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Sundance Interview: 'Brooklyn's Finest' Director Antoine Fuqua

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 18th 2009 1:02PM
Filed under: Action, Drama, Sundance, Festival Reports, Podcasts, Interviews, Celebrity Interviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


Cinematical spoke with Brooklyn's Finest director Antoine Fuqua on a sunny Saturday afternoon; within hours, Fuqua's gritty police drama would have sold to Senator Entertainment, the first distribution deal made at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Of course, as Fuqua talked with Cinematical about his exemplary cast, how exactly you make a cops-and-crooks film in the wake of The Wire and the challenges of shooting in New York, the film's sale was in the future. Fuqua also defended the film's controversial final shot, even as he noted he was willing to entertain discussions about changing it; "The whole point of the movie is that they don't have the proper help in the police force, and there's a huge piece in The New York Times about more police killing themselves than dying in the line of duty that just came out a few months ago ... and when you read that, it's so sad and heartbreaking, and you go "You gotta show that. ..."

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: Art & Copy

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 18th 2009 11:00AM
Filed under: Documentary, Sundance, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Sundance Reviews 2009, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


Art & Copy director Doug Pray offered during the film's Q&A at the Prospector Square theater that he didn't want to make a documentary that did nothing but re-play classic advertising, and he didn't want to make a talking-heads documentary. He achieved in both those aims, but there's also the uglier question of if he made a documentary at all. Backed by The One Club -- an organization, as the press notes observe, "dedicated to the craft of advertising" -- Art & Copy talks to some of the greatest names in the field and recounts their successes. Combining clips of ads with interviews with titans in the field like Dan Wieden (Nike's "Just do it"), Hal Riney (Ronald Reagan's "It's Morning in America") and George Lois ("I want my MTV!"), Art and Copy is meant as a celebration of creativity; it winds up being a circular tautology: Great advertising is great because it's great advertising. Art and Copy is, essentially, an ad for advertising -- all of the attractive features of the business are shown in a glorious and shining light, and any concerns or deeper questions are brought up briefly before being shoved away briskly, or, more often, simply left unasked.

It's unfortunate, really, because Pray's an inventive and quick-minded documentarian who can normally show the fullness and contradictions of a topic; Hype! chronicled the rise (and fall) of the Seattle music scene; Scratch captured the quicksilver world of turntablism and of DJ'ing; Big Rig showed the lives of America's truckers and their role in commerce. I was excited by the prospect of Art & Copy, if only because Big Rig did such a great job of showing how consumer goods get from point a to point b; I was hoping Art & Copy would examine exactly how the people at point a make the people at point b want their consumer goods. (And, yes, I was hoping for a little hint of Mad Men's bleak, chic look at the industry, as well; I'm not proud to say it, but it's still true.) Opening with the Oscar Mayer and Meow Mix jingles, Art & Copy then shows us ancient stone carvings, while one of the film's ad men notes that there's not much difference between modern advertisers and the ancients who painted "on the walls of caves." Well, actually, there is -- whoever painted the bison on the walls at Lascaux was not, in fact, attempting to sell bison at a tidy profit. Art tries to encourage you to think; advertising wants you to stop thinking and buy. (And trust me, I'm aware that as you read this, you scrolled past several ads telling you how you can lose weight fast and promoting Paul Blart: Mall Cop, so let me briefly mention that you can lose weight inexpensively and safely by eating less and exercising more, and that our own Nick Schager found Paul Blart: Mall Cop an uninspired mess of fat jokes.)
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Sundance Review: Moon

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 16th 2009 11:55PM
Filed under: Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sundance, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Sundance Reviews 2009, Reviews, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


"You haul 16 tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store. ..."

-- "Sixteen Tons," Merle Travis

Know thyself. -- Solon of Athens

Moon, the directorial debut of Duncan Jones, opens with a bright, breezy bit of corporate propaganda explaining how, in the film's near-future, clean energy is provided by fusion fueled by hydrogen wrenched from lunar mineral deposits on the dark side of the Moon. Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell, who runs a fuel-harvesting station, aided only by the base's A.I., GERTY (given voice by Kevin Spacey). Sam is nearing the end of his three-year contract, and it's been a lonely stint; he's got only two weeks left, but he's on the thin edge. The communications satellite is down, so Sam can't talk to Earth -- his bosses, his wife -- directly; for all of the high-tech trappings and whiz-bang science of his work, Sam's a hard rock miner. And that's always been dangerous work.

