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Sundance Interview: John Krasinski, Writer/Director/Actor, 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men'

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 22nd 2009 1:03PM
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Sundance, Festival Reports, Podcasts, Interviews, Celebrity Interviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


Writer, director and actor John Krasinski isn't knocking himself out trying to be cool about the debut of his film Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which Scott Weinberg reviewed here) in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance: " Being at Sundance, I think, is the greatest honor I could ever have for this movie, truly. Sundance has always been -- before I got the show (The Office), before I came to Sundance -- it's always been to me, that place where film making is done for film lovers. There's a feeling here that people appreciate taking chances and doing bold things, and I think my cast and crew took big chances. ..." Krasinski spoke with Cinematical in Park City about adapting a seemingly unadaptable book, his respect for the late David Foster Wallace, casting Julianne Nicholson (Flannel Pyjamas) as the woman facing an army of Hideous Men, and much more.

You can listen to the interview here at Cinematical by clicking below:



You can also download the interview in full right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Sundance Interview: Patton Oswalt of 'Big Fan'

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 21st 2009 10:02PM
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Independent, Sundance, Festival Reports, Podcasts, Interviews, Celebrity Interviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


As Paul Auferio, the title character in Robert Siegel's Big Fan (which Erik Davis reviews here), Patton Oswalt didn't have a chance to fall back on the skill set he's honed through the years as one of the best stand-up comics working today: "As a comedian, your instinct is you tag everything with a joke or a look or a take; this guy, this character ... this is not one of those movies where the writer and director is looking at the characters ironically or in a post-modern sense where it's implied You all know that we're better than that, we're way smarter than this, that we're all looking down on this character, aren't we? This is a character that has no irony about himself ... and just unabashedly loves what he loves, to the detriment of having a real life. ..."

Oswalt spoke with Cinematical about the challenges facing a movie and comics obsessive in the part of playing a sports obsessive, how he sees Paul as an 'imploding" character, some of his favorite independent films and how he sees Big Fan as a tribute to some of the classic 'lonely man' dramas of the 1970's, plus much more.

You can listen to the interview here at Cinematical by clicking below:



You can also download the interview in full right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Sundance Review: The Girlfriend Experience

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 21st 2009 12:17AM
Filed under: Drama, Independent, Sundance, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Celebrities and Controversy, Cinematical Indie, Sundance Reviews 2009, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


The beige square on the Sundance schedule for today -- "Sneak Preview," 6:15 at the Eccles -- was, over the past few days, filled in with a thousand brushstrokes of rumor and intimation and heard-it-from-a-friend-who-heard-it-from-a-friend whisperings. The first murmuring I heard to make that "Sneak Preview" a must-see was that the presentation was going to be an evening with Steven Soderbergh, a night of clips and conversation -- until that proposition, exciting as it was, was supplanted by another rumor: That the Eccles Sneak was going to be Soderbergh showing The Girlfriend Experience, his new run-and-gun, shot-with-the-4K-Red-digital-camera, adult-actress-in-the-lead-role, largely-improvised drama about the life of a New York escort. The rumors, for once, were true.

Soderbergh introduced the film with, as he put it, "a few caveats" as a "work in progress" projecting a 1080p reduction of the 4K file. In 1989, Soderbergh gave Sundance, and then us, sex, lies and videotape; in 2009, he offers sex, truth, and digital video. Much fuss was made when Soderbergh announced this film, and even more was made when he cast adult actress (the polite euphemism for 'porn star,' and that itself a polite euphemism for 'someone who has sex on-camera for money') Sasha Grey in the lead role as a Manhattan call girl who offers not just rushed release but the more refined "girlfriend experience" -- a suite of services including, as we see in the opener, fine red wine and Marc Jacobs black dresses, soft kisses and small talk, and many more things, an experience that goes far beyond sex. And yet still includes it.
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Sundance Interview: Paul Giamatti, Star of 'Cold Souls'

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 20th 2009 9:02AM
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Independent, Sundance, Podcasts, Interviews, Celebrity Interviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


Playing himself -- or, rather, a kind-of version of himself who volunteers to have his soul removed -- in this year's Sundance Dramatic Competition entry Cold Souls (see our review here), Paul Giamatti faced some fairly unique challenges: "I kind of forgot that I was playing myself in this ... I kind of felt that (director Sophie Bart) captured, in a funny way, an archetypal type of neurotic New York self-involved actor ... I kinda forgot I was playing myself; and I don't mean that to sound disingenuous about it, but I really did. ..." Giamatti spoke with Cinematical about how much he enjoyed Shoot 'Em Up, tapping into Russian melancholy for Cold Souls through facial hair and headgear and which midnight zombie film he'd most like to catch while in Park City. ...

