and, yes, fun and oddly life reinforcing. It is exciting and empowering to watch UNITED IN ANGER. A lesson in action for today's Occupy movements. The weakest part of UNITED IN ANGER is the talking heads who are in most cases are redundant to what we actually see visually. But certainly useful for viewers who have no knowledge of ACTUP and its history.Their introduction breaks the cinematic rhythm of image motion capturing the collective outrage and empowering response to government ignorance and denial. I suspect the rush to completion with PLAGUE already finished dictated some of these more conventional choices. Hubbard has created in tone a more authentic documentation of what ACT UP actually was and how it can be a role model for future activism than the slick and easily accessible film that France has created. While each film attempts to confront the cumulative effect of the AIDS deaths of friends and lovers in ACT UP, the loss and the effects of collective grief is subtex for the most part in both their story telling of anger, fear and outrage. UNITED IN ANGER: THE ACTUP ORAL HISTORY PROJECT trailer http://youtu.be/oCxqJgpejbs?hd=1> David Weissman’s WE WERE HERE which documents how the San Francisco lesbian and gay community came together to take care of their sick and dying and build an AIDS response which included ACT UP San Francisco, Act Up Golden Gate and Act Up East Bay, succeeds where both UNITED IN ANGER and HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE fail to go by concentrating on the personal human toll and redemption rather than just collective anger or TAG-like power brokering. UNITED IN ANGER is emotionally closer and works in tandem with WE WERE HERE, while PLAGUE in France's construction despite the Bob Rafsky story builds a myth that is not authentic in the way the other two are. On the deepest level PLAGUE rings hollow. WE WERE HERE trailer I hope there will be more documentaries on the communities affected and their response to AIDS. In particular the growth of the People with AIDS Coalition and their buyers club. The PWA written DENVER PRINCIPLES which template for any client group how to actively participate in their own treatment and care More documentaries like HOUSE OF NUMBERS which challenged the science of HIV and documents the growth worldwide of self-empowerment, alternative and complementary healing support groups. HOUSE OF NUMBERS trailer <http://youtu.be/X_N4zgjF0K0 ACT UP's impact globally and as a template for today political movements is of historical and practical significance. Perhaps a less subjective reading can come from more experienced documentary film makers like Alex Gibney, Arthur Dong or Lesli Kleinberg. The full story of ACT UP and its impact on saving lives, challenging government, the greed of PHARMA and the political expediency of elected officials is still a loadstone for further documentaries. As is what happened to ACT UP members still alive and the AIDS activists community at large including those who looked to alternative explanations of the cause and treatment of bodies out of balance are still ripe for documentary discovery. The living have an obligation to respect the full history of the AIDS activism and respect the choices individuals made to live a lives that reflects empowerment and dignity. (cc) jim fouratt July 22th 2012 revision

REEL DEAL; Movies that Matter TOP 25 Narrative Films 2011 Here is my list of the top 25 narrative films of 2011 https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1g5tE9y2s15Zjhqaa_2ip4wG4y9Wwav_2IVfyNQqHBBc

 REEL DEAL: MOVIES THAT MATTER
TOP 25 FILMS of 2011

jim fouratt

Best Narrative Films 2011

Best of lists abound at year’s end.  I hav seen close to 400  films this year between festival going and press screenings and even paying (yes! I like to see films in movie theaters with a real audience. Nothing like a dark room full of strangers watching a light flickering across a screen and illuminating a story.) So instead of pitting a $100 million + budget feature  against a less than $500 thousand film I will get a few big pictures out of the way. Scorsese’s HUGO, Spielberg WAR HORSE and 8mm,  David Fincher’s GIRL with the DRAGON TATTOO and Terrence Malick’s TREE OF LIFE  are each beautifully crafted spectacles and each deserves to be see on the biggest screen possible. Note: Scorsese’s HUGO  is not a 3D kids film but a movie about the director’s love of film that  like Miracle on 34th St will cross generations in it’s appeal and become a classic. TREE OF LIFE  is almost pure cinema. The story is told in hypnotic visual exposition with the sparse but will acted script secondary. GWTDT  would have been best served as a black and white noir film. The Fincher version looses much of its narrative tension in full color blow up but remains an enjoyable spectacle of craft. Instead I an going to list films  that I suggest be my idea of programing an at home REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter Film Festival. Some you may have heard of and many most likely not. So visit the video store, search for streams or make your REEL DEAL: Movies that Matter netflix Festival list.  You will also be able to see commentary on each film.  Most have trailers on the Internet that you can usually watch on YOUTUBE. Just goggle them: name of film and add the word “trailer”. If you google the film’s website you can search to see if it is available either on streaming or dvd. Don’t forget to invite friends over, put out the pop corn, pretzels and beverage of choice. And remember to leave time for post-festival discussion. Not a film on this list is just entertainment, but should entertain and stimulate the viewer. Movies that matter are not “fast food” and deserve digestion and discussion. Your feedback is always welcome at reeldealmovies@gmail.com.