Moon evokes many things -- the nature of the human experience, the nature of employee-management relations, how the odds are fairly good that the future will be exactly like today, but more so. With all of its far-flung inventions, impeccable visual design and Clint Mansell's eerie score, Moon boils down to a single man having a long conversation in isolation, telling himself a few lies and opening his own eyes to a few truths; Rockwell, playing the only person for tens of thousands of miles, has no one else to act against, and much of his plight has to be conveyed through special effects that gave him little or nothing to work with on-set.
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Live from Sundance: The Storm Before the Bigger Storm

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 16th 2009 12:02PM
Filed under: Sundance, Festival Reports, Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical


This morning, I got up and picked up my press pass at the Headquarters Marriott with a friend of mine, a fellow member of the press; after, we had a sit-down breakfast. And we talked -- about movies, sure, but about apartments and life and buffet etiquette and mutual friends and mutual enemies and their life in New York and my life in California. I laughed; I had a good time, a real conversation with someone I don't get to see often enough. And when it was done, I thought, Well, that was the last time you get to do that for the next ten days.

Because after that I had to double-check my interviews and double-check my screening times and cross-reference the schedule I'd made back in L.A. with the one here in Park City and call PR firms and then go back to the Marriot to pick up the hard ticket I needed for a public screening -- the public screening's on Sunday, but since I knew I had the time to go over there and I knew the PR person was there, better safe than sorry -- and do some writing before getting over to the Eccles for the opening night film Mary and Max and then heading over to the opening night party to shoot TV stand-ups with The Travel Channel and then head back here to write a wrap-up of the first day of Sundance.
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Review: Gran Torino

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Jan 9th 2009 7:03PM
Filed under: Drama, Awards, Warner Brothers, Theatrical Reviews, Oscar Watch, Reviews, Oscar News, Awards, Cinematical


Long before it opened, Gran Torino gave movie buffs plenty to watch -- the hue and cry over the news that this film would be Clint Eastwood's final performance as an actor, the (erroneous) rumor that it was a return to the screen for "Dirty" Harry Callahan, the puzzling and perfunctory trailer, with Eastwood growling "Get off my lawn!" at a group of young intruders, the news that New York's National Board of Review named the film to its Top Ten List and saw fit to give Clint Eastwood honors for Best Actor and Nick Schenk the award for Best Original Screenplay. All of this was fun to watch -- and, to be blunt, more interesting to watch than Gran Torino itself actually is. Gran Torino is not actively bad -- and there are parts of it which are actually quite good -- but it is not, in fact a film that would be worthy of any kind of enduring honor or long-term interest without the considerable power of Eastwood's myth nudging it into the zone of contention. Gran Torino is, bluntly, a pretty good film -- sleek and brawny like the title car, but a little clumsy on the corners and with no small amount of knock in its dramatic engine.
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Review: Defiance

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Dec 31st 2008 7:02PM
Filed under: Drama, Awards, Theatrical Reviews, Oscar Watch, War, Daniel Craig, Paramount Vantage, Reviews, Oscar News, Awards, Cinematical


A lot of the time, watching a movie, we recoil or start at something in it: That's fake, we say, and dismiss the whole film. On many occasions, that impulse is correct because the film is fake, but on rare occasions, we feel that sensation of dislocated wrongness not because the film is fake but because our world is; we can't wrap our heads around the facts and ugly truths of what we see, can't comprehend how such things are possible, and recoil from them out of refusal to believe, not because they aren't believable. This is one of the challenges Defiance, the newest drama from Edward Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond) faces as it tells the true story of the Bielski brothers, three Belorussian Jews and outlaw petty criminals who, during World War II's pogroms and purges, protected hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, some surviving and others actively fighting back.

We witness Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) make the decision to kill his horse so it can be eaten, and we cannot imagine such hunger. We watch Zus Bielski (Liev Schrieber) fight alongside Russians who hate him to stop Germans who hate him, and we cannot imagine such a grim choice. We watch Asael Bielski (Jamie Bell) fall in love, or a quick quip between two supporting characters, and we cannot imagine love, or laughter, in such a place. But there must have been such hunger; there must have been such anger; there must have been laughter, and love, in the years of exile. It's hard to imagine, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
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The Rocchi Review with Kris Tapley of In Contention

By James Rocchi (Subscribe to James Rocchi's posts), Posted Dec 26th 2008 7:02PM
Filed under: Awards, Podcasts, Brad Pitt, Interviews, Oscar Watch, The Rocchi Review: Online Film Community Podcast, Celebrity Interviews, Oscar News, Awards, Cinematical


Which year-end lists are really worth caring about? What films got a boost from the Broadcast Film Critics and Golden Globe nominations, like Happy-Go-Lucky, and which ones got lost in the shuffle? What's Iron Man doing on the AFI Top Ten Films List, anyhow? And what long, epic films are perfect for enjoying with a turkey sandwich on Boxing Day? Joining James this week to talk about all these topics and more is Kris Tapley of the weblog In Contention. You can listen to the podcast here at Cinematical by clicking below:



As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.
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