You can listen to the podcast here at Cinematical by clicking below:



You can also download the interview in full right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Sundance Review: The September Issue

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 19th 2009 1:03PM
Filed under: Documentary, Sundance, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Sundance Reviews 2009, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


The September Issue, directed by RJ Cutler (The War Room), offers the tantalizing promise of immediate inside pleasures with its synopsis alone, as it follows Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and her editorial team in the assembly and shaping of 2007's edition of the title issue of Vogue magazine -- the largest issue of the year, the holy writ and testament for the upcoming year in fashion, the big brassy bloated bane of every postal carrier's existence. Immediately, we're promised glamour, high-stakes editorial crisis, the confluence of commerce and style, the manic business of modern magazine publishing. The good news is not only that The September Issue offers much more than those immediate inside pleasures -- although it does, commenting on celebrity culture, digital image-altering technology, power and privilege in the distraction-industrial complex and much more -- but that it delivers those immediate inside pleasures superbly along with the nitty-gritty, so we get to witness a mix of high fashion and near-fascism with Ms. Wintour as the iron fist inside the stylish hand-stitched calfskin glove -- velvet is so last year, darling.
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Sundance Review: Cold Souls

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 18th 2009 4:32PM
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sundance, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Sundance Reviews 2009, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


It's inevitable Cold Souls -- with its pseudo-scientific commercialized metaphysics and actor's angst -- will be compared to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich; it's the first post-Charlie Kaufman film, where the writer-director's weird, wooly aesthetic becomes a genre unto itself. Starring Paul Giamatti as, in a blatant piece of typecasting, actor Paul Giamatti, Cold Souls begins with Giamatti rehearsing the title role in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and it's obviously taking its toll as he plunges into sad-sack Russian angst and anomie. Giamatti's agent tips him to an article in The New Yorker, profiling a new service called "Soul Storage," wherein melancholy Manhattanites are having their souls extracted by Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) and held in escrow so they can live less complicated lives. Giamatti, wondering if having less soul would help him better play the part and get through the day, goes to Flintstein's office to get the details: "Your soul can be stored here ... or if you'd prefer to avoid the sales tax, it can be shipped to our storage facility in New Jersey. ..."

And again, you get the Kaufman vibe from writer-director Sophie Barthes; the dry humor, the everyday acceptance of the ludicrous, the ludicrous nature of the everyday. But while the comparisons to Eternal Sunshine and Being John Malkovich are inevitable, they're also not quite right. Eternal Sunshine was about the messy business of loving another; Cold Souls, with the equally messy proposition of living with one's self. Being John Malkovitch riffed comedy out of celebrity and stardom; Cold Souls examines sub-lebrity and acting. Cold Souls is a beautifully shot film, and it also becomes more than a little bit moving, as Giamatti struggles with a question we've all asked ourselves: Is it possible to remove the burden of our soul without taking away the benefit of it? Is it the very weight we struggle under that makes us strong?
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Live from Sundance: Anarchy in the UT!

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 18th 2009 2:00PM
Filed under: Comedy, Foreign Language, Sundance, Festival Reports, Sundance Reviews 2009, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


My first Sundance film Friday morning was Louise-Michel, a French-style mind-messing am-I-laughing-with-these-characters-or-at-them? transgendered revenge comedy playing in the Foreign Drama Competition. Yeah -- when will someone finally come up with some new stories in film making? Louise (Yolande Moreau) is a laborer at a local factory who comes to work one day to find the entire operation gone; abandoned alongside her co-workers, Louise -- who's not terribly bright -- suggests that they pool their severance and hire a hitman to kill the boss; she knows someone from when she was in prison. But Louise can't find her old confederate, and instead hires Michel (Bouli Lanners), a 'security expert' with no real clients, no phone, no e-mail and a variety of handmade guns courtesy of his engineer neighbor. The hunt is on! Oh, and Louise used to be a man and Michel used to be a woman. And Michel can't bring himself to kill, so he convinces terminally ill friends to act as triggermen.

Playing like a John Waters satire with Dardenne-styled long shots, Louise-Michel aggressively resists easy enjoyment; there are some laughs in it, but Louise is clearly developmentally disabled and Michel's a buffoon. Is the entire film meant to shock, like the sequence where Michel's mad engineer neighbor recreates 9-11 with scale models to prove a metallurgical conspiracy theory? Are co-writers and co-directors Gustave De Kervern and Benoit Delepine commenting on how the gap between rich and poor is going to take more than knee-jerk violence to undo, or saying that it's at the least a good start? Louise-Michel sends not very bright and delusional characters to punish the owner's class for exploiting workers; is Louise-Michel suggesting it's not very bright and delusional to think anything can be done about layoffs, maximum profit, and outsourcing? And what to make of the ending's final nativity scene, or the fact that the transgendered characters seem to reverse their decisions in the name of family and love? A closing title offered the fact the film's title is taken from Louise Michel, a 19th-century French anarchist; that information and some quick research didn't clarify things much. I really wish I'd seen Louise-Michel at a public screening -- just to enjoy counting the walkouts -- and at the same time, as it writhed and squirmed across the screen, I thought, Well, really, isn't this what you come here for, at least in part?
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