REEL DEAL’s Top 25 Narrative Films of 2011

in alphabetical order

 A Few Days of Respite

A Sundance World Narrative discovery, A fifty-ish academic and a 30 something Algerian man fleeing Iran secretly cross the border between Italy and France where a local woman, French actor Marina Vlady, sensing their predicament, shelters them until one is picked up and these two lovers are sent back to Iran where homosexuality is forbidden and punished by a choice between death or an imposed sex change. A beautiful reverie of romance, pleasure, kindness and fear.

A Few Days of Respite trailer

Director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation normalizes Iranian people caught in the very universal drama of white lies and their consequences as a couple struggle to protect

their child. Universal human situations : parental aging and the burden it presents to adult children; Deciding where and how to raise a child.  A narrative film that is so specific in capturing the human condition that it flows like a complicated documentary.

A Seperation traiIer

BEGINNINGS  director Mike Mills 

What  happens  when as an adult you discover your now dead mother and your father in his 70’s had a secret that they kept from you all your life. Could it be the reason you are having such a hard time  maintaining  an  adult  relationship with a person  of the  opposite sex?  Why is your best relationship with man’s best friend your little dog? These are some ot the questions Ewan McGregor begins to  ask himself  when  his 74 year old father comes out, gets a younger lover and  as  played by  Christopher  Plummer has the time of his life. Director Mike Miles’ smart and tender comedy  looks at  a father/son relationship and suggests how nothing may have been be as you remember it . Through flashbacks we the audience see a child well behaved but somehow lost .. as he is as an adult. Mills keeps the humor human and forgiving. Doing so he has lifted the lid off some of the questions children rarely get  to ask their parents. Plummer steals the movie … but that is ok. No it is not a “gay” movie but a movie about honesty and courage and what a son can actually learn as an adult from his father Beginners trailer

 

Cedar Rapids Director Miguel Artete

Under-rated director Miguel Artete (Star Maps is a hidden treasure) turfs out Coen Brothers’ mid-America to tell a story of how the small town values are eroded away when greed and cronyism replace integrity and honesty in business.  With a level of comedic tension worthy of the best of the OFFICE  a fine cast including  Ed Helms, Anne Heche and John C. Reilly tell a story of an insurance salesman who goes to a convention in the big city and find himself like a fish out of water gulping for air while everyone else parties on. Preston Sturges humor tinctures the clever written script and rescues the story from falling into the gross and vulgar humor peppering so many HANGOVER genre box office hits.

Cedar Rapids Trailer 

Coriolanus director Ralph Fiennes

Ralph Fiennes and screen-writer of the moment John Logan  sets Shakespeare’s play some where to the right  Hurt Locker in time and place and makes Will as relevant today as he was centuries ago . Fiennes and Gerard Butler sizzles as warrior rivals heating up the screen in brutal passion and homoerotic rivalry that makes one think of football or hockey players on the playing field and in the locker room. Vanessa Redgrave delivers her best performance in years as the martial infected, authoritarian Queen-Mother.She makes Barbara Bush seem like a pussy cat in comparison. Emotional incest has never been so naked on the screen.

Coriolanus trailer 

Descendants Director Alexander Payne

Sideways/Election/Citizen Ruth director Alexander Payne  again mines the contemporary US psychic through a prism of dysfunctional relationships that look good on the outside but are festering inside. A tragedy jump starts change and the exquisite ensemble cast make poignant rather than sensational the crisis. George Clooney’s best performance ever in a Hawaii setting that is less paradise than anywhere America.

Decendants trailer

Drive

the sleekness of a Maserati soundlessly driven full throttle on a European autobahn,  Drive manages to take the action genre and make it into an art film that pleases the eye, tingles the senses and never stoops to gratuitous violence or Tarantino  misogyny to hammer home its POV.  Ryan Gosling delivers the ultimate action film, mystery hero performance as if he was in a Prada sports commercial playing a Samurai messenger or an Armani styled contract killer. The soundtrack is to die for!

 Drive trailer

Extremely Loud and Very Close   Director Stephen Daltry

 A  film that makes 9/11 finally emotionally accessible as did Judgement of Nuremberg the Holocaust, without overwhelming the viewer’s subjectivity. Dir Stephen Daltry (the Hours) artistically navigates a quite desperate story of a family in grief. Sandra Bullock’s restraint as the mother of a 13 year old boy trying to come to terms with the death of his father at the World Trade Center while he holds in a big secret,  is central to the success of the film. We journey with the boy in a hunt to unravel the clues he has about his dad and in doing so meet a cross-section of NYC humanity personified by a stream of class A character actors including, the remarkable Viola Davis,  Zoe Caldwell, Max Von Sydow and downtown legend Lola Pasalinkski.  Not since Brandon de Wilde in SHANE has a child actor navigated with such insight and sensitivity the world of loss in a way that allows all of us to grieve and heal. Eric Horn plays the boy, who feels guilty coming to terms with the loss of his father. His Academy Award alert performance manages to both keep the film from falling into sentimental bathos as it universalized the story.

Extremely Loud and Very Close trailer 

 

Ides of March

George Clooney directed. Seemingly torn from a liberal politician’s nightmare of self-destruct. Will feel familiar but it has the moral conflict of a Green drama mashed up with Ayn Rand selfishness. Ryan Gosling proves he is capable of playing just about any kind of complicated young white male. Rest of ensemble is pitch perfect with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffery Wright, Marisa Tomei and Paul Giametti indelible.

Ides of March trailer

In the Family

A small miracle of a film that herald’s the debut of a promising new director Patrick Wang who soars above first film pit holes and resonates Abbas Kiarostami,  Kelly Reichard and John Sayles sensibility in cinema language. Wang, a theater actor uses the camera to tell a complex story of loss, grief and justice. Set in a small town in Tennessee,  the plot is two men, one a Chinese contractor and the other a Christian white professional recently windowed wh o meet, fall in love and begin to make a life and a family for the mother-less six year old Joey.  Creating a life of normalcy in a small conservative Southern town is challenging. No activists, these two men just want to create family in the way any two people in love do. When Joey’s dad is killed in an automobile accident, his other dad remains committed to making a family for Joey who he has bonded with as he grieves the loss of his partner, Joey’s biological dad. Homophobia which has been shoved under the carpet with Southern politeness and racism slithers out. Joey is court mandated to his birth dad’s sister and her husband. Most people turn away as his chosen dad seeks to get his son back. Until a retired married Southern patriarch played by seasoned theater actor Brian Murry  offers his legal services pro-bono. Sounds like a LOGO afternoon special but what Wang has created is a complex film of human drama that through the use of camera technique and understatement allows the reverberations of emotion to be played out  without being hammered verbally home. Like the best of Kiarostami work what is seen on the screen is what moves the story and  not the written narrative.  Those human moments that speak through silence, physical gesture and reflection. Reichard’s and Sayles  influence is seen in the subtle unfolding of the story without dramatic high tension moments.  Wang lets ordinary peoples actions reveal how this community acts. In the Family was written, directed, and produced by Wang also who plays the lead character on a minuscule budget. It is a remarkable achievement and a gem of independent film making that will speak across difference to any one who has loved a child and/or lost a partner. Or who cares about creating a modern definition of what was called traditional family  In the family trailer

Letters From The Big Man

Director Christopher Munch has made 5 features including  Sleepy Time Gal  and Harry + Max that have an uniquely and unforgettable vision and rightly so has become  a film festival favorite. Letters From the Big Man is set in the North West where a government hydrologist walking out of a relationship and wanting to be alone while sorting out her feelings and her future. But she is not alone. This is Big Foot land and he smells her as does a hiker dude. This is not a horror tale but it is a story you have not seen before and will find hard to forget. Lily Rabe holds each frame with the spirit of a young Katherine Hepburn and the self reliance of a young Barbara Stanwyck. And the  Big Man does appear.

Letters From The Big Man

London River

Rachid Bouchard specializes in telling human stores that illuminate large contemporary events (Outside the Law). London River is set in April 2005 when terrorists blew up inner city London subway cars and buses causing over 60 civilian deaths. Less a political thriller or a docudrama expose, London River is the human drama of two very different people looking for their missing child. Accomplished British actor Brenda Blethyn plays a military widow farming on the Island of Guernsey whose only child living in London is missing.  Sontigui Kouyate plays an African inmmigrant living in Paris who left a six year old son Ali with his mother in Mali 15 years ago who also is missing. What brings these two  together is that their children unknown to either of them were lovers living together. The confrontation of class, race and grief is foregrounded in the narrative and how they find what it is they have in common is the story line with all the politics alive today submerged into a human transformation that templates possibilities for many of the transitions of history today necessitates. Two time Academy Award nominee Blethyn delivers once again a heart wrenching performance that Kouyate matches in complexity.   London River  trailer

Margin Call

 How greed trumps morality in the 24 hours Wall Street collapsed seen through the eyes of two young traders to be. Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons ethics tango is a sight to behold. The entire superb ensemble cast stuns. Director/screenwriter J. C. Chandor’s remarkable debut heralds a major new Director/Writer talent.

Margin Call Trailer

Meek’s Cutoff

 Kelly Reichard with now four low budget, critically acclaimed features is considered by  many in the world cinema community an American Master. Screened mostly in Festivals with short theatrical runs Reichard’s work has had as much influence thanks to streaming distribution on young filmmakers today as has had Quinton Torrentino and Jim Jarmish. Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy showed up on critics best list when released. Her work is on the opposite end of Hollywood spectacle. Yet her story telling and scripts have attracted first class actors. Meek’s Cutoff  is a Western directed by a woman with an eye for small detail and authenticity. Her cast including Michele Williams, Bruce Greenwall, Shirley Henderson and Will Patton who populate a small moving covered wagon caravan led by a braggadocio who is at a loss as to how to problem solve and will not admit it. Meek’s Cutoff shows how men and women deal differently with adversity, hardship and the unknown. It is a powerful study in how different men and women handle the same situations. This is no feminist track, gender roles are very defined. But it is the small moments of crisis that we see how theses people interact as men and as women. Surprisingly there is sensibility in this low budget western that  resonates John Ford and Howard Hawks in the composition of framing and the respect for simple people handing complicated circumstances which are out of their experience.  

Meek's Cutoff trailer

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN;  Simon Curtis’s delicious truffle of a film. With drawing room lightness, sophistication and an Oscar deserving performance by Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, Williams shows how MM drove men crazy be they Sir Lawrence Olivier or a 19 year old movie set gofer (exceptionally played by Eddie Redmayne) who is assigned to be at her beck and call for a week. Williams’ ability to bring to the surface

the three Marilyns is remarkable: public MM, the working MM manufacturing the public MM and the rarely captured in most MM characterizations, the private MM which was both what essentially captivated men and caused her to ultimately feel inadequate. Williams does not mimic MM in the way Meryl Streep does Margret Thatcher in IRON LADY. Ultimately her MM is more alive on screen than the acceptable but surface Streep’s Thatcher. Williams should be Oscar bound.

My Week with Marilyn trailer

Pariah

Dee Rees had a Sundance short and was encouraged  to expand it into a feature. At the Sundance Institute she gestated the project through all the opportunities offered and finally birthed her first feature PARIAH  proving how important the Institute is in bringing through its various workshops an almost impossible story to sell to success.  A black teenager finds herself attracted to girls and her Christian lower middle class mother freaks and her cop Dad simply ignores. No hood tale: this is black domestic life far removed from the sentimentality of Tyler Perry. Cast and director/writer Dee Rees while telling a specific story universalizes the emotions in a way that invites all kinds of viewers to sit together in a dark room and feel touch by the journey of this one teen exploring her AG gender expression (butch masculine female identity) and her desire for and  love of women.

Pariah trailer

Poetry

South Korean director Chang-Dong Lee’s insight into how art (poetry) makes an impossible life situation livable. Indelible performance by older actress Jeong-hie Yun transcends culture and location and is unforgettable.What director Matthew Porterfield has accomplished on a small budget is makes one think of Botticelli or Caravaggio and their celebration of that luminous glow that emanates from post-adolescent skin. Anxious to see what he does next.

Poetry trailer

Punture Complicated advocacy films with high drama stories are rare today. But Puncture which world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival picked a hot subject: clean needles ...not in the hood, but in the hospital, cast superstar Chris Evans as the lead, a committed attorney with a bad coke problem who takes on busting the medical supply industry and its price fixing monopoly and callous putting profit over health.  Evans proves he is far better an actor than the eye candy superstar roles he usually gets cast in. With a script that avoids the pitfalls of most dramatic movies with good intentions and a cast up to the complexities that make good intentions more complicated, Puncture succeeds in exposing greed and the wreckage of addiction. Based on a real life attorney, this film mic checks the heath care supply industry.

Punture Trailer

Putty Hill

Every so often a film comes a long that is so visually beautiful that it seduces the eye and makes one forget traditional forms. Putty Hil, a SXSW Film find, is such a film. It feels generational and suggests how a hippie detoxed of all politics would be like today. It’s ennui is at the opposite end of Larry Clark’s vampire lust for youth vitality as it celebrates youth and beauty and nature. Death is not a part of being young and the central tension in Putty Hill  is dealing with the death of ‘one of us.” What director Matthew Porterfield has managed to do visually on a small budget reminds one of the beauty and celebration of youthful sensuality that both Botticelli and Correggio captures on canvas. What Porterfield does next catches my breath

Putty Hill video

Tomboy:

Hot topic nature vs nurture sidesteps theory and GAGA’s its way to how real life rains down on a loving family when nature takes on nurture. Told as a simple story of a child growing up in a binary policed gender world  whose gender expression fools other children and the freedom and fun the child has until the real world of order demands conformity. How a sensitive but confronted mother helps bring her child into adolescent without outrage while worrying  about her child’s future. Crafted with the aesthetic rigor of a Bresson film,  Tomboy shows how the challenge of good parenting butts up against a child’s sense of ‘why not.

Tomboy trailer

Take Shelter

 With Michael Shannon (HBO Broadway Empire, Revolutionary Road ) delivering the best actor’s performance to beat as the sort-of-hero in a frank look at mental health issues and biblical threats. While neither overtly political or religious director/writer Jeff Nichols’ story telling in this low budget gem centers on the tension between spiritual crisis,  reality check, and fear of the unknown without dressing it up in religious tropes. Unsettling and provoking this is indie film making at its finest.

Take Shelter trailer

To Die Like a Man  Controversial and provocative Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues best know for his visually stunning,  erotic study of masculinity,  the narrative feature O Phantasma returns with an equally provocative look at the hot topic gender identity vs gender expression and raises questions in art that would not be allowed in current popular discourse. An aging queen and former ruling professional gender illusionist has to face up to v age, v need for love and a body in revolt. This man-made women has a body rotting with cancer. Is it from years of silicon injections and synthetic  hormonal ingestion?  We are never told. Despite being a drag queen he fathered a son who has been traumatized as a n adolescent by the life of his father. The current lover is a 22 year old junkie sex toy with larceny on his mind. Rodrigues raises many serious questions about gender and body, but not in a mocking or judgmental way. This makes the film much more confrontational as he gives the Queen a great deal of dignity as v’s  world falls apart. Visually exciting and peopled with unforgettable characters. This is no Priscilla of the Desert...or maybe it is 30 years later.

To Die Like a Man  trailer

Weekend

 Two young people hook up at the beginning of a weekend and over it discover despite the casualness of the encounter deep feelings and impossible possibilities. A perceptive look at a contemporary relationship, one a smart working class lifeguard and the other a sassy queer theory damaged artist. Weekend feels like a Mike Leigh film but director Andrew Haigh has subtly shot it like an art film. So  frame by frame it is seductive to the eye. Weekend trailer

The Whistleblower

Based on the true story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a cop from Nebraska who became a ‘peacekeeper” in Bosnia who discovered that fellow peacekeepers were protecting know sex-traffickers of underage Eastern European girls in return for free use of the their services . These peacekeepers were formally employed by the UN. Director Larysa Kondracki  skillfully reveals the complicated web of political intrigue, exploitation, profiteering, diplomatic neutrality and desperate circumstances moving the action like a political thriller. Rachel Weisz brings a sensitive resiliency and engaged outrage as she attempts to intervene and discovers that in the world of international diplomacy a different standard of morality sometimes take precedent over justice. Vanessa Redgrave plays a professional diplomat who fails to share Bolkovac outrage for political reasons. Monica Bellucci makes complex a woman who tricks the girls into prostitution. An interesting meditation on the role of “peacekeepers”, mercenaries and “contractors” and raises the question, relevant to today’s Iraq with 16,000 contractors replacing the returning troops,  under what order and law do these soldiers of fortune operate in the name of freedom. Weisz is terrific as a peacekeeper raising hell.

The Whistleblower  trailer

Young Adult

Again the combination of Director Jason Reitman and screen writer Diablo Cody as in Juno centers a story on a “post-feminist” woman who seemingly has it all and disrupts all kinds of politically correct feminist stereotypes. And that exploded in the lobby post screening I was at. Scary . Charlize Theron is the small town high school girl with the most cake:  prom queen, football hero boyfriend, most likely to succeed who goes from small town celebrity to big city fame only to wake up 15 years later alone and hung over.  With unbridled, politically incorrect obsession she goes back home to reclaim her high school sweetheart. His being married and a new father does not even give her pause. She is use to getting what she wants.  A horror story festering with female hormonal passion and egg harvesting hunger. Not pretty but riveting with Theron fearless in her character building. Diablo is also fearless and guaranteed to again provoke an uproar from feminist critics who reject the patriarchal  theory that female is biologically determinate claiming that it produces female enslavement. This dialectic is core to the YOUNG ADULT as it  was in JUNO.Theron matches Michelle Williams’ MM and off to the Best Actress races for the both of them. Outstanding also is sit -com comedy actor Patton Oswalt who takes the serious part of a disabled ‘nice guy” and runs with it straight to the Oscars nominations for Best Supporting.

Young Adult trailer

WE"RE NOT BROKE ...IMPORTANT DOCUMENTARY ON WHAT THE FISCAL CRISIS IS ACTUALLY ABOUT ..ON TUES WE'RE NOT BROKE plays IFC in NYC for one screening and will play selected dates around the country, It addresses corporate greed and the failure to pay taxes by multi-nationalism corporations . Films sun-12 world premier WERE NOT BROKE q&a w directors Karen inc jim fouratt question raises election issues and Obama ... answer is really helpful. Film links the birth of the UNCUT movement to the birth of OCCUPY WALL STREET ..... please SHARE this post widely Q&A with Directors at World premier screening at Sundance http://youtu.be/3x4XZE3H_xA?hd=1 Background for the Doc .. well done http://youtu.be/rpbRXXntGM8 trailer http://youtu.be/tCy1fBNAWpg?hd=1 web site :http://werenotbrokemovie.com/

SUNDANCE:Watch Niomi Wolf diss OWS and dismiss Documentary films as passe at SUNDANCE 12 panel on mass movents

ll hell broke loose at sundance panel at the filmmakers lounge when Naomi Wolf not only dissed the Occupy Movement for not being sound bite ready and media savvy but than went on to say documentary film making was passe and replaced by youtube. http://youtu.be/Xj3VS52vq2k?hd=1

Tribeca Film Festival review DETACHMENT

a sensitive powder keg of a film with an engaged script that is powerfully directed by Tony Kaye and acted by a superb ensemble cast with top-of-their-game performances from Adrian Brody, James Caan and Marcia Gay Harden. A forceful answer-back to liberal embraced Waiting for Superman. DETACHMENT captures the desperate position that budget cutting, fast-lane test scores criteria of teaching success, the amoral drenching of young people in false marketing fantasy of who they should be and the further break down in family structure fueled now by economy collapse. Kaye sets a character landscape that more fully dimensions the effect on all aspects of life of teachers and students the collapse of the public education system and humanizes the almost cliche emotional dysfunction that results. Kaye never stoops to exploitation or easy violence in his frank depiction. This allows the audience to resonate not simply in shock but with more complicated emotions. Brody fleshes out how an adult can make choices despite the pain that kids are just not capable of making because their life experience has not conditioned them yet to make. I suggest it is a must see film if you care about an America that still believes every citizen is entitled to an a quality, free education. And it s about time some one shows just how complicated the life of teachers are today. Life is complicated and there are no real heroes in this films but the humanity of each character is vividly displayed onscreen. Each performance especially Bordie is wonderfully nuanced DETACHMENTis a film that both teenagers and teachers and parents can identify with and one that should make smooth talking politicians sweat. Note: it is also entertaining in a way that narrative films can be with serious subjects that documentaries by form can not.

jim fouratt
reel deal